LOGINClara's POV The name was on my tongue. Then there was only the drip of water and a ceiling I didn't recognize. I lay still and waited for it to come to me. Water-stained, with a long brown crack running from the corner like a river on a map. Metal walls, a window the size of a dinner tray, and a thin mattress propped on a stack of textbooks where one leg of the frame had given out. A kettle ticked on a two-ring stove six feet from my head. The whole room hummed with a damp, warm, insect-loud morning, like a held breath finally let go. My trailer. Sundown Court, lot nine. I knew that. I knew it the way I knew my own birthday and the price of ramen, and I let the knowledge settle over me like a blanket I'd always owned. I was twenty-three years old. I was in my final year of pre-med. I had a poster on an easel, a showcase on Thursday, and a rent notice taped to the fridge with a smiley-face magnet I'd bought to make myself feel better. My face was wet. I touched my cheek and
Lucan's POV The mist reached me before I finished reaching for the memory, and it was warm as bathwater. It closed over the fire pit and the ash, the stones and my boots. The smoke from the notebook flattened and thinned. I stood in the middle of it with my hand half raised toward a sound I had been about to name, and the name went out of me as softly as breath fogging off a window. Then I was lying on my back in a bed, looking at a ceiling. Wooden beams. Pale plaster between them. Light came through a tall window, thin and white, with the particular flatness of a morning that hasn't decided on weather. Under my shoulders lay a mattress I knew. Under my ribs lay a dull ache where nothing was injured, a ghost of something that had once been very sore. I lay still and waited to be told where I was. The house told me. Brainstorm. Your house. Brick and oak, the one you bought eleven years ago with the pack's first good timber money. The knowledge arrived whole and unembarrassed,
Clara's POV I kept my hand raised long after he'd walked out of sight. The lawn lay empty under the new palms. A thin mist drifted across the grass where he had stood, and I watched it close over his footprints one by one until the quad looked as though nobody had ever crossed it. My arm began to shake. I lowered it. My palm still tingled with the shape of his, and I pressed it against my mouth, because I knew I would not be allowed to keep that either. Courteous, I thought. He nodded to me the way you nod to a stranger. It should have been the worst thing I'd ever felt. It was only the second. The worst was still waiting inside me, and it was my turn. I slid down the wall until I sat on the floorboards with my back against the bed and the jar of Pea in my lap. The room was gray and gold and utterly quiet. Someone had folded Lucan's sweater over the chair. It still smelled of him: cedar, smoke, a faint ghost of clove from Gail's bandages. I didn't touch it. I'd decided that
Lucan's POV I nodded to a stranger's window, and then I stood in the middle of a lawn trying to work out why my chest hurt. It wasn't the wounds. Gail had packed those and sworn at me for an hour. This ache sat lower and older, the ache of a hand reaching for a light switch in a house where the wiring had been moved. I knew I'd left someone asleep upstairs. I knew she'd had dark hair. I knew I had wanted, very badly, to turn around. I didn't. The black notebook was in my fist, and my feet seemed to know where it needed to go. The campus was changing as I walked it. I watched it happen in small, patient pieces, the way you watch a tide come in over flats. The hemlocks along the east path had begun to shed their needles in soft brown drifts, and from each bare crown a green spear was pushing up, unfurling into fronds. The air thickened and warmed. Mist lay across the grass in long pale scarves, and the ridge that had stood against the sky for forty-three years was sinking into m
Clara's POV "Clara," I said. "You told me to call you Clara." "Clara." He said it carefully, like a man setting down something hot. "Thank you. I'm sorry. I keep dropping it." "You can drop it as often as you like. I'll keep picking it up." He looked at me for a moment longer. Then he laughed, short and wrecked, and led me up the rest of the stairs by the hand. Gail had cleared the guest quarters in the east wing and left a kettle on the stove, three mismatched mugs, and a note in her cramped hand. Milo is alive and swearing. Do not come to the infirmary. That is a medical instruction. Someone had lit the little fire. Someone had also, God bless her, left a plate of Victoria's rolls under a dish towel. We spent the first hour pretending. Lucan made tea badly and put the milk in first, and I told him so. He said it was a family tradition. I said it was a crime. He sat on the sofa, a lumpy green thing with one cushion permanently sunk, and I curled into his side with my fe
Lucan's POV She didn't flinch, and that was how I knew she'd been expecting it. Clara stood in the failing blue light with a specimen jar held against her sternum like something that might spill. Behind her the loom had gone quiet, a gray frame in a garden of dimming flowers. The vines on the walls hung slack. Across the chamber, two of Declan's wolves were hauling Adan Blackridge to his feet. He went without a fight, a soft, balding man in the ruin of a good suit, muttering the same four words to the floor. I'm owed. I'm owed. Nobody answered him. Gail had promised me Milo would keep his side and his stubbornness, in that order of certainty, and the promise sat in my chest like a breath finally let go. I'd climbed twenty-two steps rehearsing a speech, one sentence per stair. Somewhere between the last step and her face, it had slid out of my head and left only the shape of the hole. "It's all right," she said. "It isn't. I had it whole a minute ago." I leaned on the rail, b







