Chapter 3

Tory POV

I moved across Sorrel Ridge as dawn broke over the trees, my mother's letter clutched so tightly in my fist that the wax seal had left a mark on my palm.

Every instruction she'd written was seared into my memory now, past the ridge, into the woods, follow the crooked pine line until it stops being a path at all.

How had she never told me any of this?

Sixteen years under her roof, and not once had she given me even a hint. A secret bloodline.

It still didn't make sense, no matter how many times I turned the words over in my head.

But I hadn't come this far to turn back now. I needed to get to the bottom of it, whatever it cost me.

The woods swallowed me whole.

Every step deeper felt like a step further from anything familiar, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't just confused, I was afraid.

Was the letter even talking about me? What had my mother meant by Elowen? The name sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't cough up.

The pack grounds behind me had gone eerily silent, the kind of silence that makes you question whether you're even still standing on land you know.

An owl hooted somewhere above, low and mournful, and I swore I felt eyes tracking me through the underbrush, not wolves, not anything I recognized.

Strange noises kept slicing through the quiet, sharp enough to make me flinch, gone before I could place them.

Then I saw it. Exactly where the letter promised it would be.

A tree unlike any other in that forest, bark black as pitch, with the same engraved symbol burned into it that I'd found on the ring.

My breath caught. This was real. All of it was real.

I pressed my palm against the raised mark disguised in a bead of hardened sap, and the tree groaned, splitting down the center like it had been waiting its whole life for someone to find it.

I gasped as the vault revealed itself, gold-plated, gleaming even in the dim morning light, exactly as the letter had described.

My pulse hammered so hard I could hear it in my ears.

The lock bore the same engraving as the ring, the same one from the tree, the same one that had haunted every corner of this impossible morning. My hands shook as I slid the ring into place.

It clicked open.

I couldn't believe what I was looking at.

Gold.

Currency I didn't recognize. Amulets that pulsed faintly with something that felt less like metal and more like a heartbeat.

"What is all this, Mother?" I whispered, confusion knotting tight behind my ribs.

I unfolded the letter again, desperate for anything that might explain it, and there, on the back, in a line I'd somehow skipped the first time through were the words that changed everything.

"In the chest lies the riches of the Elowen bloodline. You have inherited all of it, for you are the last surviving heir of our species."

The last surviving heir. Not just of a family. Of a species.

I spun around, checking the trees behind me, certain I could feel something watching.

Nothing. No one. Just the wind moving through branches that suddenly felt too still.

I gathered the vault into my arms, heavier than it looked, cold against my chest, and started to run.

I didn't know where I was running to yet, only that staying in that clearing another second felt like inviting disaster.

That was when the sky flickered.

A light unlike anything I'd ever seen, white edged in blue, cold in a way that I had never imagined, split the air above me.

My stomach dropped straight through the forest floor. I knew that light. I'd dreamed that light.

It struck the tree. The same tree the vault had come from, now cracking apart in a shower of splinters and smoke.

"Aaargh!" The scream tore out of me before I even understood why I was in pain, and then I saw it.

A strange blue glow erupted from my own palm, spreading up my fingers like frost creeping across glass.

This had never happened to me before. Not once in twenty-two years, not even in my first life.

Ice shot out of my arms in a violent burst, arcing toward the burning tree and where it landed, the flames simply stopped.

No fire. No smoke. Nothing but ice creeping over blackened bark like it was smothering the fire on purpose, obeying me.

I stood frozen, staring at my own hands like they belonged to someone else.

Before I could even begin to process what I'd just done, the sky answered with something far worse.

A meteor, the exact meteor from my previous life, down to the way it screamed through the air, slammed into the ground barely a foot from where I stood.

The heat of it singed the edge of my sleeve.

That wasn't a dream, how I wish it was.

The realization hit me harder than the meteor had.

"That wasn't a joke," I said aloud, my voice shaking but certain, each word landing like a verdict. "It was a memory. And I have to move. Now."