PROLOGUE
Seven years ago…
Isle of Skye
Tamsin Drake
The morning started with a light sheen of mist.
It always did out here, the sea breathing fog over the hills like a dragon guarding its hoard of golden treasure. The heather was wet under my boots and the wind smelled of salt and peat smoke. When I stepped out of our shelter, the cold kissed my cheeks hard enough to make my eyes water.
Camp was tucked into a shallow dip above a rocky inlet, hidden from the open coastline by a crooked line of birch and gorse. We’d chosen it because you couldn’t see the sea unless you knew where to look, and because the cliffs behind us rose like the spine of a sleeping giant.
For our people, it was safe, at least safer than most places anyway.
The shifters called it Haven sometimes. We humans just called it Skye. A patch of stubborn green that the Collapse hadn’t swallowed whole, where wolves and humans shared fires and watch rotations and dried fish racks without looking at each other like mortal enemies.
Here, the wolves didn’t go feral.
Here, no one went missing in the night.
I tugged my braid over my shoulder and started toward the firepit, the soles of my boots soft on the damp ground. Someone had already stoked the coals. Orange light winked between stones, and the kettle hanging over sent steam up into the air like a rising cloud.
My mother was humming.
She always hummed when she was trying to pretend that she wasn’t excited about something. Her hands were busy with the oatcakes, flipping them on a flat stone, her fingers quick and sure. Her dark hair had come loose from its tie and the wind kept stealing strands and slapping them against her mouth.
“Happy birthday,” she said without looking up, but I could hear the smile in her voice. “Fifteen now, huh? You’re practically ancient.”
“I’m practically dead,” I muttered, stepping close enough to steal one of the warm cakes.
She slapped my wrist with the flats of her fingers, laughing. “Wait, or you’re going to burn your tongue. If you do, don’t come crying to me.”
My father sat on a log near the edge of the firelight, sharpening a tool with slow, careful strokes with his pocketknife. When I looked closer, I saw that it was a bone hook for pulling nets.
He glanced up at me and his eyes softened. “Fifteen,” he echoed, like the number meant something big. “Your gran would’ve?—”
He didn’t finish.
We all had people we didn’t finish sentences about.
A shadow shifted behind him, tall and broad-shouldered, moving like he belonged everywhere at once. Griff dropped into a seat by the fire, and I glanced up at him.
He was smiling, which was always a warning.
His hair was tied back with a leather cord, the wind catching loose strands and turning them into a mess around his ears. He wore a patched coat that had once been military. The scars on his knuckles looked older than I was.
“Birthday girl,” he said, voice warm as the fire. “You ready?”
“For what?” I asked automatically, because with Griff, the answer was never nothing.
He tipped his chin toward the others gathering in the morning light.
They came in twos and threes from the shelters and from the perimeter, drawn in by the smell of breakfast and the excuseof celebration. Aunt Moira with her hands stained green from herb poultices. Wee Finn, who wasn’t wee anymore, carrying a coil of rope like it was his own personal treasure. Eira, one of the wolves, shifting from her four-legged form into human with that smooth ripple that still made my stomach tighten even though I’d grown up with it. Someone passed her a set of clothes and she pulled them overhead, covering herself.
My mother wiped her hands on her skirt and finally turned to face me properly. “Come here,” she said, and the way she said it made my skin prickle.
I moved to the center of the circle they were making, the fire at my back. Heat licked up my spine. The air felt charged, like the moment before lightning struck and set the forest aflame.
