Smoke swallowed our camp. In the haze, I saw soldiers moving like shadows with guns. I saw a wolf fall and not get back up. I saw a body I couldn’t name because if I did, I’d stop running.
A scream cut off too quickly.
My legs almost buckled.
Griff’s grip tightened like a vise. “Tam,” he snarled, voice thick with panic and fury, “move!”
I moved.
We plunged into the rocks above the inlet, scrambling up a narrow cut in the cliff face where sea wind whipped hard against my face. Griff shoved me ahead, shielding me with his body whenever the path opened to the shoreline.
We climbed until my hands bled and my knees shook.
And when we finally dropped into a hidden crease between boulders—a place where the trees grew thick and the rocks blocked sightlines—Griff pressed a hand over my mouth and held me still.
We listened.
Boots passed by above us. Then there were voices. A dog barked.
Then the sound faded, swallowed by wind and distance.
Griff’s forehead dropped to my hair, his breath shaking.
I was still holding my knife.
My hands were smeared with blood that wasn’t mine.
I swallowed hard and forced the words out through Griff’s palm, muffled and broken.
“They killed them.”
His eyes shut. His jaw clenched until a muscle jumped. When he finally spoke, his voice was a rasp that sounded like it scraped his throat raw.
“Aye,” he whispered. “They did.”
In the silence that followed, with smoke still staining the sky behind us, I realized several things at once.
Skye was gone.
My parents were dead.
And my world was never going to be the same again.
CHAPTER 1
Present day
The Isle of Man
Tamsin
The first thing I felt was fire.
Not the clean, crackling kind from a hearth or a signal blaze on the cliffs, but a fire inside me, crawling through my veins like it was alive and furious. It burned and froze at the same time, a wrongness that had no edges, only hunger.
I was sinking.
No—floating.
