Three of them, at shoulder height, cut deep into the wood at a downward angle like something dragged hard from high to low. Each one is about four inches long, too wide for a human hand.
A dog did it, I thought at first. There is no dog. There has never been a dog in this house, not in eighteen years, not once.
Maybe it was old damage, decorative molding gone rough, my grief working on me until ordinary things looked significant. I've been convincing myself of lies for eighteen years.
I press my fingers into the grooves now. The wood is splintered at the edges, raised, raw like recent damage rather than old. Something with significant force tore into this door, something with claws long enough to span four inches and strong enough to take the wood with them.
And then someone, after, painted over it. A color that was close but not exact, and I can see the seam of it if I look at the right angle, a clean line where old beige ends and slightly different beige begins.
The house is quiet around me. It has that silence where a person used to be and isn't anymore, a silence with texture to it, something almost audible in all the small sounds Rosa used to make that aren't happening.
My stomach drops through the floor.
I go back to the letter.
Your parents were not human. You are not human. I know that isn't what you want to hear. Rosa raised you to believe otherwise, and she did it because she loved you and because she was terrified. She was trying to protect what was left of you.
Your mother and father were Silverpelt wolves. The last of a bloodline the Council spent twenty years hunting to extinction. They murdered your parents, Nova. Tore them apart in front of witnesses. You were eight months old and hidden in a neighbor's basement and they didn't find you. That is the only reason you are alive to read this.
The Silverpelt wolves died screaming. Every single one of them. Your parents died screaming. That is not a detail I include to hurt you. It's a detail I include so you understand exactly what you're walking into.
You'll be next. You may already be marked.
I set the letter down and press both hands flat on the table. The kitchen is quiet. Outside, a car passes, the sound of it impossibly ordinary, someone driving somewhere unremarkable while the world underneath me splits open. The morning light through the window above the sink is pale and flat, hitting the ceramic glaze of Rosa's tea mug.
My hands won't stop shaking. I watch them and I don't try to make them stop.
I've healed fast my whole life. Faster than anyone I know, fast enough that I learned early not to mention it, not to let gym teachers or school nurses see how quickly a bruise faded or a cut closed.
I've always been slightly too strong for my size, slightly too steady in the cold. I ran faster than the boys in my grade when I was twelve and didn't understand why I wasn't supposed to.
I have dreams, vivid and sensory, of forests I've never been to, of running through moonlight on four legs, of a sound in my chest that isn't quite a heartbeat.
I thought I was strange, a little broken, something in me wired wrong.
Rosa knew. She knew all of it. The whole time she was holding me and feeding me and driving me to school she was carrying this. Now she's dead. It might not have been natural. There are marks on her bedroom door. The photograph on my table shows two people who were torn apart before I was old enough to understand what loss meant.
She kept this to protect me but it killed her anyway.
The tea mug on the counter catches the light. Small blue flowers on white ceramic. I remember the shop where she chose them, the smell of paint and something sweet. We got two. Mine broke the summer after and she gave me hers without making it into anything.
That was who she was. She just gave things.
My throat closes.
I pick the letter back up.
My name doesn't matter. What matters is that I've been looking for Silverpelt survivors for years, and you are the last one. I found out about you three months ago. The Council found out about you four months ago. You have a month, maybe less, before they come to wherever you are.
Staying is not an option.
There is a place. Everpine Academy, in the Colorado mountains. A school for our kind. They'll accept you on my recommendation, late enrollment, no questions asked. It's where your parents met. It's also where the Council has significant influence, which makes it the most dangerous place I could send you.
I'm sending you anyway.
The Academy has resources you need. Knowledge about what you are. People who knew your parents, who may remember them with something other than fear. People who, if they understood what you are, might have reason to protect you.
Might.
