A scream spikes from inside. Grandma.
I rip away from Reid and sprint up the steps. The front door hangs crooked on splintered hinges, the wood speared with ice where claws probed for seams. I shoulder through, my breath sawing. The little cottage I grew up in is a ruin—salt lines scraped and broken, thyme wilted to black threads, frost-blasted wood shining like bone. Grandma is slumped against the pantry door, one hand pressed to her side, blood seeping between her fingers. Her eyes are open and furious. Oh, thank the gods, she’s alive!
I don’t have time to sob in relief. The gray wolf looming over her is no longer a wolf.
He’speeling.
Fur splits along long seams, claws tear his paws apart, and the thing beneath steps out—a wraith wearing tatters of wolf-skin like a cape, ribs showing through night-black flesh, thorns sprouting from his shoulders as if he grew up through a dead hedge. His eyes burn like coals. They fix on me, and hesmiles.
“You smell like him,” the thing rasps. His voice is metal dragged over a stone floor, and the windows shiver in their frames.
“Who?” The word scrapes my throat.
“Your father. A man who tampered with dark magic. Who used me like a tool. Whospilled my blood to save his ownand cursed me to roam this forest in hunger, bound me as wraith and wolf to his bloodline, unable to reach him.”
Its teeth glint like shards of black glass. “I worried your nest. I left antlers and thorns, drove you out to gather, and waited for a wolf to mark what the wards once held. But now you’re marked. You left the nest. The last ward broke, just as I planned. And now his debt lives on in you.”
The floor tilts. My knees go weak. “What… Who are you?”
The thorns along his shoulders twitch like hackles as his ember eyes flicker with memories. “Fenric. I was once a man. Simple. Good. Awarden of the forest.”
I lick my dry lips. “What did my father do to you?”
“He came to me under the guise of friendship,” Fenric says. “Offered me money. Work. Promised it was nothing more thana favor—a small spell to help him stay hidden. I agreed.”
He laughs, low and bitter. “But he tricked me.Poisoned my body with thorn-wine. Burned ash into my mouth. Spoke my name into rot. Then hetied my fate to his bloodline so the price of his power would fall on me instead of him.”
“Why would he do that?” My voice breaks.
“He needed a shield,” he says, stepping closer. “And a weapon. He found both in me.” He gestures to his ruined form. “I foughtthe hunger at first. I tried to hold on to who I was. But he kept feeding me names—people to find, people to punish. And the more I obeyed, the more I forgot myself. The man I was died in pieces until nothing was left but this. He killed me without a blade.”
Fenric’s gaze snaps back to mine. “You carry his legacy. His blood.” His voice curdles with cold delight. “And that meansI can finally collect.”
He lifts one bramble-wrapped hand and points at my chest. “Free me with your blood. Or feed me. Those are the terms he left. And I’ll keep coming—again and again—until the debt is paid.”
My pulse slams so hard that it shakes my chest. “You knew what would happen. That Reid would bite me. That it would sever the last of the magic protecting me,” I whisper, knowing it’s true.
He nods. “A wolf always comes when his mate needs him. And he alwaysclaimswhat he saves.”
Of course. Fenric can readscents and ward-signaturesthe way a ledger reads ink.He knew Reid was out there; he simply had to draw me out and wait.
“Another should have paid the debt,” he continues, his mouth curling with frustration, “but she was denied me.”
“Another?” I echo.
Fenric trains his empty gaze on me. “A woman with the same red hair and green eyes. The same blood. Your sister. But she chose a future that put her beyond my reach when she chose to drink.”
I shake my head. “I don’t have a sister.”
“Arya,” Grandma breathes, her eyes wide with realization. “She drank the punch. It… changed her. He could no longer use her blood to pay the debt.”
I know the story—Arya drank Dr. Karloff’s Frankenpunch to buy forever with Gregor. The brew could bless or ruin; in her, it made a shapeshifter.
And now I learn that we shared a father, that Arya is mysister…
I shove down the million questions invading my head to focus on the larger emergency of blood on Grandma’s fingers and the thing smiling at me with a mouth full of glass.
“Old Lawcounts names,” Fenric says, savoring my shock. “Arya’s changerenamedher. I can’t tally what I can’t read. But you still carryhisname.”
