Nova The last time I stood at the Duskwood gates, they were burning my skin. Now I stood there again, six years older, with a medical bag in my hand and a lie in my mouth. "Name?" The guard held a silver-tipped spear an inch from my chest. "Dr. Ivy Calder." My voice came out smooth, thank God. "The Alpha sent for a healer." "The Alpha sent for a miracle." He sniffed the air and frowned. "You smell like medicine." Good. That was the point. I had spent three weeks rubbing wolfsbane salve into my skin until my own scent was only bitter leaves and soap. I had cut my hair short and dyed it brown. I wore glasses I did not need and under my collar, over my left shoulder, the old brand still throbbed, a crossed fang, the mark they burn into wolves who are never allowed home. The guard did not know me. He had been a boy when they threw me out. He had probably cheered. "Go on," he said at last, and the gate groaned open. I walked into the place that killed my mother. Duskwood looked the same. Pine forest, stone lodges, snow packed hard on the paths but the faces were different. A woman sat on a porch step coughing into a rag, and when she pulled it away, the cloth was black. Black veins crawled up her wrist like roots under ice. The Silver Rot! I had read about it and seeing it was another thing. I kept walking but then, I told myself not to look left. Anyway, I looked left. The execution post stood at the edge of the square. Old, grey wood, stained dark at the base. Nobody had cleaned it, nobody had even tried. I had been eighteen, on my knees in the snow with silver chains on my wrists, and I had screamed my mother's name until I had no voice left. She had looked at me across that square, calm as a Sunday, and said only: "Live, little moon." My breath fogged white, my hands were shaking. I put them in my pockets. Not yet, I told myself. Not here and not until I find out who did it. "Dr. Calder!" A man came down the Alpha House steps with both hands out, smiling like I was a long-lost daughter. Tall, silver at the temples, handsome in a soft, kind way. Ambrose Duskwood, the Beta. Caelan's uncle. Once, he had slipped me sweets from his pockets when I was seven. "We are so grateful," he said, folding my cold hand between both of his. "So many have come and failed. My nephew is..." He swallowed. His eyes shone. "Forgive me. He is all I have left." I smiled back. My whole body went still, like a rabbit near a fox. I could not have told you why. "I will do everything I can," I said. "I know you will." He patted my hand once, gently. "Come. He's been asking." The Alpha's room was dark and hot, and smelled like sickness. The curtains were drawn. A fire burned low and in the great bed, propped against the pillows, lay the man who had destroyed my life. I had practised this moment for six years. I had imagined him smug, or cruel, or on a throne. I had not imagined him looking like this. Caelan Duskwood was thinner. His cheekbones had sharpened to knife edges. Black veins crawled up his throat and into his jaw, and his skin was the colour of old paper but his eyes were the same. Steel grey and steady. Worn to the bone, and still refusing to blink. "Dr. Calder," Ambrose said softly. "The Alpha." Caelan looked at me. Something moved behind his eyes. Fast and strange. His nostrils flared, his whole body went rigid against the pillows, and the black veins at his throat pulsed once, hard. I stopped breathing. He knows, I thought. He has to know. "Leave us," he said. His voice was a raw whisper. "Caelan, you need..." "Leave us, Uncle." Ambrose hesitated. Then he bowed his head and slipped out, and the door clicked shut behind him. Silence, fire crackling. My pulse pounded in my ears. "Who are you?" Caelan asked. "I told you. Ivy Calder." "No." His eyes did not leave my face. "That's your name. I asked who you are." I forced my chin up. I made my voice flat as a scalpel. "I'm the only person who can save you, Alpha. If you want to live, I have two conditions." A flicker of something crossed his face. It might have been a smile or It might have been pain. "Go on." "One. Full control of the clinic. Every drug, every patient, every decision. No one overrules me, not the Beta, not the Elders. Not you." "And two?" "Your oath. You will not interfere with my work, my methods, or my questions. You will not ask where I came from. You will not follow me." I took a breath. "Swear it, by moon and by blood or I walk out of these gates tonight and let your people rot." It was cruel. I knew it was cruel. He studied me for a very long time. Long enough that the fire popped twice. Long enough that six years of anger cracked, just slightly, and I hated it. Then Caelan Duskwood reached under his pillow, drew a small silver knife, and slid the blade across his palm. Blood welled dark and bright. He held his hand out. "By moon and blood," he said, quietly, "I swear it." I did not breathe. Our hands met. His fingers were hot, burning with fever, but his grip was careful, almost gentle. The moment my skin touched his blood, something inside me, deep in a place I had thought was empty, opened its eyes. His breath hitched. His pupils flared gold. A low sound rumbled out of his chest. It was not human. It was the sound of a wolf who had slept for six years and had just heard a name. Then his hand fell away and I fled that room. I only remember cold air, a girl's voice somewhere shouting about tea, and the long walk to the clinic with my hands trembling around my bag. The clinic was in the old stone cottage behind the lodge. The door was unlocked. Inside, it smelled of dried herbs and ink, and my knees almost gave out, because it was exactly the same. My mother's glass jars. My mother's mortar and pestle. The stool where I used to sit and watch her work. The stool had been dusted, the mortar was clean, which means someone had kept this room alive. On the workbench, beside a single white flower in a glass of water, sat a folded card. My fingers did not feel like mine as I opened it. Welcome home, Nova. Nobody in Duskwood knew my name. I stared at the handwriting. Round loops, a little slant. Every letter sitting on the line like a bird on a wire. I had seen that handwriting on a thousand recipe cards. It was my mother's!

Nova I did not sleep that night. I sat on my mother's stool with the card in my lap, reading the same three words until they stopped looking like words. Welcome home, Nova. Anyone could copy handwriting. I told myself that over and over but my mother always crossed her sevens, and so did the person who wrote this. Either someone in Duskwood knew who I was, or my dead mother had left me a message. I did not know which idea frightened me more. At dawn, I put the card in my boot, tied my hair back, and went to work. The first thing I did was draw blood from Caelan. He lay half asleep when I entered his room, his skin hot and gray, the black veins crawling higher than the day before. He did not wake when the needle slid in. That was a bad sign. His wolf was too weak to fight the pain. "How long does he have?" Ambrose asked from the doorway. He had been hovering there since sunrise, wringing his hands like a worried grandmother. "Three weeks, maybe even less." I did not look up. "Please close the door now. He needs quiet." "Of course, anything you need, Dr. Calder." His smile was warm. "Anything at all." The door clicked shut. I let out a breath I had not known I was holding. Back in the clinic, I set up my mother's old microscope and laid out three samples: Caelan's blood, a swab from the coughing woman on the porch, and a vial of black fluid from a dead patient. Then I worked until my eyes burned. The Silver Rot was clever. It was not a virus, like the Elders believed. It was a toxin, built to hide in the blood and eat the wolf from the inside. It attacked the bond between a wolf and its human half, which was why no healer could stop it. You could not cure a creature whose soul was being torn in two but the toxin had a seam. A tiny weakness, like a loose thread in a sweater. If I could find it, I could pull. I ran test after test. By noon, my hands shook with hunger. By three o'clock, I had a name for the weakness: an unstable compound that needed a stabilizer, or the poison would break down in a day. I tested the stabilizer, then I tested it again. I had to put the dropper down very slowly, because I could not trust my hands. I knew this formula: It was moon vine extract, mixed with crushed silverleaf and a pinch of ground amber, bound together with a rare resin that grew only on the northern slopes. The ratio was exact. One part to seven to three. My mother had invented it when I was twelve, in this very room, to ease the pain of old Alpha Dorian's failing heart. She had never written it down. She had told only two people: the old Alpha, and me, in a whisper, while I sat on this stool pretending to do my homework. Somebody had taken my mother's kindest invention and turned it into a weapon and somebody had used that same weapon, six years ago, to poison the old Alpha and blame her for it. My mother had not just been framed. Her work had been stolen, twisted, and fed to the pack like rat poison. It was proof. I did not cry even though I wanted to. My eyes were dry and hot, and what rose in my chest was colder than tears. I picked up a glass beaker and threw it against the wall. It broke with a high, bright, ringing crack. "That," said a voice from the doorway, "was a very expensive beaker." I spun around. A girl stood there with a tray in her hands, wearing a bright red scarf and a face like a startled owl. She had Caelan's gray eyes. "I brought tea," she said. "You didn't come to dinner. I'm Wren. I'm his sister. You're allowed to throw things, I think. I would." "I'm sorry," I said, and meant it. "It has been a long day." "It's been six long years." She set the tray on the workbench and glanced at the broken glass without a hint of guilt. "Eat something. You look like a ghost." She left before I could answer. The tea steamed on the table beside a plate of bread and cheese. I stared at it for a long minute, then I ate every crumb. When the sun went down, I locked the clinic and sat in the dark with a single lamp, my mother's formula written on a scrap of paper in front of me. Someone in this pack knew her recipe. Only three people ever had: my mother, the old Alpha, and me. The old Alpha was dead. I stared at that sentence until my skin prickled. I noticed that something moved outside the window, a figure was crossing the snow in the moonlight, tall, thin, and unsteady. He wore only a light shirt and trousers, and his feet were bare. He walked like a man who knew every step by heart. Caelan! My pulse jumped. He should have been in bed. He should have been too weak to stand. I grabbed my coat and followed. He did not go toward the lodge, or the gate, or the training field. He went toward the old pack cemetery at the edge of the forest, a quiet place of pine trees and stone markers where the dead of Duskwood slept under the snow. I kept far back, hiding behind the trees, my breath held tight. He stopped at a small, plain cairn near the back. It was my mother's grave. I knew it before I saw the name. Someone had cleared the snow from the stones. A glass jar sat on the cairn, holding fresh white flowers, the same kind as the one beside the card in the clinic. Caelan sank to his knees. He laid his palm against the cold stone, and his whole body shook. I could not hear his words but I saw his back heave once, then twice, the way a person's back heaves when they are trying not to make a sound. Six years, I thought. Six years of this, and I never knew. My anger faltered. I hated that it did. Then he stood up, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and said into the dark, in a voice that was clear and steady and very tired: "You can come out, Ivy. I know you followed me." My heart stopped. I stepped out from behind the tree, and the snow crunched beneath my boots. "You swore not to follow me," I said. "I did not follow you. You followed me." He did not turn. "Ask your question. I can see you have one." I stared at his back. At the pale marker. At the flowers, still fresh, still sweet. "Whose grave is this?" I asked. Caelan was quiet for a long moment. Then, very softly, he said: "Nobody's."

Nova Nobody's! The word hung between us like smoke. I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, and Caelan swayed. It was a small movement at first, just a lean to the left. Then his knees gave out, and I caught him before his head struck the stones. He was heavier than he looked, and burning hot. Through his thin shirt, I could feel the black veins pulsing against my arm like something alive. His eyes were half closed. His lips moved. "Don't," he whispered. "Don't tell Wren I came here." "You're an idiot," I said, and my voice shook. "You have three weeks to live, and you walk around barefoot in the snow." "I had to." His fingers curled weakly in my coat. "It's the one night he doesn't watch." "Who doesn't watch?" But he had already gone limp. I do not know how long I stood there, holding the man who had broken my life while the snow fell on both of us. I know that my anger did not leave. It only changed shape, the way water becomes ice, until it was something harder and much more painful. I thought of him on his knees at that cairn. I thought of the day he rejected me. Both memories were true, and neither would fit inside the other. "Caelan!" A figure came crashing through the trees. Wren, in her red scarf, her face white. "Oh, God. I knew it. I knew he would sneak out again." Together, we dragged him back to the Alpha House. I gave him a sedative and a cold compress, and I sat beside his bed until his breathing slowed. Wren stood by the window with her arms wrapped around her, watching her brother sleep. "Thank you," she said at last, in a small voice. "It's my job." "No, I mean it." She turned. Her gray eyes were red-rimmed. "I need to tell you something strange. You can tell me I'm crazy." I waited. "Three weeks ago, before Uncle Ambrose sent for any healer, Caelan called me into his study. He said, 'Dust the clinic and put fresh flowers on the workbench. Someone is coming, and I want her to feel at home.'" Wren laughed, short and uneasy. "I thought the fever was making him confused. We didn't even know you existed. And then you walked through the gate." My skin got cold. "He said 'her,'" I said slowly. "Yes." Wren studied my face. "He's been waiting for you, Dr. Calder. For six years, I think. I just never knew who for." "He also told me to leave honey out for your tea," Wren added. "He was weirdly specific about it." I had taken my tea with honey since I was six. Nobody in Duskwood could have known that. I did not trust my voice, so I did not answer. It was past midnight when I got back to the clinic. I locked the door, drew the curtains, and stood in the middle of the room with my heart thudding like a fist. Welcome home, Nova! Someone had planned this. Meaning someone had known I would come. The flowers, the dusted shelves, the card. And Caelan had said "her," weeks ago, as if he had always known her face. I needed to understand. I needed something real to hold. So I did what my mother taught me to do when I felt lost. I cleaned and started with the workbench, wiping every jar, every beaker, every drawer. When I lifted the heavy stone mortar to wipe beneath it, my fingers caught on something odd. A seam in the wood, a thin line, where the grain did not match. I knew this table. I had sat beside it for twelve years. That seam had never been there. I pressed my thumbnail into the groove, and a small panel slid open. Inside it lay a folded sheet of paper, yellowed at the edges. On the front, in loopy, familiar handwriting, was one word. Nova! My knees folded. I sat down on the floor with the letter in my lap and read it by lamplight. My darling girl, If you are reading this, then I am gone, and the formula I made out of love has been twisted into something terrible. Forgive me. I never meant it to hurt anyone. I hid this where only you would think to look. There is something I should have told you years ago. You are not like other wolves. The blood in your veins is older than the pack, older than the Alphas, older than the border. It is called Lunar blood, and it is the only thing in the world that can break the poison I made. Do not tell anyone. Not even the boy fate chose for you, if he comes to you with kind eyes. Not even those who say they are friends. The ones who want what you carry will smile at you first. Trust your own hands. Trust the moon. I love you more than all the stars, Mama I read it three times. By the end, the page was wet, and I did not know when I had started crying. Lunar blood! The cure was not in any jar or herb. It was me. It had always been me and the poison killing Duskwood had been born in my mother's hands and could only die in mine. Behind me, the lamp flickered. I froze. The window was latched. The door was locked. There was no draft. The flame bent sideways, as if something had passed in front of it, and then it went out. Darkness swallowed the room. I held my breath. The only sound was the thump of my own pulse. Then, very softly, I heard a floorboard creaking behind me. I moved without thinking. I rolled sideways just as something whistled through the air and buried itself in the table where my head had been. A knife. I smelled it before I saw it. Silver. "Who's there?" I gasped. No answer. A shadow lunged, tall and fast, and a gloved hand clamped over my mouth. The blade flashed again, toward my throat. I did not decide what happened next. Something inside me, the thing that had opened its eyes when I touched Caelan's blood, simply woke up. Heat burst through my chest. My hands lit with a faint silver glow. The attacker cried out and stumbled back. For one heartbeat, the light showed me a hooded shape, a black mask, a pair of cold, steady eyes. Then the figure threw something at my face, and a cloud of white powder exploded in the air. I coughed, stumbled, and fell. The powder stung my eyes and burned my nose. Wolfsbane, I realized. Someone knew exactly how to stop a wolf from healing. By the time I could see again, the window stood wide open on the empty night. I lay on the floor, shaking, my throat raw, my hands still glowing. Then I saw it. Caught on the window latch, where the attacker had squeezed through, fluttering in the cold breeze: A thread of bright red wool.