CHAPTER ONE — The Wrong Kind of Prey (1)

Somewhere in the mist-wrapped mountains above the Umbra Valley. Midnight.

The mountain was singing again.

Isola Vane heard it the way other people heard their own heartbeat — without listening. The song of the Veil: a low, wet hum that rolled down the Kestrel Pass like a river of milk. It was beautiful, if you didn't know what it was for.

It was for keeping things out. And for keeping things in.

She moved through the pines without a sound, boots finding stone where stone hid under frost, breath curling white and then not at all. On her back, the shadows of the trees bent toward her like children reaching for a mother. That was her gift, and her curse, and the reason the Circle of Elders had made her the youngest Chief Guardian in three hundred years.

The blade on her hip drank light. The law on her tongue drank mercy.

Her sister had taught her the difference. Then the law had eaten her sister too.

Isola stopped. The mountain's song had changed key.

Fresh tracks in the mud. Human tracks. Not a hiker who'd wandered off the trail — these were moving wrong, too fast, dragging a heavy pack in a straight line toward the east scar, where the wraithwolves denned. The man who'd made these tracks was either the world's worst hunter or the world's best idiot.

She checked the moon. She checked the sky. She checked, against her own code, the part of her that still flinched at the smell of human sweat.

The law is the Veil, and the Veil is the law. Human blood poisons the Umbra. This is the oldest truth we have.

She had repeated it so many times that the words had gone smooth, like river stones. She believed them the way she believed the sun rose — because she had never once been allowed to watch it not rise.

Then she heard the screaming.

* * *

Kellen Blake was having the worst livestream of his life, and he was going to die on camera, and his last words were going to be a joke about bear spray.

"Okay, okay, quick update for the six hundred people still watching — we're live from the legendary Umbra Mountains, where local folklore promises either the world's rarest blackstone artifacts or a really embarrassing obituary. Spoiler alert: it's the obituary."

Something the size of a horse hit the drone.

It didn't crash. It ate the drone. The feed died with a sound like a wet bag of cough drops, and then the mist in front of Kellen got eyes.

Six of them. Silver, stacked in pairs, floating at chest height like a string of ugly Christmas lights.

"Right," Kellen said, gripping his machete, which had seemed like a great idea back in Portland. "Bear spray it is."

He was a professional. That was the thing. He'd spent eight years filming himself in places the internet called "unsafe," with a smile that the internet called "a red flag" and sponsors called "bankable." He'd walked the edge of an active volcano. He'd swum with sharks. He'd once spent forty-eight hours in a Siberian hunting lodge with a very territorial moose and come out with a viral video and a restraining order.

He had never, in all that time, seen a wolf made of darkness.

The first one took his machete out of his hand like it was taking candy from a very stupid child. The second one knocked him flat. The third one — thank you, universe, there's a third one — crouched over him, and its chest was a hole where a fire should be, and its breath was cold, and its eyes were the eyes of something that had been eating nightmares for breakfast since before his ancestors learned to farm.

"Okay," Kellen whispered, staring into the void. "If this is my last upload — subscribe. My therapist will need the income."

The wolf leaned down.

And then the wolf was gone.

Not dead-gone. Removed-gone — yanked sideways through the air by something fast and dark and furious, slammed into a pine trunk with a crack that sounded expensive. The second wolf turned, snarled, and got a blade through the throat so clean it made a sound like the end of a sentence.

The third wolf didn't get to run. It tried. The mountain let it get five strides before the shadows on the ground stood up and took it home.

Kellen lay in the mud, heart doing breakdance moves in his ribcage, and watched a woman step out of the dark.

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and she was holding a sword, and she was looking at him the way you look at a stain.

"Please tell me," he rasped, "that you're the welcome committee."