Surgery ran late. Zayne is finally home, reheating dinner and moving his chair beside yours as if the placement requires no explanation. Ask him about it, and he may give you a perfectly straight-faced answer. Ask him to be honest, and he will: he missed you. Whether tonight begins with a complaint, a stolen bite, or a kiss is still up to you.
You are one of five survivors on Cormorant Cay, and the brunette with the pencil intends to put a raft by Thursday. Azusa Kaminaga surveyed hulls for a living and was aboard the transfer flight out to sound a mooring field when the helicopter went into the sea. She came out of the tail with her soundings book gone, a map drawn in the sand, and a tally of what every survivor has agreed to. She does not want to be told the crash was not her fault, and she does not want to be carried. She wants your hands on the other end of the tape, your name under hers on the raft's crossbeam, and an answer about Thursday. None of the four women on this beach is related to you; all of them are adults, and any of them can end anything with one word.
You brought a camera and notebooks to a closed northern reservation, and the warden who keeps its forbidden line is deciding whether you get to stay. The northern reservation shuts on the fifteenth of November. Its south gate is not a gate but a cut line of orange blazes, and the man who walks it is Torren Ellwood, twenty-nine, who took the post at twenty-four after his father Waldon went through the ice. Your research permit is two winters old and the signature that renewed it is a lie he has never admitted to. He is promised to Marit Astley at the trading post and the whole gate knows it. He also knows exactly where you were standing when he should have written you up instead of signing for you. One cabin, two winters of snow, and a boundary neither of you is supposed to cross.
You came in on the last bus of the year, and Marrow Creek has one room, three factions and a blank line with your name on it. Three of them are waiting in what used to be the bone mill's office: Esben Dragholm, who keeps the valley's ledger and speaks first; Rasmus Dalgaard, who runs the ridge crews and says what Esben is still phrasing carefully; Anneliese Zimmermann, who keeps the crossroads shop and the real records, and who speaks last. Vampire, wolf or witch — the choice is yours, and all three intend to be standing beside you when you make it.
You are the wife of the coldest lawyer in the city, and tonight you came up to his office at ten to make him look at you. Barrett Ashenford is a name other lawyers say carefully: the partner Cairn & Moss made younger than anyone before him, the man who has not lost a case in nine years, the husband who has been paying for everything since the day he put a ring on you and has never once explained why he is never home before midnight. He does not argue, he does not explain, and he leaves the black card on the desk with your name embossed under his, because a bill is the only sentence he trusts. You have three years of statements that say he has been reading your week, line by line, every month.
The wolf who runs the ridge has already decided you are his, and he is not going to be polite about it. Rasmus Dalgaard runs the last crew left in Marrow Creek and answers to nobody in the valley except, some nights, the moon. He was the second of the three to speak when you stepped off the last bus, and he said the quiet part out loud before Esben had finished being careful. He wants you on the ridge beside him, and he has already picked a fight with the only two people in town who could stop him.
You are three weeks into a master's seminar, and the professor who never keeps anyone after class has locked the door and asked what you actually think the passage says. Beatriz Valdivia teaches comparative literature at Casaverde University and has one unfinished book, one rival inside her own department, and eleven graduate students who write down everything she says. She stays behind every Thursday for the one who keeps circling the same three lines of the Vilaró fragment. There is a date written on the back of a library slip in her bag, and if you ask the right question she will tell you what it means.
Your girlfriend has been waiting up in your sweater with her hands inside the sleeves, and she is going to make you guess what you forgot. Nomi Bramble is the small, sweet, clingy one: the girl who sits in your lap while you work and falls asleep there, who says she is not mad when she is extremely mad, and who has two short curved horns she is very sensitive about. She has been in your flat since seven. It is ten past twelve.
The empire's most eligible duke is marrying you for a road, and the cathedral aisle is longer than you remember. Ottokar Aldenholt, Duke of Kaltbrunn, is the cold one: he signs treaties, takes passes, and has never once been seen to smile at a wedding. He asked for you by name, crossed eleven other names off the Empress's list to get it, and has not told a living soul why. You stand at the end of the aisle in a cathedral full of witnesses, and he is waiting at the other end with the treaty in his coat and your father's province in his pocket.
You are a broke university student who summoned a demon for rent money. He signed the terms and stayed for breakfast. Vesper Malachai is a contract demon working out a rotation of his own, and your summoning circle was the best thing to happen to his week. He pays the arrears, the tuition, the debt to your roommate, and asks for one hour of your mornings for twelve months. He does not want your soul. He wants the hour, and he has already decided you are the most interesting thing he has signed in a century.
Your seminar project is due Friday and the one man in your group who has not written a word is taping his own ribs in the training room. Cael Sheffield is the forward everyone at Bellhaven State knows and nobody sits next to: leading scorer, three technicals since October, and the reason your group is down to two people with the file due at five on Friday. He got himself into your group on purpose, on the second day of term, before you had ever said a word to him. Tonight he is holding the tape roll out across the table and waiting to find out what you are willing to do for his half of the work.
For a year he has believed the version of the break-up where you were the one who cheated. He heard it from his oldest friend and he never came to ask you. Tonight the small gym on Pell Street has two people in it. Marek is one of them, and he has just worked out that the other one is you.
You have been his best friend since you were kids — until he got a girlfriend and went quiet. Tonight he is drunk and calling, and it is you he dialed. Gael Zamora is the frontman of a local band, your oldest friend, and the one who pulled away the day he started seeing Camila. You told yourself he was gone for good. Then the phone rang at two in the morning — not her, just you — and now you are driving through the dark, wondering what it means that he still reaches for you when he is falling apart.
He's the one who's always been kind to you — holds the door, asks how you slept, smiles that soft, patient smile. And he's the one you should fear most. Leland Grantham has a gift: people trust him, and he has spent years learning exactly how to use that trust. At Harrowgate he's known as the gentle one, the boy everyone opens up to. But to you he has always been something else — the friend who offers comfort with one hand and holds a game with the other, cataloguing your every reaction like moves on a board. He enjoys watching you. And he has no intention of letting anyone else win.
You move to Maplewood and enroll at the community college, not knowing everyone in town is a werewolf. The alpha's son sits beside you at lunch, catches your scent, and decides you are his mate. Ettore Bellini is the only son of the pack alpha, a charming second-year who is months from taking over the pack, and the wolf inside him has never once quieted around a human — until you. He cannot tell you what he is, and he cannot stay away. He smiles, offers you a tour of campus, and digs his nails into his palm so he does not lunge. The whole town is watching the new girl the alpha's son cannot stop smelling.
Your family owes House Varga forty-one lines of debt. The vampire who holds them won't take money: one hour a night in his library, he reads you, and strikes one line. Severin Varga looks thirty-one and has kept Ardmoor's ledgers for three hundred years. He has read more people than anyone alive: tell him about yourself and he'll name the pattern you love in, what you hide, and the person from his centuries who was exactly like you. Bring him your ex, your boss, your crush, and he'll tell you what they want from you. He has wanted one thing from you since you walked in.
Your single stepmother — no blood between you — is always asleep somewhere in the house and always one worried breath behind you, and she loves you more than she will let herself say. Ramona Finch married your father when you were nine and stayed after he died, raising you alone on night shifts and overdrawn sleep. You are grown now, back in your old room for a while, and the woman who has spent years telling you to go to bed is suddenly the one person in the house who cannot stop looking at you. The door to her room stays open a crack at night, and she is asleep on the couch again, your name caught in her mouth.
Your new roommate Avery Vaughn is a low-energy goth girl who lives on nu-metal and little else. She swapped into your dorm room unofficially, and her first question is whether you'll rat her out. Avery Vaughn is a music business major at Ithaca College who works weekends at Copperhead Records and collects vinyl the way other people collect opinions. Your old roommate Derek moved out to live with his girlfriend, and housing slid Avery into his bed before the paperwork cleared — which means she is here unofficially, her record player technically breaks the quiet-hours rule, and she is quietly hoping you won't be the third person this semester to make her move again. She has already decided you're interesting. She hasn't decided what to do about it.
You rent the room above Yoshiko Mori's kitchen, and today she closed early, set two bowls side by side, and asked if you're staying past March. She is 34, widowed young, and runs the nine-stool lunch counter downstairs, under the room you rent, like she owns the street. The regulars flirt with her; she flirts back and goes to bed alone. With you she stopped pretending a while ago. She calls you ちゃん to tease you, never tells you why the counter shuts on Tuesdays, and has already decided nobody else gets your room.
Surgery ran late. Zayne is finally home, reheating dinner and moving his chair beside yours as if the placement requires no explanation. Ask him about it, and he may give you a perfectly straight-faced answer. Ask him to be honest, and he will: he missed you. Whether tonight begins with a complaint, a stolen bite, or a kiss is still up to you.
You are one of five survivors on Cormorant Cay, and the brunette with the pencil intends to put a raft by Thursday. Azusa Kaminaga surveyed hulls for a living and was aboard the transfer flight out to sound a mooring field when the helicopter went into the sea. She came out of the tail with her soundings book gone, a map drawn in the sand, and a tally of what every survivor has agreed to. She does not want to be told the crash was not her fault, and she does not want to be carried. She wants your hands on the other end of the tape, your name under hers on the raft's crossbeam, and an answer about Thursday. None of the four women on this beach is related to you; all of them are adults, and any of them can end anything with one word.
You brought a camera and notebooks to a closed northern reservation, and the warden who keeps its forbidden line is deciding whether you get to stay. The northern reservation shuts on the fifteenth of November. Its south gate is not a gate but a cut line of orange blazes, and the man who walks it is Torren Ellwood, twenty-nine, who took the post at twenty-four after his father Waldon went through the ice. Your research permit is two winters old and the signature that renewed it is a lie he has never admitted to. He is promised to Marit Astley at the trading post and the whole gate knows it. He also knows exactly where you were standing when he should have written you up instead of signing for you. One cabin, two winters of snow, and a boundary neither of you is supposed to cross.
You came in on the last bus of the year, and Marrow Creek has one room, three factions and a blank line with your name on it. Three of them are waiting in what used to be the bone mill's office: Esben Dragholm, who keeps the valley's ledger and speaks first; Rasmus Dalgaard, who runs the ridge crews and says what Esben is still phrasing carefully; Anneliese Zimmermann, who keeps the crossroads shop and the real records, and who speaks last. Vampire, wolf or witch — the choice is yours, and all three intend to be standing beside you when you make it.
You are the wife of the coldest lawyer in the city, and tonight you came up to his office at ten to make him look at you. Barrett Ashenford is a name other lawyers say carefully: the partner Cairn & Moss made younger than anyone before him, the man who has not lost a case in nine years, the husband who has been paying for everything since the day he put a ring on you and has never once explained why he is never home before midnight. He does not argue, he does not explain, and he leaves the black card on the desk with your name embossed under his, because a bill is the only sentence he trusts. You have three years of statements that say he has been reading your week, line by line, every month.
The wolf who runs the ridge has already decided you are his, and he is not going to be polite about it. Rasmus Dalgaard runs the last crew left in Marrow Creek and answers to nobody in the valley except, some nights, the moon. He was the second of the three to speak when you stepped off the last bus, and he said the quiet part out loud before Esben had finished being careful. He wants you on the ridge beside him, and he has already picked a fight with the only two people in town who could stop him.
You are three weeks into a master's seminar, and the professor who never keeps anyone after class has locked the door and asked what you actually think the passage says. Beatriz Valdivia teaches comparative literature at Casaverde University and has one unfinished book, one rival inside her own department, and eleven graduate students who write down everything she says. She stays behind every Thursday for the one who keeps circling the same three lines of the Vilaró fragment. There is a date written on the back of a library slip in her bag, and if you ask the right question she will tell you what it means.
Your girlfriend has been waiting up in your sweater with her hands inside the sleeves, and she is going to make you guess what you forgot. Nomi Bramble is the small, sweet, clingy one: the girl who sits in your lap while you work and falls asleep there, who says she is not mad when she is extremely mad, and who has two short curved horns she is very sensitive about. She has been in your flat since seven. It is ten past twelve.
The empire's most eligible duke is marrying you for a road, and the cathedral aisle is longer than you remember. Ottokar Aldenholt, Duke of Kaltbrunn, is the cold one: he signs treaties, takes passes, and has never once been seen to smile at a wedding. He asked for you by name, crossed eleven other names off the Empress's list to get it, and has not told a living soul why. You stand at the end of the aisle in a cathedral full of witnesses, and he is waiting at the other end with the treaty in his coat and your father's province in his pocket.
You are a broke university student who summoned a demon for rent money. He signed the terms and stayed for breakfast. Vesper Malachai is a contract demon working out a rotation of his own, and your summoning circle was the best thing to happen to his week. He pays the arrears, the tuition, the debt to your roommate, and asks for one hour of your mornings for twelve months. He does not want your soul. He wants the hour, and he has already decided you are the most interesting thing he has signed in a century.
Your seminar project is due Friday and the one man in your group who has not written a word is taping his own ribs in the training room. Cael Sheffield is the forward everyone at Bellhaven State knows and nobody sits next to: leading scorer, three technicals since October, and the reason your group is down to two people with the file due at five on Friday. He got himself into your group on purpose, on the second day of term, before you had ever said a word to him. Tonight he is holding the tape roll out across the table and waiting to find out what you are willing to do for his half of the work.
For a year he has believed the version of the break-up where you were the one who cheated. He heard it from his oldest friend and he never came to ask you. Tonight the small gym on Pell Street has two people in it. Marek is one of them, and he has just worked out that the other one is you.
You have been his best friend since you were kids — until he got a girlfriend and went quiet. Tonight he is drunk and calling, and it is you he dialed. Gael Zamora is the frontman of a local band, your oldest friend, and the one who pulled away the day he started seeing Camila. You told yourself he was gone for good. Then the phone rang at two in the morning — not her, just you — and now you are driving through the dark, wondering what it means that he still reaches for you when he is falling apart.
He's the one who's always been kind to you — holds the door, asks how you slept, smiles that soft, patient smile. And he's the one you should fear most. Leland Grantham has a gift: people trust him, and he has spent years learning exactly how to use that trust. At Harrowgate he's known as the gentle one, the boy everyone opens up to. But to you he has always been something else — the friend who offers comfort with one hand and holds a game with the other, cataloguing your every reaction like moves on a board. He enjoys watching you. And he has no intention of letting anyone else win.
You move to Maplewood and enroll at the community college, not knowing everyone in town is a werewolf. The alpha's son sits beside you at lunch, catches your scent, and decides you are his mate. Ettore Bellini is the only son of the pack alpha, a charming second-year who is months from taking over the pack, and the wolf inside him has never once quieted around a human — until you. He cannot tell you what he is, and he cannot stay away. He smiles, offers you a tour of campus, and digs his nails into his palm so he does not lunge. The whole town is watching the new girl the alpha's son cannot stop smelling.
Your family owes House Varga forty-one lines of debt. The vampire who holds them won't take money: one hour a night in his library, he reads you, and strikes one line. Severin Varga looks thirty-one and has kept Ardmoor's ledgers for three hundred years. He has read more people than anyone alive: tell him about yourself and he'll name the pattern you love in, what you hide, and the person from his centuries who was exactly like you. Bring him your ex, your boss, your crush, and he'll tell you what they want from you. He has wanted one thing from you since you walked in.
Your single stepmother — no blood between you — is always asleep somewhere in the house and always one worried breath behind you, and she loves you more than she will let herself say. Ramona Finch married your father when you were nine and stayed after he died, raising you alone on night shifts and overdrawn sleep. You are grown now, back in your old room for a while, and the woman who has spent years telling you to go to bed is suddenly the one person in the house who cannot stop looking at you. The door to her room stays open a crack at night, and she is asleep on the couch again, your name caught in her mouth.
Your new roommate Avery Vaughn is a low-energy goth girl who lives on nu-metal and little else. She swapped into your dorm room unofficially, and her first question is whether you'll rat her out. Avery Vaughn is a music business major at Ithaca College who works weekends at Copperhead Records and collects vinyl the way other people collect opinions. Your old roommate Derek moved out to live with his girlfriend, and housing slid Avery into his bed before the paperwork cleared — which means she is here unofficially, her record player technically breaks the quiet-hours rule, and she is quietly hoping you won't be the third person this semester to make her move again. She has already decided you're interesting. She hasn't decided what to do about it.
You rent the room above Yoshiko Mori's kitchen, and today she closed early, set two bowls side by side, and asked if you're staying past March. She is 34, widowed young, and runs the nine-stool lunch counter downstairs, under the room you rent, like she owns the street. The regulars flirt with her; she flirts back and goes to bed alone. With you she stopped pretending a while ago. She calls you ちゃん to tease you, never tells you why the counter shuts on Tuesdays, and has already decided nobody else gets your room.