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“Was everything in your bag?”

“What?” Nora looks up at me from her place on the floor where she sits with her back against the wall, her legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. “Oh, yeah.”

“Good.” I tap my finger against my knee, straining to hear Xeran’s voice through the walls. It’s low, and he only speaks a few words at a time so I can’t catch or hold on to any of what he’s saying. “So, you took your pills?”

“Like I do every morning,” she says, nodding, eyes on me as though she’s more worried about me than I am about her. Only ten, and she acts like she knows exactly what it is to carry the world on her shoulders.

And maybe she does.

There are a million things running through my mind right now. Getting Nora more of her medicine, finding some clothes, whether or not it would be safe to take a shower here.

How soon we can get away from this house without Xeran finding out.

He won’t hurt us, I know that. But there’s nothing I want less than to be trapped in this house with him. I already feel like I’m itching out of my skin, and the growing, aching want in my lower belly is getting warmer, more insistent.

If I’m around him for too long, it’s going to bring on a heat. And I can’t think of anything more embarrassing than that.

I haven’t had a heat since the night I got pregnant with Nora. In the entire time that I’ve cared for her, she’s never known me to have one. And she’s a smart girl. I don’t want her putting the pieces together about what that might mean.

In fact, I don’t want Nora around Xeran at all, if I can help it. She’s always been incredibly perceptive, and she just might start to put the pieces together. The slope of her nose, her cheekbones.

Her hair might be a carbon copy of my own, but those blue eyes are Xeran’s. They practically scream Sorel. When his brother Dallas looked at me, it reminded me with a startling clarity that in another world, he might have acted as my daughter’s uncle.

In a world with a nicer pack, with a better alpha supreme than Declan, without the devastation from the fires… we might have all been a happy family.

Instead, my hands shake as I try to figure out if I could magic her eyes to appear a different color. If I want to risk casting something onto her body like that. Xeran might look too closely at her and see the truth there in the sapphire of her irises.

Maybe I could try it on myself first. But would Xeran notice if the color of my eyes changed?

That thought almost makes me laugh out loud—of course he wouldn’t. I’d be surprised to learn that he ever even knew what color they were in the first place.

Back in high school, when we were alone, he made it seem like he might be the kind of man to care about the color of a woman’s eyes. Like he might put some thought into finding the right word for mine—chocolate or amber, cinnamon or cedar.

But that was all clearly a lie.

I push away the familiar swell of embarrassment that chokes my throat and force myself to focus on the matter at hand.

I need to figure out how to get Nora and me out of here as quickly as possible.

For her sake, I’ll be cordial to him. Act like this is all part of the plan.

But the second we can leave, we’ll get in the car and go.

“Mom?” Nora asks, her eyes cutting to the door. “Maybe we could go to the—”

“I think we should try to get some rest,” I say, cutting her off and clearing my throat.

I meet her eyes. They’re suspicious, wheels turning in her mind. If she were any other kid, she might protest. Instead, she goes to the en suite bathroom, brushes her teeth, and climbs into the bed next to me a moment later, her body slotting against mine.

In a few years, when she grows up more, Nora will need less sleep than me. If let go, I could sleep a full ten hours every night. After puberty—and her first shift—she’ll move into an alpha’s sleeping pattern.

But for right now, we’re more alike than different, and she falls asleep with her back to me. I watch her shoulders rise and fall, knowing I won’t be able to follow suit.

I’ll stay awake, listen for the sound of Xeran retiring to wherever he plans to sleep. Then I’m getting my daughter and me out of here.

***

When Xeran has been asleep for an hour, I rouse Nora at my side.

She blinks, still deep in sleep. But the moment she opens her eyes and registers my face, she must know to keep quiet, because she does.

I hold my finger to my mouth, and we slide out of bed silently.

I grab her backpack and pull it over my shoulders, and together, we move to the balcony off the room.

At first, the sliding door sticks. I hold my breath, eyes shut, praying that Xeran didn’t hear the noise, that it wouldn’t wake him up in the middle of his sleep.

Alphas may sleep less, but they sleep harder.

When he doesn’t come barreling through the door, Nora and I work together, jimmying the door from either side so we can move it along the track and create a space just wide enough for us to slip through.

I have to take her backpack off again, set it down on the porch and go after it, but it works.

Nora looks to me, and I hold a finger up to her, then climb over the side of the railing. It’s harder to control my own body like this. I manage to lessen the pull of gravity and lower down a little slower, but I still hit the ground harder than I intended, and I feel the shock of it in my ankles.

When I’m standing on the ground, wet grass tickling my ankles, Nora holds her backpack over the side of the balcony and lets it drop. I use my magic to stop it a foot before it hits the ground and grab it.

Already, I can feel the drain of this expenditure. But hopefully, once we get far enough away, I’ll be able to rest and recover.

Nora climbs over the side of the balcony and finds my eyes in the dark again. And this time, unlike with the little boy, I see nothing but full trust on her face. She slides off rather than jumping, and doesn’t even close her eyes as I exert my full force of magic to help her to the ground gently.

Nora hits the ground lightly, hovering for a moment before her toes touch the grass.

Together, we move through the lawn and toward the car, but Nora touches my arm, jerking her head toward the trees. I look to the car, then to her, but she seems adamant that we should go the opposite way.

Just like she trusted me, I trust her, and we move through the grass until we break through the tree line. It finally feels like we’re far enough away from Xeran—and his excellent hearing—to talk.

“I saw him do something to the car,” Nora says, reaching out and taking her backpack from me. I try to protect it by holding on to it, but I’m weary from the use of magic and allow her to take it just for a little while. “We should go through the woods.”

“Leave the car?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder at it. “What do you think he did?”

“Probably a tracker,” Nora says. In the low light of the moon filtering in through the canopy, her blue eyes look almost black. “What kind of old friend is he, Mom?”

I bite my tongue. From the time she was a baby, my one rule in raising her has always been that I would never lie to her. That I would tell her the truth and show her the world as it really is, so she would never be hit with a reality that she hadn’t come to expect.

But now, there’s nothing I want more in the world than to keep the truth about Xeran and me to myself.

I tell myself that it’s not a lie. That I’m allowed to have things that are private. That I’m not telling her, not because I’m fabricating something, but because it belongs to me.

Trying to find a middle ground, I settle for, “I can tell you later. But for now, we have to move.”

Nora doesn’t look satisfied with this answer, but she nods, reaching back and tying up her hair before tightening the straps of her backpack and pivoting to face the dense forest around us.

For the majority of her life, Nora has lived a comfortable—though not exactly socially rich—existence on the street where my grandmother lived.

But that didn’t stop me from keeping her ready.

With the threat of fires, and the looming fear of an unhinged supreme, I made it a point to ensure Nora was ready for anything.

That included having a go-bag, teaching her survival skills, and impressing on her the importance of a strong will.

Now, here we are, me taking a moment to breathe while my daughter thinks.

“He wouldn’t expect us to go further into the mountains,” Nora says, her chin tilting up toward the north, further from town and deeper into the dense blanket of trees falling over the mountainside. “And if we go that way, we can walk through the creek. And hopefully, obscure some of our scent.”

Maybe it’s not good form to follow your ten-year-old daughter’s advice for escape, but my brain feels fuzzy from the magic draw, so I just nod, figuring we can always reroute if I come to my senses and want to go a different way.

If I’m being honest, I hadn’t thought much further than getting to the car, getting on the road, and getting the hell out of Silverville.

We move quickly and quietly, stepping among the pine needles on the ground.

I use what magic I have left to further muffle the sound of our footsteps.

As we go, we might be getting further and further from Xeran, but that doesn’t mean the threat has stopped.

There are still plenty of things in the woods to get us.

Plenty of terrors hiding around the corner, just waiting for a moment to pounce.

In recent years, these woods have become known for the rampant daemonic fire ravaging through them, but before that, there were plenty of other things to fear. I grew up with the tales of Colorado cryptids, our own versions of the bogeyman.

Except, unlike what humans tend to believe, they are real.

Maybe extinct—or in hiding now, from all the flame and soot—but definitely very real.

Nora and I creep along, and I feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising as I think about nymphs in the water, grabbing your hair and pulling you in to drown. Men with faces like tree knots, stepping away from the bark and turning you to wood, too.

So when we step into a small clearing and something appears in our path, I’m ready, raising my hands and saying loudly, “We cause you no harm. We are only passing through.”

It’s what my grandmother always told us to say if we came across a cryptid of the wood. They’re natural protectors and might let you go if you make it clear that you’re not a logger, not a poacher.

“Oh, isn’t that rich ?” a deep voice rolls through the little space, and I look up to find Dallas Sorel—all three hundred lumbering pounds of him—staring down at us.

He might as well be licking his lips. The big bad wolf.

“She thinks we’re cryptids,” another voice says, a little higher, more nasally.

I put my arm around Nora, turning to see Farris Sorel emerging from the other side of the clearing. I realize the strange smell I caught earlier wasn’t the woods at all. It was the thick, minty scent of his hair gel.

“It’s a lot worse than that,” Dallas says, grinning when another figure emerges, and Tanner—looking more bored than anything—appears, sighing and leaning against a tree, crossing his arms like he’s ready to get this over with.

“Just let me go,” I say, voice small. Why did I use all that magic to get out of there? We could have tried to sneak through the front door, or made a rope from sheets. Then I would have more power available now to fight off these assholes.

“While that’s very convincing,” Farris says, his eyes glinting like the knife in his hand as he circles around us, “we are under strict orders not to let you go.”

“You don’t have to do what he says,” I try, thinking I might just be able to appeal to them. “Think about your father—”

“You don’t know shit about our father!” Tanner surprises me by slamming his fist into a tree, which shakes the thing so violently that daemonic ash shifts around us, twinkling through the air. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so chilling.

“He’s right,” Farris shrugs, looking pleased that Tanner has joined in on the fun. Farris opens his mouth to say something else, but at that moment, Tanner lunges forward, reaching for Nora.

A scream rips out of her when he catches her around the wrist and yanks, and when I turn toward him, I don’t see anything. I don’t see him, or the trees, or the sky, or even my daughter.

Only a swirling rage of red and black as I reach into the stores of magic I have left, scooping at the very bottom of the barrel and drawing some life from myself, bottling up that anger, condensing it, and firing it at the man who has dared to try taking Nora from me.