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PROLOGUE

WINTER, 1847

Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

T he baby came during the worst of the storm.

Nora McAlister crouched beside her aunt Amelia in the cramped lean-to, watching her aunt’s breath steam in the frigid air. The roof creaked under the weight of snow, the wind whistling through the cracks. No matter how hard Uncle Thomas tried to patch up the weak spots in the shack, the cold always got in. It was like a ravenous monster itself, finding every weakness in the lean-to, of which there were many.

Now Thomas was gone, as was little Nathaniel, lost days earlier to a fate that Nora didn’t let her thirteen-year old mind think about. She couldn’t, not even for a second. She had to keep concentrating on Amelia and the baby, she had to do all she could to make sure both of them survived.

And Nora was good at that. For the last few months, all they had been doing is surviving, ever since the Donner Party got stuck at Truckee Lake. The year prior, Nora lost both her parents to tuberculosis and her father’s brother, Thomas, took her on just before they started their journey from Missouri, joining the 500 wagons en route to a better future in California. Tragedy and calamity struck again and again on the grueling journey, until it came to a head when they got snowed in at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

People began to starve. People began to die.

People started to do the unthinkable.

It was enough that Thomas, a deeply God-fearing man, broke away from the group and sought refuge for Nora and his family, finding it in a dilapidated cabin built by previous emigrants, located half a day’s walk from the camp at Truckee Lake, further up in the mountains beneath the pass. He had hoped the distance would keep his family safe from the horror that was slowly ravaging the groups.

He was wrong.

“You’re going to be okay,” Nora said to her aunt, though her voice shook from both the cold and the fear that made a permanent nest in her bones.

The lantern’s flame cast grotesque shadows across Amelia’s face, deepening the hollows of her cheeks, the dark pits of her eyes. Months of starvation had pulled her skin tight across her bones, but her belly remained swollen, distended. Unnatural. Something about the way it moved beneath the blanket made Nora’s skin crawl.

“You just need to push,” Nora whispered through her cracked lips. Her hands shook as she positioned the threadbare blanket. “Almost there, Aunt Amelia.”

But the lie tasted bitter. Nora didn’t know anything about birthing babies, but they’d been at this for hours, and something was wrong.

So wrong.

Amelia’s skin was cold to the touch, too cold for someone in labor. Her eyes had taken on a strange sheen, and the veins beneath her skin showed black against flesh that was growing paler by the hour. When she screamed, the sound was wrong—guttural, hungry. Like the sounds Uncle Thomas had made yesterday, when he’d torn into?—

Nora pushed the memory away.

Blood pooled between Amelia’s legs, black in the dim light of the fire. Too much blood. The metallic scent of it filled the air, and Nora watched in horror as Amelia’s tongue darted out, as if tasting the air before running across dried white lips. Something shifted behind her eyes and Nora swore they were taking on a milky cast, a pale glacial blue.

It’s the light , Nora told herself. It has to be a trick of the light.

“Hungry,” Amelia moaned. Her fingers clawed at the blanket. “So hungry, Nora. The meat?—”

“No,” Nora said sharply. “Don’t think about that. Think about the baby. Your baby. Little Joseph or maybe little Josephine.”

But Amelia’s face had changed. The tendons in her neck stood out like cords, and her jaw worked mechanically, as if chewing something. Her teeth…had they always been that sharp? Did she have extra teeth now? A fresh wave of terror washed over Nora as she remembered how Uncle Thomas’s mouth had looked just before he?—

Another contraction seized Amelia. Her back arched unnaturally, spine cracking as it bent. The sound of tearing flesh filled the lean-to as her belly rippled. Something was coming, but Nora wasn’t sure it was just the baby.

She wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

“I see the head,” Nora said through a gasp. She had to keep things normal. “One more push, Aunt Amelia. Just one more?—”

Amelia’s head snapped toward her, neck extending—long, too long. Black fluid leaked from the corners of her mouth. When she spoke, her voice was a rasp of bone on bone. “Flesh of my flesh,” she crooned. “Blood of my blood.”

At that, she gave one final push and the baby slid into Nora’s waiting hands, impossibly small and perfect. A girl. For one blessed moment, hope bloomed in Nora’s chest. The infant was warm—so warm compared to her mother’s corpse-cold skin. Pink and alive and untouched by whatever had taken hold of their family.

Then Amelia’s spine cracked again. The sound of ripping flesh filled the lean-to as her jaw distended, unfolding like a snake’s. Where her eyes had been clouded moments ago, they now burned with feral intensity. Her fingers elongated into claws, skin splitting at the joints. Black blood dripped from the fresh wounds.

“Give her to me.” The words emerged as a hiss, nothing left of Amelia’s gentle voice. “My baby. My flesh. So tender, so fresh?—”

Nora stumbled backward, clutching the newborn to her chest. The infant let out a thin cry, and Amelia snapped her jaws at the sound. Something crackled beneath her aunt’s skin—bones shifting, reforming. The transformation that had taken Thomas and Nathaniel days was happening in minutes.

“No,” Nora choked. “Not you too.” The words came out as a whimper.

She knew now that Amelia was no longer, that this creature was in her place.

And there was nothing for Nora to do…

But run.

The storm hit her like a physical blow as she burst from the lean-to, her boots sinking deep into the snow. Wind-driven flakes scoured her face, but the cold was nothing compared to the terror clawing at her throat. Behind her, Amelia’s shriek split the night—no longer human, not even animal.

The sound of something that should not exist.

The unholiest of all that is unholy.

The baby squirmed against her chest. Nora tucked the infant deeper into her coat, praying the thin material would be enough. They’d eaten their leather coats weeks ago, when the hunger first began. Before they’d turned to worse things.

A shadow detached from the darkness—Uncle Thomas. The storm had frozen his clothes solid, the fabric crackling as he moved. His face was a ruin of frost and old blood, teeth gleaming wetly in the faint light coming from the cabin. Behind him, little Nathaniel peered around a pine. Her cousin’s cherubic face had twisted into something monstrous as he smiled with black and bloody teeth.

They’d been waiting, she realized.

Waiting for fresh meat.

“Give us the child, Nora.” Thomas’s voice was thick, as if his throat had frozen. “You can’t keep her from us. She isn’t yours to have. The hunger must be fed.”

“Stay away!” she screamed at them and quickened her pace, changing direction, heading for the ridge. Every step was agony, the snow past her knees. Her legs burned with effort, lungs screaming for air. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to get the baby away from what her family had become.

The hunger had taken them slowly at first, after they’d eaten the dead. Thomas had been so against cannibalism, even staring death in the face, but eventually he too had caved, just as many in the other camps did.

Just as Nora did.

At first they ate the bodies of those who had died naturally but then when some discovered the hunger could not be sated, they had fallen into a gradual decline into madness that none of them had recognized until it was too late.

But Amelia’s transformation was different—faster, more violent. As if the baby’s birth had accelerated it.

The curse , Nora had thought. What was this if not a curse placed on them by the spirits of the land, for violating the codes of humanity?

To eat the flesh of another is to become a monster.

And this time, it was literal.

Another scream pierced the night, closer now. The sound of something moving through the snow, fast.

Nora ducked under a tree as she ran but her foot caught on a hidden branch. She pitched forward, managing to twist so she didn’t crush the infant. Pain exploded through her shoulder as she fell on it wrong, sinking into the snow. When she looked up, Amelia loomed over her.

Her aunt’s nightgown was soaked black with blood, steam rising from the dirty fabric. Her skin had split in dozens of places, revealing muscle and bone that writhed. Her mouth gaped open, jaw hanging by strips of flesh, teeth crowding forward. The milky eyes had turned an impossible blue-white, glowing with hungry fire.

“Please,” Nora whispered, though she knew her aunt was beyond hearing. “She’s your daughter. Josephine.”

Amelia lunged. Nora rolled, the movement sending fresh agony through her shoulder. The baby wailed, the sound swallowed by the storm. Nora’s vision blurred—from tears or exhaustion or the beginning of the change, she didn’t know.

Already she could feel it inside her, the hunger that had turned so many of them into monsters. It gnawed at her belly, whispering promises of warmth, of meat, of life. The baby’s skin looked so soft, so tender?—

“No!” Nora bit her own arm, using pain to focus. She wouldn’t become like them. Not yet. Not until the baby was safe.

In the distance, torch light flickered. Voices carried on the wind—human voices. A search party? Or people from the other camp?

People who had already turned.

Nora didn’t have time to ponder it. She got up and forced her failing legs to move faster. Behind her, the sounds of Amelia’s pursuit faded, lost in the howling wind. Her family rarely ventured far from their shelter, at first paranoid about the other parties, but then it turned into something territorial. The hunger made them brutal but cautious.

The baby squirmed against her chest, alive and warm and human. In that moment, Nora made her choice. If the search party were ordinary humans, she would tell them the child was hers. She would hide the truth of what happened in the lean-to, of what her family had become. And when the hunger finally took her—because she could feel it would, the curse already burning in her blood from the flesh she had eaten in desperation—at least she’d know the baby survived.

She stumbled toward the torchlight, her aunt’s inhuman shrieks fading into the storm. Through the swirling snow, she could make out figures moving closer. Human figures, moving normally, their voices sounding sane.

Safe.

This monstrous curse was already in her veins, but perhaps this child—this miracle born in blood and snow—would find a different fate. Even as the hunger clawed at her insides, Nora smiled. The baby would live.

She stumbled forward just as the search party spotted her, rushing forward to help.

Behind her, three pairs of blue-white eyes watched from the darkness.

Waiting.

Hungry.