Prologue
The fire was the first thing Lilith remembered.
Not her mother’s face. Not her father’s voice before that night. Just the fire - orange and gold and hungry, climbing the walls of the cottage, eating everything her mother had built.
Heat pressed against her cheeks. Smoke filled her lungs until she couldn’t stop coughing. Her father’s arms were iron around her, crushing her against his chest, and his heart was beating so fast she thought it might break.
“Don’t look, little one.” His voice was wet. Wrong. “Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t—”
She looked. She was five years old. She always looked.
Her mother stood in the doorway.
Not running. Not fighting. Standing. Her arms were spread wide, her hands glowing with light so bright it left spots dancing behind Lilith’s eyes. White light. Beautiful light. The kind of light that should have saved them.
“Elara, run—” her father screamed.
Her mother didn’t run.
The wolves came through the wall.
Not wolves. Men. Men who became wolves, bones snapping, bodies twisting, teeth already wet. Three of them. Five. Lilith couldn’t count. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t do anything but watch as the light in her mother’s hands flickered and flickered, and finally went out.
Her mother’s scream cut off like a thread snipped with scissors.
Snip.
Just... gone.
Her father ran.
He ran with her in his arms, branches whipping at her face, her ears ringing with sounds she would never unhear. He ran until his breath came in ragged sobs. He ran until something caught him from behind and his arms opened and Lilith was falling, falling, falling -
She hit the ground hard enough to crack her teeth.
When she looked up, her father was on his knees. A wolf had his arm in its mouth. Another had its claws in his back. Her father’s eyes found hers across the dirt.
“Hide,” he breathed. “Hide, Lily. Hide and don’t -”
He didn’t finish.
Lilith ran.
She ran until her legs gave out. She ran until she couldn’t hear the sounds anymore. She ran until she collapsed in a ditch somewhere, covered in mud and blood and something she didn’t want to name, her chest burning with a light she didn’t understand.
It was the first time her magic woke up.
Her palms lit up green, bright green. The wrong green. The color of sickness, the elders would tell her later. The color of monsters.
She stared at her hands, at the light pouring out of her five-year-old fingers, and she understood something in that moment that no child should ever understand.
The light had killed her mother.
If it hadn’t flickered, if it hadn’t happened, her mother would still be alive.
Lilith shoved her hands into the mud. She pressed them down until the mud swallowed the light, until the green died, until all that was left was cold and dark and the sound of her own breathing.
She vowed to never let the light out again.
Not once.
Twelve years later, she still remembered the way her mother’s scream had cut off.
Like scissors through thread.
Snip.
