Prologue— The Child Beneath the Cypress
The storm arrived without rain.
Wind tore through the cypress crowns and sent Spanish moss streaming like gray veils over the dark water. Far beyond the levee, thunder rolled across Saint Marais Parish, low and patient, as if the sky were warning the wolves before it opened.
Odette Baptiste stood ankle-deep in bayou mud with a newborn pressed beneath her coat.
The baby did not cry. Her wide brown eyes reflected the moon, though clouds had swallowed every star. A crescent-shaped birthmark curved beneath her left shoulder, black at the center and silver along the edges.
Behind Odette, men shouted through the trees.
“Find them!”
Torches flickered between the trunks. Wolves moved with the hunters—large shadows slipping through reeds, noses raised to the blood in the air.
Odette kissed the baby’s forehead. “Your name is Amara,” she whispered. “It means grace, and you will need every ounce of it before your people find you again.”
She hurried toward an old fishing cabin where a woman waited in the doorway. Celestine Vale wore Briar Hollow colors: rust-red cloth tied around one wrist.
“You said no one followed,” Celestine hissed.
“I was wrong.” Odette thrust the infant into her arms. “Take her. Hide the mark. Tell them she is yours.”
Celestine stared at the baby, then at the growing torchlight. “And when they ask about you?”
“Tell them I died.”
A howl split the night.
It was answered from the east by a deeper call, one that made the water tremble around Odette’s legs. Blackwater wolves. Her family. Too far away to save her, close enough to know blood had been spilled.
Odette stepped backward into the darkness.
“Wait,” Celestine said. “Who is her father?”
Odette smiled through her fear. “A St. James.”
Then she shifted.
Where a woman had stood, a silver-black she-wolf launched through the reeds, drawing the hunters away from the cabin. The baby finally cried as the night swallowed her mother.
Celestine covered the crescent mark with her palm.
Years later, she would tell herself she had saved the child.
Years later, she would hate the child for surviving.
