Chapter 2 The Recipe My Mother Never Shared

Nova

I did not sleep that night. I sat on my mother's stool with the card in my lap, reading the same three words until they stopped looking like words.

Welcome home, Nova.

Anyone could copy handwriting. I told myself that over and over but my mother always crossed her sevens, and so did the person who wrote this. Either someone in Duskwood knew who I was, or my dead mother had left me a message.

I did not know which idea frightened me more. At dawn, I put the card in my boot, tied my hair back, and went to work. The first thing I did was draw blood from Caelan. He lay half asleep when I entered his room, his skin hot and gray, the black veins crawling higher than the day before. He did not wake when the needle slid in. That was a bad sign. His wolf was too weak to fight the pain.

"How long does he have?" Ambrose asked from the doorway. He had been hovering there since sunrise, wringing his hands like a worried grandmother.

"Three weeks, maybe even less." I did not look up. "Please close the door now. He needs quiet."

"Of course, anything you need, Dr. Calder." His smile was warm. "Anything at all."

The door clicked shut. I let out a breath I had not known I was holding.

Back in the clinic, I set up my mother's old microscope and laid out three samples: Caelan's blood, a swab from the coughing woman on the porch, and a vial of black fluid from a dead patient. Then I worked until my eyes burned.

The Silver Rot was clever. It was not a virus, like the Elders believed. It was a toxin, built to hide in the blood and eat the wolf from the inside. It attacked the bond between a wolf and its human half, which was why no healer could stop it. You could not cure a creature whose soul was being torn in two but the toxin had a seam. A tiny weakness, like a loose thread in a sweater. If I could find it, I could pull.

I ran test after test. By noon, my hands shook with hunger. By three o'clock, I had a name for the weakness: an unstable compound that needed a stabilizer, or the poison would break down in a day. I tested the stabilizer, then I tested it again.

I had to put the dropper down very slowly, because I could not trust my hands. I knew this formula: It was moon vine extract, mixed with crushed silverleaf and a pinch of ground amber, bound together with a rare resin that grew only on the northern slopes. The ratio was exact. One part to seven to three. My mother had invented it when I was twelve, in this very room, to ease the pain of old Alpha Dorian's failing heart. She had never written it down. She had told only two people: the old Alpha, and me, in a whisper, while I sat on this stool pretending to do my homework.

Somebody had taken my mother's kindest invention and turned it into a weapon and somebody had used that same weapon, six years ago, to poison the old Alpha and blame her for it.

My mother had not just been framed. Her work had been stolen, twisted, and fed to the pack like rat poison. It was proof.

I did not cry even though I wanted to. My eyes were dry and hot, and what rose in my chest was colder than tears. I picked up a glass beaker and threw it against the wall. It broke with a high, bright, ringing crack.

"That," said a voice from the doorway, "was a very expensive beaker."

I spun around. A girl stood there with a tray in her hands, wearing a bright red scarf and a face like a startled owl. She had Caelan's gray eyes.

"I brought tea," she said. "You didn't come to dinner. I'm Wren. I'm his sister. You're allowed to throw things, I think. I would."

"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it. "It has been a long day."

"It's been six long years." She set the tray on the workbench and glanced at the broken glass without a hint of guilt. "Eat something. You look like a ghost."

She left before I could answer. The tea steamed on the table beside a plate of bread and cheese. I stared at it for a long minute, then I ate every crumb. When the sun went down, I locked the clinic and sat in the dark with a single lamp, my mother's formula written on a scrap of paper in front of me. Someone in this pack knew her recipe. Only three people ever had: my mother, the old Alpha, and me.

The old Alpha was dead. I stared at that sentence until my skin prickled. I noticed that something moved outside the window, a figure was crossing the snow in the moonlight, tall, thin, and unsteady. He wore only a light shirt and trousers, and his feet were bare. He walked like a man who knew every step by heart.

Caelan!

My pulse jumped. He should have been in bed. He should have been too weak to stand. I grabbed my coat and followed. He did not go toward the lodge, or the gate, or the training field. He went toward the old pack cemetery at the edge of the forest, a quiet place of pine trees and stone markers where the dead of Duskwood slept under the snow.

I kept far back, hiding behind the trees, my breath held tight. He stopped at a small, plain cairn near the back. It was my mother's grave. I knew it before I saw the name. Someone had cleared the snow from the stones. A glass jar sat on the cairn, holding fresh white flowers, the same kind as the one beside the card in the clinic.

Caelan sank to his knees. He laid his palm against the cold stone, and his whole body shook. I could not hear his words but I saw his back heave once, then twice, the way a person's back heaves when they are trying not to make a sound.

Six years, I thought. Six years of this, and I never knew. My anger faltered. I hated that it did. Then he stood up, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and said into the dark, in a voice that was clear and steady and very tired:

"You can come out, Ivy. I know you followed me."

My heart stopped. I stepped out from behind the tree, and the snow crunched beneath my boots.

"You swore not to follow me," I said.

"I did not follow you. You followed me." He did not turn. "Ask your question. I can see you have one."

I stared at his back. At the pale marker. At the flowers, still fresh, still sweet.

"Whose grave is this?" I asked.

Caelan was quiet for a long moment. Then, very softly, he said:

"Nobody's."