Chapter 1
Wren
The last audience had been gone for two hours by the time I finished.
The front-of-house lights were already half-dark, the kind of dim that made a theater feel less like a place and more like a held breath. I stood alone in the dressing room corridor, facing my locker the way you face something you've been putting off for a long time — not with dread exactly, but with the particular tiredness that comes after you've already made the decision and what's left is only the physical fact of it.
I started with the work badge. Then the spare props I'd accumulated over five years: a folding fan with a cracked spine, a tube of spirit gum I'd never thrown away, a pair of character shoes two sizes wrong that I'd borrowed in a pinch during tech week of my second season and somehow never returned. There was a backup jacket on the hook inside the door, dark gray, worn at the elbows. I folded it and set it in the canvas bag. The rehearsal schedule I'd pinned to the inside of the locker door — the one that had been replaced four times over but which I'd never bothered to take down entirely — I pulled loose without looking at the dates. At the very back of the top shelf, tucked into the corner where the paint had chipped away to bare metal, there was a small square of paper gone yellow at the edges. I recognized my own handwriting before I even touched it. Stay until you're done. I'd written it during my first week, when I didn't know anyone's name and the city felt like a language I hadn't learned yet. I folded it twice and pressed it to the bottom of the bag, underneath everything else.
The key went on the makeup counter. I pushed the locker shut and listened to the latch click — a small, clean sound, the kind that doesn't echo. Down the hall, past the heavy curtain that separated the wings from the loading dock, I could hear the prop crew doing their final walkthrough, their voices low and their footsteps unhurried. They didn't know I was still here. There was no reason they would. That was the thing about being an omega who'd spent five years on the West Coast without a pack, without a territory, without anyone whose instinct it was to track where you were at the end of the night — you got very good at leaving rooms without leaving traces.
I sat down at the counter and opened my phone.
The draft had been sitting there for three days. I knew the exact wording — I'd revised it twice, then stopped, because there was nothing wrong with it and I was only revising to delay. I didn't read it again. I pressed send, and the phone gave a single small vibration, and something that had been sitting very high in my chest for a very long time came loose and settled somewhere lower, somewhere quieter.
I looked at myself in the mirror for a moment. Behind my reflection, the dressing room was a row of empty lockers, all closed, all identical. Five years, I thought, without particular feeling. I'd come here at twenty, not knowing anyone, mispronouncing street names for the first six months, taking the wrong bus home twice a week because I refused to admit I didn't have a reliable sense of direction. A lone omega in a city that didn't know her name, working three jobs at once, eating convenience store rice and telling herself it was temporary. I'd learned eventually. I'd learned most things, eventually. And now I knew this city well enough to leave it without a map.
I woke up on the floor.
That was the honest version. The more dignified version was that I'd been sleeping in the camping sleeping bag I'd laid out beside the couch because I'd already packed the bedding, and the alarm went off at two in the afternoon, and I lay there for a moment staring at the water stain on the ceiling that I'd been meaning to report to the landlord for four years, and then I picked up my phone.
Twenty-three messages from Piper. Six missed calls, also from Piper. The timestamps started at eleven-thirty in the morning and escalated at intervals that suggested she had been doing other things in between attempts but had not forgotten about me.
I replied to the ones that required replies, skipped the ones that were purely expressive, and pushed myself upright. The apartment was almost empty. The furniture belonged to the lease. My things were already in transit — two large boxes shipped to an address I hadn't yet seen in person, a new city's worth of eventually waiting in a building I'd only looked at in photos. What remained here was what I could carry: the canvas bag from last night, the backpack I traveled with, a duffel with three days' worth of clothes.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at the face that looked back. Pale. Fine-boned. The kind of face people occasionally described as delicate, which I had always found mildly offensive. The dark circles under my eyes were the same dark circles I'd had since I was seventeen and working the closing shift at a campus café to cover my grandmother's first month of care. They had become a permanent feature, like the small red mole on my left earlobe. I washed my face with cold water and didn't think about anything in particular.
Five years, I thought again, this time in front of the bathroom mirror instead of the theater mirror. You'd think something would look different.
The Uber driver didn't talk, which I appreciated. I sat in the back seat with my backpack between my feet and watched the city scroll past the window — the neighborhoods I'd learned in order, the coffee shop where I'd worked my first winter, the overpass I'd walked across exactly once, at midnight, during a period of my life I didn't particularly want to revisit.
My phone buzzed. Piper, this time calling from what the screen told me was a Maldives area code.
"You actually did it," she said, before I could speak. Her voice had the particular quality of someone standing somewhere very bright and very warm. "You actually sent the email."
"I sent it last night."
"I know, I saw it — you added me to the CC, remember? Wren." A pause, and then, with the energy of someone who had been restraining themselves for some time: "I'm coming home early. Blake won't mind, he owes me from the Cancún thing —"
"Piper."
"Just hear me out —"
"I'm already in the car." I watched a traffic light turn green. "I'm twenty minutes from the airport."
The silence on her end lasted exactly long enough to confirm that she had, in fact, been about to book a flight. "Fine," she said, in a tone that meant it was not fine but she was choosing her battles. "But you have to call me when you land. And I want to know — I mean I genuinely want to understand — why now? Why go back there?"
Outside the window, the city kept moving. A woman pushing a stroller. A delivery truck double-parked with its hazards blinking. A mural I'd seen so many times I'd stopped seeing it, until now, when I was seeing it for the last time.
"I'm tired," I said. It came out quieter than I intended. "I've been out here floating for five years and I'm just — tired of it. There are things back there that feel like mine. Places I know. People I —" I stopped.
Piper was quiet for a moment. "You don't have to explain it," she said, carefully. "I know what's back there."
She wasn't talking about my grandmother. Or not only about my grandmother.
"I'll call you when I land," I said.
She let me go without pushing further, which was one of the many reasons I had kept her around.
The flight was UA2847, the announcement echoing through the terminal as I cleared security. I found my seat — economy, aisle, third row from the front — and spent the time before boarding working through a backlog of messages I'd been ignoring for two days. The plane began to taxi just as I switched to flight mode, and I tucked the phone into the seat pocket and looked out the window at the runway lights moving past in the dark.
Before I put the bag in the overhead bin, I reached into the side pocket, the way I always did before a flight. The habit was so old I didn't think about it anymore, the same way I didn't think about checking that the stove was off before I left a room. My fingers found the familiar shape: a half-finished bar of dark chocolate, the foil wrapper slightly soft from being carried too long. Sea salt and dark cocoa. I pressed my thumb against the edge of it and felt the small, solid weight, and then I zipped the pocket back up.
Still there. It always was. Most werewolves couldn't stand the stuff — the theobromine hit their nervous system like a low-grade static, a hum behind the eyes they described as deeply unpleasant. I'd never had that problem. If anything, the mild bitterness sharpened me, cleared the fog, pressed my instincts flat against the floor of my skull where they belonged.
