"Werewolves." I let the word drop in a single breath. It lay between us like a wedge.

  A moment passed, then another.

  Elise's mouth tightened. "We existed long before the word 'werewolf' was invented by frightened humans telling stories around fire. We do not use that term."

  A beat.

  "What do you use, then?"

  Elise hesitated a fraction.

  Jack's eyes stayed on me, sharp and unreadable.

  Then Elise said, "Lupines."

  The word landed heavy. New, yet familiar.

  "Like… wolves?" I whispered.

  Elise's expression flickered with something like disdain, not toward me, but toward the concept.

  "To call us simply wolves," she said slowly, "is like calling humans chimpanzees."

  My skin prickled.

  "So you don't turn into… animals," I managed.

  Elise's gaze held mine. "We exist in dual form, that of a man and that which you might mistake for a wolf. But we are not mindless or cursed. We are not fairy tales or an infection." Her nose wrinkled in obvious disgust. "We are a people."

  A people. The phrase made my stomach quiver.

  Silence stretched. My hands trembled. Then I forced the next question out, like dragging glass through my throat.

  "What am I? Hailey?"

  Elise's jaw clenched so hard I heard her teeth click.

  I waited.

  Jack watched.

  Elise exhaled through her nose, slow, and when she spoke again, her voice was careful.

  Then she said, "Bloodkin."

  The word punched me.

  Lara's voice spitting it like poison.

  Ethan saying it like a fact.

  Nausea surged. I pushed it down.

  "Bloodkin is you," I whispered, echoing Ethan's words, and my voice shook. "So what does it mean?"

  Elise's eyes flicked briefly to the stairs, toward where Hailey's laughter drifted faintly from downstairs, thin and fragile.

  My heart pounded. "Does it mean that we're… half human, half… lupine?"

  Elise's eyes flicked back to mine, her face tightening.

  "No," she said sharply, then caught herself, smoothing her tone like fabric. "No, not in the way you imagine."

  "How else am I supposed to imagine it?" I snapped. "My dad isn't human and my mom was, or at least I suppose she was, wasn't she?"

  Elise went very still.

  Jack's gaze sharpened a fraction, as if the mention of my mom carried weight in this house that even I didn't understand yet.

  "She was," Elise said very carefully, like the words carried more weight than I could imagine.

  "Then…" I began, but Elise interrupted, her voice dropping low.

  "We are separate species. We can't have children with humans," she said, each word precise. "Not unless—"

  Jack caught her wrist. She stopped.

  The silence throbbed.

  "Unless what?" I demanded.

  Elise's jaw flexed. Jack released her. Her eyes flashed once in irritation, then with something else, something like fear. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed.

  Jack's eyes stayed on her, then something in his expression broke in half as he turned to face me. His jaw worked once, as if something inside him resisted the words he was about to speak.

  "Shifting form is just one expression of what we are," Jack said at last, his voice low, rough around the edges. "Our biology adapts when it has to."

  He paused, then took a deep, pained breath.

  "Your mother was human. Gabriel is lupine. Under normal circumstances, that pairing produces nothing. Ever." His gaze pinned me. "And yet you and your sister exist."

  He said it like a judgment, not of me, but of whatever impossible thing had to take place for me to be born.

  My stomach felt shrouded in ice, but Jack kept going, steady as stone.

  "When a lupine bonds to a human as strongly as Gabriel did to your mother, the body reacts. It adapts. It forces what shouldn't be possible into being."

  The room seemed to fade around the edges. That word echoed. Bond, bond, bond.

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  "Wh… what?" I whispered weakly. Was he saying that I was some sort of… freak? My knees felt soft.

  "It means Gabriel's bond to your mother was so powerful it broke the very rules of nature," he said, relentless. "It overrode his lupine biology to create… " Jack's jaw shifted, uneasy. He looked away for a moment, as if he wished someone else had to say this. "…a facsimile of a human," he finished. "That's the closest term we have." He winced as the phrase left his mouth. It hung between us, and for just a moment he looked like a man who wished there were a better one. I heard no disgust in his tone, just resignation. And… sadness.

  It still felt like an insult. Worse, like I wasn't even a person, just a shadow of one. Everything inside me recoiled. Nausea surged. I clenched my teeth and forced it down.

  Elise inhaled sharply. "Jack!"

  For a moment his jaw tightened. "She asked for it, Elise. If you want to sugarcoat it, be my guest. But I don't think that's what she wants, do you?" He looked at me and waited.

  "No," I rasped. One of my hands found the doorframe and I leaned into it because I didn't trust my legs anymore. "A facsimile." I whispered as the word bounced between my brain, my heart, and my gut, leaving bruises everywhere. "A facsimile!" My voice rose as anger surged, white and hot, held at bay only by apprehension.

  Jack paused, and for a moment something like sympathy, sprinkled with the tiniest bit of embarrassment, crossed his face.

  "In lack of a better term." He sighed as weariness crept around the corners of his eyes. "It's a poor word, but the closest I can think of."

  I swallowed.

  No wonder Jack had behaved the way he did if he truly saw us that way. My anger sank heavily to the pit of my stomach. The phrase still pulsed, still hurt. I refused to accept it. I let it slide down my skin like oil over water and gritted my teeth.

  "A fascimile." I spat, unable to escape the horror of the word. "You're saying it like I'm not even real. Screw that, I'm not a fascimile of anything! I'm a person!"

  Elise took a half step towards me while giving Jack a glare. "Of course you're a person, darling! It's not malice, just your grandfather's chronic inability to express himself like a normal person."

  Jack pressed his lips together until they turned white.

  "Kelsey." She turned towards me, voice softer. "You and Hailey are human in everything that counts as human in their world." She shifted her weight. "They can't tell the difference, of course," she continued. "But we can."

  I closed my eyes and for a minute just let myself breathe.

  "But…" I pushed myself to ask the question I'd been dreading. "Am I going to… Hailey… we're not going to…" I struggled to find the words that could describe my fear of looking in the mirror and seeing reflective pupils stare back at me. "...change?"

  Something raw crossed Elise's face. "No." She wiped her hands against her robe in a slightly nervous gesture. "You're not going to change, to become like us. It simply doesn't work that way."

  "If it did, we wouldn't have half the problem we have," Jack snorted. "You'd just be assimilated into the pack. Late, but still. What you truly are makes it impossible. Bloodkin belong with humans, not here. That's what I've been trying to tell your father."

  He shrugged then, a trace of something other than steel creeping in, a breath of exhaustion. A trace of… warmth.

  "It's too dangerous for you girls here," he said. "There are only three of us in this house. And the Greystones, by agreement. But Cold Creek is bigger than that, kid."

  Elise gave him a sharp, warning look. "You know exactly why Gabriel couldn't stay among humans," she hissed in that low, inhuman voice that reached deep within me, making me shiver.

  Jack looked away.

  Equally fast, her face and voice smoothed out, and she turned back to me.

  "What your grandfather is trying to say," she said, "is that if bloodkin could shift, the problem would solve itself. But bloodkin don't shift, don't become more lupine over time." She sighed, and in that moment I saw weariness around her eyes, like she too was saddened by the fact. "You're human because the bond made it so, because you couldn't have come into existence any other way. But you carry the trace of it, and the trace of our bloodline, and it calls upon instincts in this town that are older than language and reason."

  "Is that," I began, stepping forward without meaning to, my throat dry, voice raspy. "Is that why kids at school act weird around me?"

  Jack and Elise exchanged glances, then looked back at me.

  "You said nothing about this. When did it start?" Elise's gaze slid to the scrape on my hand. "Did that have anything to do with it?"

  "You're doing it again, evading," I snapped. "Just tell me why everyone at school has been acting like I was both a magnet and a time bomb. At least I deserve to know that."

  Elise's mouth tightened. "Because to them you smell…" She hesitated. "Different."

  The word landed wrong.

  "Different how?"

  She hesitated. "Like too many things at once."

  I stepped back. "What does that mean?"

  Elise's firm posture faltered. Her eyes fell. She took a deep breath. Suddenly she looked very, very tired.

  I wrapped my arms around my middle. "You know what, I'll just talk to Dad. When will he be back?"

  Elise's gaze held mine. Then her face changed, just slightly, and there it was again, that maddening certainty.

  "We don't know."

  "You don't know," I echoed, my voice shaking. "Hailey wants him. I'm going to find him."

  Elise's eyes narrowed. "No."

  In one movement she blocked the hall that led to the stairs, her body angled, not aggressive, just placed. Like a wall.

  Jack pushed off the doorframe too, slow and deliberate, and moved to stand on the other side.

  My pulse spiked.

  I looked from Elise to Jack, disbelief turning into fury.

  "Let me pass," I snapped.

  Jack's gaze remained steady. "No."

  A laugh ripped out of me, sharp and broken, almost hysterical. "Oh, now you're holding me hostage?"

  Elise's voice stayed calm. "Of course not."

  "You are literally blocking the stairs," I shot back.

  Elise's jaw flexed. "You are not going into the woods."

  My whole body shook with the need to scream.

  "My dad is out there," I said, my eyes burning, tears blurring my sight, rage and terror fused into one. "You just told me you don't know when he'll be back. So he's still in there. In the woods. And I'm going to find him. Because Hailey asked for him and because I need to talk to him."

  Elise's jaw tightened.

  "You don't understand," she said.

  "Then make me understand," I sobbed. "For once, tell me the truth."

  Elise held my eyes for a long moment.

  "The town is one thing, Kelsey. It's a place for reason, for language. The forest…" She hesitated. "Is something else altogether. It's a place where human laws don't take precedence over nature. It's…" Her eyes flicked past me toward the window, where the forest loomed dark and ominous. Her voice dropped. "A hunting ground."

  A cold shiver ran down my spine. My gaze flickered to Jack for a second. You sent me there, I wanted to shout, but didn't. He said nothing.

  "Dad wouldn't hurt me," I said, more a prayer than a belief.

  Elise let out a long breath. "Of course he wouldn't. Not intentionally. Ever."

  Hope flared in my chest, fragile and desperate.

  "Then let me go," I said, my voice shaking. "Let me find him."

  Elise's eyes softened for a fraction.

  Then she said, "But not only Gabriel wanders through that forest."

  The sentence hit like a blow.

  "What?" I whispered.

  Elise swallowed.

  Jack's gaze sharpened, scanning me like he was measuring whether I could handle what came next.

  Elise's voice dropped. "There are others."

  My stomach turned.

  "Others like you," I said, my voice sounding far away.

  Elise nodded.

  "And they…" I couldn't finish.

  Elise's eyes held mine, and for a moment the mask was gone completely.

  "Yes," she said.

  The word was enough.

  I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve, furious at my own tears.

  "But you said nobody would hurt us," I snapped.

  Elise's gaze didn't waver. "I said we wouldn't."

  I stared at her, my breath ragged.

  Elise inhaled slowly.

  "We are your family," she said, quiet but firm. "Hailey and you are our blood. Our young. We love you. To us, you are something to cherish and protect."

  "And to the others?" I asked, already afraid of the answer.

  Elise hesitated, just for a heartbeat.

  Jack's jaw clenched.

  Elise's eyes dropped, then lifted again, meeting mine with something like regret.

  "To others," she said softly, "you are nothing but…"

  She stopped.

  My breath caught.

  Elise's throat bobbed as she swallowed, like even saying it felt wrong.

  Then she finished, her voice barely above a whisper.

  "A scent."