“Although the precise mechanism is not known, it is generally accepted that magic users can sense the magic in other people. While putting this to practical use requires rare talent, even magic users with little ability tend to have an instinctual aversion to their own kind.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

It was dark by the time Silver unloaded her backpack onto her bedroom floor. Outside, the rain continued, a fine, frigid drizzle that made her small bedroom feel cozier than usual. There was a lot crammed into the small space – a narrow desk dominated by her laptop, a bunk with storage beneath for her clothes, a few boxes that would be emptied into a bookshelf when her parents got around to making a trip to the furniture store. At least the closet was her own since she no longer had to share with her sister, though after the move, her clothing was sparse. The only other belonging she cared about was a narrow wooden box that stored mementos from her childhood, including a pure white feather the length of her forearm she had picked up on a beach long ago, and a deep black stone speckled white so it resembled the night sky – both cherished childhood treasures.

Ignoring the mess she had made, Silver quickly cast around for a pencil and propped open her laptop to search up the mysterious Book of Lineage. It was not a fruitful search. Cifa proved to be an acronym for several important and impressive sounding agencies, and there were a stupidly large number of movies with the words “Book” or “Lineage” in them. After tapping in a series of increasingly frustrated searches, she devolved into sifting through the news and checking to see if any of her friends from her old school – namely Kerie and Skye, who she had hung out with nearly every day – were online, and then finally into skulking outside the kitchen to see how close she was to dinner.

Close, as it turned out. Her mom looked up from the casserole box she had been reading at the sound of Silver’s footsteps. “Hungry already?”

“When is she ever not?” her sister, Rilena, or Lena as Silver called her, called from the other room.

Lena had sprawled out on the carpet with a textbook and a calculator to do her homework. From behind it was difficult to make out her carefully selected beaded tank, which was paired nearly daily with a different coat, and impossible to see her distinctive smoky eyeshadow. Silver teased her sometimes – lovingly, of course – about her semi-goth yet tasteful clothing choices, which were every bit as stylish as Silver’s were boring. The thing about being her sister was that Silver would always remember the cutesy little skirt-wearing princess with a single, nineties ponytail who had first won her heart. Shortly thereafter, Lena had won her attention as well, because, as the youngest of the siblings, she was also the loudest.

“True. Hopefully you’ll last half an hour?” her mom chuckled and then pointed at the cupboard. “It’ll go faster if the table’s set.”

Of course, table setting meant being poked and prodded for details of her homework, and then further interrogated for details about the “friend” she had met at the library. It also meant she received all the latest celebrity gossip, learned that the color of the year was mint green, and discovered her muddy pants were not allowed at the dinner table. Over all, a pretty typical night.

Silver had nearly forgotten the rigors of her school day by the time she slid into a chair at the dining table to watch her dad mix a huge bowl of salad. Lena joined them with an appreciative glance at the casserole and a sneer at the salad. It took a bit more effort to pull her fifteen-year old brother, Ren, away from his computer, but soon he, too, had been won over by the promise of casserole.

Videogame addict though he was, Silver would be the first to admit she loved her brother. Years of reading his many wordless expressions had left them with a unique appreciation for each other; he had barely spoken his first word until the time he was three years old. He had changed a bit since then, and now sported handsome, curly brown hair that had fooled more than one mom into thinking Silver had two younger sisters when they were children. He also had a great tennis backhand and an even better fore, a natural love of taking things apart – and sometimes a talent for putting them back together – and a deep voice that no one heard because he hardly ever said anything. Ever.

“Do you know when your cap and gown arrive?” her mom asked, glancing at her brother as he, too, stared hard at the salad and then dug a serving spoon into the casserole.

“Soon, I think. You can take pictures then.”

“You don’t want anything professional?”

“It’s fine. It won’t be any better than the picture they took for the yearbook earlier, anyway,” Silver determined. Her mom frowned and looked unconvinced, something that she often did when Silver seemed not to care about something that she should – or that perhaps other girls did – care about. Silver had spent enough time scheduling photography sessions and scanning through hundreds of pictures in her brief stint as a family photographer at their old place to be thoroughly over the experience.

“You still heading up to volunteer at the wildlife reserve tomorrow?” Lena asked then, following it up with, “Do we have any tomato sauce?”

“You want tomato sauce on your casserole,” her mom said in disbelief through a mouth full of food. Ren and her dad were laughing.

“I almost forgot that was tomorrow,” Silver finally admitted, once the conversation about tomato sauce had calmed down.

“Are you kidding? I’m super jealous,” Lena said.

“I told you I’d take you if you were eighteen,” Silver grinned, and Lena pouted playfully.

“Yeah, yeah. Rub it in.”

“Which reminds me of the reason I forgot,” Silver paused to take a few bites as she stared thoughtfully between her parents, “I told you about that family history assignment I got today, right? I know I’ve asked before, but you really don’t know anything about Grandma and Grandpa’s lives? I mean, well, you’ve really only mentioned mom’s parents before. Anything about our other grandparents?”

Her mom seemed to think for a few minutes as she ate, while her dad said, “I really don’t know much. My parents didn’t talk about their lives before us, and as far as my brother and I knew—”

“You have a brother?” Silver interrupted, surprised despite the fact that she had seen it only hours before, or maybe because she had seen it and hardly believed it.

“Really?” Lena jumped in as well. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s been a long time,” her mom interjected with a glance at her dad, “but he passed…has it been thirty years now?”

“Just about,” her dad agreed heavily. Silver was ready to let things drop at that point, but Lena was not quite. She looked horrified.

“What happened?”

“Let’s talk about something else,” their mom said decisively. Of course, after that there was not much to talk about, and once the food was gone, Silver excused herself to her homework and negotiated her way out of loading the dishwasher. She did manage to catch her dad for a quick hug before she went, while he scrubbed down his plate.

In reality, she had no intention of doing any more work that night. Instead, she retrieved the feather from the box in her closet and went to bed, spiraling it between her fingers and watching it catch the golden light from the streetlights outside her window. With the lights out, she could watch the rain fall, glittering like gold dust against the backdrop of the trees. If she peered harder, she could just make out the ring of mountains that had always been an edge to her world. What she looked for in that deceptively dark, glittering world she did not know. The same thing, perhaps, that she looked for from the top of the bleachers. Or maybe something she had forgotten.

Sighing, Silver ran her fingers up and down the soft vanes of the feather until she drifted off to the rhythm of the rainfall.

At what time she woke with a start, she was not sure. It was a sound that had woken her, though she had no idea where it had come from, and the world was peacefully silent by the time her groggy mind roused itself. But she had fallen asleep staring out the window, and so she woke to see movement in the glow of the streetlamps below. She knew what it was before she believed it.

Not a dog. Not a coyote.

A wolf.

Her eyes widened as she lay, frozen. The beast was as much enrapturing as it was frightening. In the amber glow of the streetlamp, she could clearly make out the bright silver of its coat, the arch of its hooded ears as they twitched in the night, even the brightness of its eyes where they shone like jade stars. Doubtless, looking at those eyes would be like looking into a tinted mirror as deep as the sea itself.

As if the beast sensed her gaze, its long neck arched proudly, head held high, ears pricked to absolute alertness. Even its tail rose level with its back, a proud flag beneath the watchful night, declaring kingship beneath the moon. It remained there a moment, haunting the streets of their boring suburban neighborhood. Then it turned to the trees and was gone, a waking dream in the late hours of the night. Beneath the glow of the clustered streetlamps, the bushes lay dark and tangled and lifeless, shivering beneath the chill night sky.

Silver stared at them for a long time, long enough that when morning came she was startled to realize she had drifted off a second time. She woke with a yawn, realized she had fallen asleep with the feather on her chest and so replaced it in her box, and then searched the tree line for any sign of the wolf. There was none, at least so far as she could see through the slushy rainfall.

The weather meant that she would definitely not be making the trip to the lake this morning, but anticipation of her shift at the wildlife reserve lessened the sting. She had finished her orientation the week before, after the school threatened her graduation on the grounds of having too few community service hours. Having completed her orientation meant she was a full-fledged volunteer, at least in the sense that she was allowed to clean pretty much anywhere in the compound without someone hovering at her back.

It took her a few extra minutes to pack a change of clothes, a flashlight, and a few other things she needed for her shift in her backpack, and then to stuff in everything she had poured out the night before. All the while she daydreamed about the lake, a drumming chorus of life in the rain. Birds chirping desolately and shaking the wet from their feathers. Squirrels holing up and curling tightly in their thick tails, safe in the trees that welcomed the rain with open branches. The lake would be even more alive than usual, swollen against its banks.

By the time she had finished washing up for the day, she was convinced that heading to the reserve in the rain would be better than going on a sunny summer day, even if it meant bringing a raincoat. She met her dad in the kitchen again. This time he had her lunch already finished. “Drive carefully,” he said, kissing her lightly on the forehead.

“Jealous,” Lena repeated her sentiments from the night before with a yawn, shuffling into the kitchen with her hair tangled gloriously about her head; no one could sleep quite as violently as Lena slept. “Take pictures if there’s anything cute. When I checked the website the other day they said something about baby owls.”

“You know I’m going to be cleaning most of the time, right? You hate cleaning,” Silver pointed out.

“Cleaning just doesn’t agree with me. I don’t hate it.”

“I cleaned out the memory on the camera yesterday,” Ren’s deeper voice echoed from the dining table. She peered around to see him burying his spoon in a bowl of cereal, and he pointed at one of the cubicles. The camera was right in front.

“You’re taking the car this morning, right?” Lena asked, watching Silver grab the camera and reach for the keys. Silver nodded and gathered up her backpack, wondering if her sister was still contemplating begging to hitch a ride up to the reserve. It was open to the public, so it was not such a crazy idea.

“Give me a few weeks and I’ll make sure to take you up there. They might even let you volunteer if you’re not doing anything near the animals,” Silver said.

Lena smiled a bit and nodded before unexpectedly asking, “Was he good looking?”

Silver stopped halfway to the door.

“What?” She already knew what her sister was talking about of course. Lena tilted her head and raised her eyebrows instead of going for her usual eye roll.

“Bek, right? Was he hot?”

“Definitely not,” Silver said a bit too vehemently, but without a hint of doubt. “He offered to help with a school project. Ren,” she avoided her sister’s gaze as she called to her brother, but still felt the eye roll, “am I driving you today?”

“Sure. One sec.”

“Really?” Lena had continued, “Because there’s a boy in my class that I’ve been talking to, and he’s really hot. I thought we could swap stories.” After that, Lena did not stop talking. Ren joined them and Silver listened as her sister followed her out to the car before heading off to the bus stop to catch the bus to the middle school.

That morning, the drive in was rough. The rain formed a curtain of rich, gleaming fog. That fog was perhaps the thing Silver most loved about Washington so far, but she still had to narrow her eyes to slits to see through it or risk running half the stop signs between them and the high school. Ren was characteristically silent till she dropped him off in the parking lot, at which point they were both surprised to find Bek waiting outside the school. He had escaped the rain under an overhang, and gave a curt, decisive wave as they approached.

“Are you Silver’s brother?” he asked as soon as they, too, had escaped the rain.

“Yeah,” Ren glanced at Silver, who put on a bit of a false smile to say, “this is Bek, the guy who I met at the library yesterday.”

“Oh, cool.” Ren returned his gaze to Bek, ran a hand uncomfortably through his damp curls, and said, “well, you two have fun,” before heading off in the direction of the freshman buildings. Silver watched him go wistfully. If only she could escape Bek so easily.

She glanced sideways at Bek then, considering. It did not take her long to decide not to think too much of their meeting. It was possible, after all, that he had not actually been waiting for her.

“I’ll see you in class,” she said with a lame wave before stepping neatly around him to head for homeroom. It took him maybe half a stride to catch up to her.

“I was waiting for you,” he stated firmly, staring at her as if daring her to meet his gaze. Refusing to, she kept her stare fixed straight ahead.

“Do you really hate me that much? I mean—” he began to say.

“I don’t hate you,” she interrupted him, turning to eye him thoughtfully. “There’s just something about you...” He stopped, and for half a second, his expression gave him away; guilt, maybe, or realization. She narrowed her eyes at him, wondering what exactly he had to hide. There were many times in her life when she had followed her gut, and few when it had led her astray. In that moment, she chose to follow it again.

“Maybe we can meet up this weekend at the library again. I still have a lot of work to do on that family history assignment.”

Surprise; she could sense it in him, even if he merely nodded and traced a hand across his throat.

Who knew that one sentence could bring her such abrupt peace. There was a tenuous friendship between the two of them now, or at least the beginnings of one, so he would probably not bother her in class. And she had something to look forward to in the afternoon.

Pressing through the day with unabashed enthusiasm, she hardly noticed if she met stares throughout the day, whether from Bek or anyone else. At the strike of two-thirty, she was crammed into the van she shared with her siblings, pulling out of the gravel parking lot in the direction of the mountains. Ren would take the bus. They had planned it before. No one expected her home till after dark. A dubious glance at the sky suggested that dark would fall earlier tonight than expected, but that was not enough to put a damper on her mood. In fact, she was singing along to the radio as she turned onto the roads that wound through the woods up to the reserve, and eventually up to the ski resorts in the heart of the mountains. She was not going that far today, of course, but the promise was there come winter.

As she drove the trees changed, from sturdy pines and sparse hardwoods huddled close around old houses to the taller, craggy softwoods of the mountains. The earth changed, too, from the smooth, sloping fields and valleys farther from the base of the mountain to the sheer, stony hills closer at hand. Rock loomed over her, carved with serpentine waterfalls that reflected and shattered the gray of the clouds into gaping chasms. Her ears popped as the earth fell away from her other side, vanishing into a white mist so thick it was as if she teetered on the edge of the world. All the while, the slushy rain continued, until finally it froze.

Then she drove towards the brick face of the wildlife reserve through a light snowfall that powdered its metal roofs and traced the contours of its many chain link enclosures. The structure was splendid, set with windows as tall as she was at nearly every point. In the summer, it would look out over a carefully tended botanical garden on one side, and a sheer drop to the falls on the other. To its right were the chain link enclosures that housed sick and injured animals in need of rehabilitation, all facing inward to an impressive set of veterinary facilities.

Parking, she slid out of the car, grabbing her things. Then she stood, simply living in the moment. Taking a deep breath of the fresh, frigid air, she remained a moment in the absolute silence of the deep woods. Time seemed to stand still there. Nothing lived. Nothing stirred. Around her, the ancient trees stood so still the very air hung about them.

It was a while before she made her way inside to be greeted by one of the more permanent staff and pointed to a whiteboard full of tasks that needed doing. It fell to her to dry and fold a pile of old towels they used for bedding, mop around the tables in the two examination rooms out of sight of the public, and then replace a series of signs in one of the upstairs exhibits with one of the public events coordinators, Cindy Chen. Cindy bustled around the exhibits alongside her, answering enough questions to drive a less patient woman up a wall.

Before sending her outside to shovel the boardwalk alongside the enclosures, the coordinator also agreed to take her down to see the baby owls. Silver cooed over them from the other side of a mesh screen for half an hour before Cindy showed her how to check on the livecam footage her sister was probably watching from home. They walked out together, bundled up against what had become a much thicker snowfall. It had grown chilly enough that Silver regretted not bringing a thicker coat.

“Is that your van?” Cindy asked, squinting through the snow at the parking lot.

“Yeah.”

“We shouldn’t be getting ice this time of year, but the snow’s getting bad. I’m sending you home after this, before it gets dark.”

Silver nodded, and watched the woman head around the building to unlock the tool shed. Along with all manner of odds and ends, from rakes to billboards to what looked like a croquette set, there were a stack of snow shovels. She and Cindy each took one, shook off a few spider webs, and headed to opposite sides of the enclosures. Then Silver was left alone again, with only the silence and the drudgery of scraping ice and snow from the gravel. It was invigorating. When her forearms started cramping, she stopped, standing the shovel up on its head while she stared up through the towering pines, and then turned to peer into the enclosures.

Most of the animals were inside, out of the snow, so it was no surprise when she found the first three empty. But the fourth...the fourth was not. At first she thought it was, until she realized that eyes watched her from its farthest corner; dizzyingly deep, penetrating eyes. Her heartbeat sped up.

A wolf.

A magnificent beast, body stretched so still across the snow it might have been stone. It watched her without making any indication that it did so, with eyes like gold topaz, ears forward, body curled around in a position that said it could reach her in an instant. There was something about this creature, something un-nameable about the silvery flash of its fur in the light reflected off of the snow, the hooded curve of its heavily furred ears, the still hush of its presence when it turned its predatory gaze onto her and became as still as anything unliving. In its eyes there was all the fire, all the regality and viciousness of life.

But she was not worth its while. Still silent as a ghost, the wolf lowered its head to its paws, and only then did she see the injury that had brought it to the reserve. One of its limbs had been mangled, crushed perhaps, and the fur was only now growing back in gray tufts.

“I can’t imagine that pain,” she spoke in hushed tones. Again, the beast raised its head, but its expression had changed. Everything in its attention, in fact, had changed. The weight of its stare burned like a physical thing, pinning her to the gravel boardwalk. Silver drowned in its gaze, forgetting for an instant that a fence lay between them. Gray crept to the edges of her vision, and then a crash at her feet brought her back to the world.

Silver’s eyes crept slowly downward, and she stared for several long seconds, numb, at the snow shovel she had dropped. When she raised her head again, the wolf’s gaze was elsewhere, but she was not yet to be saved from whatever strange spell had come over her.

Where before they had been alone, now there was a bat perched awkwardly across the chain link. Scrambling backward hastily, Silver tripped over the shovel and fell back into the snow, then stayed there, heedless of the meltwater seeping through her pants. For an instant, she had thought the bat larger than it was, maybe three times the size of the common brown bats she was used to seeing; there were quite a lot of bats in Washington. But her sudden movements had not phased the tiny creature, which watched her all the while she got back to work, scraping the snow from in front of the wolf’s enclosure and casting surreptitious glances at its inhabitants.

It was nearly an hour before Cindy appeared around the other side of the boardwalk and relieved her of the shovel.

“Drive slowly around the turns,” she warned, “if you don’t think you’re going to make it to the base of the mountain, call the main line for the center. One of us will come and get you home.”

“Okay, thanks for today,” Silver called as she brushed off the windows of her car and slowly pulled out of the parking lot. Cindy was right about the ice – the van still had quite a bit of traction. There were no other cars on the road, but there was a good set of tracks to follow. She settled into the drive without concern, watching a purple blush creep across the sky through the faint snowfall. Come summer, she would have a magnificent view coming down these mountain roads. The sky stretched on to eternity, a vast open bowl that cupped her little home city and everything around it. Today there was only the fog, but it was magnificent in its own right, a shroud over everything she knew.

“So beau—” her words were cut short as the van swerved suddenly to the side and she was slammed against the window so hard she thought the glass would break against her head. Fumbling desperately at the steering wheel, she felt it spin through her outstretched fingers. Somewhere seemingly far away, brakes squealed, drowning out her surprised cry. Beyond her window the world flashed past, a blinding blur of hulking shadows, any one of which could be the end of her.

One of them loomed suddenly and sharply into view, and her entire body strained away from it to no avail. The air shot from her lungs as she lurched forward, chest and face slamming against something in front of her. Pain shot through her left arm. Still far away, Silver heard a sound like a tin can being crushed. The world shook. It roared. It was still spinning, spinning, spinning...for a moment that was eternity.

Then everything was still. Silver grasped for what had happened, struggling for an instant to understand. She was not dead. Not yet. Although her left arm hurt, the pain was centralized to her elbow, and she could move it. The thing she was pressed against was an airbag, and the crushed metal...she raised her head tentatively, waiting for waves of pain or dizziness that did not come. The car had hit a tree, luckily not head on. Most of her hood was tangled in a clump of bushes, and her bumper had splintered a fallen tree.

Silence reigned.

What had happened? She had no idea. Not ice. Not snow. Something...Silver reached for the steering wheel to push herself up and realized she was shaking so hard she could barely grab hold of it. There was ice in her chest, a cold, hard lump of pure terror, expanding rapidly as she realized what had happened.

Something had hit the car – hit it hard enough to drive her off the road.

“A d-deer,” she mumbled aloud, as if the sound of her voice could comfort her. It rang in the silence instead, drowned in the staccato thump of her heart. She had not been driving that fast. She would have seen something. And she had.

That was no deer.

Something passed over her then, turning the darkening sky pitch black. The car shuddered and then moaned as some tremendous weight settled on its roof. The breath caught in Silver’s throat as she shrank down, trying to see above her. One word rang through her mind again and again and again.

Run.

Adrenaline shot through her as she suddenly turned and pummeled the unlock button on the car door, forcing her shaking fingers into the handle to push it open. There was something blocking it. Probably the brush, or even the edge of the fallen tree. Silver slammed her weight against the car, whimpering as her injured elbow caught the doorframe. Nothing happened. In a panicked instant, she realized she was trapped. The van would be her cage, her grave, unless she could find a way out.

Run, run, run, run.

Her body was trembling with a wild fear as icy claws gripped her heart. Her mind raced. All she could feel under her numb fingers was the steady vibration of the car and the suffocating darkness beyond it, closing in slowly. The shadows were watching, moving, turning back on themselves as if they had forgotten something. And still the creaking from above, as something moved overhead, searching for a way in.

Then it stopped.

It felt as if her heart stopped, too. Now all that could be heard was the harsh rasp of her breath and the rumble of nearby thunder. Long minutes dragged by. She was waiting, Silver realized with stark clarity, for her death. She knew what was out there without really knowing.

Anger mingled with her fear. Reflexively, her fingers clutched at the slick glass of the impenetrable window, unable to find any grip, and her teeth chattered so hard she thought she must have bitten her tongue. The salt taste in her mouth must be blood. There would be more of it soon. Everywhere. She could see it already, as if her mind prepared her for the worst.

When talons the length of her upper arm sliced through the roof, peeling away a portion of it as easily as if it were paper, Silver was not sure for an instant if she imagined that as well. It was all nightmares now. Real and unreal at the same time. Silver sucked in a breath, meeting the gaze of the most horrific darkness she had ever known. It was nothing but shadow – shadow and two scarlet eyes that loomed like foxfire at the edge of the sky. That did not matter. Every fiber of her being knew what it was in a way that went far beyond words. This thing was not alive. It was evil.

“Stay away,” she whispered. Her voice shook dangerously.

Silence greeted her words.

“Stay away!”

A rumble issued from above her, and it vibrated through her very bones.

“Do it then,” she suddenly screamed at the thing above her, reaching for anything in the car that might work as a weapon. The best she could come up with was a tissue box. She held it one hand, no longer shaking. “Whatever you are,” she promised, “you’ll regret this.”

If lightning struck in that instant and saved her life, it was no more a miracle than the creature it saved her from was an abomination. For an instant, she was blinded. Heat exploded into her car, a hot wind that melted the ice from her windshield in the blink of an eye. A grating scream from above sent chills rolling down her spine. For an instant more, the van groaned louder as the creature apparently pushed off and was gone.

There was no more sound after that, no more motion.

Silver waited with baited breath, staring up at the hole in the ceiling. To remain in the enclosed space meant no escape, to step outside of it, no cover. There was nowhere to go. She knew it, and the thing that had attacked her probably did, too. The minutes ticked by, but there was no sign that the beast had returned.

Gradually, she set down the tissue box and unbuckled her seatbelt, casting around for her cellphone. To her confusion, the wail of sirens was already audible somewhere through the snow and fog, and they seemed to be headed in her direction.

By the time the police arrived with an ambulance in tow, she had nearly extracted herself from her seat and managed to jam open the passenger-side door wide enough to escape. She waved them down a few paces away from the back of the car, where she had stopped to inspect the damage herself. It would not be taking her anywhere for a while, that was for sure. From the ground, though, it was difficult to see the terrific damage to the roof, and more difficult to convince anyone of its cause. Thus, the presence of the police lacked any real reassurance – what would they do against a creature that could destroy the roof of her car without apparent effort, after all – except in that they helped her call her dad and waited for her to be picked up.

For his part, her dad said little on the drive home. Perhaps that was because he had to call several towing companies to find one that would pick up in the snow the next day, perhaps because he was relieved to find her safe and upset by the loss of her car, perhaps because he was waiting for them to arrive home so he could wrap her in a tight hug and tell her in exacting detail how afraid he had been when the police called. She hugged him back tightly, her mind still shaken and body mysteriously exhausted.

“I don’t know what happened,” she blurted. She could feel his sigh throughout his embrace.

“Let’s head inside, Silver.”

She heard footsteps from every direction as soon as the door opened. “Is she alright?” her mom came around the corner of the kitchen with a spoon still in her hand. “Oh my...Silver. Silver, honey.” Silver stared at her, suddenly at a loss for words because everything she wanted to say would only sound strange. I’m safe. I’m scared. Mom, would you believe me…

“You’re soaked. Is that blood? We heard from the police station…my...they called an hour ago.” She could see the strain in her mom’s stare. In fact, she could see the tension all through her body, and suddenly she was thinking again of the fear that she had felt, cold and hard and clawing in her chest. But this time her heart ached as well. Her mom was so worried, more so than she had ever seen her, even though Silver was obviously safe and sound.

After a moment, she noticed Lena and Ren standing at the edge of the stairs, both watching with wide eyes. Her throat burned, and she averted her gaze quickly.

Warmth surrounded her in the form of two arms, maybe not so much strong as clutching, holding her close as if afraid she would slip away. Silver let her mother hug her, wishing that some of her anxiety would melt away in the embrace the way the cold from the outdoors did.

“Were you scared? No, I’m sure it was fine. Just an accident. I always tell you…what would I do?” The words were hardly recognizable, thick with worry. Silver felt her mom’s body shaking, and wondered if her mom was crying. Her dad was standing behind her several steps away, and his expression was enough that she knew he felt the same.

She closed her eyes as she returned her mom’s hug, and pulled away seconds before she was suffocated. Her mom’s face was dry, at least, or if there were tears of any sort, she was bustled up the stairs too quickly to see them. It was a good thing…she did not want anyone to see how close to tears she was, either.

In moments, she was taking a steamy shower that melted the cold from her bones. The wispy fog soaked into her skin and hair, relaxing her, smelling softly of floral shampoo and soap. Silver jumped when a voice sounded beyond the curtain.

“Silver?” She waited several seconds, pulling her fingers through her hair as she let the hot water pound against her face, before she answered.

“Yeah.”

“What really happened?” Another pause. How could she know? Lena’s shadow against the curtain shifted and Silver knew her mom had asked her sister to get her a fresh towel.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You would never be that freaked out by an accident if you walked away without more than a scratch, I know you.” Too many bike crashes, climbing accidents, and cooking failures had earned her a frightening reputation for calm among her family members.

“I’m not freaked out.”

“You were,” Lena informed her, and the girl’s silhouette shifted away from the towel rack.

“I didn’t crash the car. Something crashed into it,” Silver admitted after a moment, “I was trapped inside while that thing ripped a chunk of the roof off. You’ll see it when they tow the car in.”

Lena was quiet for a long time, until Silver was sure she could hear the gears turning in the younger girl’s mind.

“Mom says dinner’ll be done soon.”

“I think I’m going to bed after this. Can you let her know?”

Lena was silent for a moment more. “You’re sure you’re not injured? Dad said you turned down the ambulance when they offered to take you to the hospital,” her sister asked.

“They still took a quick look at me. I’m just...tired.”

“Okay,” Lena said, “I’ll let her know. It’s weird when you aren’t hungry.”

The door opened and closed with a click. Silver turned the water off, dressed, and stood for several minutes staring in the steam-coated mirror at her pale, freckled face. It was possible she was a bit paler than usual. But there had been a moment...as the terror she had experienced played through her mind again, she could see again the dagger-like claws puncturing the roof of the car, hear the creak and groan of metal as it bent beneath the weight of something she could never have imagined.

Turning the sink on cold, she splashed water on her face until her thundering heart quieted once more. Then, as promised, she went straight to her bedroom and turned out the lights, stretching out in the bed with her laptop. Again, her friends were silent online, probably asleep already. It was later than she had expected.

Not ready yet to be interrogated about what had happened a second time, and too tired to face small-talk, she still remained too nervous to fall asleep. She settled for perusing the news instead, wondering if anyone else had been attacked by the eerie creature that had nearly killed her. A bear had apparently wandered through a local neighborhood for hours before breaking into a convenience store to steal a ham sandwich. There was a part of her that wondered if the story was true, though the video footage was convincing. Climate experts were baffled by freak weather patterns extending across the globe. Their local news station had done a segment on it, suggesting she would be among the only graduating class in their small town to ever graduate in the snow. She looked away from the article to the pelting snow outside the window, and offered it a sardonic grin. It seemed very likely that the author was correct, but she was not sure what it had to do with wild animal attacks.

Momentarily distracted from her search, Silver eyed another local article thoughtfully. It was the picture that had caught her eye; a lovely gold necklace, chain spread across black velvet. She had only to read a few lines of the article to understand that it had been stolen. The museum where it had been housed was in Seattle, not so far from them. Mostly the article discussed some of the technologies that were increasingly giving thieves an edge against highly automated alarm systems, but it also lamented the loss of four other, million-dollar stones, dubbed the Dawn, the Day, the Dusk, and the Night, that had vanished just as mysteriously from more stringently secured premises in the past year.

Zeharial’s necklace, the article claimed, had been discovered in an Egyptian tomb eighty-two years before, along with the stones. It had a long and mysterious history that the article did not delve into, except to promise that the authorities had lost no time attempting to track down the perpetrator of the crime.

Finally feeling the leaden weight of fatigue weighing on her, Silver shut down the computer and set it on the floor near her bed. As she drifted into sleep, she stared out the window at a world painted pure white, ghostly with the moon’s reflection. The snow glistened with a radiant light that cast it into sloping ridges and dunes, and her thoughts strayed again to the terrors of that frigid world as she drifted off.