Kassian, my Kassian, called me Erie, and I liked that name best of all. It made me think of wind-swept skies and rippling cloaks and soaring high above the forest, higher than any Sworn or treecrawler could reach. It made me feel safe, but also somehow adventurous.
“She’s our daughter. We’ll call her whatever we want,” my father said to my grandmother.
“She’s my granddaughter,” my grandmother replied icily. “Her hair isn’t even red anymore. It’s brown. It doesn’t make sense, and besides, she has a perfectly good name.”
My mother remained silent. She wasn’t afraid to argue with my grandmother, but she picked her battles. Tonight, she seemed determined to let my father do the fighting.
“Lots of people call me Mere, Grandmother,” I interjected. “And the butcher’s son calls me Merry.”
“The butcher’s son has a Chosen for a sister,” my grandmother spat. “Do you really want the brother of a Chosen calling you anything?”
“Those poor girls,” my mother murmured in my grandmother’s direction. “It isn’t their fault, Delphine.”
“Let’s eat some cake,” my father declared, because this was another fight brewing.
“Yes, please,” I said about the cake. I was feeling scared because of the way the adults were acting, and the end of the words squeaked when they left my lips. I didn’t want to think about the Chosen—girls who were dragged from their homes and marked with claw-drawn tattoos by the Sworn, marks made to designate them as future breeders for the werewolf army. I wanted to pretend everything was happy this evening. I wanted to pretend that there was no Alpha ruling us as a dictator, that there were no dangers prowling the forest that grew thick and wild around our village and farm, and that there were no disagreements between the people I loved about the right way to think about these things.
Kassian grabbed my hand beneath the table, and I felt a thrill of excitement despite everything else. I ate my extra big piece of honey carrot cake and held Kassian’s hand, and for ten minutes, even though my grandmother and my parents had argued and my grandmother still looked quietly furious, I felt safe and whole.
After dinner, my father asked me to take the scraps to the compost heap. “You’re old enough to go alone,” he said, with a pointed look in my grandmother’s direction when she tried to protest. “Take your new cloak.”
The night air smelled sweet as I stepped onto the back stoop. The forest lay black with shadows, the branches of the trees moving faintly in the wind. Our house huddled right up against the woods. In the distance, I could see the feathery peaks of the vertical forest against the starry backdrop of the sky. The place that had once been a city with towers of silvery steel. Now, it was overgrown with so many vines and trees that it looked like the earth had reached leafy green fingers up to touch the sky.
One day, when I was old enough, my father had promised to take me there. To show me the secrets and wonders of the world before the Alpha and the Sworn.
I couldn’t wait.
The cloak lay heavy and soft against my shoulders. I felt older wearing the weight of it, taller. Braver. Stronger, even. As if I could fight off any threat. I wore it with the scarlet side out, and I imagined that I stood out against the shadows like a drop of blood on coal, like a fighter for the resistance, as I strode into the backyard behind our cabin. I felt the faintest prickle of magic singe my skin again.
Crickets sang loudly, and the grass whispered around my ankles as I made my way to the compost heap, located a stone’s throw away from the house so we wouldn’t get raccoons rustling beneath our windows in the night while we slept.
I took my time in the yard, enjoying the feel of the length of cloak sweeping behind me like the train of a lady’s gown. The weight of the cloak emboldened me. Usually, I scurried through my chores, nervous in the darkness with the forest at my fingertips, imagining invisible eyes were watching. But this time, I pretended I was a queen walking through her garden, regal and composed. The cloak dragged across the dew-soaked wildflowers. One day, it would fit me. It was a woman’s cloak, made for a full-grown future self.
As I walked, the hem snagged on the thrusting roots of the Thorn Trees that rose from the soil like the grasping hands of buried zombies. We hacked them back, but they grew with a speed and stubbornness that rivaled every other plant in the forest, because they were magic. They’d burst into our world at the same time as the werewolves, spreading like fire across civilization along with the dreaded disease of the land that we called the Spore, a magic plant-disease that spread horrors in its wake.
I stopped to free myself from a Thorn Tree tendril, rubbing my thumb over the embroidery at the edges once more. A thrill lanced through me to think that this beautiful cloak was mine. I felt like a queen, and so I paused to lift my chin as if accepting the bows of my subjects before I raised the bucket to upend the contents over the compost heap.
I was dumping the scraps when the Alpha’s elite werewolf soldiers came.
I had never seen the Sworn before, but I’d heard stories. Whispers of how they were fast as the wind, and just as silent. How they were taller and more muscular than the humans they looked like. The stories also said they had faces like monsters and eyes that glowed the cold blue of the moon on a frosty night, but the Sworn wore black wolf masks, so I didn’t see their faces as they melted from the shadows of the forest in silence. They surrounded the house before I heard anything at all.
The first indication of trouble was a glass breaking.
And then my mother’s scream.
I whirled, the cloak swirling around me. I saw the figures surrounding the cabin. They were as quick and lithe as ghosts. They wore the black armor of the Sworn—thorny arm shields and chest plates, and helmets fashioned from metal to look like wolves’ heads.
They were like monsters from the deep forest.
Every person I loved was inside that cabin. Mother, Father, Kassian, Grandmother.
A gasp wrenched from my lips.
One of the Sworn turned its masked face toward me at the sound of my exhalation. The wicked wolf face glinted like a death mask in the pale moonlight. His curved shoulders, powerful beneath his armor and cloak, tensed.
I stood, feet rooted to the ground, a shout frozen on my tongue. My heart thundered. Surely the Sworn saw me. He would cross the grass and kill me with one swipe of his arm-shield. The thorny spines along it would slice my throat.
I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t breathe.
Like a fawn discovered by a predator, I was locked into place, trembling, my limbs like lead.
After an eternity, the Sworn turned back to the house and slipped inside. It was as if he hadn’t seen me at all.
Another scream split the night, and I heard the sound of a struggle that ended in a dying gasp. The light in the house went out.
They emerged from the house, and I couldn’t see how many of them there were. One wrenched his mask from his face, and moonlight caught his features. He looked just like a man.
I didn’t understand. Where was his fur, his monstrous, doglike mouth?
The Sworn bled away into the shadows, rushing past me like wind, and I was alone.
Time seemed to swell and slow around me. My heartbeat felt as lethargic and final as the hand of a dying drummer in my chest. My thoughts sorted from their tangle and presented themselves one by one. Hide in the shadows. Run to the door and call for my mother. Stay here and never move again.