Prologue
I was innocent once, but I didn’t get to stay that way for long. Raised by a single mother somewhere in the vicinity of upper-lower class, day-to-day life was always a struggle. My mom tried to cover it with her flowing Bohemian skirts and shimmery laughter, but even my youngest self knew something wasn’t right. Secrets haunted her like misty ghosts; she carried them in the slump of her shoulders and the depths of her sea glass colored eyes.
Over the years, her boyfriends would come and go, but none of them were around for longer than a few months. Her parents were gone, and my father was nothing more than a one-night stand. The only constant was us, and in my tiny world, she was my best friend, my safe harbor, and my favorite person. I would have done anything, given anything, to keep her with me forever.
Right up until the day the darkness swallowed her whole, and she left me all alone.
Chapter One
The constant banging echoes with a heavy foreboding that drags me awake. Cursing under my breath, my legs tangle in the sheets in my hurry to get up and I fall back onto the bed, setting the less than sturdy frame shaking and squeaking.
It is far too early for this.
Lying flat on my back, I squeeze my eyes shut and count to ten, willing whoever is at my door to go away. When that doesn’t work, I grind my teeth in frustration and roll off my slightly swaybacked mattress. Thoroughly annoyed now and my eyes still blurry with sleep, I stumble my way toward the noise while yanking my T-shirt and sleep shorts out of the cracks and crevices they crawled into while I slept.
“There’d better be something on fire, asshole!” I yell toward the locked and dead-bolted door from the middle of my puny living room. At the sound of my voice, the banging starts in earnest. "For fuck's sake, I'm coming!" Peering through the scuffed up peephole, I’m not exactly overjoyed to see the lecherous leer of my infinitely skeevy landlord on the other side. Flicking the locks and opening the door just wide enough with one hand, I instinctively cross the other arm over my thin shirt to keep him from eye-groping my tits.
"What the hell do you want at six o'clock in the morning, Todd?" A sizable yawn escapes me, and since I'm more concerned with covering my chest than covering my mouth, he winces as my breath floats in his direction. I don’t even try to stifle my satisfied grin; this fucker's roving eyes and grabby hands deserve far worse than a little dragon breath.
He doesn’t say a word, just stands there, staring at me.
“Earth to Todd. Make a damn sound already. Silently ogling me this early in the morning is more aggravating than usual." It’s repulsive to me that I have to be even marginally civil to this guy when all I want to do is junk punch him. Unfortunately, there aren’t many landlords in this town willing to rent to an underage girl with no credit history, so I have to play nice. Ish.
His small, close-set eyes—somewhere between baby shit brown and dirty old mustard—lazily make their way from my shapely bare legs up to my heart-shaped, and currently very fucking irritated face. Licking his slimy lips, he half-chuckles, and it sounds like a death rattle.
“This came for you. Ran into the delivery guy yesterday and told him I would make sure you got it." He lifts his scarecrow-thin arm, and, for the first time, I catch sight of the package gripped in his left hand. Wrapped in plain brown butchers’ paper and about the size of a family-sized cracker box, I can see his greasy fingerprints all over it. Shuddering involuntarily, I reach forward, doing my best to grab it without having to touch his fingers in the process.
“How about you let the delivery guy do what he’s paid to do?” I suggest, shaking my head in a mix of frustration and disgust. Bored with his little game now, I slam and lock the door without another word. My need to make sure he actually leaves has me checking the peephole, just in time to see his usual constipated expression morph into something darker, likely at not being thanked nicely.
Big deal. The guy's a card-carrying creeper, and there’s only so much of him I can stomach.
The pockmarked hallway mirror on the way to the kitchen reveals a grumpy raccoon; last night's mascara and eyeliner now smeared around a pair of tired, deep violet-blue eyes. Dumping the package on my scarred kitchen table, I run the broadside of my index fingers under my eyes to wipe the black away and park my ass in my single, wobbly kitchen chair.
Pulling one leg up to my chest and resting my chin on my knee, I eyeball the package in front of me. The longer I sit staring at it, the more my nerves hum, and the stronger my strange sense of foreboding gets. Who would send me anything? With no family to speak of and my deeply ingrained distrust of pretty much the entire human race, I have exactly one friend and a handful of acquaintances. I can't think that a single one of them would spring for the price of postage.
For two years, I've been on my own, ever since my mom up and disappeared the winter after I turned fifteen, and any small sense of normality in my life vanished with her. Now, two and a half years later, I have developed a finely honed sense of when things are about to go sideways.
Today is starting to feel exceptionally sideways.
With a resigned sigh, I slide the package toward me to get a closer look.
I shake it a little.
Give it a suspicious sniff.
Set it back down.
Nibbling on my left thumbnail, my go-to bad habit when I’m overthinking, I contemplate the grease-stained wrapping a little longer. Finally, curiosity overtakes wariness, so I pick up the package again and rip it open.
To my utter surprise, nestled inside the cardboard shell is a wooden box, carved with a small cluster of vines and what looks like dainty sparkling stars. Polished to a warm cinnamon sheen, it’s just big enough to hold a large paperback novel. After turning it over a few times and running my hands over its understated beauty, my fingertips find the small latch on the front and press open the hinged lid. Honestly, I have no idea what I expect to see inside. I can say with utmost certainty, however, that the little ecru envelope with fancy black cursive script spelling out Stella Evangeline Bradleigh wasn't on the list of possibilities.
Resisting the urge to drop the box like it bit me, I gingerly set it, still open, on the table with shaking hands. My wooden chair creaks in protest as I lean back, taking a few deep breaths to try to quiet the panic that surges through me like a rogue wave at the sight of my real name.
The name nobody is supposed to know.
Up until my fifteenth birthday, I was Evvie Ellis. Stubborn. Intelligent. Creative. I may have been from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, but my mom and I did the best we could, and for the most part, I was happy.
There have always been strange gaps in time that were dark voids in my mind, but Mom told me it was because I was too busy remembering the good things, so there was no room for anything else. She would get this weird deer in headlights look and start to cry when I would tell her I wanted to try to fill in some of the holes in my Swiss cheese memory, so I learned to shove my questions and fears down deep.
Her tendency for avoidance decided to bite me in the ass the night I turned fifteen.
Over store-bought chocolate birthday cake and melting vanilla ice cream, my mother lost her mind. At least that’s the only explanation I could think of at the time. Playing with a loose thread on the edge of her sleeve, and unable to meet my eyes, she told me a story about a baby named Stella Evangeline Bradleigh. A baby who was supposedly me, born in a town she refused to name, far from where we lived in Gloversville, NY. Grabbing my face desperately with both hands, she made me promise over and over to never tell anybody who I really was, not letting go until I said the actual words. Finally satisfied, she patted my cheek and told me I would always be safe as long as I kept my promise.