[BOOK ONE] When hunter-gatherer Adele Shepherd comes across an injured werewolf in the woods, it's up to her to take him in and save his life: in a remote town dedicated to killing the creatures, she's the only one left who wants to help no matter t...
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A HOWL ECHOED around the forest, the angry wail of wind that whipped through the trees as though stirring up a nightmare. Bony branches bent in the wind like crooked fingers, scraping their nails against the windows with a shriek, muffled by the snow that fell hard and fast. A white coat fell over the world, hiding the stark red of a slain deer and the tracks of the wolves who had feasted on its flesh.
A blank canvas. A fresh start. A whole new day.
It wasn't the noise of the night that woke Adele, nor the bloodcurdling screams of the wild foxes, but the cold. It sank into her bones, lacing its ribbon around her heart until it pulled tight enough to jerk her from her sleep with a gasp. Her bedroom felt like a mortuary, her skin ice cold beneath her blanket. The heater had given up, it's orange glow as dead as Adele felt.
The worst thing about winter wasn't the lack of heat, she thought, but the constant dark. When she sat up, feeling around for an extra blanket to wrap up in, she couldn't tell if it was two in the morning of eight when it was. That was when the sun was supposed to rise but there was usually a two-hour gap between it lifting its head and the light reaching the depths of the valley, once it spilled over the lip of the mountains to bathe the trees in whatever warmth it could afford.
Adele didn't even care in morning had woken. She wanted to go back to sleep, if she could ever get warm enough to let her brain switch off, but that wasn't going to happen. As she shivered, so did her phone, buzzing on the bedside table. On the tiny screen, not even two inches wide, a handful of pixels read JADE. Adele groaned. It was too early to talk to her sister. It always was. But she couldn't afford to miss another call.
Jabbing the green button, she wrapped the blanket around her shoulders like a cape and she trailed through to the kitchen, dragging her weary body to the heater beside the armchair.
"Hi," she said, holding back a yawn as she plugged in the heater and curled up in the armchair.
"Hi, it's me," Jade said. That was a pointless introduction, Adele thought: if she was to be introduced by her voice alone then the two words were superfluous.
