Page 7

But now its engine was running.

A faint cloud of exhaust drifted into the cold air, and there was a man sitting behind the wheel. I couldn't make out his face, only the pale shape of it through the windshield.

He was looking at the house.

At the kitchen window.

At me.

Something cold settled in my stomach.

"Marion," I said quietly. "That car." She didn't look up. "I've seen it before."

"I know."

I turned to her. "How long has it been coming here?"

Her eyes stayed on our hands.

"Since the day you came to me," she said.

2

Chapter 2

Wren

Ididn't sleep that day, and I barely slept the night that followed.

Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the pale shape of the driver's face turned toward the kitchen window. Marion had said the car had been appearing on and off for eighteen years, which meant whoever was inside it hadn't found me because of yesterday's letter. They had known where I was since I was four years old.

I lay awake on the narrow bed in my old room, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars I'd stuck to the ceiling when I was nine and never bothered to remove. The photograph of my mother was propped against the lamp on the nightstand, and the drawing of the white deer lay on the pillow beside me. While the house settled around me, I went through every reason I could think of not to go.

There were plenty of them. I had always been good at making lists, especially when I needed to convince myself that staying exactly where I was counted as a decision.

The letter could easily be some kind of elaborate scam. I had a job, a real one, with a pension plan I had never once looked at. I had Marion, who was fifty-eight, had a bad hip, and became irritated whenever anyone acknowledged it. My car was due for an inspection. I had no idea where Ironmoor was, what it was, or who O. Brannock might be, and sensible women did not climb into strange cars simply because an impossible letter told them to.

I spent nearly an hour trying to find anything useful online.

A search for Ironmoor turned up a private boarding school in Canada, an abandoned mine in Wales, and several fantasy games. None of them used the wolf-and-dragon seal. Oda Brannock produced nothing at all. Council of Iron gave me a heavy-metal band and a company that manufactured garden gates, while Accord of 1702 led to three parliamentary records about shipping and an extremely heated discussion about taxes.

I photographed the seal and ran the image through a reverse search, but there were no matches.

At one point, I even pulled up the police non-emergency number and sat there with my thumb hovering over the call button before closing the screen again. I had no idea what I was supposed to tell them. A letter had arrived with my name on it. An iron seal had somehow reacted to my fingerprint. A black car that Marion claimed had been watching the house for eighteen years was parked legally across the street. None of it sounded like something I could report without hearing how absurd it was as I said it aloud.

At two in the morning, I gave up on sleep and went downstairs for a glass of water. Marion was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, both hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had clearly gone cold a long time ago.

"What happens if I don't go?" I asked.

She didn't ask what I meant. "They'll come anyway."

I stood in the doorway and waited.

"Just not the polite ones," she added. "I'd rather see you walk to that car by yourself than watch someone force you into it."

I pulled out the chair across from her but didn't sit down. "Is it dangerous? Wherever they're taking me?"

Marion was quiet long enough that I knew the answer before she gave it.