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1
THE NIGHT HARROWfound me, I was digging up a fox’s bones. The ground was hardened with an early frost, and I had to throw all my weight into each hacking strike with the shovel. I should have waited until it thawed, but the bones were ready and we wouldn’t be staying here long. I’d seen the way the neighbors were starting to look at me, and I’d seen the balance in our bank account. Both suggested it was time to move on.
I tossed aside the last shovelful of earth and knelt, brushing aside the rest of the dirt before peeling back the blue tarp. Beneath, the bones shone pale in the darkness, flesh and fur rotted away.
I’d found the fox on the side of the road months ago, mangled and twisted. Now I cradled the skull in my hands and looked into the empty eye sockets. A few stray bits of dirt clung to it, but the bacteria and beetles and worms had taken care of the rest.
I didn’t know what I would use it for yet—what it would want to be and how I would craft that out of wire and river stones and scraps of cloth. Something so beautiful deserved to be transformed, not thrown out like waste. I trailed a finger along the center of the skull, then turned it over in my hands, checking for damage.
I froze. On the roof of the mouth, a spiral wound sharply inward, bisected by a single straight line.
My heart thumped. A thousand times I’d woken with a scream in my throat and that spiral blazing like an afterimage in my mind as I thrashed free of a dream.Thedream.
Harrow.
My hand shook. It shouldn’t be here. My dreams were just that—figments of my sleeping mind, the echoes of a childhood I didn’t remember. I rubbed my thumb across the spiral, hoping it was a trick of the light or some smudge of dirt, but it was etched deep in the bone.
The weight of a hand settled onto my shoulder. I didn’t move. Couldn’t. My limbs were pinned in place, my jaw welded shut. I tasted damp earth.
“Harrow waits,” a hoarse male voice croaked by my ear as my fear juddered through me.
Wake up, I thought.You’re dreaming. Wake up. Just wake up.
“Beware the spiral. Find its center. Harrow—”
“Helen!” My stepfather, Simon, burst from the back door and charged toward me across the yard. “Are you okay?”
I lurched forward as whatever force had been holding me released its grip. I spun around. There was nothing there. No man, no reaching hand—nothing except the fox skull in my hands, still bearing that impossible spiral of carved bone.
“Helen?” Simon repeated.
Had I screamed? I must have called for help. “I thought I heard... I...” I gulped, stopped myself. “I’m fine.”
I’d learned a long time ago not to tell Mom and Simon aboutthe things I saw or heard or dreamed. It only worried them, and there was nothing they could do.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked, forcing my words around my calcified dread. If Simon had come running, why hadn’t she?
“In the living room. She got a phone call,” he said.
A feeling of deep wrongness swept through me. I hurried toward the back door, then straight through the kitchen, following the quiet murmur of my mother’s voice. Mom sat curled against the corner of our rust-colored easy chair in the living room.
“Yeah. No, of course,” she was saying. She had her thumbnail between her teeth, not quite biting it. “I have to go. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“Who was that?” I asked.
“That was your uncle Caleb,” she said. She tapped her nail against her teeth. “He finally did it. Dad finally found a way to get me back to Harrow.”
“What did he do?” Simon asked, stepping into the room behind me.
I knew the answer before she spoke.
“He died.”
—
The house was officially named Harrowstone Hall, but I didn’t think I’d ever heard my mother call it that. It was always Harrow, a name that encompassed the house and the grounds and the family and everything else bound up with that place.
We’d left when I was seven years old. My mother never gave me a straight answer about why. Sometimes I thought even shedidn’t know. All she could tell me was that we had to. It wasn’t safe.
