PROLOGUE
Nameless
Once, there was a young witch who lived with her mother on the prairie. For a while, she was just like other witches. She did her lessons and her chores, and she never, ever used her magic in public.
Then one day, she changed.
An extraordinary spell filled her with more magic than she had ever touched. She became more powerful than any other witch on the continent, more powerful than her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother combined, and for a while it was like living in a dream.
Magic sang to her. She could hear it in her mother and in all the witches of her coven. They each had their own tune, and when they came together, the song they created was so unbearably beautiful that the girl would burst into tears, unable to explain that she wasn’t sad but something else. Something beyond telling.
Her mother didn’t understand.
“You hear us?” she’d asked, with a frown of concentration. She had frowned more and more often since the extraordinary spell had altered the girl, so the girl was very careful with her questions.
“I hear all magic,” she’d explained. She heard other things, too, but she didn’t want to make her mother frown any harder. “Does that mean you don’t?”
“We don’t,” the girl’s mother said, drawing a clear line between her daughter and other witches. Then she added, “You’ll have to get used to it. And until you do, you must be careful. You can’t go around sobbing or giggling at nothing, or folk will get the wrong idea about you.”
“You mean that I’m a witch?” the girl asked.
Her mother pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Worse,” she said.
That hadn’t made any sense to the girl. Being discovered as a witch was absolutely the most terrible thing that could happen to a person.
If her mother said there was something worse, the girl wanted to know what it was, but before she could ask, her mother thrust the cast-iron skillet into her hands and told her to prep the cornbread for dinner. The conversation was over.
The young witch had done her best. She practiced tuning out the melodic strains of other witches. She learnedto identify the urgent songs of items that had been imbued with magic—they sounded like droning cicadas in the summertime, right up until the moment they burned out and went quiet again, leaving only crusty exoskeletons behind. She found that even people and things that weren’t magical had their own resonance. The world was full of songs.
And they all rang through her.
Until the day she found a song that didn’t.
She was waiting while her mother conducted business at the bank when she heard it: a song like two blades of grass whispering past one another, like the strike of flint against flint, the quiet hiss of a spark flashing to life.
It did not sound like witches. Witches sounded like rainstorms, with voices that sighed just as often as they crackled with laughter or thundered with conviction. Witch songs made her want to cry from the beauty of them.
This song made her want something else.
Power, sang a voice in her mind. She wasn’t bothered by the voices, because they had come with the extraordinary spell that gave her all the songs. But she didn’t always understand them. There were seven distinct voices, and she had a sense that some were older than others.
“What kind of power?” she asked, softly lest anyone think she was talking to herself, which she was.
Bone power, the same voice answered.
Intrigued, the witch followed the unusual whispering song toward the park, where she found a boy, not much older than she was. He had frosty-pale skin and dark brown hair, with eyes that reminded her of spring moss.
“What are you?” she’d asked, walking right up to him.
He’d stumbled back, with a disbelieving laugh. “That’s a strange sort of question to ask.”
“Not for you it isn’t,” the witch insisted.
The boy regarded her with an amused smile. “And why is that?”
“Because”—she lowered her voice and leaned closer—“you’re something more than human.”
“How did you—” The boy stopped himself from saying something he shouldn’t. But he’d already given himself away, and they both knew it.
It was the witch’s turn to smile. “I can hear it,” she confessed. “I just don’t know what it means. What you are.”
Moon friends, whispered a second voice. This one was older than the first, perhaps the oldest of the voices, and she rarely made much sense.
“I’m—I’m a—” The boy stared at her, wide-eyed, curiosity and fear at war in his expression. He so clearly wanted to tell her.
But he didn’t have to.
Wolf, whispered one of the seven.
At the word, the girl felt an unfamiliar hunger rip through her chest. She wanted to know everything there was to know about this wolf and his magic.
“Jack?” a woman’s voice called from behind. He startled and whipped his head toward the sound.
The witch’s head was suddenly a rage of noise. Sevenvoices repeated the name over and over in her mind, laughing and crying and shrieking, Jack! Jack! Jack!
“Jack,” the witch whispered, and when she said his name, she felt a tendril of magic snap into place between them. But it was more than a tendril. It was a bind. And that gave her control.
Jack turned back toward the young witch, a question in his eyes. He’d felt it, too.
For a second, they stood there. A witch and a wolf bound together by the thinnest slip of magic. But it wasn’t enough.
“Jack is one of your names,” she said. “Give me your others.”
The boy struggled against the immediate compulsion to speak, but it was no use. He was too young, and the witch was too strong. “J-J-John Cecil Callahan,” he gasped.
The witch felt her power fall over him completely, felt the part of him that struggled against it. A butterfly in a net. A fish on a hook. A wolf in a trap. She could name him and, therefore, she could control him.
“Tell me what you are, Jack,” the witch said.
Power, murmured the voices. Good power.
The boy’s eyes tightened and his voice was nearly a growl when he answered, “Werewolf.”
“Jack!” the woman called again, only this time, her voice was farther away. She would not be near enough to help him.
“I have to go,” he said, taking a few steps. “That’s my mother.”
“Jack,” the witch sang. “Stop right there.”
The boy stopped.
“John Callahan,” his mother shouted, “if you don’t answer me right now!”
The boy turned pleading eyes on the young witch. He wanted to answer his mother, but some part of him already knew that the witch wouldn’t allow it.
“Your will belongs to me,” she whispered.
“But why?” he asked.
“Because that is the way it’s supposed to be,” she explained. “That is my purpose.”
The boy swallowed hard and asked, “Who are you?”
The witch smiled and said, “I am nameless, but now that I have your names, you will do whatever I say.”
Copyright © 2023 by Natalie C. Parker. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
