The Wolf in His Eyes

After her father chooses his new wife over her, and her boyfriend of two years cheats on her with her best friend, seventeen-year-old Jessica Turner stops believing in love and moves across the country to her mother Angela's mansion in Hartwell, a huge house on the edge of a forest nobody hunts in, where fog coils between the trunks even on clear nights. Jessie has one plan: keep her head down, hold on to her dream of owning a bakery someday, and never trust anyone again.

The town has other ideas. Her right shoulder has ached for a week, and it sings the day a boy named Damon Cole knocks her to the floor of her new school for no reason she can see, except that for one suspended second, behind his furious blue eyes, she sees a huge gray wolf staring back at her, watching her like it has finally found the thing it has been searching for all its life. Then Damon runs faster than any human should, warns her away from the north trails, and fields guards who are spectacularly bad at being subtle. A black wolf takes up post on her lawn, sits down like a dog told to stay, and bows to her.

The strangeness only grows. Jessie outruns her whole gym class on a zero-training mile, growls at a bully with a voice that is not entirely hers, and at night a howl rises out of the valley, a howl her heart answers by slowing, opening, feeling homesick. Then she overhears her mother on a midnight phone call, calling someone Alpha and speaking the name of an aunt Jessie has never heard of: Lily, who died at seventeen on the north ridge twenty years ago. Because the women of the old line turn at seventeen, on a moon near their birthday, and Jessie's moon is five days out.

What her mother buried, the forest kept. Her grandfather Elias was Alpha of the Blackpine Pack, and his letter has waited in a trunk, addressed to a granddaughter he would meet by moonlight. The truth comes with teeth. A rogue named Graves, the wolf who killed Lily, crosses back over the line the very week Jessie's own wolf wakes on her lawn, in front of a pack that has waited twenty years for the old line to stand again. And standing in that circle beside her is Damon, ordered all autumn to stay away from her and breaking the rule in inches, because the moon has named her his mate, and the claim is hers to accept, refuse, or make him wait for.

Every answer opens an older question: an exile who has guarded the valley in secret for twenty years, a grandmother who taught her daughter to dam rivers, a debt carried north and paid in full, and a bakery with a blue door that is starting to look like hers. The pack elders warn that a hard winter tests a young line. Jessie is about to find out what the valley expects from the girl it chose, because the moon does not make mistakes. It was never wrong. It was only waiting for her.