Chapter 1 The Girl in the Shadows

Elara Moonstone, an orphan raised in a cruel family, learned early how to disappear. How can she get quiet when everyone is being cruel to her?

She feels safer in the shadows, behind lockers, crowds, and silence.

In a town that looked at her as peculiar, she carried invisibility as a second skin.

She had no history of how she got there, no childhood pictures, no tearful relatives to claim her when she was left on the doorstep of the Harrow family when she was six with nothing but a little pendant and a name.

And Harrows, they were cruel.

Their Morrow Street house felt cold even when the furnace burned. Mr. Harrow spent his nights working and his days drinking. Mrs. Harrow smoked on the living room sofa, watched soap operas all day long, and feigned Elara's existence if it wasn't to clean something. Three years older than Elara, their son Garrett used her as a rumor he'd treat with scorn whenever he wasn't taunting her bizarre dreams and mumbling "freak" in the high school corridors.

But Elara no longer wept.

She traversed the world silently, hidden behind a veil of numbness. She obtained good grades, but not the type that garnered applause. She read books, but not the type exchanged in class. She drew items, ancient trees, howling wolves with piercing eyes, moons that fractured like glass, without knowing the reason they resided in her mind.

Until the day she turned eighteen.

It started with a dream.

She stood barefoot in a field of black flowers, the sky a velvet curtain of stars. A wolf with silver eyes approached her, silent and reverent. Behind it, a figure cloaked in shadow watched, unmoving. The wolf bowed. The figure vanished. When she looked down, the flowers had turned to ash.

She woke breathless. And then she screamed.

Because glowing on her shoulder, just below the collarbone, was a mark she had never seen before, circular, etched in what looked like light itself. The shape of a crescent moon with a slash through it.

Panic gripped her chest.

She scrubbed at it. Nothing. She tried to cover it. It bled through the fabric like a hidden truth finally revealed.

"Elara!" Mrs. Harrow's voice banged at the door. "What are you doing in there?"

"Nothing," she lied, throwing on a hoodie and hiding the mark as best she could.

The school that day was a blur. Her skin itched beneath her hoodie, the mark pulsing like a second heartbeat. People stared more than usual. Garrett laughed louder. But something was different. She could feel it.

Like her senses had sharpened overnight.

She could smell emotions, anxiety, desire and fear. Hear heartbeats in the silence. And worst of all, she could feel something watching her. Not from school. Not from town. From something older. Something hungry.

After her last class, she bolted, the need to get home replaced by the instinct to hide.

But she could not hide.

She rushed towards the forest to take a deep breath, to think about what was going on!

But she didn't know, as the moment Elara took a step in the forest, to sort things out, a sudden figure with shiny eyes, a fearsome personality, suddenly appeared, like he wanted to kill her. Elara screamed and started running deep into the forest.