The voice came at midnight.
Arvella was sitting cross-legged on her bed, the journal open in her lap, reading her mother's words for the fourth time. The moonlight through her window was unusually bright — not the diffuse glow of an ordinary night, but a focused, deliberate beam that fell across the bed like a spotlight, as if the moon itself were leaning down to read over her shoulder.
She was turning a page when she heard it.
Not through her ears. Deeper than that. Inside her, in the hollow place below her ribs where she had spent eighteen years waiting for a wolf that never came, a voice spoke — and it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.
Hello, Arvella.
She froze. The journal slipped from her fingers. Her hands went to her chest, pressing flat against her sternum, as i
