Jonas kicked his horse into motion, and she grabbed his coat and held on. He didn’t look back once as they rode away from the cabin, away from everything Cassidy had ever known. She twisted her neck and shoulders to look as long as she could, as if there were someone still in the cabin who could say good-bye. Then they rounded a curve and passed behind a stand of pines, and the cabin was gone.
The ground was a long way away. If she jumped off, she wouldn’t have her books and food. She couldn’t leave the books, not even to find Isabelle.
She was too small, now, to do what Mother wanted. But the time would come when she was big enough, and strong enough, to go to San Francisco. Then Isabelle would take her to England, and she would be with family again. Family who could love and want her and teach her how to be loup-garou. No matter what happened in New Mexico with Uncle Jonas, she would never lose that dream.
I promise. Mother, she prayed silently. I’ll never forget.
One
London, England, 1875
Cassidy opened her eyes to unfamiliar darkness and held very still, listening for sounds of lapping water and the rumble of the steamer.
But the smells were not of brine and sea air, and the noise was nothing so peaceful as the sea. She lay very still and retraced in her mind the long road that had brought her here, to the hotel in Victoria Station and the heavy stench of a London night.
It had all been like a dream from the moment she’d left the ranch where she’d spent the last fifteen years of her life—left behind a place that had never been home and people who were glad to see her go. Her father’s kin, who could never understand or accept her, because within her ran Edith Holt’s wild blood.
The blood of those she’d come so far to find.
She thought back to the long trek westward from New Mexico Territory to California, rationing out what little money she’d scrimped and saved for herself over the years.
She had been immersed in a flood of alien sensations from the moment she boarded the crowded coach in Las Cruces. Her narrow experience of the world—a world of sagebrush and creosote and mesquite, desert heat and cattle and adobe—had been forever changed by the time she reached the train in Colorado. Not even her carefully preserved books of poetry and tales of romantic adventure could prepare her for what she found in the bustling railroad towns, nor could she imagine anything else so vast and daunting.
Until she reached San Francisco, and searched out the address she had memorized so long ago. Only instinct and stubborn determination had led her through the maze of streets and buildings to find the one person in all the world who could help her.
Isabelle Smith, her mother’s friend, who had made the rest of this journey possible. And now they were both in London—a place bigger than San Francisco, bigger even than New York, which Isabelle had said was America’s greatest city. Immense, seething, impossible to escape even in sleep.
Cassidy sat up and looked at the dim square of the window. It must be near midnight, and yet the constant din and clamor from the streets below had hardly lessened; If she went to the window, she’d see the carriages rattling up and down the cobbled street, on their way to and from places with names like Belgravia and Mayfair.
It was “the Season,” Isabelle had explained, a time of parties and constant activity in this fashionable part of London. The people in the neighborhood were wealthy or titled or important in some way. It was the sort of place where the earl of Greyburn might live.
The earl. A lord, like knights in the old stories—a kind of man unlike any Cassidy had met in all her life. He would be powerful, and noble, and far too grand for the likes of Cassidy Holt.
But he was a Forster. He was on the list Cassidy had memorized when she was seven years old. He was family.