Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven #1) by J.R. Ward

Darkness abounded, dense and fraught with shadow. O’erwhelming the land as it claimed the souls of the unjust. The earth a vast grave o’er which the dead roamed, searching, searching for all that they had lost …



AS NIGHT FELL in Walters, Lydia was sitting at her kitchen table with a mug of Campbell’s tomato soup between her palms, the old poem rattling through her head in her grandfather’s voice, in her grandfather’s language. The fragments were all that remained in her memory of the full piece, as if the words were fabric that had disintegrated with age.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it …”

As she spoke out loud, she took another sip from the lip of the mug. She tasted nothing, couldn’t have said whether it was hot enough, didn’t know if she had made it with water or milk.

Lies were a sickness, her grandfather had always said. And too many of them could be terminal.

The weight on her chest sure as hell felt like a disease.

Glancing to the window beside the little table, everything outside was dark—and not dark in the way things had been in Boston. Not city-dark. Walters was country-dark, like where she had grown up outside of Seattle, no ambient anything throwing off a glow, no soft, urban-diffused illumination to reassure a person who was jumpy and unhappy that all was not lost. All was not a void that you could fall into.

Especially if you were a sinner. Or if you lied.

“Forgive me, Grandfather,” she whispered.

She put the mug down, finding the normally comforting smell revolting. And as she glanced at the level to see how much she’d actually taken in, the sight of the heavy, viscous red soup was worse.

It reminded her of blood.

Bolting up, she took her sad-sack dinner to the sink and looked away as she rinsed out the mug.

The kitchen had been renovated last in the late eighties, the cabinets a Home Improvement-era mauve, the linoleum floor a pink and blue color scheme that matched. The appliances were black and coordinated with nothing. The sink was stainless steel and matte from use and cleaning.

But none of that was what she dwelled on, and not because she’d gotten used to the Candy-style decor: There was a window over the sink. Another by the table. A third in the door that opened to the detached garage and the backyard.

Her hands shook as she rushed around and pulled the flimsy curtains shut. Then she hustled out of the kitchen, and zeroed in on the stout front door and its dead bolt. As she turned the brass grip and pulled, the catch of the lock in its sturdy metal cage made a clapping sound.

Putting her other hand on top of the first, she bent her knees and leaned all of her weight back. Then she pulled again.

“It’s locked.”

Even as she told herself the obvious, she didn’t believe it. And as she straightened, she wanted to test things again and again, like she could maybe make it all stronger by the repeated challenges.

Spinning around, she fell back against the wood panels and hugged herself.

The house was so small that aside from the kitchen and the parlor she’d just raced through, there was only one other room on the first floor: A study with a desk, a random bean bag chair, and a side table that she’d put her wireless printer on. Given that the home office was on the far side of the stairs, there was absolutely no light carried in from the kitchen.

Stepping over its threshold, she approached the window that faced the backyard with her heart in her throat and her body on a live wire.

Flattening her back against the wall, she took a couple of breaths. Then peered around to look through the wavy antique panes. Like she was taking cover from a shoot-out.

She expected a face to be there, a stranger with evil eyes in a black uniform, returned to do what he’d failed to accomplish in the trees.

Nothing. And as she continued to look out across the scraggly yard, reality seemed to shift on her, the past moving forward and overtaking the present. She had always felt like such a fraud among others, and maybe that was why the lies had been so easy to construct and say out loud to Eastwind. But that didn’t mean any part of it sat well with her.

Disturbed, she was back in the kitchen before she knew it, before she was aware of choosing to move or picking a place to go.

At the back door, she watched from a distance as her hand reached out for the shiny brass knob. Like the one on the front door, the thing was original to the house, old and tarnished except for where palms buffed and polished it through use.

Her intention was to test the dead bolt, just like she had the one in front. And then retest how sturdy it was when her brain refused to accept what her eyes were seeing.

Instead, her right hand went to the bolt and released the mechanism. Then her left turned the knob and opened the door.

Stepping out onto the back stoop, she breathed deep and smelled the remnants of the rain that had fallen all afternoon long. The scent of earth and growing things, of wet cedar shingles and puddles on the driveway’s pavement, was yet another announcement of spring’s arrival. But the temperature was still cold.

Or maybe that was her insides. She felt frozen under her skin.

Across the yard, just into the tree line, the tent Daniel had set up was nearly impossible to see: If she hadn’t been looking for it, even her keen eyesight wouldn’t have noticed the ever so subtle thickening in the shadows’ density.

There was no light to give Daniel’s presence away. No fire, either.