Prologue
Eighteen Years Ago
Gretchen Rose Miller came from a long line of shifters. Mostly, the people in her family turned into lynxes. There were a few bobcats on her dad’s side, and her great-great-grandmother on her mom’s side had been a falcon shifter. But mostly, it was lynxes all the way down. Her mom, her dad, her two sisters, and her brother: they all turned into long-eared, long-legged spotted cats with imperious stares.
Gretchen didn’t. Gretchen was human.
There was no genetic test for shifter parents to give their children. If your parents were shifters, you were a shifter: that was how it worked. If one of your parents was a shifter and the other one was human, you were still probably a shifter.
No one had ever heard of a case where two shifter parents produced a fully human child.
Not until Gretchen, anyway.
For the first few years of her life, her parents had just expected that she would turn into a lynx kitten at some point.
Then the whispers had started:
She’s just a late bloomer.
I think my second cousin was six or seven when he first shifted. I’ll ask around.
She’s healthy! There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be able to do it. The doctor said there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her.
Now, she was twelve years old, and they all knew the truth. There was nothing wrong with her—except she was different.
She was average instead of extraordinary.
She wasn’t super-strong. She didn’t have an inner animal, a manifestation of her subconscious that would keep her company inside her own head and keep her in touch with her instincts. She would never look at someone and instantly know that he was her mate, destined to click with her perfectly on every level. There was magic—or at least something like magic—out there in the world, out there in the rest of her house, even, and she couldn’t touch it. She couldn’t use it.
She was just plain, ordinary Gretchen. The fluke. The dud. The mistake.
And while she knew her family loved her, they had a million little ways of driving that fact home.
“Don’t roughhouse with Gretchen! She’s not as strong as you are.”
“Remember to look after your sister. She doesn’t have your instincts.”
“Gretchen, I just don’t know if that’s safe for you.”
Well, Gretchen had a plan to deal with all of that.