Jamie tutted, the flames in his eyes turning to embers as he watched the cat wriggle about in Percy’s arms, who had a world-weary look at having to babysit the little monster. ‘This damn cat.’

‘Give me a second,’ Jamie signed through the window, giving Vampy a sharp look. The cat sank like a lump of putty, his large head receding into his neck until he was more slug than cat. ‘Sorry, Lottie.’

The moment Jamie was outside, Lottie packed up her books and headed to her dorm.

Ellie had left the balcony door ajar when she’d gone to fencing practice, making the room cold and causing goosebumps to come to life on Lottie’s arms when she entered. Placing Liliana’s diary back on her bedside table, Lottie leaned down, ignoring the way the floorboards groaned in protest when she shoved the rest of the books under her bed before turning to her bedside drawer.

Nestled inconspicuously inside the antique nightstand was Lottie’s sketchbook. It looked quite ordinary, a plain, if slightly beaten-up, purple moleskin, but when she pulled it open the pages were filled with her private thoughts and sketches. Ink and watercolour brought to life everyone, and everything that resided in her mind. Ellie, Jamie and all her friends flickered past her fingertips as she flipped through, mixed up in the slideshow with the more monstrous faces of Ingrid, Haru and Claude. And right at the centre, held in the creases of her sketchbook, were the letters and clues Claude had sent her.

Moving on autopilot, she plucked out the puzzle pieces, laying them on the bed until she found the photo of Hirana, and with shaky hands she wrote down her new information in pencil on an empty page. But writing Hirana’s name still didn’t help Lottie to make any sense of the clues, and so she did the only thing she could think of: she drew what she was feeling.

The graphite pencil became an extension of her thoughts, and slowly the pages began to fill with likenesses of Jamie and Ellie. Ellie she drew as a wolf, snarling teeth, biting and snapping in fear. Jamie she drew above his mother’s name, in flames, trying to capture the burning in his eyes, with thick stag antlers protruding from his skull. These doodles looked more demonic than human, ferociously at odds with the regal and princely ways she usually drew them.

It wasn’t until her left hand brushed one of Claude’s letters that she was pulled out of her trance, the rustling of the paper underneath her skin like a menacing whisper in her ear.

Right there, at the bottom of this letter, were words she’d shoved into a locked box in her head, and now they glared back. She uttered them in horrified rapture. ‘Wolves are hunters too.’

It ignited inside her like a bomb, with no way of stopping it from going off.