Cover

Also by Kalyn Josephson

The Storm Crow

The Crow Rider

Dedication

To my sister, Adriane, who taught me to value my heart

Chapter 1: Anna

Everything looks different in the dark.

By day, Ravenfall’s ballroom is all sparkling stained glass and high, arching ceilings—the perfect place to sit and sketch for hours. By night, my family’s inn becomes a minefield of laughing guests, friendly locals, and what I’m pretty sure is at least one werewolf over by the fruit punch, judging by the bite-sized pieces of raw steak he’s digging into.

The crowd would be fine, if it didn’t make not touching people impossible. Before I turned thirteen and got my psychometry powers—a fancy way of saying Congrats! You get visions of death now—I’d have been weaving through the crowd, chasing down our cat Max before he could prank a guest.

Now I’m hiding in a plant.

You’d think no one would wander over to a dark corner overhung with singing ivy—currently rustling out a tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and trying to wrap its crimson vines around my ankle—yet I’ve had to dodge a wayward guest three times already.

Granted, Ravenfall’s ballroom is full to bursting. It’s mid-October and the countdown to Samhain and my family’s biggest party of the year is well under way, even if half the people here don’t even know that Samhain is the Celtic origins of Halloween, or that it’s pronounced Sa-Win.

But in the town of Wick, Oregon, where magic is never far from your fingertips, Halloween is the biggest holiday of the year, and Ravenfall is the place to be. Our Samhain party at the end of October is the only time the house lets down its magical wards, letting in everyone from the local witches and mazzikim to the selkies that live in Hollowthorn Woods. Under glamour, of course. We like to give the out-of-towners something to talk about, not run screaming from.

The house went all out in celebration, decorating the two-story room’s white stone ceiling with a swirling galaxy of pastel pink and blue and yellow. Glittering mist gathers in the corners and spirals down in ribbons.

When the ivy starts playing with my hair (a curly hair “no freaking way”), I escape along the wall behind the buffet, where the house is trying to foist a slice of pumpkin cake with tiny orange icing stars on a baffled guest. I wonder how long he’ll spend looking for strings that aren’t there. The local magical folk know not to bother—the house can control the inanimate objects inside it, so long as it’s touched them before.