She could hear them—howling, growling. Had they finished off Vigo? Or had they grown tired of his old body, and were they now lusting after hers? He’d bought her time, but it was all for nothing. Tears stung her eyes as she pushed herself faster.

Your bones will lie bare under the sky, banished from the sacred crypts.

She could never outrun them. Nobody could. At seventeen, she would be far from the youngest to fall under the hounds’ vicious teeth; you only had to see the chewed-up remains at the foot of the city walls to know that. But there was a chance—just a chance. She had to try.

Your soul will never join the Ancestors, will never feast on the glories of ages past, will never guide the fates.

Lena found herself down in the lowest tier of the city. The fog was thicker here. She stumbled to a halt, suddenly unable to breathe, a crushing pain in her side. Pulling up the neck of her habit to cover her mouth and nose, she felt tears welling behind the glass of her shield-eyes.

You will be dead, in this world and the next.

A howl broke the gloom, then a chorus of howls, swiftly followed by frenzied barking; the hounds were gaining. No time to cry. She turned and ran, harder than ever, hobnailed boots clacking against the pavement.

Soon the city walls loomed above, and a small bone crunched under her foot. She felt sick, but pressed on around the curve of the wall, desperately scanning the base where the dark stone met the bone-littered ground. The gates had been locked for two years, bolted with broad beams of oak, ivy grown over the rusted locks—but nearby … Vigo had told her…

Lena scanned the rotted undergrowth for the outline of the old rosebush—and found it, her heart no more than a hollow, fluttering thing in the back of her throat. She could so easily have missed it altogether, a tangle of bare thorns almost lost among the skeletal remains of its neighbors. Parting the branches with her thick leather gloves, she spotted a slight dip in the earth. So small.

I used it as a child, he’d said, in the few moments they’d had together before the hounds. I would slip out into the forest to play when I was supposed to be at my lessons. It was before my … deformity.

She’d shaken her head wordlessly, clutching at his old arthritic hands, the hands that had first picked her up from the steps down to the cryptling cellars when she was a baby, wailing into the dawn. She’d been crying again then.

Lena, I cannot run. But you might just be fast and small enough to escape.

It was her only chance.