Chapter 2

The message on my phone glowed cheerily.

The Rose Moon is tomorrow. Ritual starts at noon. Don't be late!

I reread it, knowing better than to interpret its tone as cheery. Laney was never cheery with me. "Contemptuous," often. "Suspicious," regularly. "Outright hostile," at least once a month. But cheerful? Never.

To be honest, I was more comfortable with contempt than cheer.

Leaning back in my chair, I dropped my phone on the counter beside the microscope. The snow-white cat lounging on the microscope's other side cracked one blue eye open, peered at me, then closed it again. I pinched the bridge of my nose until it hurt, letting the pain clear the fog from my head.

The Rose Moon. No one else considered the pinkish moon of early summer to be bad luck, but it had haunted me my entire life. I'd been born on a Rose Moon, and my mother had even named me after it—Saber Rose—ensuring it would haunt me forever.

A hint of leafy, citrus smoke teased my nose, leaking from my broken memories of a long-ago Rose Moon. I squinted, my eyes losing focus as I chased the dim flashes of a dark alley, cold rain, and a faceless figure in a hooded jacket. As my fractured recollection disintegrated into blank nothingness, a suffocating wave of bitter, raging despair rose in its place, clogging my throat until I could scarcely breathe.

My mind might be incapable of recalling that time of my life, but my heart knew what had broken me.

Most days, I was glad I couldn't remember.

Pushing all thoughts of the past away, I positioned my face in front of the microscope's eyepiece and turned the fine focus knob.

"Saber!"

The door beside me flew open and I almost put the microscope through my eye socket.

"What?" I snarled.

Kaitlynn hung in the doorway, her green scrubs stained with something wet and her mouth slack at my aggressive response.

"Sorry." My voice rose half an octave as I smiled. "You startled me. What's up?"

Blinking, she recovered her wits. "Oh, actually, I'm just—Dr. Lloyd's last appointment peed everywhere and cleanup took forever, and I have a thing planned tonight. I haven't had time to feed the cats, but I don't want to be late, so I was hoping… if possible…?"

She trailed off, waiting for me to volunteer. The white cat beside me stared unblinkingly at her, but she didn't react to the animal in the lab room—nor did she comment on his unearthly eyes, pale blue and crystalline with no visible pupils. She didn't see him at all.

"Sure, I'd be happy to help out!" I replied brightly.

The cat flicked his tail in annoyance.

Beaming, Kaitlynn gushed, "Thanks. I owe you one. Coffee tomorrow?"

"I'm off tomorrow."

"Oh, then for your next shift?"

"Sounds good!"

She bounced out, swinging the door shut, and my smile dropped.

Utterly authentic. A breathtaking performance.

I shot the cat an irritated look before returning to the microscope. I examined the skin scraping under the lens, identifying the cigar-shaped bodies of demodex mites, and made a note on the requisition beside me. I had two more samples to check—a urinalysis and a white blood cell count—but pushed away from the table. I'd feed the animals first, then finish my lab work.

The snow-white feline sprawled on the counter watched me leave with ten times the judgmental disdain of any mortal cat.

Cutting through the large treatment room, I skirted an exam table, the pervasive odor of disinfectant stinging my sinuses. The steady yowling of a homesick cat leaked through the door ahead.

"Kaitlynn, let's go!"

With thudding steps, Kaitlynn flew out from the hall to the staff room and shot past without noticing me. She disappeared behind the drug cabinet that blocked my view of the back exit.

"I'm here," she panted. "Just give me a second to tie my shoes."

Her impatient companion huffed. "Did you feed the cats?"

"No, I asked Saber to do it."

"Saber?" The disgruntled repetition of my name came from a third voice. "Ugh."

"What's ‘ugh'?" Kaitlynn asked.

"Why would you ask her?" Though she'd lowered her voice, I still recognized the high-pitched tones of Nicolette, another vet tech. "Don't you get a weird vibe from her?"

"What do you mean? She's super nice."

"Yeah," the third woman chimed in. "She's really nice! Cut her some slack, Nicolette."

The back door thumped shut. I stood in front of the cat room, my reflection in the door's small window gazing back at me. My straight black hair hung to my elbows, thick bangs cut in a severe line at my eyebrows. A tan warmed my fair skin enough that I didn't look like a corpse, and a faint dusting of freckles covered my nose. My cheekbones stood out sharply, my lips turned down slightly at the corners. Classic resting bitchface.

My blue-gray eyes stared, intense and eerily piercing even to me. A soldier's thousand-yard stare.

I opened the door. Feline chatter erupted at my arrival, and I reviewed the feeding instructions for the first cat, a long-haired Himalayan.

People like it when others do things for them. They don't respect you for it, but they like you, and that was what I needed. I was nice. The nice girl. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'd learned how to be the nice girl while studying to become a vet tech, and I'd perfected it in my four years working at this clinic. The hard lesson that being liked was more important than being honest, genuine, or respected had come much earlier in my life.

Being liked was a survival technique, which was why I would keep doing favors for my coworkers, even when I'd rather tell them to shove it.

I couldn't let anyone realize I wasn't a nice girl at all.

* * *

The evening sun cast beautiful golden light over the narrow road as I drove my pickup truck east out of Coquitlam. I'd left the suburbs behind, and dense, mature trees leaned over the left side of the road, cutting off my view of the sprawling mountain slopes beyond them. On my right, farmland stretched toward the unseen banks of Pitt River.

Quiet tranquility stole over me. The summit to the north was part of a provincial park, and beyond it was the endless expanse of the Coast Mountains. The dense metropolis of Vancouver was less than an hour's drive west, far enough that its hectic bustle didn't disturb my home territory.

The road curved northeast, and as my truck rolled around the bend, a large sign beckoned me:

Hearts Hooves Animal Rescue

I turned left onto the dirt driveway. My truck's tires rumbled over a metal cattle guard, and I accelerated again, zooming past a long, fenced pasture carpeted in grass. A mixture of hoofed animals—horses, ponies, donkeys, goats, sheep, alpacas, and a handful of cows—lifted their heads to watch my vehicle pass, then returned to their lazy grazing.

Ahead, a dense stand of trees concealed the farmstead. As I drove past the screening foliage and through an open gate, a small house appeared on my left. All the farm's buildings— stable, machinery shed, storage, small-animal enclosures, greenhouse, garden, and more—faced the wide gravel yard. A mixed fruit orchard formed neat rows of trees beyond the greenhouse.

Parking in front of the house beside a rusting first-generation Ford Ranger with pale blue paint, I swung my door open and climbed out. As I turned to close the door, the white cat jumped out after me. He gave me an unreadable look with his ethereal blue eyes, then sauntered off with his tail in the air.

I shut the door, my gaze drifting toward the sunlit forests blanketing the mountain north of the farm, but a brusque greeting interrupted my half-formed thought about going for a hike.

"Saber!" Dominique appeared in the large open doorway of the sprawling stable and jogged across the gravel yard toward me. Several inches shorter and much curvier than my five-foot-nine frame, she didn't look like someone who regularly lifted fifty-pound hay bales. Her tightly curled black locks were cut short, and her bold red glasses stood out against her golden umber skin.

"I'm glad you're back," she said, halting beside me. "The two new geldings are worse than we expected. The vet is coming tomorrow, but can you take a look?"

"Of course," I said quickly.

"The big gray is lame," she told me as we strode toward the stable. "He's got the worst case of thrush I've ever seen. The smaller one is moving okay, but he's underweight and he was quidding half his hay. I suspect serious dental problems."

"I won't be much help with that." Hooves, I could do, but not teeth. "Are these Harvey Whitby's horses?"

"Yes," Dominique growled. "He never should've bought horses for his spoiled-ass daughters. Those girls have never mucked a stall in their lives, so of course they wouldn't know or care about how to keep a horse healthy. But that little prick would rather toss the horses in a field and forget about them than let me take them."

Giving up animals—even ones he'd never wanted—to a rescue organization would be tantamount to admitting he made a mistake. And Harvey Whitby didn't make mistakes.

The crunch of our steps changed to the thud of boots on concrete. Hearts Hooves Animal Rescue wasn't a high-end facility by any stretch—most of the buildings had needed a fresh coat of paint for decades—but Dominique had poured everything she had into a complete renovation of the stable eight years ago.

On our left, a row of spacious stalls stretched to the back of the building, each one opening into an outdoor turnout twice as large. On the left, windows lined a huge indoor arena, filling the stable's interior with sunlight.

"At least you were able to get them at the auction," I murmured.

"For twice what I should've paid. The meat buyers drove up the price on me again." She smirked without humor. "I returned the favor."

Ears pricked curiously, the stabled horses stuck their heads through the V-shaped openings in their stall doors to watch us stride past.

I frowned. "You said two horses. Didn't Whitby have three?"

Dominique's shoulders twitched angrily. "I was expecting three at the auction, but the third one wasn't there."

"So Whitby kept it?"

"He must've, but I can't imagine why."

At the far end of the stable, two unfamiliar horses stood in the open-front tack stalls, cross-tied between two posts.

Greta, co-owner of the rescue, glanced over as we joined her. Taller than me, rail-thin, and with a deeply tanned complexion from hours spent in the sun, she was different from Dominique in every way except for her uncompromising dedication to the animals they cared for.

She stood next to a light dappled gray, cooing softly to him as she rubbed his forehead. At over seventeen hands, he was on the large side for leisure riding and had at least a bit of draft horse in him—Percheron, I was guessing, judging by his color, thick build, and sturdy legs. The smaller brown was a quarter horse through and through, his ears rotating nervously as he monitored the unfamiliar surroundings.

I assessed the equines on my approach: stiff postures, bony shoulders, protruding ribs, dull eyes. By the time I stood in front of them, a tight feeling had spread through my chest. Not anxiety, distress, or anger, but something cold and brittle. Something hard and sharp. Something tinged red and pulsing like a living thing inside me.

Sweeping into the tack room, I pulled my farrier kit out from beneath the table and tied the leather apron around my waist, its thick panels covering my legs down to my shins. I wasn't a vet—I was a tech, an animal nurse—and I wasn't a fully-fledged farrier either. I was still an apprentice, but I knew enough to be useful.

I loaded tools into my apron's pocket and grabbed my kit. Treating the horses, nursing them back to health, and finding them loving new homes would comfort Dominique and Greta. But that wasn't enough for me.

Neglect. Abuse. Callous mistreatment. Harvey Whitby didn't care about the suffering he'd caused. No one would punish him. No one would disburse consequences commensurate for his crimes against innocent animals.

The red-hazed shards in my chest ground against my lungs as I set my kit down and approached the big gray with gentle hands and soft murmurs.

No one except me.