The town of Raven's Peak, Washington, existed in a perpetual state of half-light. I'd noticed it immediately when my battered Chevrolet rolled through the town limits two hours ago—the way the ever-present clouds diffused the afternoon sun into a soft, silver glow that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was like living inside a pearl, or perhaps inside someone's melancholy memory of a town.
My mother thought she was doing me a favor, sending me here.
"It's quieter, Ellie," she'd said, her hands trembling slightly as she'd helped me pack, the same way they'd trembled for as long as I could remember. "Less temptation. Less... everything."
What she meant was less of me. Less of the daughter who'd proven, time and again, that she couldn't exist in the normal world without leaving chaos in her wake. Less of the girl who'd burned through three schools in two years, who'd accumulated a file thick enough to require its own filing cabinet at the juvenile assessment center, who'd somehow always been standing in the wreckage when things fell apart—not because she'd caused it, but because she'd been too slow, too weak, too something to stop it.
The last time—the incident that had finally broken my mother's determined optimism—I'd been found standing over three unconscious boys in a parking lot behind a convenience store. They'd been bigger than me, older, the kind of boys who thought a girl walking alone at night was an invitation. I still didn't remember exactly what had happened. There was just the fear, the anger, and then... nothing. A gap in my memory like a missing tooth. When I'd come back to myself, they were on the ground, and my knuckles were bleeding, and the police officer who'd cuffed me had looked at me like I was something that needed to be caged.
The charges hadn't stuck. Self-defense, they'd ruled, looking at the security footage that showed the boys surrounding me, advancing on me. But the questions had stuck. How had a hundred-and-twenty-pound girl done that kind of damage? Why couldn't she remember? What was wrong with her?
I'd learned, over the years, not to ask that last question. There was no answer that made sense.
So here I was. Raven's Peak, population 3,842 according to the faded sign at the town limits. A place so small that "less everything" wasn't just a hope—it was a geographical reality. My new home loomed ahead on my left: a two-story Victorian house that had seen better decades, with peeling white paint and a wraparound porch that sagged slightly in the middle, like an old horse too tired to hold itself up anymore. This was my aunt's house—my mother's younger sister, a woman I'd met exactly three times in my seventeen years.
Aunt Cora stood on the porch as I killed the engine, her arms crossed over her chest, her expression unreadable. She was thinner than my mother, harder-looking, with the kind of face that seemed carved from the local granite rather than built from flesh and bone. Her hair, the same dark brown as mine, was pulled back in a severe bun that pulled the skin taut around her eyes.
"You're late," she said, by way of greeting.
"Traffic in Portland." I grabbed my duffel bag from the passenger seat and climbed out, the damp air hitting me like a wet blanket. "Also, I stopped for coffee. Also, I don't actually owe you an explanation."
Aunt Cora's eyes narrowed slightly, but something that might have been approval flickered in their depths. "At least you're not a liar. Your mother said you had spine. We'll see if it does you any good here." She turned and walked into the house, leaving the door open behind her. "Bring your things. School's tomorrow, and you'll need to be registered by seven-thirty."
I followed her inside, dragging my bag through the door and into a front hall that smelled like lemon polish and wood smoke. The house was larger than it looked from outside, with high ceilings and dark wood paneling and furniture that looked like it had been purchased when Eisenhower was in office. A staircase curved up to the second floor, its banister gleaming with the patina of a hundred years of hands sliding up and down it.
"Your room is at the top of the stairs, first door on the right." Aunt Cora had already disappeared into what I assumed was the kitchen; I could hear the clink of cups and the rush of water from a faucet. "Dinner's at six. I don't wait, and I don't reheat."
I hauled my bag up the stairs, the wood creaking under my feet in a way that suggested I was the first person to use them in hours, maybe days. The hallway at the top was narrow and lined with faded wallpaper depicting scenes from some story I didn't recognize—knights and forests and women in flowing dresses, all rendered in muddy greens and browns.
My room was small but clean, with a single bed pushed against one wall, a dresser with a oval mirror, and a window that looked out over the front yard and the street beyond. I dropped my bag on the bed and walked to the window, pressing my forehead against the cold glass.
The street was quiet. Of course it was quiet—it was a Tuesday afternoon in a town of thirty-eight hundred people. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. A child's bicycle lay abandoned on a lawn across the street. Normal. Safe. Boring.
I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt like I was suffocating.
Dinner was a silent affair. Aunt Cora made pot roast with vegetables, and we ate at a massive oak table that could have seated twelve, sitting across from each other like two gunslingers waiting for the other to draw. She asked a few questions—how was the drive, did I need anything for school, was I planning to cause trouble—and I gave one-word answers that gradually expanded to two words, then three, as the silence became too heavy to bear.
"I'm not planning to cause trouble," I said finally, pushing a potato around my plate. "I just... it finds me sometimes."
Aunt Cora's knife paused over her meat. "Trouble doesn't find anyone. It's made. By choices. By reactions. By not thinking before you act." She resumed cutting, her movements precise and economical. "Your mother told me about the boys. About what you did."
My stomach clenched. "I didn't do anything. I mean, I don't remember—"
"I know." She looked up, and for the first time, I saw something other than hardness in her face. Something almost like... recognition. "That's what concerns me. Not what you did. What you don't remember."
The conversation ended there. She cleared the plates, and I went to my room, and I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the wind rustle the bare branches of the trees outside, wondering what the hell I was doing here.
Raven's Peak High School was a squat, one-story building that looked like it had been designed by someone who'd never actually been to high school. It was all long corridors and fluorescent lighting and the faint smell of floor wax and adolescence. Aunt Cora dropped me off at seven-fifteen with a curt nod and a reminder to "stay out of trouble," which felt about as useful as telling the rain to stay dry.
The front office was a flurry of activity when I walked in. A secretary with permed hair and reading glasses on a chain around her neck looked me up and down with the practiced assessment of someone who'd been processing new students for thirty years.
"Eleanor Vance?" She didn't wait for confirmation. "I'm Mrs. Patterson. You're late. Not terribly late, but late enough. Here's your schedule, here's a map, here's your locker combination. Mr. Hartley will walk you to first period." She gestured to a student aide who was lurking by the copy machine, a gangly boy with acne and an eager smile. "Try to keep up."
Mr. Hartley—his first name was David, he informed me as we walked—was the kind of person who filled silence the way water fills a glass, because the alternative was having to actually sit with his own thoughts. He talked about the school, the teachers, the sports teams, the weather, the lunch options, and the town's annual Founder's Day celebration all in the space of the three minutes it took to reach my first class.
"—and so anyway, if you need anything, just ask. Everyone's pretty friendly here. Well, mostly friendly. There are some kids who are—you know—clique-y. But that's every school, right?" He laughed nervously. "Anyway, here's Mr. Alderman's room. English. He's okay. Kind of boring, but he doesn't give a lot of homework."
I thanked him and slipped into the classroom just as the bell rang. Twenty-eight faces turned to look at me—the universal assessment of the new girl, the outsider, the unknown quantity. I'd been through this enough times to know the drill. Keep your head down. Don't make eye contact. Find a seat in the back and disappear into the wallpaper.
Mr. Alderman, a balding man with glasses and a tweed jacket that looked like it had been purchased in 1987, pointed me to an empty desk near the window. I slid into it, pulling out a notebook and pen with practiced efficiency, and tried to ignore the whispers that rippled through the room.
"—new—"
"—from Portland, I heard—"
"—she's the one—"
The last whisper came from a girl with dyed black hair and too much eyeliner, and it had a knowing quality that made my skin prickle. I glanced at her, and she quickly looked away, but not before I saw something in her expression that I recognized: fear.
That was new. Usually, the whispers were about what I'd done, not who I was. But this girl looked at me like she knew something. Like she'd heard something specific.
I filed it away and tried to focus on Mr. Alderman's lecture about symbolism in The Great Gatsby, but my mind kept wandering to the window, to the gray sky, to the forest that pressed against the edges of the town like a dark tide waiting to roll in.
By third period—Biology—I'd already mapped the social hierarchy of Raven's Peak High with the precision of a anthropologist studying a primitive tribe. There were the jocks, clustered at one end of the cafeteria. The theater kids, huddled in corners practicing lines. The stoners, lurking near the back doors where they could slip out for quick hits between classes. The brainiacs, already stressing about AP exams that were months away. And then, at the edges, the outliers—the kids who didn't fit anywhere, who drifted between groups like ghosts at a party.
I was, by default, an outlier. But outliers attracted attention, and attention was the last thing I wanted.
Biology was taught by Ms. Chen, a young woman with an earnest smile and a passion for cellular biology that she seemed genuinely surprised no one shared. She assigned us lab partners alphabetically, which landed me next to a boy named Ben Chen—no relation, he assured me quickly—who had a kind face and the slightly hunted look of someone who'd been bullied enough to know that new people were unpredictable.
"Hey," he said, offering a tentative smile. "You're Ellie, right? The new girl?"
"Word travels fast."
"This town's small. A new person is big news." He organized his textbook and notebook with the precision of someone who'd been doing it the same way for years. "Where are you from?"
"Portland. Well, near Portland. Different places, really. We moved around a lot."
Ben nodded like this made perfect sense. "Military family?"
"Something like that."
He didn't push, which I appreciated. Instead, he launched into a quiet explanation of how Ms. Chen ran her class—pop quizzes on Fridays, extra credit for dissecting frogs if you were into that kind of thing, a general belief that everyone could succeed if they just tried hard enough. It was the kind of information that would have been boring from anyone else, but Ben delivered it with such earnest helpfulness that I found myself almost relaxing.
"—and the only thing you really need to watch out for—" He lowered his voice, glancing toward the back of the room. "—is them."
I followed his gaze. In the last row, two boys sat at a lab table that was conspicuously empty of equipment or books. They weren't doing anything—just sitting, staring straight ahead, utterly still in a way that seemed wrong somehow. Like statues. Like predators waiting for prey to wander too close.
One was dark-haired, with sharp features and an expression of absolute boredom that somehow managed to convey contempt without moving a single muscle. The other was blond, broader in the shoulders, with the kind of face that belonged on a magazine cover—perfect symmetry, high cheekbones, a mouth that looked like it was designed for smiling but never quite got around to it.
They were both beautiful in a way that was almost painful to look at, like staring into the sun. And they were both, I realized with a jolt, looking directly at me.
"They're the Cullens," Ben whispered. "Well, not really Cullens. They're adopted. The dark-haired one is Jasper, and the blond one is—"
"Edward," I said, the name rising to my lips without conscious thought. I had no idea how I knew it. I'd never seen this boy before in my life.
Ben blinked. "Yeah. How did you—"
"I don't know." I pulled my gaze away, my heart hammering against my ribs for no reason I could identify. "I just... guessed."
But I hadn't guessed. I'd known. And when I risked another glance toward the back of the room, Edward Cullen was still watching me, his golden eyes—golden, that was wrong, eyes weren't that color, they couldn't be—unblinking, intense, and filled with an expression I couldn't quite read.
It looked almost like hunger.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. I went to classes, I took notes, I smiled when appropriate and nodded when expected, but my mind kept circling back to Biology, to those golden eyes, to the way my skin had prickled when Edward Cullen looked at me.
It wasn't attraction. Well, it wasn't just attraction. There was something else, something deeper and more primal, a recognition that made no logical sense. Like my body knew something my mind hadn't caught up to yet.
By the time the final bell rang, I had a headache building behind my eyes and a desperate need for fresh air. I gathered my things and headed for the front doors, hoping to find a quiet spot to wait for Aunt Cora—she'd said she'd pick me up, though I wasn't entirely sure I believed her.
The parking lot was chaos: students streaming toward cars, buses rumbling to life, teachers standing watch with the weary resignation of people who'd seen it all before. I found a low wall near the edge of the lot and sat down, pulling my jacket tighter against the damp cold.
"Ellie Vance."
The voice came from behind me, soft and cultured and utterly unexpected. I spun around, nearly losing my balance on the wall.
Edward Cullen stood three feet away, close enough that I could see the individual flecks of gold in his eyes, far enough that he wasn't invading my personal space. He was even more striking up close—pale skin that seemed almost translucent, features so perfectly arranged they looked carved, hair the color of burnished copper catching the weak afternoon light.
"You're Edward," I said. It came out breathless, which was embarrassing.
"Yes." He tilted his head slightly, studying me with an intensity that should have been uncomfortable but somehow wasn't. "I wanted to apologize. For staring, earlier. It was rude."
"You weren't staring. I mean, you were, but—" I stopped, took a breath, tried to gather my scattered thoughts. "It's fine. I'm new. People stare."
"Not like that." Something flickered in his eyes—pain, maybe, or regret. "I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
He turned to go, and panic surged through me—an irrational, overwhelming need to stop him, to keep him here, to understand why my body was screaming at me not to let him walk away.
"Wait." I stood up, my legs unsteady. "Do I know you? Have we met before?"
Edward froze. For a long moment, he didn't move, didn't breathe—and in that stillness, I noticed something I hadn't seen before. The way his chest didn't rise and fall. The way his skin, perfect and pale, seemed almost to glow from within. The way he stood so utterly motionless that he might have been carved from marble.
"No," he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. "We've never met. I would remember."
And then he was gone, walking away with a fluid grace that wasn't quite human, disappearing into the crowd of students like smoke dissolving into mist.
I stood there for a long time, my heart pounding, my mind racing, completely unable to make sense of what had just happened. And somewhere in the back of my consciousness, a voice that sounded almost like my own whispered a warning I couldn't quite hear:
Nothing in Raven's Peak is what it seems. Least of all him.
That night, I dreamed of golden eyes and forests and the taste of copper on my tongue. I dreamed of running through the trees, faster than should have been possible, my heart pounding with joy and terror and something else—something that felt like hunger.
I dreamed of a voice calling my name from far away, and when I woke, gasping, in the dark of my unfamiliar room, I could still hear it echoing in my ears.
Ellie.
The window was open. I was sure I'd closed it before bed.
And on the sill, barely visible in the moonlight, was a single perfect flower—a white rose, its petals untouched by frost, impossibly blooming in the middle of winter.
I picked it up carefully, half-convinced it would dissolve at my touch. It was real. It was warm. And wrapped around its stem was a thin strip of paper, folded so small I'd almost missed it.
I unfolded it with trembling fingers and read the single word written there in elegant, old-fashioned script:
Run