Gloria woke because something tapped against the glass.
Not a branch. The sound came in a careful rhythm—three light clicks, a pause, then three more. Moonlight spilled across her ceiling, cold and blue, and for one breath she remained beneath the quilt, listening to the house groan around her. Wind pressed at the stone walls of Vale Estate. Somewhere below, a shutter banged.
The tapping came again.
Gloria sat up. Her nightdress clung damply to her back. Beyond the window, the snowfield gleamed beneath the full moon, unbroken from the black line of the forest to the stable roof. No wind moved through the pines. No animal crossed the yard.
Yet beneath her window stood a silver hoofprint.
It shone in the snow as if it had been stamped with liquid light. Another print curved beside it, then another, forming a perfect circle around the bedroom wall. Gloria pushed away the quilt and crossed the floorboards barefoot. Frost feathered the inside of the glass beneath her fingers.
There were dozens of prints.
They circled the room in a wide, impossible ring, each hoofmark narrow and deep. The snow between them remained untouched. No trail led toward the circle. None led away.
Gloria’s breath caught.
At the center of the nearest print, a crescent shape glimmered faintly, like a sliver of moon trapped beneath ice. She knew that mark. She had seen it in dreams, in old illustrations hidden beneath the loose floorboard in her mother’s study, in the scars of memory that woke whenever the moon grew full.
A Luna unicorn.
Her mother had called them myths. The Order of Obsidian had called them prey.
Downstairs, a bell began to ring.
Not the front bell. The iron alarm beside the servants’ stairwell clanged once, twice, and then stopped as a man shouted.
Gloria spun toward the door.
The lock turned from the other side.
*
The door burst inward, striking the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. A masked figure lunged through the opening, black coat shedding snow onto the rug. His face was hidden behind polished obsidian shaped like a snarling wolf, and in one gloved hand he held a short blade whose edge smoked in the cold air.
Gloria stumbled backward. The intruder moved faster than any ordinary man, crossing the room in two strides. He seized her wrist, and pain flashed up her arm.
“Found her,” he said.
A second figure appeared behind him, carrying a lantern filled with violet fire. The flame bent toward Gloria though the room was still. Her skin prickled. Beneath her ribs, something ancient lifted its head.
She drove her knee into the first man’s thigh. He grunted, but his fingers tightened. Black veins of light crawled from his glove into her skin, searching, tasting. The mark inside her wrist burned white.
“Don’t let her shift,” the second intruder snapped. “The horn must be taken intact.”
The word tore through her.
Gloria twisted with everything she had. The window stood open behind her now, though she had not touched it. Snow blew across the sill, and moonlight poured into the room like a river. The pressure in her bones became unbearable. Her captor’s grip slipped as her scream broke into a sound too sharp for a human throat.
Light erupted beneath her skin.
The men staggered back. Gloria fell to her knees, but her hands struck the floor as narrow, silver-rimmed hooves. Her fingers folded inward, bones reshaping with a cascade of wet cracks. White fire raced along her spine. Her nightdress tore apart as a luminous coat burst over her body, pale as frozen starlight, each hair glittering with blue sparks.
The room shrank around her.
A mane spilled down her neck, threaded with constellations. Her breath smoked. From her brow thrust a single horn, long and translucent, its tip burning with the cold radiance of the moon.
The first masked man whispered, “The last one.”
Gloria lowered her head.
The horn struck him in the chest.
*
He flew through the window without a sound.
Glass flashed around his body, but before it could touch her, the fragments turned to frost and dissolved. Gloria landed on the snow outside, four hooves sinking no deeper than a boot heel. Behind her, the second intruder shouted and raised the violet lantern.
The light found her.
Pain clamped around her skull. A black thread sprang from the lantern and raced across the snow, curling toward her foreleg. Gloria reared, silver mane snapping in the wind, and the thread tightened. It was not rope. It was a shadow with teeth.
She kicked. Moonlight burst from her hooves and split the shadow apart.
A horn sounded from the stable.
One long note, then two short.
Elias.
Gloria wheeled toward the dark barn. The stablemaster had taught her to ride before Mara had learned to walk, had slipped apples into her pockets when the household called her strange, had looked away on the nights she returned from the forest with torn clothes and frost in her hair. If he had sounded the warning, he had seen the intruders.
She plunged across the yard.
Behind her, the order moved without hurrying. More masked figures emerged from the house, their boots leaving no impressions. Violet lanterns swung at their sides. Wherever the light touched, thin black sigils appeared in the snow, joining themselves into a widening net.
Gloria reached the stable doors as Elias staggered out.
Blood darkened his wool shirt. He held a pitchfork in both hands, though one arm hung uselessly. Three obsidian-clad hunters stood behind him among the stalls. The horses screamed and kicked at their doors, eyes rolling white.
“Go!” Elias shouted when he saw her. “Into the trees, girl!”
The tallest hunter raised a hand. A ring of black stone gleamed on his finger.
Elias’s shadow peeled away from his feet.
He collapsed as if the ground had opened beneath him. His body struck the snow, and the darkness beneath him stretched into a long, living spike. Gloria screamed, but the sound came out as a roar that shook frost from the stable roof.