The granddaughter's name was Cara.
Mare found this out because Cara Ellery, as it turned out, was in his AP English class and had been since September. She sat in the third row. She had straight dark hair and a silver ring in one ear and the handwriting of someone who wrote quickly and precisely. She had turned in a paper in October about liminal spaces in gothic literature that Mr. Hartwell had called one of the best he'd read in ten years of teaching.
He had sat next to her in a class discussion. He had lent her a pencil once. He had not known any of this.
He knew it now, in the particular retroactive clarity of realizing that a person you've been sharing a room with for months is significant, and all the small interactions you'd dismissed as random were in fact the beginning of a story you didn't know you were in.
The question of how to handle Cara Ellery was not simple.
Option one: ignore her. This was Luka's position. She was seventeen, she was curious, she was probably going to get bored and move on.
Option two: expose the pack's existence to her directly. This was Callum's position, which surprised everyone, but Callum explained it with his usual unhurried logic: Cara Ellery was the granddaughter of the man who had enforced the non-disclosure agreement for forty years. If Garth Ellery was bringing her up specifically, he was signaling that she was trustworthy by his measure. And Garth Ellery, Callum said, had not been wrong yet.
"You want to invite her in," Petra said flatly.
"I want to give her the choice to know or not know." He paused. "There's a difference."
Option three, which was Mare's contribution: talk to her first. Just talk. Get a read on who she was before they made any decisions. He had the advantage — they shared a class, they'd had small interactions, it wasn't suspicious for him to start a conversation.
The pack agreed on option three.
He sat next to her in AP English the following Tuesday and after class, when most of the room had emptied, he said, "You wrote the liminal spaces paper in October."
She looked at him with attention that was already sharper than he'd prepared for. "Yeah."
"It was good. Hartwell wasn't wrong."
"He tends to not be wrong about essays." She picked up her bag. "You're Mara Vasquez."
"Mare." It came out steady. "Just Mare."
She didn't blink. "Mare. You've changed a lot since September."
"Yeah."
"It looks good on you," she said. Not pointed, not leading — just a statement, the way she said apparently everything. "Are you friends with Rook Thayer?"
He kept his expression easy. "Why?"
"I've seen you together. He transferred in October." She looked at him directly. "Same time you started changing." A pause. "I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm just — I've been paying attention to the Backs since last summer. And some things I'm paying attention to are in that school right now."
The hallway was clearing. Through the window, the January light was thin and white.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"The truth." Simply, directly. "My grandfather has spent forty years keeping a secret he won't tell me. I found the stone in the Backs. I've seen tracks that aren't any domestic dog." She held his gaze. "I'm not afraid. I'm curious."
Mare thought about what Callum had said. About choices. About what Cara Ellery's grandfather had implied by naming her.
"Come to the farmhouse off Route 12 on Saturday," he said. "At noon. Bring nothing. Tell no one except your grandfather."
She didn't hesitate. "Okay."