In every story there is a beginning, and this was hers, the one she had been waiting for all her life. Ava Abbot had grown up in Genesis, Maine, a town too small to be on the map, the only child of a couple who tended an apple orchard. Her parents vowed they would never travel beyond the state line, insisting there was nothing to be found in the outside world other than chaos and crime. To venture forth was foolhardy and dangerous, they insisted, and yet from as far back as she could remember, all Ava had wanted to do was run away.

With her red hair and ink-black eyes, Ava seemed almost too beautiful to be real. Of course, there were flaws. She had been born with an eleventh finger on her left hand, an abnormality that had been removed when she was little more than a baby, but the scar still stung on damp, rainy days. Wary neighbors told their children that Ava had come from the underground land where fairies resided beneath the twisted roots of the apple trees. Don’t talk to her, they whispered. Don’t even glance in her direction. Something was different about her, that much was clear. Something that made them stay away.

There were no mirrors in the house where Ava grew up, for such things were said to encourage vanity, but she had seen her reflection in the still water of the pond at the edge of their land. Whenever she caught sight of herself, she half-believed she’d spied a stranger. She didn’t resemble her parents, and her long hair looked ruby red, so bright she had to blink. She had come to believe she didn’t belong in a house where the front door was double-locked every night at the hour when the world disappeared into darkness.

She was someone else entirely. Someone she didn’t know.