Exclusive Cover Reveal + Excerpt: Jordan Stephanie Gray’s Bitten

Werewolf stories aren’t new in the fantasy and paranormal romance space—from Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series to Ali Hazelwood’s Bride, we’re all fascinated by these supernatural creatures that are part human and part vicious killer. (It doesn’t hurt that they’re almost always depicted as really hot, either.) But Jordan Stephanie Gray’s debut novel Bitten sounds like it’s about to turn many of our favorite tropes from this genre on their heads.
When werewolves attack seventeen-year-old Vanessa on the way home from her birthday party, she instantly loses everything she loves. Imprisoned by the Wolf Queen and forced to endure a painful transformation, she is given no choice but to join their enchanted court, where everything is beautiful and nothing is what it seems. Described as Crescent City meets Fourth Wing, Graya’s blend of enemies-to-lovers romance, intricate worldbuilding, bloody revenge, and potentially deadly court politics makes for an addictive roller coaster of a ride.
Here’s how the publisher describes the story.
After a vicious werewolf attack on the night of her seventeenth birthday party, Vanessa Hart loses everything she loves in a split second. Her best friend, her father, and even her home.
Bitten and imprisoned without explanation, Vanessa endures an agonizing transformation into the very beast that maimed her, and her captors make it clear she cannot escape: she will either swear her life to the Wolf Queen’s Court, or she will die.
With no other choice, Vanessa joins their enchanted Castle Severi—where flowering vines grow through the walls, gifts are bestowed by the stars, and a claw can break through skin as easily as silk—but she hasn’t forgotten what they stole from her.
Vanessa still seeks vengeance, scheming in the shadows even as she finds herself mesmerized by the golden prince Sinclair Severi, who threatens to steal her heart though he is promised to her nemesis. And by his brooding, disgraced cousin, Calix, whose smoldering gaze hides even darker secrets. Immersed in the magic of their whimsical yet cruel society, Vanessa soon learns not all is as it seems.
The Court is at war, and she may simply be a pawn in its lethal game.
Bitten won’t be released until September 30, but we’re thrilled to be able to give you an exclusive first look at its (beautiful!) cover — and a sneak peek at the story itself!
4
The wolf—the beast—is huge. Twice the size of us, large enough to block out the light of the moon. The full moon. No. No. This is a sick joke. This isn’t. . . It’s not. . .
Celeste finds the knife in my hand, loosely dangling from my grasp, and tightens my fist around it. “Run,” she commands.
“What?” I can’t think, breathe, even feel. I am petrified.
It’s not real. It’s not real. It can’t be real.
“We need to run.” Celeste begins walking us quickly down the street, past a closed strip mall and flickering streetlights.
“We’re drunk,” I say. “We—we had too much, and now we—”
“It’s real,” she hisses.
I turn because she’s wrong. I want her to be wrong—even when, bur‑ ied deep in my gut, I know that she’s right. The wolf remains. It lowers its front legs to the ground, almost as if—as if it’s going to pounce. But it wouldn’t, right? Why would it want to pounce on us?
“We need to run.” Celeste clutches my shoulders, her nails digging brutally into my skin. Horror fills her gaze.
The wolf leaps and lands hard in the gravel of the road. Chunks of rock break off, scatter in the breeze like marbles thrown in the wind. It snarls, its sharpened fangs flashing in the darkness. Its eyes glow so red, they’re almost black.
Shit.
We really need to run.
Just then, my brain catches up to reality. My legs begin working. I pull Celeste forward, and we stumble after each other, our minds racing faster than our limbs.
“Split up,” Celeste says in a rush. “If we go in different directions, that—that thing will be less likely to catch—”
“No! I’m not leaving you. We run together.” It doesn’t matter that I’ve always been faster. That she might slow me down. I can’t leave her.
I don’t understand what’s happening or why, but vicious growls pierce the night, and we throw ourselves down the sidewalk, our sandals slapping the concrete. Someone will find us. Or this is a dream. Or… My thoughts come in quick bursts of hope and fear as I pump my legs faster, haul Celeste after me. Nearly drag her body. We can make it out of this. We can find help and survive.
She loses a sandal, almost trips and falls as it flies off behind us. “Fuck,” she whispers. Her hand grows clammy in mine and slips from my grip, but I grab her wrist instead and heave her back to her feet.
“Keep running,” I say between breaths. “Don’t stop running. Someone will come. Someone will help us.”
Her bare foot slows our pace even more, but I keep us moving as quickly as possible. I think of volleyball practice. Every morning for two hours before school. The laps I run around the court until my lungs ache and I consider quit‑ ting and joining the school’s book club instead. This is just like that. We run, and we run. There is no stopping. Past the strip mall and a gas station and—
Oh, shit. Shit shit shit.
There is a second wolf, slightly smaller than the one behind us, prowling behind the gas station. Eyes bloodred. It bares its teeth from a darkened alleyway and springs into action.
No. God, no.
“Move,” I command. There is no thinking anymore; there is only doing. Celeste huffs, sobs breaking between each of her breaths. I know she’s crying. I’m crying. But we can’t stop moving.
This is a goddamn nightmare.
The second wolf begins to run alongside us, and I flick open my Swiss Army knife. Hold it as if it’s our only lifeline.
Celeste starts to limp, but she doesn’t give up. I don’t give up. We dodge the first wolf, swerving into the road. I pray someone drives down the street. Anyone. We scream. For help, for mercy. For everything. No one answers our prayers.
The streets remain empty, almost too silent. Too abandoned. This is some sick joke. It has to be.
And then Celeste trips, and my heart stops.
She collapses with a howl of pain, and I try not to glance back as I drag her to her feet. But she isn’t stable. She can’t stand up.
“Vanessa,” Celeste cries from the road. “Vanessa, I can’t—”
“You can,” I say, tasting salt on my lips. Tears. Mine.
“I can’t.” A piece of jagged glass protrudes from her bare foot. Blood trickles around the wound, dripping onto the ground. Behind us—far too close—there is a heated exhale and a growl. She can’t run. Not anymore. Not at all.
“You have to go.” She rips my hand off hers. Blue hair sticks to her cheeks, her eyes. She looks wild, crazed, as she shoves me. Once, twice. “Go, you stupid idiot! Get out of here.”
“I’m not—”
She throws me forward this time, pushing with so much might that she collapses onto her knees with another shrill cry. I stumble backward, landing on my ass as the wolf behind us makes one more jump.
It hits the earth right in front of Celeste.
The last time I see her face, she is screaming for me to get up and run. Her mouth is parted. Her eyes are wide. And I—I can’t move. In this moment, space swallows time, and I am trapped in an endless loop of hell on earth. Before I can breathe, the wolf tears into her neck. Blood spurts. Then gushes.
Celeste’s blood.
My fingers twitch around cold metal. No. No no no.
I said I wouldn’t leave her. I promised.
Thoughts escape me, reason and reality fleeing my mind. I promised.
“Get off!” I lunge with my knife out and stab the wolf between its ribs, gripping its fur for leverage. It yelps. A sad, pathetic sound. Good. I relish it. Look to see if Celeste celebrates too.
But she’s limp, and she’s drowning in her own blood. Crumpled like a rag doll in a pool of scarlet. The sight of her—it makes me pause. It makes me whimper.
The wolf shakes, jostling me back and forth as if I’m in the midst of a tornado. Its rippling muscles bruise my skin with each hard throttle, but I can’t—I can’t let go. The knife almost falls from my hand, but I grasp it tighter. Regain control. For Celeste.
I stab the wolf again, deeper this time. Twisting the blade so that it hurts. So that it maims. “Get. Off. Her!” I tear my knife down its side, and the wolf snarls. But I am not afraid. I’m someone else now. Someone terrifying. Someone in control.
I want to kill it. I need to kill it. And that will fix everything.
It has to fix everything.
Before I get the chance, the second wolf rushes out from the shadows, snaps me up in its jaws, and… and bites.
I scream from the immediate explosion of pain.
My ribs fracture between its teeth, its fangs shredding the flesh of my waist. It feels like melting. Like being thrown onto an open flame and blistering to death. I scramble, try to scratch at its eye with my nails. Try to unclamp its jaw from my skin. It hurts. It hurts, and I’m going to die. I scream again. Louder. Until my throat aches and my lungs give out. The bite feels like needles, like razors, like a dagger sharp enough to peel flesh like an orange.
The wolf seems pleased. Slowly, it opens its mouth and drops me on the ground. Right beside what used to be Celeste. A sob splinters my chest. The pain of the bite dims to the faint throbbing of a heartbreak.
A barely connected pile of skin and bone and hair lies limp on the ground in a sea of blood, in the broken shape of my best friend.
My North Star. Imploded.
My constellation. Snuffed out.
All that remains is blue hair. Blue and red and red and red.
Suddenly, I can’t bring myself to care about wolves anymore. It doesn’t matter that they stalk out of sight. That I can hear their bones cracking and reforming in the distance. I curl my fingers into the earth, slowly wrenching myself toward her, inch by bloody inch, until I’m holding her in my lap.
I promised I wouldn’t leave, and so I won’t.
5
I find Celeste’s phone in the puddle of her blood and call my dad.
It takes less than fifteen minutes for him to send over a squad car and an ambulance. Restless—sick and faint and shaking—I watch the time tick by on her cell phone, staring at the picture of us in the background. She’s licking my cheek. I’m laughing. We’re in the middle of seventh grade geometry in the picture, so her hair is more turquoise than blue, and I have blunt bangs that look like an art project gone wrong, but she’s refused to change the picture for the last four years because she says it’s the happiest we’ve both ever been.
I think I might’ve been happier tonight. Before. When we were dancing on the beach.
My chest has caved into a pile of rubble, like the remnants of a shipwreck after a terrible storm. I don’t bother trying to breathe through the pain. I just let it consume me. Burning, aching. Bleeding. My ribs shift and pop with my every twitch. It doesn’t matter.
Celeste is dead. I’m holding her in my arms.
Less than an hour ago, she was right in front of me. Laughing and dancing and making stupid, inappropriate jokes.
An officer approaches. His uniform is a size too big, black in the darkness, and his badge flashes gold in front of my face. He’s the only one I could’ve called. The only one who will understand.
“Oh, baby.” He drops to his knees with a sob and tries to pull me into a hug. But I won’t let go of Celeste.
“Vanessa, honey, what happened?” My father’s voice breaks, but it sounds like gravel in my ears.
“I—I promised” is all I can manage through shallow breaths, because he keeps trying to take me away from her. I can hear Celeste as if she’s standing beside me and almost fool myself into believing that version of reality—one where we escaped the wolves, or there were no wolves to begin with.
“You look disgusting,” she would laugh. “Come here and let me fix your hair.”
But my hair isn’t the problem. It’s hers. It’s damp. Tangled. Unattached.
I curl inward, folding myself over her as my spine screams in agony. My entire being screams in agony. And my thoughts, they don’t stop, even as my body feels wholly and completely broken.
Someone is going to have to tell her parents. Someone is going to have to clean out her locker. What—what will happen to her car?
“Baby, you have to stand up.” My father pulls despondently at my arms.
“No.”
“Baby—”
“No!” Celeste and I are fully entwined. There is no parting us. That’s what she used to say anyway. “We’re basically the same person. One soul, one brain cell.”
“Help her to her feet,” someone else says. A man.
I assume he’s another officer. Dad’s coworker. But when I glance up, I don’t meet the aged eyes of someone wise and old. I meet the golden eyes of a boy from the beach. One of the wealthy kids. Black hair, tanned muscles stretched taut beneath his obsidian shirt, and a scowl on his face so reminiscent of arrogance and disdain that I growl.
“We don’t have time for this,” the boy says, his voice firm and commanding. “Get her up, and have this scene cleaned. Now.”
I blink, unable to understand. He pulls out a watch from his jeans’ pocket and flicks the face. “This is a fucking mess.”
A… mess.
The two words burrow under my skin and nestle between my broken bones. This boy is not an officer, and he is not a friend. I climb onto my knees and search for the knife in the gore of my oldest friend.
“Looking for this?” He kneels, dangling the bloodstained knife in front of my face. I reach out to snatch it, anger making the pain all but vanish. I snarl at him, and he frowns.
“You don’t want to make this into a bigger battle than it already is,” he says. Those eyes burn into mine, glowing brighter by the second. “You need to come with me.”
He’s insane. So insane if he thinks I’m going to follow him anywhere. “I would rather die.”
“That can still be arranged,” he snaps.
My hands tighten into fists. I hate him. Something about the way he watches me, his head cocked like a predator stalking its prey, feasts on my nerves. I don’t trust him. I want him gone.
“Dad,” I say. “Where is everyone else? Where are the other officers?”
Dad doesn’t answer. The boy does. “Roadkill. A wild boar ran out in front of a semi. Made quite the mess, but the entire force isn’t needed.” His gaze challenges me to argue otherwise.
“Dad.”
He puts a shaking hand on my shoulder. “Vanessa, I… You… you were bitten, honey.”
“I know.” I should probably be dead. But I’m not. Pain lances through my chest, but the only thing I feel—really and truly feel—is rage. I can’t understand it, can hardly recognize the emotion with the agony of Celeste cracking open my heart, but it’s there. It hurts.
“Why—”
“No questions,” the boy says to my dad. “All you need to understand is that she is coming with me, or she’s not leaving the scene alive.”
I turn around. Caution tape, Dad’s police car, and flashing blue and red lights section off this side of the road. An ambulance hides us from sight. And between me and that ambulance—is a fully blacked-out Rolls Royce SUV. A line of people waits beside it, some I recognize from the beach and others I don’t. Gold crests hang from each of their necks in coinsized medallions.
I swallow roughly. “Dad, who—?”
“No questions,” the boy repeats, voice low and rough. He tries to hoist me to my feet, his hand hot on my wrist, but Dad hits his arm away with his baton.
“Do not touch my daughter.”
The boy snarls and straightens. He’s about a foot taller than my father. Maybe a foot wider too. And Dad—he looks up with a trembling chin and a snotty nose at the boy.
“I am not asking you for permission. You can acquiesce, or you can face the consequences for you and your family.” The boy grabs Dad’s baton, and it crumbles almost instantly in his grasp, turning to plastic con‑ fetti dusting Celeste’s hair. I want to take every bit of debris and suffocate him with it. My knuckles crack. My skin heats. My chest heaves with effort.
But even amidst the battering of that aberrant rage against my broken ribs, I shiver. Dad is nothing compared to this boy. Something . . . something is wrong with him. Unnatural. The same sort of unnatural that nearly bit me in half. The same sort that killed Celeste. I hug her body closer, tension knotting in my spine. “
You want my compliance?” Dad says, not backing down even when his eyes widen, and he wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Fine. If it keeps her alive, I’ll do whatever it takes. But you will not hurt her. Swear it. Swear it to me now.”
The boy stares at him. Silence buzzes like electricity between them. The boy is still holding my knife, and he tosses it to his other hand, catching it smoothly. A threat.
“We won’t hurt her,” the boy says.
I laugh at that. I’m already hurt. Bleeding even where they can’t see.
Dad turns my face toward his. His green eyes crinkle. “Listen to me, you need to get up and go with—with this young man.”
I refuse.
“Let her go, Vanessa. She’s gone, and if you want a chance of survival you need to get out of here.” His voice cleaves in half—Celeste was almost as much his daughter as she was my friend—and his face falls further into despair. “You need to go.”
He twists my hands free of hers, but I throw him off me with an easy shove. He trips backward, stumbling on loose bits of road. Almost collapsing. I don’t care. When he catches himself, I bare my teeth at him. “I. Promised.”
“The transformation has already begun,” the boy says to Dad. He flicks the face of his watch again. “Time’s running out.”
Dad stares at me, his face paling by the second. His gaze diverts to my waist, to the blood staining the gashes in the tank top I borrowed from Celeste. I glance at her in my lap, at Dad’s face, at the boy above us.
“I won’t leave her. She deserves more than… than whatever this is.”
Dad cries again, and I hate the sound. I even hate the weakness behind his shoulders sagging and shaking.
“Let me come with her,” Dad tries.
The boy shakes his head, tucking my knife into his pocket after his watch. “That’s not our law, human.”
“Fuck your laws!”
It’s the wrong thing to shout, and Dad knows it. Instantly, the people near the SUV stalk forward. They move as if they’re made of lava and steam. Liquid heat and danger. “Time’s up,” the boy commands. “What’s your choice?”
Collecting himself, smoothing out his shirt first and then his badge, Dad says, “Help me grab her.”
I flinch.
They reach for me simultaneously, ripping my body from Celeste’s, but I fight. Dad falls away easily, but the boy—I can’t take him. His hand clamps down like a shackle on my upper arm, and he drags me away as if I’m featherlight.
“That is my friend,” I hiss. “Let me go!”
“You’re not in your right mind, but that will pass. Or it won’t, and you’ll die,” he says gruffly. “As of right now, you are property of the Wolf Queen’s Court.”
It doesn’t make sense, the words coming out of his mouth or the color of his eyes. Changing, brightening. His pupils are on fire.
“Dad?” I call. “Dad, help me! Make them stop!”
My father stands completely still. His radio rings out and one of his colleagues says, “Do you have the accident under control, Rufus?”
I beg him silently, knees bent and eyes wet, to please, please, please help me. But Dad presses the button to talk back and says, “Sure is. Getting it cleaned up now.”
The boy throws open the door of the SUV and shoves me inside without a second thought.
That’s when I know I’m well and truly alone.
Bitten will released on September 30, but you can pre-order it right now.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB