Moon-Touched: The Rise of the Lost Luna

A Few Days Before Destiny

Two years is a long time when you're young. It's long enough to build walls and call them boundaries. Long enough to turn "just friends" into a fortress so well-constructed that even the people inside it forget there was ever anything else.

Arvella turned eighteen in four days, and she had never felt more alone.

It wasn't loneliness, exactly. She had Levi, who made her laugh until her ribs ached. She had Marcus and Bianca, whose love was so constant and so unconditional it sometimes made her chest hurt with gratitude. She had the forest, which was and had always been her truest friend — the place where the wind knew her name and the trees leaned down to listen.

But she didn't have a wolf. And in a pack of shifters, that made her invisible.

Everyone around her had shifted. Everyone. Levi had shifted at fifteen — his wolf, Lionelle, was black-furred and broad and had the same ridiculous sense of humor as his human half. The other kids from their generation had shifted at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Even the late bloomers had their wolves by seventeen.

Arvella was four days from eighteen, and inside her there was nothing. No stirring. No second heartbeat. No wild intelligence pressing against the walls of her consciousness, demanding to be let out.

Just silence.

She told herself it didn't matter. She told herself she was fine. She told herself that a person's worth wasn't determined by whether they could turn into an animal, and that she had plenty of other qualities — she was smart, she was kind, she knew more about herbal medicine than the pack healer, she could identify every plant in the northwestern forest by smell alone.

But on the nights when the moon was full and the pack ran together — a river of wolves flowing through the dark forest like living silver — and she sat on the porch steps watching them go, she did not feel fine. She felt like a window looking out onto a world she would never be part of.

It was Tuesday afternoon when the forest called her.

Not figuratively. Not metaphorically. The forest actually, literally called.

She was sitting in her room, reading a book on celestial botany she'd found in the pack library's dusty back shelves, when she felt it — a pull. Deep in her chest, below her ribs, in the place where a wolf should have been but wasn't. A pull like a hook behind her sternum, gentle but insistent, drawing her north.

She stood without deciding to stand. She walked without deciding to walk. She was out the back door and into the tree line before the logical part of her brain caught up with her feet.

What are you doing? she asked herself.

She didn't have an answer. But the pull intensified with every step, and the forest — the forest was doing something extraordinary. The trees were leaning. Not from wind — there was no wind — but leaning, bending their branches toward a path she couldn't see but could feel, like a road made of instinct instead of dirt.

She walked for twenty minutes, deeper into the northern woods than she'd ever gone alone. The pull grew stronger. The trees grew older. And then, between one step and the next, the world shifted.

A cabin appeared.

Not gradually, not from behind the trees — appeared, as if someone had lifted a curtain and revealed what had always been there. Small. Stone fireplace. A single window catching the afternoon light. Ancient oaks whose roots had grown over the foundation like protective arms.

Arvella stood at the threshold, her heart hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears. Every instinct she had — every instinct she didn't know she had — was screaming that this place was important. That this place was hers.

She pushed open the door.

Inside, the air smelled of dried herbs and old magic. There was a cast iron pot on the cold hearth. Crystals on a wooden shelf, dusty but still faintly glowing. And on a small table near the window, as if someone had placed it there knowing she would come, was a book.

Leather-bound. Worn soft with time. And on the cover, pressed into the leather in silver that still caught the light, was a crescent moon.

Arvella picked it up, and the moment her fingers touched the cover, the crystals on the shelf blazed to life. The cabin hummed. The floor vibrated beneath her feet, and something deep in the earth — something ancient, something that had been sleeping for eighteen years — stirred.

She opened the journal.

My name is Selena. If you are reading this, then you found your way home. And that means it is time for you to know the truth.

You are my daughter. Your father was the Northern Lycan King Derek— the bravest and most beautiful man I have ever known. He was killed before you were born, by rogues who were sent to destroy him. I fled to protect you.

You were born in this cabin, under the full moon, with moonlight pooling around you like water. The moment you entered this world, the earth sang. The trees bent toward you. The wind whispered your name.

You are Moon Touched, my darling. You are the last of a bloodline older than memory — celestial beings born of the Moon Goddess herself. You carry her mark behind your right ear. Your eyes will glow violet when your powers stir. You can command the earth, the air, the living things of this world, because they are yours and you are theirs.

I wrapped you in a blanket of witch silk and silver runes and placed the bracelet on your wrist to hide your power. I carried you to the border of Silver Fang Pack and left you where you would be found. And then I ran, because the ones who hunt your kind were close, and the only way to keep you safe was to lead them away from you.

If you are reading this, then the blanket and the bracelet held. The spells worked. You grew up safe and loved and hidden.

But you cannot hide forever, Arvella. The prophecy says you must find your true mate — your Alpha — and together you will awaken. Together you will rise.

I wish I could be there to see it. I wish I could hold your hand and tell you not to be afraid. But I gave my life so you could have yours, and I would do it again a thousand times.

Be brave, my little moon.

Be brave, and remember that you were loved.

Arvella read the letter three times. Then she closed the journal, pressed it against her chest, and wept.

She wept for the mother she had never known. She wept for the father she would never meet. She wept for eighteen years of feeling wrong, feeling broken, feeling like a puzzle piece jammed into the wrong picture — because now she understood. She wasn't broken. She wasn't wrong. She was hidden.

She was Moon Touched.

She didn't know what that meant. Not really. Not yet. But the words vibrated in her bones like a bell that had been struck after years of silence, and something inside her — in the place where a wolf should have been — shifted.

Not awake. Not yet. But turning over in its sleep.

She came home late.

The pack was in an uproar. Lucas had every available wolf searching the northern perimeter. Levi was pacing the Cordovas' front porch with the manic energy of a brother who had been imagining worst-case scenarios for two hours. Marcus and Bianca were in the kitchen, trying to keep their faces composed and failing badly.

When Arvella walked through the front door, clutching a leather-bound journal to her chest and looking like she'd seen a ghost, the relief was so palpable it changed the temperature of the room.

"Where were you?" Levi exploded. "We've been—"

"I'm fine," Arvella said. Her voice was strange — distant, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well. "I went for a walk. I lost track of time. I'm sorry."

She went to her room and closed the door. She didn't come out for dinner.

She didn't notice the figure standing in the shadow of the elders' quarters, watching her return. She didn't see the way his eyes locked onto the journal in her arms — onto the silver crescent moon pressed into the leather cover.

Rowan's patience had lasted eighteen years.

It was about to pay off.