Blood moon requiem

WHEN THE MOON BLEEDS RED

The silence kills me first. Then the screams.

I'm sitting on my bed in my nightgown—silk the color of midnight, a gift from Mom last week—when the front door explodes. Not opens. Explodes. The sound reverberates through our home like the world is tearing apart at the seams.

"Aria?" Mom's voice cracks from the hallway outside my room, and that single word breaks something inside me. My mother doesn't c***k. My mother is porcelain-strong, unbreakable.

Except right now, she is breaking.

I rush to my door, but Dad's voice booms from downstairs, commanding and deep, an alpha's voice even though he's just a man, just my father. "Get back. Both of you. Move to the safe room. Now."

"Who are you? What do you want?" His authoritative tone doesn't waver, but I hear the undertone—fear. My father is afraid.

The response is inhuman.

A sound erupts from the ground floor that makes my teeth ache, a primitive growl that seems to come from the earth itself. It's not a human sound. It's something feral, something that belongs in nightmares, not in my home. Not on a Tuesday night when I have a calculus exam tomorrow.

Mom appears in my doorway, her face pale, her eyes too wide. She grabs my shoulders, her fingers digging into my skin hard enough to leave marks.

"Lock your door. Don't come out, no matter what you hear. Do you understand me?" She shakes me, desperate, and I realize for the first time in my life that my mother might not know what to do.

"What's happening? Mom, tell me—"

"Aria." Her voice turns sharp as a knife. "Trust me. Stay. In. Here."

She leaves before I can answer.

I stand frozen in my room, listening to the chaos below. Furniture crashes. Glass shatters. A woman screams—my aunt. Then my grandfather's voice, shouting, then silence. The kind of silence that fills the space where sound should be and leaves you hollow.

My hands shake as I pull my phone from my nightstand. I'm dialing 911 when a voice inside my head—mine, but not mine—whispers: They won't come. Not here. Not for this.

I delete the half-written message.

Footsteps on the stairs. Heavy. Fast. Purposeful. Not my father's measured stride. These are boots, and there are dozens of them, moving in synchronized precision like soldiers, not like the random violence of a home invasion.

That's when I hear it: the sound of transformation. Bones cracking. Flesh shifting. The wet, horrible noise of bodies reshaping themselves. My biology textbook couldn't have prepared me for this. Nothing could.

The door to my bedroom swings open.

I don't think. I move on pure instinct, yanking open my window and climbing onto the fire escape that my father always said he'd remove someday. The storm is vicious, rain like bullets, the wind like claws trying to pull me back inside.

I jump.

The ground is farther than it looks from my window, and I land wrong, my ankle twisting beneath me with a sharp, sickening pop. Pain explodes up my leg, white-hot and blinding, but adrenaline is a drug more powerful than any morphine.

I run.

Behind me, I hear them changing. The sound of transformation follows me into the darkness—paws hitting wet earth, claws raking through underbrush, the heavy breathing of creatures that are no longer human, if they ever were.

The forest swallows me whole.

My pajamas shred on branches. My bare feet bleed on rocks and broken branches. The rain tastes like copper—whether from the sky or from my own mouth, I can't tell. I run until my lungs burn like they're filled with fire, until my legs scream with agony, until I'm so far from home that the sounds of the m******e fade into the darkness behind me.

I collapse behind a fallen tree, gasping like a dying animal.

That's when I realize what I'm clutching in my trembling hand. A small, crumpled piece of paper from my pajama pocket. My father gave it to me three months ago, his expression serious in a way I'd never seen before.

"If something happens," he'd said, pressing it into my palm, "read this. You'll find what you need."

I'd never forgotten those words, but I'd never believed he meant them. This kind of thing doesn't happen to girls like me.

Until it does.

My fingers unfold the paper. The words are encoded, cipher text scrambled across the surface in my father's precise handwriting. My eyes scan through the confusion, and then—

One phrase emerges clear from the chaos, glowing like a lifeline:

"Find the alpha they all fear. His name is Marcus Blackwood."

I look back toward our house, toward the flames now visible through the trees. Toward the destruction of everything I knew.

Toward the woman standing in my bedroom window.

Even from this distance, even through the rain and darkness, I see her clearly. She has hair like midnight, eyes that seem to shift color under the insufficient light—violet, then gold, then something else entirely. She's beautiful in the way a predator is beautiful. Terrible and intentional.

She raises one pale hand.

"Find him," she calls out, her voice carrying impossible distances, cutting through the storm like it's nothing. "Find your alpha, little hybrid. It won't save you. We will have you, Aria Valence. When we do, you'll beg for a death we won't grant you."

My blood turns to ice.

She knows my name. She knows exactly who I am.

And she knows what I am.

I turn and run deeper into the darkness, the paper clutched against my heart like a talisman, toward the forest's deepest shadows where moonlight fears to venture. The rain becomes my shield. The darkness becomes my asylum. And somewhere deep in those woods, separated from me by mountains and magic and time, there's an alpha named Marcus Blackwood.

An alpha that everyone fears.

I have no idea if he's my salvation or my damnation.

But he's the only name I have left.

The storm rages as I push deeper into the forest, and for a moment—just a fragment of a second—the air seems to shimmer. Ancient magic, older than civilization itself, rises to meet me. And something else awakens. Something inside me that has been sleeping since birth.

Something dangerous.

The woods go silent around me, and I realize with a shock of primal recognition that something ancient just noticed my presence.

Something is hunting the hunter now.

And it's coming.