My Body Will Walk Through the Doors

I stood behind Kaelen as he kicked open my cabin door on the northern border. The living never noticed when a ghost followed them inside. "See?" He waved Elara in and kept an arm around her shoulders. "A jealous tantrum. She abandoned her post." Cold had settled into the cabin. Ash filled the hearth, and winter light came through gaps in the shutters. Dust lay over the potion shelves and the worn desk where I had spent nights charting every ward around Black Moon territory. Kaelen reached for the shelf beside the hearth, then stopped. The dark bottle of calming draught was gone. I had always left one there after a border inspection, ready for the first warning tremor in his hands. He used to drink it before the beast inside him could take hold. He closed his empty fingers. "She took everything. Petty to the end." Elara crossed the room in spotless white furs and picked up a sheet of parchment from the floor. "Don't be so harsh, Kaelen. Her letter says she felt unappreciated. She says the burden of her bloodline was too much to bear alone." She had written the letter. For months, she had fed him the same story: Serena was unstable, Serena resented the pack, Serena would run as soon as duty became inconvenient. Now she read the lie back to him in my cabin, and he never asked why the handwriting looked unfamiliar. While he listened, she reached across my desk and slipped a roll of ancestral warding diagrams into her sleeve. Generations of my bloodline had added to those pages. They marked every barrier that kept the blizzards and rogues beyond our borders. "Perhaps her notes can help us strengthen the wards," she said. "A true Luna should think of the pack." Kaelen's face softened. "You always do. Serena thought only of herself." The door opened behind them. Marcus, captain of the border patrol, stood in the snow with his jaw set. "Alpha, we detected dark magic in the Serpent's Ravine, close to where the blizzard struck." He held out a gloved palm. A scrap of dark blue cloth lay across it, stiff with a black frozen stain. "We found this." "A rogue caught in the storm." Kaelen barely glanced at it. "The ceremony comes first." He took the cloth. His thumb passed over the silver stitching along one torn edge. It came from the protection talisman I had spent three sleepless nights making for him, and he had watched me sew the same pattern into it. He tossed it into the hearth. "Burn the rest of the trash you find," he told Marcus. "Leave her out there." The silver thread curled and blackened. The cabin disappeared behind another memory: claws against my back, ice against my teeth, packed earth bearing down on my chest. I was back under the snow.