The First Howl

CHAPTER FIVE: THE HUNGER AWAKENS

The Moonbinders didn’t leave.

They said they would. They didn’t.

Instead, they set up camp in the woods just east of Elias’s cabin—out of sight but never far. Watching. Waiting. Like they were tracking a forest fire, measuring the wind, trying to guess which way the blaze would spread.

The tall one—Caleb—started leaving notes. Not threats, just… quiet warnings. Pamphlets slipped under his door. Words scribbled in precise block lettering:

“When the second moon rises, the body begins to remember.”

“Starving the wolf doesn’t kill it. It just makes it hungrier.”

Marcus, the short one, was less poetic. His only message came face-to-face one morning while Elias was chopping firewood.

“When the next turn hits—if you lose control—we put you down. Orders.”

Not a threat. A promise.

Elias didn’t reply. Just turned back to the wood and brought the axe down hard enough to split the log and the stump beneath it.

He tried pretending it wasn’t happening. If he didn’t feed the thing inside him, maybe it would starve. Maybe it was like an infection—if he just fought it long enough, it would pass.

It didn’t.

The changes came anyway. Slowly at first. He started hearing things—mice under the floorboards, the flutter of moth wings behind closed walls, a dog barking four roads away. Smells hit harder too. Rot. Blood. Cold sweat on strangers.

Then came the cravings. Salt. Raw meat. He woke up with torn blankets between his teeth, his jaw aching like he’d been grinding bone all night. His spine throbbed like it wanted to bend a different way.

By the next full moon, he tried chaining himself inside the root cellar. It didn’t help.

He tore the steel door off the hinges before midnight.

When he came to, he was curled naked in the snow, six miles from home, with claw marks on the trees and blood under his nails. He didn’t know whose.

Two days later, she found him.

Ava Rourke.

She stood by the riverbank like a ghost—barefoot, clothes ragged, hair wild with leaves. Her eyes gleamed gold in the sunlight. Elias froze.

“I thought you were dead,” he whispered.

“I was,” she said. “Then I wasn’t.”

A year ago, she’d vanished in the mountains. Rumors said bear attack. Closed-casket funeral. Only now, here she was, alive and calm, watching him like a wolf sizing up a rival.

“You shifted last week,” she said.

“You remember it?” Elias asked.

“Only the pieces. You will too. The first time always takes something out of you.”

Elias took a step back. “Are you like me?”

“I was the first,” she said. “You’re the second.”

He blinked. “In Graypine?”

“In this generation,” she corrected. “But you won’t be the last.”

He thought of his father’s journal—those scrawled warnings:

“If he turns, he must be hidden. Or killed.”

“How many of us are there?” he asked.

She shrugged. “More than there should be. Less than there will be. Whatever your family did to suppress the bloodline before—it didn’t hold. It’s waking up again.”

That night, Elias dreamed of fire.

A village burning. Wolves running on two legs. Screams echoing through the trees. And at the center of it all—a glowing ring of three interlocked crescents, seared into his hand like a brand.

He woke in a sweat, breath ragged. His fingernails were bloody. Beside the bed, clawed deep into the floorboards, was that same symbol from his dream.

Later, he showed it to Ava.

She paled. “The Nightmark,” she said. “It’s a sign. A pack is forming.”

“A pack?” Elias asked. “You mean… like a family?”

She shook her head.

“No. More like a warband.”

He frowned. “What for?”

Her eyes glinted again.

“To fight what’s coming.”