Moombound

Episode four

Lena – Interlude: Ghosts Don’t Die Quietly

The smell hit her first.

Blood, fresh and bitter, with something fouler underneath—musk, wet fur, raw instinct. Lena knelt in the leaves, fingers brushing a red-smeared branch. Still tacky. Not an hour old.

He’s changing faster than I expected.

She stood slowly, scanning the woods. The claw marks in the tree trunk were unmistakable. Four slashes. Deep. Deliberate.

Not a warning.

A signature.

Her hand tightened around the spear’s shaft.

She should’ve killed him three days ago, when the Raven Hollow sheriff had slipped her the coroner’s report in exchange for silence. A local woman, found mauled in the woods. No animals in the region are large enough to do that kind of damage. No tracks, except a barefoot trail leading east.

She’d known it before she saw the prints. Moonbound.

The moment she heard his name—Kael Morgan—her blood had turned to ice.

She remembered the boy. Quiet. Withdrawn. Eyes too old for his face.

He’d lived across the ridge, back when her sister was still alive.

Lena looked up. The moon stared back, cold and full. Her breath fogged in the air.

She hated the silence most of all. The woods always quieted before a kill.

Fifteen minutes later, she found him.

Naked. Blood on his hands. Dazed, like someone waking from a nightmare halfway through. His eyes were green, but wrong. Rimmed in gold. Almost glowing.

He doesn’t know what he’s done. That’s the worst part.

He looked at her like a man expecting a bullet.

But she hesitated.

Not because she doubted what he was. But because he looked like her sister did. The night before, she turned.

Kael was still in there. For now.

That was the problem.

Monsters were easier to kill when they didn’t cry afterward.

She tossed him the clothes and watched him dress. He was bigger than she remembered, lean but strong, with tension in his shoulders like he expected to be attacked from all sides.

Smart.

“Who are you really?” he asked.

Lena didn’t lie. Not about this.

“I’m a hunter,” she said. “For your kind.”

The moment she said it, she felt the echo of a different night—snow on the ground, a scream in the dark, and her sister’s body broken under the weight of something too fast to see. The red in the snow. The teeth.

Her sister had turned. Slowly, painfully. She’d begged for help. Lena had refused to believe it until it was too late.

She’d buried her sister with her own hands. Burned the body, salted the grave.

She had never told anyone.

Lena glanced back at Kael. Blood under his fingernails. Pain behind his eyes. The curse was bleeding through his skin like oil.

He didn’t deserve mercy.

But he might deserve a choice.

So she gave him one.

⸻

Chapter Four – Lena: Fire and Salt

You don’t survive in this job by hesitating.

Lena Voss had been hunting werewolves since she was nineteen. She’d held her sister’s body in the snow the year before that, staring down into a face that wasn’t human anymore. After that night, she learned quickly: where to aim, what silver does to cursed flesh, what salt in a wound can force out.

She’d learned how to kill, and how to know when killing was mercy.

She had never broken that rule.

Until now.

⸻

Kael Morgan.

The name had been a ghost from her past until three days ago. Now, it was stamped across every case file she carried.

Lena sat on the roof of a half-collapsed mill on the outskirts of Raven Hollow, peering through binoculars at the town’s south woods. The clearing where she’d found him wasn’t visible from here, but she could smell the rot in the air, carried on the wind.

The blood trail was getting longer.

She’d tracked him across two counties. The first body was ruled “animal attack.” The second was found in a drainage ditch, bones shattered. No bite marks that time. Just trauma. Blunt force, maybe claws.

Kael didn’t remember either.

That was what scared her the most. Not the deaths. Not the turning.

The forgetting.

Some Moonbound remembered everything—the shift, the hunt, the kill. They wore it like armor. But the ones who didn’t… they were dangerous in a different way. Still clinging to their humanity. Still trying to make sense of the monster living under their skin.

Lena had hoped he was long dead. She remembered him as a quiet kid who used to sit under a sycamore near the creek, sketching things with chalk. Wolves. Trees. Sometimes women with wings.

She remembered her sister walking past him one summer—how he’d looked up at them both and smiled, like he wanted to say something but didn’t know how.

He’d been cursed even then.

And now here he was. Grown. Strong. Full of the same sickness that had taken her sister.

Except he hadn’t turned fully. Not yet.

⸻

Lena lowered the binoculars and checked her pack. Silver rounds. Salt laced with wolfsbane. The collapsible spear. Vials of blessed water. She’d run every hunt by the book since she joined the Order.

But Kael wasn’t in her book.

And the Order didn’t know she was here.

She’d lied. Said she was following a cold lead in Montana. She couldn’t trust the others to make the call.

If they found him, they’d put him down. No hesitation. No question.

She didn’t know why she hadn’t done it herself.

It wasn’t weakness. She’d killed people she’d liked before. Turned or not, the rules were clear: if they posed a threat to the living, they died.

But something in Kael’s eyes unsettled her.

Not guilt. Not innocence.

Recognition.

Like he saw the thing inside her too.

⸻

That night, she found him in the clearing again. Fresh out of a shift, confused, naked, still half-mad with the wildness. He looked like he’d come out of a war zone.

He didn’t even know how dangerous he was.

Lena should have run him through with the spear. Quick. Painless.

Instead, she threw him clothes. Watched him dress.

Talked to him.

You’re not the first. You won’t be the last.

When he asked her why she hadn’t killed him, she didn’t answer.

Because the truth was too ugly to say out loud.

He reminded her of her sister. Of the girl she couldn’t save.

Kael still had a chance. A narrow, bloody, knife’s-edge chance.

She wasn’t sure yet if she wanted to give it to him.

But she couldn’t kill him.

Not tonight.

⸻

As they walked back toward the town’s edge, Lena kept her hand on her spear. Just in case.

He asked questions. She gave short answers. Enough to keep him from panicking, not enough to give him hope.

She’d seen what hope did to people like him. It made them hesitate when they should run. Or fight. Or kill.

But deep down, where she didn’t say things out loud—not even to herself—Lena wondered:

If Kael could hold on to his humanity, even a little…

Could she?