THE SILVER MOON SAGA

The Parking Garage

The cold air hit Allison's face like a slap, metallic and sharp, carrying the ghost of exhaust fumes and damp concrete. She stepped out of the elevator and left her twelve-hundred-dollar custom-made heels lying on the floor where she'd kicked them off. The stained cement was rough against her bare feet, grounding her in a way the champagne-soaked Rainbow Room had not.

The pendant was still burning against her chest.

She pressed her hand to it through the silk of her gown. The heat was almost unbearable now, a small sun nestled between her collarbones, pulsing with its own quiet rhythm. She'd worn this tooth every day since her father had fastened it around her neck in the wreckage of a Long Island substation, his hands shaking, his voice broken. She'd been five years old. She hadn't understood what had happened—only that her mother was gone, and this tooth was all that remained.

Never let anyone see it glow. Her mother's voice, surfacing from fifteen years of buried memory. Promise me, Allison. Promise me.

She'd kept that promise for fifteen years. Through boarding school and business school and the slow climb up the corporate ladder. Through her mother's funeral and her father's remarriage and every anniversary of the blackout that had killed Celeste Morrow and thirty-seven others in a substation explosion the papers had called a tragic accident. The tooth had never glowed. It had never done anything except sit cold and inert against her skin.

Until tonight.

She stopped beside a concrete pillar and leaned against it, trying to catch her breath. The parking garage was quiet—the kind of deep, echoing quiet that came after midnight, when even the city's ceaseless hum seemed to pause for breath. Most of the gala guests had parked on the upper levels. Down here, on the twenty-third floor below ground, she was alone.

Or so she thought.

Her engagement ring caught on her swollen knuckle as she tried to steady herself. She looked down at it—a four-carat diamond set in platinum that Roger had presented on one knee at the Central Park Boathouse, with a speech about destiny and partnership and building a future together. She'd said yes because it was expected. Because their families had been planning the merger for years. Because she'd convinced herself that comfortable partnership was the same thing as love.

She twisted the ring. It wouldn't budge. She twisted harder. Skin tore. Blood welled up, dark in the fluorescent light.

The pendant screamed.

Not audibly—there was no sound. But the heat that erupted from it was so sudden, so violent, that Allison gasped and stumbled against the pillar. The tooth was blazing now, its silver light visible even through the silk of her gown, pulsing in rhythm with her racing heart. The blood on her fingers was sizzling where it touched the pendant, turning from red to something else. Something that glowed.

"What the—"

"Need a hand?"

The voice seeped from the shadows—male, low, with an edge like velvet over gravel. Allison's head snapped up. She reached instinctively for the pepper spray in her clutch, a Manhattan habit she'd never broken, and saw eyes glowing faintly green in the darkness between two parked SUVs.

The glow vanished between one blink and the next, leaving only a man in a charcoal suit. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with silver threading through his dark hair at the temples. Moonstone cufflinks glinted at his wrists. His face was handsome in a way that felt dangerous—sharp cheekbones, a jaw that had been broken and healed crooked, eyes that held the cold assessment of someone who had been alive long enough to stop pretending he was human.

"I didn't hear you approach." Allison's voice was steady, despite everything. The boardroom had trained her well. Fear was a luxury she couldn't afford to show—not to rivals, not to competitors, not to strange men in underground parking garages.

"You weren't supposed to." He extended a card between two fingers. Pale fingers. Elegant. The card stock was cream-colored, heavy, with embossed text that caught the dim fluorescent light. "Kane Wolfe. Wolfe Industries."

The name hit her like a physical blow. Wolfe Industries. The energy conglomerate that had swallowed New York's power grid three months ago in a deal so complex that half of Wall Street still didn't understand how it had happened. The company that had been quietly buying up competitors across the Eastern Seaboard for decades, building an empire that spanned oil and gas and renewable energy with equal, ruthless efficiency. The name that her father whispered with a mixture of awe and fear, as if speaking it too loudly might summon its owner.

And its owner was standing in her parking garage at midnight, looking at her like she was something he'd been searching for.

"I know who you are." She didn't take the card. "Wall Street Journal. Forbes. That profile in Bloomberg last spring that made you look like some kind of corporate mystic. You're the wolf of Wall Street, apparently."

"Among other things." His smile didn't reach his eyes. Those eyes stayed fixed on her—specifically, on the pendant glowing at her throat. "That's an interesting piece of jewelry you're wearing, Miss Morrow. A family heirloom, I assume?"

"That's none of your business."

"On the contrary. It's very much my business." He took a step closer, and she caught his scent—cedar and snow, incongruous in the stale parking garage air. "Your mother gave you that pendant. Celeste Morrow. She died fifteen years ago in what the papers called a tragic accident—a substation explosion during the blackout that killed thirty-seven people. But we both know that's not what really happened, don't we?"

Allison's blood ran cold. "How do you know about my mother?"

"I know a great many things." He took another step closer. "I know that your father's ocean-energy project is on the verge of collapse because the banks are nervous and the regulators are circling. I know that your ex-fiancé's family has been quietly lobbying against the environmental approvals for months. And I know that the pendant you're wearing has just activated for the first time in fifteen years, which means you're now visible to forces you don't understand and can't fight alone."

The pendant pulsed against her chest, as if in confirmation.

"What kind of forces?"

"The kind that walk on two legs." His green eyes held hers, and for a moment, she could have sworn she saw something ancient moving behind them—something patient and predatory and utterly inhuman. "I'm offering eight billion dollars for your father's project. And my protection. You're going to need both."

"I don't need protection from—"

The howl cut through her words like a blade.

It came from somewhere above them—the street level, maybe, or the lower floors of the parking structure. It was not the sound of any dog. It rolled through the concrete canyons with ancient, marrow-deep resonance, something that predated cities and asphalt. Something that made the primitive part of Allison's brain scream run even as her feet rooted themselves to the ground.

Kane's expression didn't change, but his posture shifted subtly—a predator recognizing the presence of other predators. "They're here. We need to move. Now."

"Who's here? What are—"

He grabbed her arm. His grip was iron, brooking no argument, and Allison found herself being pulled toward a black sedan parked in the shadows. The pendant was blazing against her chest, its light now visible through the silk, casting silver shadows on the concrete walls. She could feel it responding to something—to the howl, to the presence she could sense but not see.

"What are they?" She was running now, her bare feet slapping against the cement, the train of her twelve-thousand-dollar dress trailing behind her like a surrender flag.

"Eclipse-Moon pack. Your mother's enemies." He wrenched open the car door. "Your enemies, now that the pendant has activated. Get in."

"Eclipse-Moon? What does that—"

The windshield exploded.

A shape crashed onto the hood of the sedan—a wolf the size of a small horse, its fur the color of oxidized copper, its eyes burning with malevolent intelligence. It bared teeth that were far too large for any natural predator. Its claws, sunk into the metal of the hood, sparked where they touched.

And Allison's world, already tilting, began to spin.