The Rouges Moon

Chapter 2

The barn smelled like old hay and older blood, and I woke up in it not entirely sure, I'd earned the right to wake up at all.

For a moment I just lay there on the dirt floor, staring at slats of grey morning light cutting through the roof boards, and did the thing I'd apparently already learned to do without deciding to: I catalogued myself. Ribs sore but not broken.

A split lip. The ache in my jaw where that guard had caught me square on, already fading faster than it should have, faster than any injury of mine had ever healed when I was Wren.

Vera Sharp healed like something that wasn't quite human. I filed that away with everything else I didn't understand yet.

A boy was watching me from across the barn. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, all sharp elbows and suspicious eyes, sitting on an overturned crate with a knife loose in his hand like he wasn't sure yet whether he'd need it.

"You're not dead," he said, like it personally offended him.

"Working on it," I muttered, and pushed myself upright, and something in his face cracked open at the sound of my voice, some careful wall coming down half an inch.

"You sound different." He said it slowly, testing the words. "You sound like her again. Before."

Before what, I wanted to ask. Before I woke up drowning in a river with someone else's scars. But some instinct, some cold practical thing that had apparently moved into my chest alongside everything else, told me to be careful here.

This boy knew Vera Sharp. Whatever I said next was going to either confirm I was her or give me away as someone wearing her skin.

"Before I got tired of everyone deciding what I sound like," I said instead, and watched him relax, just slightly, and hated a little bit how easy the lie came.

His name was Callum. He was my brother, apparently, or Vera's brother, which by every law of blood and biology that mattered now amounted to the same thing.

He told me, in the clipped, careful way of someone who'd had to grow up faster than any kid should, that I'd been arrested nine days ago for a murder everyone in three villages knew I hadn't committed, that my execution had been set for dawn three days from now because the local warlord wanted an example made regardless of guilt, and that he'd bribed a guard with money we didn't have to get me out before they could drag me back to the cells.

"They'll come looking," he said. "We need to move before nightfall."

I sat with that a moment. Three days from a death sentence, in a body that wasn't mine, with a brother who wasn't mine either but who'd apparently spent nine days and every coin he owned trying to save a sister he thought I was.

I thought of Rhys's back turned toward that window. I thought about how easily he'd let seven months of marriage and a pup in my belly get erased by a witch's lie, without so much as looking at me while he did it.

Callum had spent every coin he had on a sister he wasn't even sure was innocent.

"Okay," I said, and meant it in a way I hadn't meant anything since I'd woken up choking on river water. "Let's move."

We didn't get far before I understood exactly how much trouble Vera Sharp had actually been in.

The warlord who'd sentenced her, a broad, scarred man named Boras Kade who ran three border villages through fear and a small standing militia, had put a bounty on her that seemed disproportionate to one dead merchant, however politically inconvenient that merchant's death had apparently been.

Every rogue and hired blade within a day's ride knew her face. My face now. Which meant every rogue and hired blade within a day's ride was, as of approximately three hours after we left the barn, actively hunting me.

I found out the hard way, in a market square, when a woman with a crossbow strapped across her back looked at me for one beat too long and then reached slowly for it.

"Run," I told Callum, and he opened his mouth to argue, and I said it again, sharper, in a voice that apparently still carried enough of Luna's authority to make a scared teenage boy actually listen to me. "Run. I'll find you."

He ran. The crossbow woman did not.

What happened next is not something I'm proud of, exactly, though I've stopped pretending I regret it either.

She was fast and she was good and she nearly put a bolt through my throat in the first ten seconds, and somewhere in the chaos of dodging and ducking through market stalls, something in me that wasn't quite me and wasn't quite Vera either simply took over.

My body moved like it had done this a hundred times, because apparently it had, and by the time it was finished the crossbow woman was on the ground with a dislocated shoulder and I was standing over her, breathing hard, with her own blade at her throat and absolutely no memory of deciding to pick it up.

I could have killed her. Some part of Vera Sharp's instinct, still humming under my skin, wanted to. It would have been simpler. Fewer people hunting me tomorrow.

I thought about Rhys ordering my death without turning around, and I thought, with sudden and total clarity, that I did not want to become someone who could end a life that easily and feel nothing about it afterward.

"Tell Kade his bounty just got more expensive," I told her instead, and let her go, and watched her scramble backward through the dirt like I might change my mind.

I found Callum two streets over, pale and shaking, and he looked at me like he'd never quite seen me before, which was, I supposed, more accurate than he knew.

We left the territory that night, walking until our legs gave out and then walking further, and somewhere in the dark, exhausted past the point of fear, Callum finally asked, I could tell had been sitting behind his teeth since the barn.

"Where do we go? Kade's militia has friends in every pack territory for two hundred miles."

I thought about it. I thought about the seven years sitting ahead of me like a road I hadn't chosen but now had to walk anyway, and about the one destination on that road I already knew, with terrible certainty, that I was eventually going to reach.

"North," I said. "There's a territory up there. Ashgrave land. Big enough that a warlord's bounty won't mean much once we're past the border, and far enough that nobody there has ever heard the name Vera Sharp."

I didn't tell him the rest of it. That I intended to spend every one of the next seven years turning that name into someone strong enough to survive walking back into Ashgrave territory on purpose.

That somewhere inside that pack was a man who was going to spend the next seven years having no idea that the wife he'd ordered drowned in a river was quietly, patiently, learning exactly how to become unkillable in the meantime.

Callum just nodded, too tired to argue, and fell into step beside me, and for the first time since I'd woken up gasping in cold water wearing someone else's hands, I let myself feel something that wasn't grief or fury.

It felt almost like having a reason to keep walking.

We didn't talk much after that. The road north was long and the night was colder than it had any right to be for the season, and somewhere around the third hour Callum's steps started dragging in a way that told me he was running on nothing but stubbornness and fear.

"We can stop," I said. "For an hour. You need to sleep."

"You don't."

It wasn't a question. I realized, a beat too late, that he'd noticed. Vera Sharp's body didn't seem to need rest the way a normal person's did, not the way mine used to when I was still soft and human and married to a man who called me his moon.

I filed that away too, one more piece of a puzzle I hadn't asked to be handed.

"I'll keep watch," I said instead, which was true enough not to feel like a lie.

He curled up under a scrub of trees a little ways off the road, and I sat with my back against a boulder and watched the sky for any sign of Kade's men, and let myself, finally, think about everything I'd been too busy running to feel.

Rhys's face when he finally turned around. Not fury. Not grief. Just that terrible hollow blankness, like grief for me had already happened somewhere I hadn't been invited to witness it, and all that was left afterward was the paperwork of getting rid of the body.

I wondered, sitting there in the cold with a stranger's scars on my arms and a stolen name in my mouth, whether the version of him I was going to meet in seven years would look at me the same way. Whether whatever poison Marisol Thorne had been feeding him had already started, this early, this many years before I died the first time.

Whether there was a version of this story where I got close enough to him to find out the truth before I let myself want anything from him at all.

I decided, watching Callum's breathing even out into real sleep a few feet away, that it didn't matter yet. Seven years was a long time. I had a body that healed faster than it should, instincts I hadn't earned and didn't fully trust, and a boy asleep under a tree who thought I was his sister and had bankrupted himself trying to save my life.

That was enough to start with.

Somewhere north, past the border of a territory I hadn't seen yet, Ashgrave Pack was going about its evening the way it always did, entirely unaware that the woman its future Alpha would one day murder was already walking toward it, seven years early, wearing someone else's face and carrying every single thing he'd taken from her the first time.

I closed my eyes for the first time since the river, and for once, I didn't dream of drowning.

I dreamed of the exact moment I was going to make him look at me again.