The Rise Of The Spectacular Luna

Chapter 6: Blood Moon Rising

The hours drag by with agonizing slowness after Margaret finally retreats to her bedroom, leaving Ella alone with her racing thoughts and the silver threads that continue to gleam in her hair like captured moonbeams. Her adoptive mother's final words echo in her mind—"Everything will be okay, sweetheart. I promise you, everything will be okay"—but they feel hollow, meaningless when weighed against the magnitude of secrets that continue to pile up around her like storm clouds.

How can everything be okay when she doesn't even know what she is?

Ella paces her room like a caged animal, her bare feet silent against the hardwood floor. The restless energy that's been building inside her all day has reached a fever pitch, making it impossible to sit still, impossible to think clearly. Every few minutes, she catches sight of herself in the mirror above her dresser, and each time, the silver threads seem to have multiplied, spreading through her hair like veins of liquid starlight and stopped at a particular section making her hair a mixture of ebony black and silver strands.

And God it was beautiful.

The transformation is accelerating, just as her parents had whispered it would, and she's powerless to stop it or even understand what it means.

She tries reading, tries listening to music, tries every relaxation technique she learned in her high school psychology class, but nothing works. The silver in her hair pulses with its own rhythm, matching the strange new hunger that gnaws at her from within. It's not a hunger for food—she discovered that much at dinner—but something deeper, more primal. Something that makes her teeth ache and her fingernails feel too short, too blunt for purposes she can't name.

Outside her window, the moon hangs heavy and full in the October sky, but there's something different about its light tonight. Something darker, more intense, that makes her skin prickle with anticipation. She doesn't know that astronomers would call it a blood moon, doesn't know that the Earth's shadow is slowly creeping across the lunar surface, transforming the silver light into something deeper, more dangerous.

All she knows is that the moonlight feels different on her skin—warmer, more alive, calling to something deep inside her that she's only just beginning to recognize.

Around two in the morning, exhaustion finally begins to weigh down her eyelids. The silver threads in her hair have grown so bright they cast their own faint luminescence across her pillow, and the last thing she sees before sleep claims her is the way they seem to pulse in rhythm with her heartbeat, like a second circulatory system made of light.

Her dreams, when they come, are unlike anything she's experienced before.

She's running through the forest that's haunted her sleep for weeks, but this time she's not afraid. This time, she belongs here. Her feet—no, paws—pound against the forest floor with perfect rhythm, carrying her deeper into the wilderness with a speed and grace that feels as natural as breathing. The scents of the night forest flood her enhanced senses: moss and decomposing leaves, the musk of small creatures hiding in the underbrush, the metallic tang of something that might be blood.

She's hunting.

The realization should terrify her, but instead, it fills her with a wild joy that makes her want to throw back her head and howl at the blood-red moon hanging above the canopy. She can smell her prey ahead—something warm and alive and perfectly unaware of the predator tracking its every movement through the darkness.

When she wakes, it's to the sensation of cold morning air against naked skin.

Ella's eyes snap open to find herself lying on a bed of fallen leaves in a small clearing she doesn't recognize. Dawn is just beginning to break through the trees, painting the forest in shades of gold and amber that would be beautiful under any other circumstances. But right now, all she can focus on is the fact that she's completely naked, miles from home, with no memory of how she got here.

And she's covered in blood.

The crimson stains her hands, her arms, her chest—dried now in the cool morning air, but still distinctly metallic when she breathes in. It's not her blood; she knows that instinctively, can smell the difference between her own scent and whatever creature this came from. The knowledge should horrify her, should send her into hysterics, but instead, there's a part of her—a part that's growing stronger with each passing hour—that feels satisfied. Sated in a way she's never experienced before.

"Oh God," she whispers, her voice rough and strange in the morning quiet. "What did I do? What have I become?"

The forest offers no answers, only the gentle rustle of leaves in the autumn breeze and the distant call of birds beginning their morning songs. She forces herself to sit up, ignoring the way her muscles protest the movement, and tries to piece together how she ended up here.

The last thing she remembers clearly is falling asleep in her own bed, silver threads gleaming in her hair like captured starlight. Everything after that is a blur of sensations—running, hunting, the taste of copper on her tongue. The dreams and reality have blurred together so completely that she can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

Panic begins to set in as the full magnitude of her situation hits her. She's naked, covered in blood that isn't hers, in a forest she doesn't recognize, with no idea how she got here or what she might have done during the hours she can't remember. The rational part of her mind screams that she needs to get home, needs to shower off the evidence of whatever happened in the darkness, needs to pretend this never occurred.

But first, she needs to cover herself.

Moving with a grace that feels foreign yet natural, Ella gathers the largest leaves she can find, fashioning a makeshift covering that will at least preserve her modesty for the journey home. The forest seems to help her, offering up broad maple leaves and trailing vines that work together to create something resembling clothing. It's primitive and probably ridiculous-looking, but it's better than nothing.

The walk home is a nightmare of anxiety and confusion. Every step brings new evidence of her nocturnal journey—broken branches at exactly the height her shoulder would have hit them, disturbed earth that matches the size of her bare feet, a trail of scents that her enhanced senses can follow as easily as a map. She was here, in this forest, during the missing hours of the night. But she wasn't alone.

There are other scents woven through her trail—something wild and predatory that makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Something that smells like pack and territory and ancient power. Whatever happened to her in the darkness, whatever she became, she wasn't the only creature hunting in these woods.

The thought should terrify her, but instead, it feels like a homecoming she didn't know she was waiting for.

Relief floods through her when she finally sees the familiar white colonial through the trees. The house sits quiet and peaceful in the early morning light, with no signs that anyone has noticed her absence. Her parents' bedroom window is still dark, and the kitchen shows no evidence of early morning coffee preparation. She's managed to time her return perfectly, before anyone wakes up to discover her gone.

The back door is unlocked—it always is, a small-town luxury her parents have never quite given up despite David's occasional grumbling about city crime rates. Ella slips inside with a stealth that surprises her, her bare feet silent against the hardwood floors as she makes her way toward the stairs.

She's almost to the safety of her bedroom when a movement in her peripheral vision makes her freeze.

There, just visible through the kitchen window that faces the forest, is a silhouette standing among the trees. Tall and unnaturally still, it watches the house with an intensity that makes her skin crawl. She can't make out any details—the figure is too far away, too shrouded in shadow—but there's something undeniably predatory about its posture, something that speaks to the part of her that spent the night hunting in the darkness.

She blinks, and the figure vanishes, melting back into the forest as if it was never there at all.

But the scent lingers—wild and dangerous and achingly familiar, carried on in the morning breeze through the slightly open window. It's the same scent she followed in her trail home, the same presence that shared the forest with her during the lost hours of the night.

Whatever she's becoming, she's not alone in it.

Ella makes it to her bathroom just as her legs finally give out, collapsing onto the cold tile floor as the full weight of the morning's revelations crashes over her. The blood on her skin has dried to a rusty brown, and when she finally finds the courage to look in the mirror, she sees a stranger staring back at her.

The silver threads in her hair are brighter than ever, woven through the dark strands like veins of precious metal. Her eyes hold depths they didn't have yesterday, and there's something wild in her expression that speaks of forests and moonlight and the taste of blood on her tongue.

She turns on the bathtub faucet with shaking hands, watching as the clear water begins to fill the white porcelain basin. Soon, she'll wash away the evidence of whatever she became in the darkness. Soon, she'll try to pretend this never happened, that she's still the same ordinary girl who fell asleep in her own bed last night.

But as she sinks into the warm water and watches the blood spiral down the drain in pink ribbons, she knows that nothing will ever be the same again. The transformation that began with silver threads and supernatural healing has taken a darker turn, one that involves lost time and blood that isn't hers and mysterious figures watching from the shadows.

As the tears finally come—hot and desperate and full of fear for what she's becoming—Ella can only whisper the same question over and over: "What the hell is happening to my life?"