Rejected by the Moon, Claimed by Night

The Pack Hunt

The pack horn tore through the morning like a wound opening in the air, and my stomach dropped. I knew it before the echoes faded, that the real prey was me.

Shouts rolled through the trees. Boots crushed frost. Hounds barked at the border, their frenzy ripping through the silence as they caught my trail. Alfred had sent out a full sweep under the excuse of cleansing the forest borders, but fear clung to the wind so thick I could almost taste it.

“Stay down,” I whispered, pressing myself against the frozen bark of a massive pine tree as the first hunters crashed through the brush nearby.

Alfred was losing his grip. Worse, he knew it. Every order he barked sounded sharper than the last, frantic and careless, pushing his wolves deeper into blind thickets where the land could turn on them in a heartbeat. He wanted to look dominant. Powerful. Untouchable. Instead, he was leading his own pack straight into disaster.

A tracking hound burst through the undergrowth to my left, yellow teeth flashing as it locked onto my scent.

I barely had time to inhale before the air changed.

A dark wave of power moved through the treeline, silent and heavy, and the hound froze mid-lunge. From the darkness beneath the canopy, Lucien stepped forward like a shadow given shape. Broad shoulders. Deadly calm. No shift, no wasted movement. He seized the hound by its leather collar and hurled it back into the fog with a low growl that vibrated through the clearing and made the nearby hunters stop cold.

He stayed hidden in plain sight, close enough to protect me, careful enough not to look gentle.

“Your former alpha is completely blind with rage,” Lucien murmured, silver-gray eyes locking onto mine with hard, guarded focus. “He is running his wolves straight into a trap of his own making.”

“He’s a polished coward trying to play war leader,” I snapped, fury flashing hot through my chest. “He wants to drag me back in chains before the council realizes his own records are a lie.”

“Then let him run,” Lucien replied, a dark edge touching his scarred mouth. “But keep your head down. The wilderness does not distinguish between a hunter and the hunted.”

I did keep low. I had no choice.

The forest exploded into motion as Alfred’s main tracking team overshot our position, boots trampling brittle brush, voices overlapping in confusion. They were rushing too hard, too blind, too eager to prove they could corner me before the truth caught up to them.

Then a rogue wolf burst from a ravine.

It hit the edge of the clearing like a flash of black fur and teeth, lunging straight for Alfred’s exposed side.

Alfred stumbled so badly I almost laughed. He threw himself backward into the dirt, swinging his weapon with wild, useless force instead of standing his ground. For a supposed alpha, he looked pathetic. Every second of his panic shoved his front line into danger.

I moved before I could think.

Lucien had drilled speed into my muscles during midnight training, and my body obeyed on instinct. I lunged, snatched up a fallen branch, and drove it into the rogue’s ribcage with all the strength I had.

The beast shrieked and turned on me.

“Move,” Lucien said.

A sharp c***k split the air.

Lucien stepped out of the shadows, caught the rogue by the neck, and crushed it with an indifferent ease that made the whole clearing seem to hold its breath. The body dropped at his feet.

The tracking team screamed in confusion. Shots cracked blind through the fog. Lucien grabbed my wrist and dragged me back into the deeper trees before anyone could get a clean look at us.

Behind us, Alfred scrabbled upright in the dirt. His face had gone pale and ugly with humiliation. His own wolves had seen him fall. They’d seen him crawl, and seen him fail.

He didn’t even realize who had saved him.

He just roared for retreat, his voice breaking under its own weakness, and fled toward the safety of the main pack hall like the coward he was.

The forest went still again.

Only pine, blood, rust, and burnt powder remained.

I stepped out from the canopy, breathing hard, the last of the adrenaline shaking through my limbs. My anger didn’t fade. It sharpened. I walked back to where Alfred had fallen, my eyes scanning the disturbed earth until something bright caught the weak light.

I knelt and picked it up.

It was a heavy silver hunting weapon. Alfred’s personal alpha blade.

The moment my fingers closed around the hilt, a cold shiver raced down my spine. I lifted it higher, and my breath caught.

The silver was corroded. Stained. Covered in a dark, smoking black residue that seemed to pulse under the light.

It was the same violent pitch-black magic waking inside my own veins.