His Forgotten Silver Luna

Chapter 2

They left her at the tree line.

Two enforcers, neither of whom would meet her eyes, set her on her feet at the eastern boundary marker a carved post driven into the earth where pack land ended and wild forest began. One of them placed a small canvas bag at her feet without speaking. Clothes. Matches. Some dried food wrapped in brown paper.

Exile provisions. Prepared in advance.

They left without looking back.

Nova stood in the dark in her ivory dress and listened to the sound of boots through grass fading until there was nothing except the forest and the wind and the distant call of an owl somewhere deep in the timber.

The bond's severance was doing something to her body.

She'd known, academically, what a rejected bond felt like. Every wolf knew the stories the cold, the physical deterioration, the way the body turned against itself when the thing it had been designed to complete was ripped away. She'd read the medical texts in the pack hall, filed between herb catalogs and wound-treatment guides, and absorbed the information the way she absorbed most things: quietly, methodically, storing it away.

Reading about it and living it were entirely different categories of experience.

The cold had settled into her chest like water filling a space that used to hold something warm. Each breath required more effort than the last. Her wolf that other presence inside her, the instinctive creature that shared her body and usually felt like a second heartbeat had gone somewhere very far away and quiet, the way animals went quiet when they were badly hurt.

She needed to move. She knew that. Standing still at the boundary in the dark in a dress with no coat in the Montana autumn was a fast way to add hypothermia to her list of immediate problems.

She picked up the canvas bag. She changed in the dark behind the boundary marker trading ivory for a plain grey shirt and trousers, folding the dress carefully and placing it at the base of the post. She didn't know why she folded it. Some instinct toward order when everything else was chaos.

She laced up the boots they'd included her size, which meant someone had thought about this carefully, which meant this had been planned for longer than tonight and she stood up and looked at the forest.

Sixty miles of wilderness going north. The nearest human town was twenty miles east. She had no money, no identification, no phone.

She had matches and dried food and the particular stubbornness that had kept her upright in the Ironclad Pack for twenty-two years as an omega and an outsider and a girl with the wrong last name and the wrong blood.

She picked a direction and walked.

She made it four miles before her legs stopped cooperating.

The bond deterioration was accelerating she could feel it clinically even as it happened to her, the detached part of her brain cataloguing symptoms with the same methodical calm she used in the medical hall. Core temperature dropping. Coordination degrading. The pain in her chest, which had started as cold absence, had migrated into something that felt genuinely physical, a deep ache behind her sternum as though something structural had been removed.

She sat down against the base of a pine tree and pressed her back into the bark and looked up through the branches at the Montana sky. Stars, and a three-quarter moon, and the particular clarity of cold high-altitude air that made everything look closer than it was.

Don't, she told herself. Don't do this here. Not here, not alone, not in the dark.

But she was very tired suddenly.

And the cold was becoming comfortable in the specific way that hypothermia became comfortable, the edges softening, the urgency fading, and she knew enough medicine to know that was dangerous but the knowledge felt very far away.

She closed her eyes. Just for a moment. Just to rest.

"Nova."

The voice came from somewhere above her. Close. She forced her eyes open.

Remy was crouched in front of her, both hands on her face, his expression doing something she had never seen it do before something stripped of the humour, raw and frightened, just fear without anything over it.

"Hey. Hey, look at me. Stay with me."

"Remy." Her voice came out wrong. Thin.

"I know. I know." He pulled her upright, got her arm over his shoulders, took her weight without comment. He was warm wolf-warm, running several degrees higher than human and she turned toward it instinctively the way a plant turned toward light.

"You followed me," she said.

"Obviously."

"You'll be exiled."

"Then I'll be exiled." His voice was flat and final, the tone that meant the subject was closed and had always been closed and she could save her breath. "Can you walk?"

"I think so."

"Then walk. One foot. Then the other. We're going to get you through this."

"The deterioration"

"I know about the deterioration. I also know you're the strongest person I've ever met and the Moon Goddess doesn't give silver to someone she intends to let die in a forest." He kept moving as he spoke, half-carrying her through the trees, navigating the dark with his wolf-senses where her own had gone dim and unreliable.

She processed what he'd said.

"Silver?" she murmured.

"Old word. Old blood. Don't worry about it now."

She didn't have the energy to press him. She focused on her feet instead one, then the other, the pine needle floor, the dark, Remy's steady warmth at her side.

Behind her, somewhere in the forest, a wolf howled.

She didn't look back.