The Forest of Secrets
538 Words
The blood had been cleaned.
The girl’s body buried.
But the vision still haunted MaLeeka.
She hadn’t told Seth everything—not about the figure in the flames, not about the voice that had echoed in her skull whispering words she wasn’t meant to know. It wasn’t just a rival Alpha coming.
It was something older. Something nameless.
Something that had once been worshiped.
And might now be reborn.
⸻
She left at dawn.
Before the pack stirred. Before Seth could argue.
She shifted at the edge of the territory, her wolf stretching out beneath her skin, fur sleek and midnight-dark. The forest greeted her with silence, but she felt the eyes. The watchers. The ones who remembered who she was before the Shadowfang claimed her.
The witches of the deep wood.
They lived between life and lore, hidden in the old places where the veil was thin and memory still burned like fire.
It was there she ran.
Through brambles, across black streams, past crumbling stones etched with the old runes.
Until she reached the circle.
Twelve trees bent inward, their trunks twisted, their leaves bone-white. In the center stood a stone table, carved with ancient markings. Runes that pulsed faintly when she approached.
She shifted back into human form, sweat glistening on her skin, the chill of the glade wrapping around her naked body like a warning.
Then—voices.
Soft and layered.
“You return at last.”
Three women stepped from the trees, cloaked in shadow and silver. Their eyes glowed the way stars do before they burn out.
One stepped forward, the eldest. “You were never meant to survive that night, child. And yet you did. Fire-wreathed. Blood-marked. You should have died. But the moon chose otherwise.”
MaLeeka swallowed. “Tell me who he is.”
“The one in the flames?” the second witch whispered. “The one hunting your bond?”
She nodded.
“He is the Firstborn,” said the third, voice low. “A wolf who shed his name in exchange for immortality. He was banished. Broken. But his mate… she betrayed him.”
“The Luna of ash,” the eldest continued. “Your ancestor.”
MaLeeka’s blood turned to ice.
“His soul is tethered,” they said in unison, “to the blood of her line. And you, MaLeeka, are the last of it.”
⸻
Meanwhile, back in the packhouse, Seth paced the war room.
“She left without a word?” one of his lieutenants asked.
He growled. “She went to the forest. To the witches.”
“You let her go alone?”
“I didn’t let her do anything,” Seth snapped. “She’s not mine to control.”
But the truth gnawed at him.
He felt it—the shift. The bond stretching thin. Something pressing against it from the outside.
Something old.
When the room cleared, he closed his eyes and reached for her through the bond.
Come back to me, he whispered.
And miles away, standing in the center of that sacred grove, MaLeeka heard him.
Her lips parted.
Her hand clutched her chest.
And for the first time, she whispered something back.
I’m trying.
- Writer
