The Luna Price

Step forward, Luna. If the moon rejects you today, the rogue will take you tomorrow. The full moon burned cold above the ceremony circle. Two hundred wolves stood in a ring, eyes fixed on my bare feet against the stone. Pine sap and iron filled the air. Ritual blade. Execution blade. Same thing. I was eighteen. Today was supposed to end eighteen years of waiting. Eighteen years of being nothing. A boy in the front row tugged his mother’s sleeve. “Wolf-less freak,” he said. Loud enough for me to hear. His mother didn’t shush him. Alpha Kieran motioned for the shift test. I closed my eyes and reached for the wolf every child finds by ten. I found empty space where something should have been. Silver light flickered over my skin and died. Darius, the Alpha’s heir, smirked from the side. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His face said what the whole pack was thinking. Eighteen years of failed tests. Whispers. Being the daughter no one wanted. Today was the end. Either the moon gave me a wolf, or I was free of the humiliation. I opened my eyes. The crowd was already looking away. The moon had made its choice. I glanced at my father. Alpha Kieran’s face was stone—the face he used for executions and treaties. But his hands shook at his sides. A small tremor no one else noticed. Doubt planted itself in my chest. Did he know something I didn’t? Alpha Kieran lifted his voice for the whole pack. “The moon has spoken. Luna Blackwood is wolf-less.” A murmur ran through the crowd. Not surprise. Confirmation. “The rogues at our border grow bold,” he continued. “They demand payment for peace. Blood for blood.” Selene stepped forward, my stepmother, elegant and cruel. “We carried her eighteen years. A useless mouth still eats. Let her earn her keep.” “Earn how?” My voice barely came out. Alpha Kieran looked at me then. Really looked, for the first time in years. “The Luna Price. You will be given to the Rogue King. One girl for two hundred lives. The war ends tonight.” The pack cheered. Not loud. Steady. Approval. Relief. “Dad,” I whispered. “Please.” He stepped close—close enough only I could hear. “I’m sorry.” I stared at him. Sorry? After eighteen years of disgrace? After selling me like livestock? He turned before I could ask. Guards moved in. Iron chains closed around my wrists, cold and heavy. No one touched me gently. I wasn’t a daughter. I was currency. I should’ve felt pain. Rage. Fear. I felt nothing. That was worse. Eighteen years of trying to be enough, and in the end, they felt nothing losing me. The chains bit as they dragged me toward the border. Each step took me farther from the only home I’d known. My fingers found my mother’s moon pendant at my throat. Cold. It had been cold since she died when I was six. She was twenty-five. Too young. I remembered her voice during the fever that took her: _“Don’t cry, little wolf. Be strong.”_ She called me little wolf even though I never shifted. She believed I had one. Why did Dad hate me since birth? Why did Mom die so young? Why was I still breathing if I was only meant to be sold? The pendant stayed cold under my thumb. It hadn’t warmed since Mom died. Not once. The forest darkened as we neared the border. Trees bent and black. Air like blood and smoke. Rogue territory. No going back. A guard yanked the chain. “Keep moving, girl.” I stumbled but didn’t fall. Be strong, Mom said. So I walked. Eighteen years of being nothing. Maybe this was all I was meant for. A price paid. A war delayed. Border markers came into view: skulls on stakes. Beyond them, fires burned and voices shouted in a language I didn’t know. The Rogue King’s camp. No going back. The thought settled heavy and final. —still walking when the first rogue arrow took a guard in the throat and— “Attack!” Rogues poured from the trees with red eyes and blades. I thought I’d die wolf-less, on my knees in dirt, worthless to the end. But something else woke up. My bones cracked like ice under my skin. Moonlight burned me like acid even though the sky was clear. My veins turned silver, then black, spreading out from my chest. The air tasted like ozone and graveyard dirt. Blood filled my mouth—copper and ancient. Older than wolves. Guards dropped me. Rogues circled. I was going to die. Pain tore through my spine. I arched backward, screaming. The sound wasn’t human. It was older. Hungry. “I’m not wolf-less,” I realized as my spine broke and reformed. “I’m wolf-cursed.” Skin too tight. Nails became claws. Chains snapped without me touching them. I dropped to all fours as the change ripped through, but I didn’t see the full wolf yet. The world went white at the edges. When vision cleared, I was bigger than Alpha Kieran. Silver fur covered my shoulders. Shadows moved under it like living smoke. Eyes molten moonlight, too bright to look at. Rogues screamed and backed away. Alpha Kieran dropped to his knees. “Impossible. Luna wolves were buried a hundred years ago. Extinct.” He stared at me, then my face. Recognition hit like a blow. “You are my daughter,” he said. “My real daughter.” The words hit harder than the shift. He knew. For eighteen years he knew what I was and called me disgrace anyway. Called me useless. Sold me. Rogues charged him while he was still on his knees, shock freezing him. Instinct moved before thought. I lunged, claws out, and put myself between him and the blade. I didn’t mean to knock him out. My paw caught his jaw and he went down hard. Irony burned: saving the man who sold me from the people he sold me to. More rogues came. I fought on autopilot. Teeth and claws and shadow. They screamed and ran. When the last one fell, silence dropped over the clearing. Five questions burned: Why did he hide me? What is a Luna wolf? Why did Mom die at twenty-five? Why did the pendant go cold? What did I just become? The last rogue fell. My wolf howled once, loud enough to shake trees. Then silence. Pain exploded in my chest. The moon pendant cracked in half and fell to dirt. My wolf died protecting the pack that hated me. I felt it go. Felt the vast space inside me empty again. I fell to my knees, human again. Wolf-less again. But my blood was black now. Shadows moved under my skin, searching for a way out. Alpha Kieran crawled to me, blood on his face from where I’d knocked him out. “Luna—” “Don’t say my name.” Black veins crawled up my arms. One white hair appeared at my temple and I knew it would never turn back. “One year,” I whispered. “Mom only got seven.” Seven years. That’s all I had if this kept happening. Seven years before I ended up like her. Far underground, something woke up. I felt it through soil, through the black in my blood. And it laughed: _“Thank you for the invitation, niece..."