MOONBURN

AYLA'S POV My father has never let me celebrate my birthday like a normal person. Every year, on the night of July twenty-ninth, the same ritual: doors locked by seven, curtains drawn tight, and my father pacing the length of our kitchen like a man waiting for a storm that only he could see coming. Other dads worried about curfews and boyfriends. Mine worried about tonight, specifically, in a way he never explained and I'd stopped asking about around age twelve. "Dad, it's my birthday, not the apocalypse," I said, sliding onto a stool at the counter. He didn't look up from the pot he was stirring. "Eighteen is different." "You said that when I turned twelve. And fifteen. And seventeen." "And I was right to." I rolled my eyes, but there was a knot in my stomach I couldn't explain, a low hum under my skin that had been building all week, like static before a thunderstorm. I told myself it was nerves. In six weeks I'd be three hundred miles away at Ashwood University, and this was the last birthday I'd spend in this kitchen, under my father's watchful, exhausting love. My hand drifted, without my telling it to, to the necklace at my throat. Silver chain, small moonstone pendant, worn so long I'd stopped noticing its weight — except tonight it felt warm. Not sun-warm. Warm like something alive. "You okay?" My father had finally looked up, and whatever he saw on my face made the color drain from his. "Fine," I lied. "Just tired." He didn't believe me. He never did. But he let it go, the way he always let things go right up until the moment he couldn't anymore. --- Priya showed up at nine with a cake she'd clearly bought and lit herself, seventeen candles because she'd forgotten to buy an eighteenth, singing loud enough that Miss Stacey next door banged on the shared wall. "You're leaving me in six weeks," Priya said, flopping onto my bed while I picked frosting off the cake with my finger. "I need you to have the best birthday of your life so I have something to guilt you with when you don't call me from New York." "I'll call you every day." "You'll call me every day for two weeks, then it'll be every other day, then it'll be *hey sorry things have been crazy* every full moon." I laughed, but the word *moon* landed strangely, like a stone dropped into still water. The necklace pulsed again — actually pulsed, a small definite throb against my collarbone — and I pressed my palm over it before Priya could notice. She didn't. She was too busy scrolling through her phone, showing me a video of the Ashwood hockey team's preseason practice, all of them enormous and fast and terrifyingly coordinated. "Okay, but seriously, tell me you're at least a little excited about this," she said, tilting the screen toward me. "Look at them. Look at *him.*" *Him* was a dark-haired guy caught mid-stride, stick low, eyes fixed on something out of frame. Even frozen in a blurry screenshot he looked like he was concentrating on something no one else could see. "Thalric Vargthorn," Priya said reverently. "Captain. Future Alpha of literally the whole hockey program. Every girl on campus has a theory about why he never smiles." "Maybe he just doesn't find anything funny." "Maybe you'll be the one who does." She waggled her eyebrows. I threw a pillow at her. I didn't tell her that something about the photo made the base of my skull prickle, like I was being watched through the screen itself. I didn't tell her because I couldn't have explained it, and because normal eighteen-year-olds did not get a chill down their spine over a hockey photo. But I wasn't feeling very normal tonight. --- Priya left a little after midnight, hugging me twice at the door and threatening to cry, which made me almost cry, and then I climbed the stairs to my room with the particular exhaustion of a day that had been, on its surface, uneventful. Sleep didn't come easily. When it did, it came wrong. I was standing in a forest I didn't recognize, pines black against a sky bruised purple, no moon visible but somehow moonlight everywhere, silver and shivering on every leaf. Someone was calling my name — not with a voice, exactly, more like the shape of my name pressed into the air, into my chest, into the marrow of my bones. I turned in a slow circle, and every direction was forest, and every direction felt like it was pulling me forward at once. Then: eyes. Gold, low to the ground, forty feet away and closing the distance in a way that didn't look like walking so much as folding space. My heart slammed. I opened my mouth to scream and no sound came out, and the necklace at my throat went white-hot, searing, a brand against my skin— I woke up gasping, one hand already clutched around the pendant, half-convinced I'd find a burn mark on my palm. There wasn't one. But the moonstone was warm, warmer than it had ever been, and in the darkness of my room I could have sworn — for one impossible second — that I saw a hairline c***k running through its surface, thin as a thread, glowing faint silver before it faded. I sat up. Turned on the lamp. Examined the stone under the light with shaking fingers. Smooth. Whole. Ordinary. I told myself I'd dreamed that too. Outside my window, impossibly, a wolf howled — long and low and close, closer than any wolf had a right to be in the middle of a quiet suburban street lined with mailboxes and minivans. I went to the window and found nothing. No shape moving between the parked cars. No eyes in the dark. Just the ordinary hush of a street at one in the morning, and my own reflection staring back at me, hazel eyes too wide, hand still pressed flat against her throat like she was holding something in. Downstairs, a door opened and closed softly. Footsteps in the hall. My father, not sleeping either. I heard him stop outside my door. Stand there a long moment. I almost called out to him — almost asked him, finally, after eighteen years, what exactly it was he'd been protecting me from every July twenty-ninth of my life. Instead I heard him exhale, low and unsteady, like a man bracing for something, and say, so quietly I almost missed it through the door: "Eighteen years, Elena. I kept my promise. I don't know how much longer I can keep it." My mother had been dead for eighteen years. He hadn't spoken to her, not once, not that I'd ever heard, not in all that time. I lay back down long after his footsteps retreated, staring at the ceiling, the necklace cooling slowly against my skin, and told myself that tomorrow I would ask him everything. I didn't know yet that some questions get answered before you're ready to hear them. I didn't know that three hundred miles away, in a dorm room at Ashwood University, a boy with gold eyes and a wolf named Fenrir had just woken from the exact same dream and gone very, very still.