TOO LATE, MY LUNA

First Blood

The portrait was still in my head three days later when I walked onto the training ground for the morning session.

Mira had not explained it yet. She had taken one look at my face when I stepped into the herb room and seen whatever she needed to see there, and then she had closed the leather book carefully and told me to come back when I was ready, that the information would keep and that some things needed to be approached slowly. I had wanted to argue with her but Zane had looked at me from across the room with that steady expression that somehow communicated both that he agreed with Mira and that he would tell me everything when the time was right, and I had swallowed the urgency and walked back to my room and spent three days training harder than I had ever trained in my life because moving my body was the only thing that kept my mind from spinning in circles.

Sena ran us through the standard morning sequences first, the same combinations I had been drilling for the past week, and I moved through them with the focused automatic precision of someone who has done something enough times that the body takes over and the mind can go somewhere else. I was getting stronger. I could feel it in the way the sequences that had exhausted me in the first few days now felt manageable, the way my reaction times were sharpening, the way my body was starting to understand what was being asked of it and responding without hesitation.

Cole was my partner again for the sparring component, the same quiet steady wolf I had been paired with most mornings, and we worked through the first two rounds without any particular difficulty. He was a fair sparring partner, applying enough pressure to be useful without crossing into territory that felt unsafe, and I had started to appreciate his consistency in the same way I had started to appreciate a lot of things about Nightfall that I had not expected to.

The third round was when things changed.

Sena called a rotation and my new partner stepped into position across from me, and I recognised him immediately. He was the tall broad shouldered wolf from my first day of training, the one whose short sharp laugh had earned him a look from Zane that had turned his neck red. He had not looked in my direction once since that morning, which I had taken as a sign that the lesson had landed. Standing across from me now in sparring position he had a careful neutral expression that gave nothing away.

We started the round and for the first two exchanges it was fine, standard pressure, standard pace, nothing I had not handled before. Then on the third exchange he did something that was not in the combination.

He stepped inside my guard and shoved, hard, with the flat of his palm against my shoulder, not a sparring technique but a dismissal, the kind of contact that is designed to say something rather than to train anything.

I stumbled back two steps and caught my balance and looked at him. He was already resetting into position like nothing had happened, his expression still carefully neutral, and something about that studied indifference made something flare hot and immediate in my chest that I did not have time to examine before the next exchange began.

He did it again on the fourth exchange, the same move, harder this time, a real shove that sent me back three steps and made one of the watching wolves make a sound that was quickly suppressed. I caught myself and straightened up and I felt the heat in my chest expand outward through my ribs and into my arms and I understood in a distant analytical way that I was angry, genuinely and completely angry, in a way I had not allowed myself to be since the Blood Moon ceremony.

He reset and came at me again and I did not think about what happened next. There was no decision, no intention, no moment where I chose to do anything. There was just the anger and the heat and then something that was neither of those things exactly but contained both of them, something that rose from somewhere deep and involuntary and completely outside my control, moving through me from the center outward in a single wave.

My eyes changed. I felt it happen, a strange cold clarity dropping over my vision like a filter, turning everything sharper and more defined and slightly silver at the edges. I heard someone near the fence make a strangled sound. The warrior in front of me stopped moving.

And then he was not in front of me anymore.

He was fifteen feet away, on the ground near the far fence, one hand pressed flat against the training yard stone, staring at me with an expression I had never seen directed at me before. I had not touched him. My hands were at my sides and I had not taken a single step toward him and I had not touched him, and he was fifteen feet away on the ground.

I stood very still and tried to understand what had just happened. The silver clarity was fading from my vision slowly, pulling back the way a tide pulls back, and as it went I became aware of the silence around me in stages, the way you become aware of a sound stopping rather than starting. The entire training yard had gone completely quiet. Every wolf who had been moving or talking or running combinations had stopped, and they were all looking at me, and not one of them made a single sound.

I became aware of my own breathing, too fast and too shallow, and I made myself slow it down deliberately. I looked at my hands. They looked exactly the same as they always did, and I turned them over and looked at the palms and they were the same too, and I had absolutely no explanation for what had just happened or how or what it meant that it had come from me without my permission or my knowledge or my choice.

I heard footsteps crossing the training yard from the direction of the packhouse and I did not need to look up to know who they belonged to. I had learned the particular weight and rhythm of them well enough by now that I knew before Zane stepped into my peripheral vision and stopped a few feet away, looking at the warrior still on the ground near the fence and then at me with an expression I could not read at all.

The yard was still completely silent around us. The warrior near the fence had gotten to his feet but had not moved back toward the center of the yard and I did not think he was going to. Zane looked at me for a long moment and I looked back at him and waited for him to say something, to explain what had just happened or tell me what it meant or ask me how I felt about it.

"Do it again," he said quietly.