Blessed Luna Rising

Episode1

My Luna

Episode 1: The Girl Who Wasn't Afraid

Some curses feed on blood. His fed on love.

The House on Hollow Street

For three hundred and twelve years, Dorian Vale had mastered the art of being alone.

He lived in a crumbling manor at the edge of Marrowgate, a town that pretended not to notice the lights that never turned on in its east windows. He fed on animals, kept his distance from people, and avoided mirrors out of habit rather than necessity. He had learned long ago that closeness was dangerous. Not because he might hurt someone, but because of what happened to him.

The first time had been in 1894. A young woman named Eleanor had smiled at him across a candlelit ballroom, and he had felt something stir in his chest. By morning, he could hear heartbeats three streets away. By the end of the week, he had lifted a carriage off a man trapped beneath it with one hand.

Then Eleanor had died of fever, and the power had drained out of him like water from a cracked cup.

He had understood then, with terrible clarity: when he was romanced, his powers grew. When he was loved, he became something no one should be. So he stopped letting anyone near.

Until the night Luna Reyes broke into his garden.

The Intruder

It was a Tuesday, near midnight, when Dorian heard the iron gate groan.

He was across the manor in a heartbeat, a shadow sliding down the staircase, ready to frighten off whatever trespasser had dared to come. Teenagers, usually. A dare, a story, a flashlight shaking in unsteady hands.

But the woman standing among his dead rose bushes wasn't shaking.

She was maybe twenty-six, wrapped in an oversized green coat, dark curls pinned up in a hurry, a camera slung around her neck. She was crouched by a wilted bush, carefully photographing it as if it were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

"You're trespassing," Dorian said from the shadows, letting his voice drop low enough to rattle windows.

Luna looked up. She didn't scream. She didn't run.

"I know," she said. "I'm sorry. But these roses are black. Do you know how rare that is? Someone must have cared for them once."

Dorian stared. His voice, the one that had made grown men weep, had slid right off her like rain off a window.

"Leave," he said again, stepping into the moonlight.

She finally got a good look at him: pale as marble, eyes the color of old wine, standing perfectly still in a way no living man could. And still she didn't flinch. She tilted her head, studying him the way she had studied the roses.

"You're not going to hurt me," she said softly. "If you wanted to, you'd have done it already. So who are you?"

He should have vanished. He should have scared her so badly she never returned. Instead, to his own horror, he heard himself answer.

"Dorian."

"I'm Luna." She smiled, a small, crooked, utterly fearless smile. "Nice to meet you, Dorian. Your garden is sad. Can I fix it?"

The First Warning Sign

He told her no. Of course he did.

She came back the next night anyway, with a trowel, a bag of soil, and a thermos of hot chocolate she offered him without a second thought. He declined the chocolate. She sipped it herself and talked about her day as though he were an old friend: her job at the local newspaper, her grandmother's stories about the old families of Marrowgate, the way the moon looked "extra stubborn" tonight.

Dorian stood in the dark and listened, telling himself he was only guarding his property.

It was on the third night that he noticed it.

Luna laughed at something he said, a dry, accidental joke he hadn't meant to make, and the warmth of it hit him like sunlight he could actually bear. Somewhere in the house behind him, every candle he had not lit flared to life at once.

Luna gasped, delighted. "Did you do that?"

Dorian looked down at his hands. They were glowing faintly, silver at the edges, humming with a strength he hadn't felt in over a century.

He stepped back so fast he left a crack in the stone path.

"You need to go," he said, and for the first time in three hundred years, there was fear in his voice.

Luna studied his face, then the candles, then the crack in the path. She didn't look afraid. She looked curious. Dangerously, wonderfully curious.

"Tell me what's happening to you," she said.

And somewhere deep in the dark of the manor, something old and watchful opened its eyes.

To be continued in Episode 2: The Rule of the Moon.