BLESSING LUNA RISING

BLOOD ON THE SNOW

CHAPTER 11:

The charge sounded like thunder rolling up the mountain.

Fifty wolves. No — now I could see them clearly through the storm, a hundred at least. Magnus Vale had lied about a peace envoy. He brought his entire Alliance. Grey wolves, brown wolves, black wolves, all foaming, all howling, all sprinting up the black ice path that my command had just forced them to kneel on. The white flag they had carried was trampled into the bloody snow.

Magnus Vale himself was at the front, a huge white-grey Alpha, his fur stained with old war scars. He howled, and the sound was a direct challenge to Darius, to my father, to me.

"FOR THE ALLIANCE! TAKE THE WHITE ABOMINATION! TAKE THE GIRL AND BURN THE KEEP!"

My mother screamed.

Kael, still clutching the hem of my furs, flinched so hard he fell sideways into the snow, his hands over his head.

Darius didn't even look at the charging army. He looked at me. His black wings were still spread, twenty-five feet of midnight that blotted out the snowstorm, his silver eyes molten.

"Little Luna," he said, his voice calm, as if we were still on the balcony alone. "You said you wanted them to pay. Do you want to watch, or do you want to fly?"

My wings beat nervously, scattering silver dust. I had never flown. I had unfurled them. I had made them glow. But I had never left the ground.

"I— I don't know how," I whispered, my heart hammering so loud I thought Magnus Vale could hear it half a mountain away.

My father, Aeron, landed beside us, his white wings folding, his white hair whipping in the storm wind. His silver eyes were on the charging army, calculating distance, wind, bloodshed. The old warrior King.

"She's never flown, Darius. She's three days old in her wings. She'll fall. Let me—"

"No."

Darius's hand slid from my back to my waist, his fingers digging into the furs. His other hand came up and tilted my chin, forcing me to look only at him, while a hundred wolves charged to kill me.

"Eyes on me, Elara. Not on them. Not on him. On me."

The silver fire in my veins, which had been settled since I touched his mark, flared.

"Your wings know how," he whispered, his forehead touching mine, his breath hot against my lips, while the first howls of battle started at the lower gates as his Lycan warriors met the first wave. Screams. Blood on white snow. "They've known since you were in your mother's womb. You just have to stop thinking you are wolfless. You were never wolfless. You were caged."

He stepped back, his hands still on my waist, and lifted me. Just an inch. Then a foot. Then three feet off the black ice, as easily as if I weighed nothing.

My wings snapped open on instinct, beating wildly, clumsily, throwing silver dust everywhere. I gasped, my hands clutching his shoulders, terrified.

"Let go," he commanded softly.

"I'll fall—"

"I will catch you. I will always catch you. But you have to fall first, little Luna. Let go."

Below us, Kael stared up, his mouth open. My mother was weeping, her hands clasped. My father's white wings were spread, ready to dive if I fell.

The charging army was fifty feet from the courtyard now. I could smell them. Blood, wolfsbane, greed.

Magnus Vale's voice boomed, "KILL THE WHITE b***h FIRST!"

Something hot and white and furious exploded in my chest.

Not fear. Not anymore.

Rage. Nineteen years of tea laced with wolfsbane. Five years of being told to be smaller, quieter, to stitch wounds and not speak. Three days ago being left in white lace in a muddy cottage to die alone while Kael marked another woman over my bite marks.

I let go of Darius's shoulders.

I fell — one foot, two feet — and then my wings, my huge, beautiful, moonstone wings, caught the storm wind.

They beat. Once. Twice. Hard.

And I rose.

Ten feet. Twenty feet. Thirty feet above the courtyard, wobbling, silver dust streaming behind me like a comet tail, my black furs flapping, my bare legs cold in the wind. I was flying. I was actually flying.

Darius's laugh below was pure, dark triumph. "That's my Queen!"

My father shouted, his voice thick with tears, "Lira! Look! Our star flies!"

I looked down, and the world tilted. The courtyard was small. The charging wolves were small. Even Darius and my father were small. The snowstorm was below me. I was above it. The moon, which had been hidden for days, broke through the clouds right above me, and bathed my wings in light.

The silver fire in my veins stopped racing and settled in my palms, pooling, burning white-hot.

I didn't think. I remembered what Darius had said. Stop thinking you are wolfless.

I was not wolfless. I was White Lycan.

I cupped the white fire in my hands and threw it.

Not at a wolf. At the mountain path itself.

The fireball — pure moonfire, the White Queen's Justice fire that only appears once every hundred years — hit the black ice path between Magnus Vale's army and the courtyard and exploded.

Not with heat. With light.

A wall of white fire, twenty feet high, fifty feet wide, sealing the path. The first ten wolves who hit it didn't burn. They were purified. Their wolves were ripped from their bodies in a scream of silver light and dissolved, leaving empty, wolfless men collapsing in the snow, clutching their chests, exactly like I had done to Mara.

Magnus Vale skidded to a halt inches from the wall, his white-grey wolf snarling, his eyes wide with terror.

"What— what are you?!" he howled up at me, hovering thirty feet above him, wings spread, hands still dripping white fire.

I beat my wings once, and descended, just enough that I was eye-level with him over his wall of fire, close enough that he could see the silver crescent on my wrist, the black crescent on my chest under the furs, the silver dust falling from my wings onto his fur and burning like holy water.

"I am Elara Nocturne," I said, and my second voice rang, and the white fire wall rang with it. "Daughter of Aeron and Lira. Fated mate of Darius Nocturne. The Queen you tried to kill as a baby. And this mountain is MINE."

Behind the fire wall, his army whimpered, kneeling again, unable to stand under the light.

Below, in the courtyard, Darius and my father launched into the air, black and white, flanking me left and right, their wings beating in time with mine.

Kael, still kneeling in the snow, looked up at the three of us — White King, Lycan King, and me between them, wreathed in white fire — and finally, finally understood what he had thrown away.

He pressed his forehead back to the ice and sobbed, "Luna. My Luna. Forgive me."

And from the lower gates, a new horn blew. Not Magnus Vale's. Not ours.

The High Priestess's horn. The Goddess's own temple guard.

She had felt the white fire.