BLESSING LUNA RISING

THE WHITE WINGS

CHAPTER 5

It wasn't blood that came out of my back.

It was light.

When the skin on my shoulder blades ripped, I expected agony. I expected to see red staining his black furs. What I saw instead was silver. Pure, liquid silver light pouring out of the two slits on my back, like molten moonlight escaping from inside my bones.

Darius didn't flinch. He was still holding my burning wrist to his scarred chest, his eyes locked on my face, watching every flicker of pain, every gasp.

"Breathe, little Luna," he commanded softly. "Don't fight her. You fought her for nineteen years. Let her breathe."

I didn't know how to let go. For nineteen years I had been told I was empty. Wolfless. Half-blooded. A healer with no beast. I had learned to be quiet, to be useful, to be small enough that no one would notice I couldn't shift.

Now something inside me was demanding to be HUGE.

The light got brighter. The furs under me started to frost over. The fire in the walls of his chamber flared from blue to white.

And then — with a sound like cracking ice on a frozen lake in early spring — they came.

First one. Then the other.

Wings.

Not feathered like a bird. Not leathery like a bat. They were made of something I had never seen. Translucent, like thin sheets of moonstone, veined with silver fire — the same fire that had been crawling up my arm. When they unfurled, they spanned the entire width of his massive bed. Twelve feet. Maybe more. They beat once, weakly, and a gust of wind so strong it extinguished half the fires in the chamber slammed into the black ice walls.

I was panting. My back didn't hurt anymore. It felt... light. Like for the first time in my life, I wasn't being pressed down.

Darius finally let go of my wrist. The silver crescent mark had stayed .