I Was His Luna Until He Forgot Me

THE HYBRID SECRET

CHAPTER THREE

THE HYBRID SECRET

ELARA VAYNE

The attack came in the deep hours, when the castle had gone quiet enough that I could hear my own heartbeat against the pillow.

I wasn't sleeping. He remembers how you kept turning over in my head until the edges of it wore thin.

The first explosion shook the east wing hard enough to drop plaster dust on my bed.

I was on my feet before the tremor finished. The fire had gone dark. Smoke pushed under the door, sharp and chemical underneath the scent of spelled weaponry, the kind built to wound things that don't die easily. I'd smelled it before, during a hunter raid on a border settlement three years back.

I opened the door into chaos. Two vampires sprinted past without seeing me. Further down, a guard knelt with one hand pressed to a wound that glowed faintly at the edges. Spelled wounds close slowly. They're built that way.

I should have stayed in the room. None of this was my fight. I ran toward the explosion anyway.

The courtyard was a battlefield. Thirty or more attackers in grey-and-black tactical gear, hunter gear, the same kind from the border raids, moved through it in tight formation, placing charge devices against the load-bearing columns.

They weren't here to fight. They were here to bring the walls down.

Kael was in the center, handling three hunters at once and winning. A fourth was coming up behind him, charge device armed, arm already drawn back.

I didn't think, I didn't even plan.

Something woke up inside me…the place where wolf blood and witch blood met, the seam that had always run too hot to control. It rose like a wave and poured out through my hands. A burst of silver force crossed the courtyard and slammed into the fourth hunter's chest, throwing him into the wall. The device clattered to the ground and went dark.

The courtyard went silent. Every head turned toward me. The hunters broke formation and retreated through the gate, fast and organized. Whatever I was, their commander had decided it wasn't worth staying to find out.

Kael crossed the courtyard toward me. Blood on his knuckles, a cut on his jaw already closing.

"How did you do that," he said.

"I don't fully know."

"That wasn't wolf power. I've been around wolves my whole life."

"No."

"It wasn't witch power either. Not the kind I've seen."

"I told you I don't completely understand what I am."

He took my left wrist without asking and pushed up my sleeve. We both looked at what had appeared there, a mark running from my elbow to my wrist, silver-black, intricate, like writing in a script I'd never been taught. It wasn't warm or painful. It sat there like it had always been waiting for the right moment to show itself.

Kael went still.

"What is it?"

He read the mark with his eyes, not touching it. "The Vorath seal. An ancient bloodline marker. It only manifests in a genuine carrier, under extreme conditions. It can't be faked." He looked up, and something in his face shifted, not cold calculation this time, unease. "There are four known hybrid bloodlines in recorded history. Three of them are extinct."

"What does it mean for me?"

"I don't know yet. Most of the old records were burned during the wars between the courts." He was still holding my wrist. "But if a Vorath carrier surfaces in a place like this, every faction in three kingdoms will know about it within a day."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a warning. There's a difference." He let go of my wrist carefully, like the mark might still be hot. "Whatever you are, Elara, you didn't ask to be it. That won't stop people from deciding what to do with you because of it."

"Can it be removed?" I asked.

"I don't know. Nothing about a Vorath seal has ever needed removing before. Every other carrier wanted it."

"And the fourth bloodline?"

The temperature in the courtyard dropped. Every vampire straightened at once, like something had walked over a shared grave.

A woman came through the broken gate. Tall, silver-haired, dressed in dark fitted clothes with no ornamentation. Her eyes were the same dual silver-and-gold as mine.

She looked at Kael first. Then at me.

"So the rumors were true." She tilted her head, studying me like a document she hadn't expected to find. "My name is Lyra Morcant. I'm the hybrid queen of the Vorath bloodline." Her eyes held mine. "And you should not exist."