The Luna They Branded a Traitor

Chapter 4: On the Run

I didn't realize I had been running for the past four hours until my feet were bleeding.

I did not stop to look, for to stop was to die. I had learned that lesson in the first hour of leaving the only home I had ever known, when I heard voices behind me on the road and had to dive into a ditch full of freezing water to avoid detection.

I stood in the cold water until my lungs burnt and the voices went away, and when finally I came up gasping, I knew something simple and terrible.

It occurred to me that any wolf in Elarion who heard my name would want me dead or back in chains.

I left the Crescent Moon territory before the moon was low. I felt small, as if the land had stretched and cooled the moment I crossed the border markers. Ryker and I used to walk past as children.

My stomach knotted so tight I nearly doubled over. I don't even remember the last time I ate. Something from before the ceremony, when I still believed tonight would be the best night of my life instead of the night that ended it.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered hoarsely to myself, my throat raw.

"Go ahead, Neriah.” I said to myself again, but I didn't know where I was going. I just knew I didn't want to go back.

It was early morning, and I was walking past a small collection of huts on the edge of what must have been neutral territory, a land that belonged to no one pack.

I walked past one, and I saw an old man standing outside with his eyes narrowed at me.

"You look half dead, girl," he said, his voice hoarse with sleep or suspicion; I couldn't tell which.

"I'm all right," I said, and my knees nearly buckled as I said it.

“You’re not okay. You’re running away from something, or someone.”

He looked at me a little while longer and looked at the shredded ceremony dress hanging on my body, smeared with blood that wasn't mine.

I said, "Please. I just need water. I will not bother you anymore.”

He didn't answer; he just vanished into the hut. And for one stupid second I felt something like hope. A minute later he returned, this time not with water but with a cold, unyielding look.

“Crescent Moon Pack colors." He nodded at the torn ribbon still uselessly tied around my wrist, a leftover from the ceremony I hadn’t thought to take off.

“There’s a name in the wind this night. A Judas. A woman who slew her own warriors on the night of mating.”

My blood ran cold as I heard those words. “No, it isn’t,” I said quickly. “Please, I am not who they say I am.”

“I never said your name,” he said softly.

"You did, with your face just now.”

He entered his hut and closed the door. I heard the slide lock click.

I didn’t wait to see if he returned with something worse than a locked door. I ran immediately!

As the night went on, the land changed, hills rising into rockier ground and the trees becoming thinner and stranger.

The air carried scents I did not know. I didn't know whose turf it was. All I knew was that every mile I put between me and the pack that tried to kill me twice in one night increased my chance of survival.

Somewhere past a ridge of broken stone, my legs gave out, and I went down hard, hitting my knees on the rock and my palms scraping raw stones. I lay there for a long moment because I was too exhausted to be afraid and too empty to cry.

“Get up! You cannot stop now,” I told myself. My voice sounded strange to me.

I got up and kept walking, one hand pressed to my ribs where the broken bond throbbed like an old wound opening with every step.

Suddenly, I smelled something around me. It was blood. So much blood, you could smell it on the air if you had a human nose. My wolf senses knew it right away, and every instinct in my body screamed to turn around, to run the other way, to save what was left of my life.

But I did not turn around. I don't understand why I didn’t. Maybe part of me had already decided that if this was the price of survival, to run from every drop of blood in the world, then I didn't want to survive badly enough to keep doing it. Or maybe I was just too broken to be afraid of anything else tonight.

I followed the smell over the ridge and stopped at the top, looking down into a small clearing that looked like something out of a nightmare and all I saw were bodies. So many bodies lying on the grass, like something had come along and ripped the world apart.

They were soldiers, from the look of their ragged uniforms, though I could not see the markings on their sleeves. Below them the ground was dark and shiny in the dying light of the moon, and it was blood.

The silence roared in my ears louder than any noise had ever roared before. “Hello?” I whispered, my voice shaking, almost unheard.

But I never got an answer.

I made myself walk closer, my bare feet cold on the wet grass, my stomach lurching with every step I took. I counted five bodies, then six, then more… Then I saw one chest still rising and falling faintly, the movement so small I almost missed it in the dark.

I ran to him.

He was young, perhaps younger than I, his uniform soaked at the belly, where something had torn deep. His eyes were half-open and unfocused, his breathing short and wet with gasps.

"Wait!" I knelt beside him and pressed my hands hard against the wound before my mind caught up with what I was doing.

“Please hold on; I've got you.”

"Who?" he managed, a faint whisper. You, "Who?"

"It doesn't matter," I replied. “Watch your eyes. Look at me. Stay awake.”

Every instinct that had kept me alive tonight was screaming at me to run, to leave him, to save myself before the person who did this came back to finish what they started, but I ignored all of it.

My hands slick with blood, my own shattered body shaking with fatigue and cold, I pressed harder on his wound.

"Please," I whispered, not knowing if I was talking to him or to whatever was left of the goddess I used to pray to every night before all this chaos happened.

“Please don’t die. Not here. “Not because of me.”

I was still doing all that when I heard behind me a low growl rumbled from the trees. It was close, deep and certainly a warning shot.

“Don’t move!" said a voice, cold and sharp enough to cut through the night air.

“One more inch and I swear you won't move again.”

I froze, my hands still on the dying warrior’s chest, my heart pounding against my ribs, and from behind me came the unmistakable sound of a blade sliding free of its sheath.