Rejected Luna: The Moonborn Returns

Chapter 2: Beneath the River

The water was so cold it felt like being hit.

I tried to scream, and the river poured into my mouth.

Something hot ran down my back and thinned into the current.

Blood.

A lot of it.

I kicked toward the surface.

My arms moved slowly, like I was pushing through mud.

The current grabbed me and dragged me down and sideways, away from the shore.

Don't die, I thought. Not like this. Not for him.

But my chest was already burning for air, and the wound burned worse.

Whatever the blade was made of, it wasn't normal steel.

The cut felt like acid.

Silver. It had to be.

Silver was poison to wolves.

One cut and I should have been dead in minutes.

So why was my heart still beating?

It was beating slowly. Strongly. Like a drum far underwater.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

With every beat, the burning in my back dulled.

A strange warmth spread across the wound, and I felt skin pulling together, stitch by stitch.

I had never healed like this. Not once. When I cut my finger in the kitchen last winter, it stayed sore for a week.

I'm healing, I realized.

How am I healing?

I broke the surface with a gasp and coughed up half the river.

The current had carried me around a bend, under a hanging willow, where the bank was steep and dark.

Voices. Close.

I froze, floating in the shadows with only my nose above the water.

Two men stood on the rocks above me.

I couldn't see their faces.

But I could smell them. Leather, sweat, and something familiar, a smell from home.

Panic scrambled my head, and I couldn't place it.

"Did you see her go under?" the first man said.

"She went under."

"That's not what I asked."

"The blade went in clean. Silver to the kidney. Nobody survives that."

"She's an omega, Hale. Nobody expects her to survive anything." His voice was cold now.

It was the man who had said sorry.

"I'm not worried about the omega."

Water lapped around my chin.

"Then what…"

"Something woke up on that bank tonight. You saw the light."

"It was the moon."

"It wasn't the moon."

The second man said something I didn't catch.

Then the first one spoke again, flat and clear.

"Search the river. Both banks. Make sure the Moonborn doesn't survive."

My heart stopped.

Moonborn?

I didn't know the word. But I knew it was about me.

Why would anyone care about me? I was the girl who scrubbed floors.

I was nobody.

But they had sent men with silver blades after a nobody, and they weren't even ashamed to say it out loud.

Boots scraped on stone.

A torch flared above me.

I sank slowly, lower, until even my nose was under.

The cold crawled into my bones.

My lungs begged.

Then one of them jumped.

He hit the water with a heavy splash and came straight at me, a blade flashing silver in the torchlight.

He must have caught my scent.

I tried to swim.

My body wouldn't listen.

I was too weak, too cold, too tired.

A hand clamped around my ankle.

He dragged me back, hauled me up, and slammed me against the rock.

His forearm pressed into my throat.

Up close, I saw his face.

Young. Scared. Sweat on his lip.

"Sorry," he whispered. "Orders."

The blade rose.

I grabbed his wrist. I didn't think. I just grabbed it.

Light burst out of my palm.

Silver-violet fire raced up his arm.

His eyes went wide, and he screamed, a raw, awful sound, and he flew backward across the water and hit the rocks with a crack.

The knife fell.

It sank without a sound.

I stared at my hand. It was shaking. Smoke curled from my fingers.

"Hale!" the other man shouted. "Hale, what did she…"

"She's alive," the man in the water choked.

He was clutching his arm.

The skin was blistered, as if it had been burned from the inside.

"She's…she's Moonborn. It's true. It's real."

Silence from above.

Then running footsteps.

Run, my wolf whispered.

It was the first time she had ever spoken to me clearly. Now.

I pushed off the rock.

My legs felt like they belonged to someone else, but I swam, and swam, and let the current take me.

Behind me, torches flared along the bank. A horn sounded, long and low.

They weren't just looking anymore. They were hunting.

My vision narrowed.

The edges went dark first.

Then the sky.

Then the sound of the men shouting, until the only thing left was the thump of my own heartbeat.

Every beat cost me something. I could feel it.

My strength was draining out of me along with the healing, like the power wanted payment.

I was so tired.

Just a little rest, I thought. Just a few seconds.

The river twisted. It dragged me down through a narrow dark channel, under stone, under roots, deeper than any river should go.

The air in my lungs turned to fire.

I stopped fighting.

Then my heartbeat was answered.

Thump.

And from somewhere far below me, from the deep black water beneath the riverbed, came another.

Thump.

Slower. Heavier. Older. Like the heartbeat of a mountain.

Every hair on my body stood up.

The water around me began to glow, faint and silver, and I saw something shifting in the darkness below.

Not a fish. Not a rock.

A shape so enormous I couldn't see where it ended.

A voice rolled through my skull.

It wasn't a man's voice. It wasn't a woman's.

It sounded like stone and moonlight and a thousand years of waiting.

There you are, little one.

We have been waiting for such a long time.