THE HOLLOW MOON PACT

THE HOLLOW PACT A Novel Book One of the Hollow Line CHAPTER ONE The Seventh Night The letter found Selene Voss exactly where she wanted to be found last: elbow-deep in a stranger's wound, three streets from the human town's only clinic, six years and one lifetime away from the pack that raised her. "Package for the healer," the courier said, though his eyes lingered too long on the silver at her throat, the collar of scars beneath it. He knew what she was. Everyone in Millhaven knew, eventually. They just pretended not to, the way you pretend not to notice a storm gathering until the first drop of rain forces your hand. She didn't open the letter until the wound was stitched. The farmer sent home with instructions and a tincture, the clinic swept clean of blood. Only then did she sit at her small desk beneath the window, break the wax seal stamped with the Ashvale crest, a wolf circling a hollow moon and read her father's handwriting for the first time in five years. Selene. The pact comes due. Seven nights from the reading of this letter, the new moon returns, and with it, the binding you were born to complete. Come home. Bring nothing you cannot leave behind. Corwin. She read it four times before the shape of the words stopped rearranging themselves into something less terrible. The pact. Of course. She'd known, in the vague way you know, a debt exists long before the collector arrives that her name had been signed to something before she was old enough to hold a pen. Forty-one years of war between Ashvale and Blackthorn, a border soaked in enough blood to salt a decade of harvests, and someone, at some point, had decided the cheapest way to end it was to bind an Ashvale heir to a Blackthorn one and call the marriage peace. She had been that heir since birth. She had spent the last six years trying very hard to be someone else instead. By dusk she'd packed a single bag of clothes, her mother's healing kit, the small brass compass that didn't point north so much as it pointed home, which had made it useless in Millhaven and unbearable everywhere else. She left before she could think better of it, because thinking better of it was how she'd stayed away five years past the point her father's letters had turned pleading, then furious, then silent. The border between human land and Ashvale territory ran through an old beech forest that hadn't changed in six years or, she suspected, sixty. The trees still leaned in over the deer trail like they were listening. She still felt the exact moment she crossed the invisible seam where the treaty lines were drawn, a pressure behind her sternum, her wolf lifting its head inside her like it recognized the smell of home before she did. She smelled the other wolf a half-second before she heard him. Not Ashvale. The scent was wrong for that colder, threaded with pine and iron instead of the loam and woodsmoke of her father's territory. Blackthorn, then. Which meant she'd wandered further off the marked path than she'd intended, or he had. "You're on the wrong side of the river for an evening walk," she said, without turning around, because turning your back and speaking was the oldest trick in the book for finding out if someone was going to be a problem before they had a chance to decide it for themselves. "So are you," the voice said. Low. Amused, in the particular way of a man who found very little worth being amused by and was surprised to have found something. "Ashvale doesn't usually smell like a human infirmary." She turned then. He was exactly what she expected: a Blackthorn enforcer tall enough to make a doorway feel personal, dark-haired, built like something that had been carved rather than born, a fresh scar bisecting one eyebrow. What she did not expect was the eyes. Gold. Not amber, not hazel; the flat, unnatural gold of a coin left too long in firelight. She had seen that exact color in exactly one other face in her life, reflected at her every morning from whatever water happened to be nearby. Her mother had told her, once, before the fever that wasn't a fever took her, that the gold eyes ran so thin in the bloodlines now that Selene might live her whole life and never meet another pair. She was looking at another pair right now. "You're staring," he said. "You have my eyes," she said, before she could decide whether that was a wise thing to say to an armed stranger from the pack she was being sold to. Something moved behind his expression, not surprise, exactly. Recognition arriving somewhere it had been expected for a while and was still unwelcome. "Kade," he said, instead of explaining it. "Ravenshaw. I run the border for my father's Alpha." Ravenshaw. She knew the name the way you know the name of a disease you've been told you might inherit. Damon Ravenshaw's line, the enforcers who'd killed her uncle at the Millrace crossing eleven years ago in a fight that had never fully stopped, had just gone underground and worn a diplomat's face. "Selene Voss," she said, and watched it land on him exactly the way his name had landed on her, like a door closing somewhere neither of them could see. Neither of them moved. Somewhere below them the river kept running, indifferent to the fact that two people who were, as of seven days from now, supposed to be strangers no longer had that option. "I was told the Voss heir was small," Kade said finally. "And difficult." "I was told the Ravenshaw enforcer had killed a man for looking at him wrong." She lifted her chin. "We were both misinformed, apparently." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "I didn't kill him for looking at me wrongly. I killed him for looking at my sister wrong." A beat. "The report about you, though. That part might still hold." She should have hated him on principle. It would have been easier. Instead, she found herself cataloging him the way she cataloged a wound before deciding how to treat it, where the damage was, what it would take to close it, whether it would scar. She didn't like how easily the habit came to her, applied to a man instead of a laceration. "I need to get to Ashvale hall before dark," she said, because it was true, and because she needed to stop standing in a forest memorizing the face of a man whose pack had signed away her future without asking her. "I'll walk you as far as the ridge," Kade said. "Not out of kindness. My father wants to know the moment you arrive. I'd rather be the one who tells him than have him hear it from someone with worse intentions." "Comforting." "I didn't say it to comfort you." They walked in a silence that should have been awkward and instead felt like a pause before a held note. She didn't ask him about the scar over his eyebrow, or why a man who ran his Alpha's border patrols had gold eyes that matched a bloodline everyone assumed had gone extinct on the Ashvale side three generations back. She filed the questions away with the others, the ones about her mother's illness that had never behaved like any wolf-sickness she'd since learned to recognize, the ones about why her father's letters had turned silent the exact year the physicians stopped visiting. Ashvale Hall rose out of the treeline at full dark, torchlight spilling gold across the courtyard stones, and her father was already standing at the top of the steps as if he'd known the precise minute she would arrive, which she supposed, given what wolves could smell in the wind, he probably had. Corwin Voss was aged a decade. Grey ran through his beard now in a way it hadn't in his memory, and there was a stoop to his shoulders that no Alpha wore by choice. "You came," he said, and for one unguarded moment he sounded almost surprised, almost grateful, before the Alpha in him folded the feeling away and put a colder mask back on. "Good." We have seven nights, and less time than that to prepare you for what the binding will require." "You could start," Selene said, climbing the last of the steps, "by telling me why the man you're bending me to has my mother's eyes." Her father's face did not move. But she had spent her whole childhood learning to read the small tells beneath Corwin Voss's stillness, and what she read there now was not confusion. It was fear. "Come inside," he said. "There are things about your mother's death I should have told you five years ago. I was a coward not to. I don't have the luxury of being one any longer, not with seven nights left, and not with what's coming for both packs the moment that moon turns dark." Behind her, at the edge of the torchlight, she caught one last glimpse of gold eyes watching from the treeline before Kade Ravenshaw turned and disappeared back toward the river and toward whatever report he was about to carry home to a father she was suddenly, urgently certain she needed to fear far more than she'd been told.