The Luna’s curse

The forest smelled like rain and copper, and Elena Voss was the only one still standing. Six of them had come across the border an hour before moonrise Redfang scouts, judging by the crude iron collars they wore, the kind that only a pack desperate enough to trade with humans would bother forging. She'd counted their scent on the wind before she'd heard their footsteps, and by the time Ashwood's watch bell finally rang, three of the six were already dead in the ferns behind her, and she was down to her last knife. "You don't quit, do you," rasped the last one, circling her with his shoulder blades hunched, half-shifted, claws dragging grooves into the mud. "Not really my strong suit," Elena said, and let him come. He was fast, faster than the others had been, wild with the kind of desperation that made wolves reckless, and his claws opened a line of fire across her ribs before she got her knife into the soft place beneath his jaw. He went down heavy, twitching, and then he went still, and the forest went quiet except for her own breathing and the thin, insistent drip of blood off her fingers. Elena stood over him for a moment, chest heaving, and let herself feel it, the shake in her hands, the sting along her side, the bone-deep exhaustion of having done, once again, what should never have been hers to do alone. Then she wiped her knife on the dead wolf's collar, and went to find out where everyone else had been. By the time she limped back through Ashwood's gates, the watch bell had gone silent and half the pack had gathered at the tree line, drawn by the smell of blood on the wind. Wren got to her first, shoving through the crowd with her dark hair coming loose from its braid and her eyes already doing the fast, clinical sweep she always did shoulders, ribs, hands, are you upright, are you going to fall down on me. "Redfang," Elena said, before Wren could ask. "Six of them. Scouting party, I think, not a raid — they didn't come loud enough for a raid." "Six." Wren's jaw tightened. "Alone?" "The watch bell rang late." That was all Elena said about it, but it was enough she watched the understanding land on Wren's face, watched her friend's eyes cut toward the great hall, where torchlight glowed gold behind shuttered windows and laughter carried faintly on the night air. A gathering. A celebration. The kind Damian didn't like to have interrupted. "He doesn't know yet," Wren said. It wasn't a question. "He'll know when I tell him." "Elena—" "I'm fine, Wren." She wasn't, particularly the gash along her ribs had stopped bleeding but hadn't started healing, not the way it should have by now, and there was a deeper ache under her sternum that had nothing to do with claws. But she straightened her spine anyway, because six pairs of eyes were still watching her from the tree line, and a Luna who staggered was a Luna the pack stopped trusting. "Get a healer out to check the border. If there were scouts, there'd be more behind them." Wren didn't move. "You saved this pack tonight and you're going to walk in there like you did nothing." "I'm going to walk in there," Elena said, quieter now, just for her, "because if I don't, someone will ask why the watch bell rang late, and I'd rather it come from me than from gossip." Something in Wren's face cracked just slightly, not surprise, just the old, familiar grief of watching a friend do the sensible thing when the sensible thing cost so much. "One day," she said, "you're going to stop covering for all of them." "Today's not that day." Elena managed something like a smile. "Go. Please." Wren went, but she looked back twice, and Elena made herself keep walking until her friend was out of sight before she let her shoulders drop even an inch. The great hall was warm and bright and smelled like roasted meat and spilled wine, and for a moment, standing in the doorway with blood drying stiff along her side, Elena almost turned around. She didn't. The gathering was smaller than she'd expected pack elders, a few of the ranking warriors, and at the head table, Damian, laughing at something one of his men had said, a cup loose in his hand. He looked, as he always did lately, entirely at ease. Entirely unbothered. A man with nothing weighing on him at all. Elena crossed the hall, and conversation rippled into silence in a wave ahead of her, the way it always did when the pack noticed the state she was in before their Alpha did. Damian looked up last. "Elena." He set his cup down, and there — there, finally a flicker of something that might have been a concern. "What happened?" "Redfang scouts. Six of them, near the eastern ridge." She kept her voice level, professional, the voice she used for reporting a hunt, not a wound. "Three dead, three fled. I've sent Wren to check the border for more." A murmur went through the hall. One of the elders half-rose from his seat. Damian's second, Marcus, stood near the wall with his arms crossed, watching Elena with an expression she couldn't quite read, not a concern, not quite anything. "Six of them," Damian repeated slowly. "And where was the watch?" "Late," Elena said. "I handled it before it became a problem." "Alone." "There wasn't time to gather anyone." Damian's gaze moved over her to the blood, the torn shirt, the way she was standing very carefully to keep her ribs from pulling and for one unguarded second, Elena let herself hope. Let herself think; this is the moment he finally looks at me and sees what it costs. "You should have sent word first," he said instead. "This gathering matters, Elena. We have guests." The hope curdled fast and ugly in her chest. "Guests," she repeated. "I was going to introduce you properly." Damian's attention was already sliding sideways, toward the far end of the table, and Elena followed it before she could stop herself toward a young woman she hadn't noticed until now, seated close to Damian's chair, dressed in pale blue silk that had never once seen a battlefield. Soft hands. Untouched skin. Eyes wide and lovely and entirely unafraid, because nothing in this hall had ever asked anything of her. "This is Seraphine," Damian said. "Her family's pack borders the Redfang territory. She's been telling us about their movements which has been very useful, given tonight." A faint, approving smile, aimed at the girl, not at Elena. "Seraphine, this is—" "Your Luna," Elena said, when he didn't finish the sentence fast enough. "Of course." Damian's smile didn't waver. "Of course, my Luna." But he hesitated. Just for half a breath. every wolf in that hall and Elena could feel it, the way the air itself seemed to hold still. Seraphine's eyes flicked to Elena's blood-stiffened shirt, to the knife still sheathed at her hip, and something crossed her lovely, untroubled face that might have been pity, or might have been something colder. Calculation, maybe. It was hard to tell, and Elena was too tired and too raw to try. "You're hurt," Seraphine said softly, and it should have sounded kind. It didn't, quite. "It's nothing," Elena said, because it was easier than the truth, and because Damian had already turned back to his guest, already laughing again at something too quiet for Elena to hear, and the great hall had already begun to close back over the moment the way water closes over a stone. She stood there a moment longer, blood drying on her ribs, she wasn't even sure what she was waiting for anymore. For him to ask again. For him to notice the wound properly, the way a mate should. For anything. Nothing came. "I'll go see to the border myself," she said finally, to no one in particular, and left before anyone could tell her not to bother. Outside, the night air was sharp and cold against her skin, and Elena pressed a hand to her ribs and let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding since the moment she walked through those doors. Six wolves, she thought. Three dead by my hand. And the only thing that mattered in that room was the color of some girl's dress. She started toward the healer's hut slower now, letting the ache have her, since there was no one left to perform strength for and that was when she felt it. A prickle down the back of her neck. The specific, primal awareness of being watched. She stopped in the middle of the empty path, hand drifting instinctively to her knife, and scanned the tree line. Nothing moved. No scent she recognized, not Redfang, not Ashwood, not anything she had a name for something older, and colder, and utterly unfamiliar, threading faintly through the wind from somewhere beyond the northern ridge. The hair on her arms rose. A guest, Mother Rue had told her once, years ago, in that maddening, sideways way of hers. The moon has plans that don't run through this pack. Elena had laughed it off then. She didn't feel much like laughing now. The feeling of being watched didn't fade if anything, it sharpened, pressed closer, until it felt less like a presence in the trees and more like something looking directly through her, weighing her, deciding something about her she wasn't privy to. And beneath the fear, unwelcome and inexplicable, something in her chest gave one slow, heavy pull like a hook sinking into old rope, testing whether it would hold. She had never felt anything like it in her life. Somewhere out past the ridge, far beyond the borders Ashwood's watch bell was supposed to protect, something answered that pull and began, unhurried, to come closer. Elena's knife was in her hand before she'd decided to draw it. Whatever was out there wasn't Redfang. And it wasn't leaving.