The Luna’s curse

The Empty Bed

Elena didn't call out.

Calling out would have meant admitting she didn't already know what was coming through the trees, and some old, stubborn instinct told her that whatever was out there would hear more in her silence than in her voice.

She backed toward the tree line instead of the healer's hut, knife low, weight balanced the way Wren had drilled into her a hundred times over a hundred sparring sessions: don't plant your feet until you know what you're planting them against. The scent on the wind was stronger now, and wrong in a way she couldn't name. Not sour like Redfang. Not familiar like Ashwood. Something clean and cold, like the air right before snow, threaded through with something darker underneath smoke, maybe, or old blood, or something with no human name at all.

The pull in her chest hadn't stopped. If anything, it had gotten worse a steady, deliberate tug, like a current dragging at her ribs from the inside.

"Show yourself," she said finally, because the silence had gone on too long and her nerves couldn't take much more of it.

Nothing answered. But the pressure of being watched sharpened again, focused, and this time she was almost certain that she caught a flicker of movement at the top of the ridge. Something tall. Something still. There and gone before she could be sure it had been there at all.

Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the feeling broke.

The wind shifted. The strange scent thinned and scattered. The pull in her chest eased into something duller, more like a bruise than a hook, and the ordinary night sounds of Ashwood's border crickets, the distant murmur of the gathering, her own ragged breathing came rushing back in, as if someone had lifted a hand off her throat.

Elena stood there a long moment, knife still raised, heart still hammering, waiting for it to come back.

It didn't.

"Elena?"

She spun, blade coming up on reflex, and only barely stopped herself before it found Wren's throat. Her friend had her hands raised, eyebrows halfway to her hairline.

"Easy," Wren said. "Just me."

"Did you see anything?" Elena's voice came out rougher than she meant it to. "On the ridge anyone, anything…"

"I saw you standing in the middle of the path with a knife out, staring at nothing." Wren lowered her hands slowly, studying her with the sharp-eyed concern that meant she was cataloguing every detail to worry about later. "The border's clear, by the way. No sign of more Redfang. You look like you saw a ghost."

"I don't know what I saw." Elena made herself sheathe the knife, made her hands stop shaking through sheer force of will. "Something was watching me. It didn't smell like anything I've ever come across. And then it was just...gone."

Wren's gaze flicked past her, up toward the dark tree line, then back. "Gone how?"

"Like it decided to leave," Elena said slowly, hearing how strange it sounded even as she said it. "Like it wasn't finished. Just... not yet."

For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Wren, in the practical, unshakeable way that had made her Elena's closest friend since they were pups tumbling in the training yard, reached out and gripped her arm. "You're freezing. And bleeding, still, from the look of that shirt. Whatever it was, it's gone now, and you need a healer before you fall over. Ghosts can wait until morning."

Elena let herself be steered back toward the healer's hut, but she looked back once, twice, at the black shape of the ridge against the stars, and the feeling stayed with her long after the presence itself had gone the unshakable sense that something out there had looked at her not the way a predator looks at prey, but the way a man looks at something he intends to come back for.

Her rooms, when she finally reached them near midnight, stitched and bandaged and bone-tired, were exactly as she'd left them that morning. Which was to say: empty.

Damian's side of the bed hadn't been slept in for three nights running. His boots were gone from beside the door he'd taken to keeping a second pair somewhere else, somewhere he clearly thought she didn't know about, though of course she did; a mate always knew, on some animal level, even when she tried very hard not to. The fire had burned down to embers, and no one had thought to build it back up, because building up a fire for a Luna who spent most nights alone wasn't the kind of task anyone remembered.

Elena sat on the edge of the bed and peeled her ruined shirt away from the half-healed gash along her ribs, wincing, and looked at the space beside her cold, undisturbed, exactly the size and shape of a man who used to fill it and now simply didn't.

She thought about the gathering. About the way Damian's eyes had slid past her wound like it was scenery. About the careful, deliberate half-second of silence before he'd called her his Luna, as though the words needed convincing to come out at all. About Seraphine's soft hands and softer pity, and the particular, specific cruelty of being outshone by someone who had never once bled for this pack.

You should have sent word first, he'd said. This gathering matters.

As if six Redfang wolves at the border mattered less than a girl in blue silk.

She lay back against the pillows without bothering to change, too tired to do more than that, and stared up at the dark ceiling, and let herself feel just for a moment, just here, where no one could see her. Three years married to a bond that was supposed to mean chosen and had instead come to mean tolerated. Three years of proving herself in blood so no one would notice how little was given back to her in kind.

One day you're going to stop covering for all of them, Wren had said.

Elena closed her eyes and didn't answer, even in her own head, because she didn't trust what the answer would be.

She didn't remember falling asleep. She remembered, later, only fragments of the low murmur voices somewhere far off, a weight settling briefly at the edge of the mattress that vanished when she startled awake, the cold place beside her staying cold all night regardless.

It was the burning that woke her fully, sometime past three in the morning, a sharp, sudden heat blooming just beneath her collarbone, over the old scar Mother Rue had once touched but refused to explain.

Elena sat bolt upright, hand flying to her chest, breath catching.

The scar, a thin pale crescent she'd carried since birth and never once questioned, one of a thousand small oddities she has learned to live with was glowing.

Not metaphorically. Not a trick of moonlight through the window. A faint, unmistakable silver light pulsed beneath her skin in time with her heartbeat, bright enough to cast shadows against the wall, bright enough that for one terrified, breathless second Elena was certain her own body had caught fire from the inside.

Then, as fast as it had started, it stopped the light guttering out like a snuffed candle, leaving nothing behind but the ordinary pale crescent scar and the frantic slam of her own pulse.

Elena sat there in the dark, one hand pressed hard against her collarbone, waiting for her heart to slow, waiting for the light to come back, waiting for some explanation to arrive out of the shadows the way explanations never actually did.

Somewhere out past the northern ridge faint, but unmistakable, and closer now than it had been at midnight a wolf that wasn't Ashwood's, and wasn't Redfang's, let out a long, deliberate howl.

It sounded, more than anything, like an answer.