Moonbound Secrets

Episode 4

The phrases remained a long time after all the people took their leave, crawling like the shadows on the skin of Lyra. The curse has begun again.

She had expected anger. She had expected suspicion. However, what she did not anticipate was that she had so many eyes on her every move, like she was carrying a disease that they would acquire with a single breath.

By daylight, the fortress-like compound of the pack was teeming along with whispers. Along her path--along the stone corridors, along the training yard, through the kitchens where the smoke rose incurably around the iron stoves--conversations were suspended the moment she approached. Wolves turned round and looked with cold and fierce glares. Some sneered openly. Others were saying words she could nearly hear, words such as outsider and curse.

It was suffocating.

Darius was the only thing that could hold them back. His presence followed her like a shadow--powerful, icy and absolutely unavoidable. The wolves bowed their heads as he passed, but Lyra watched them looking at him as well. Their Alpha, hitherto unquestioned, was now dragging the weight of her being. And they resented it.

She attempted to shrink. To disappear. But it didn’t matter.

A young wolf in human form was in the training yard and when she spat, his eyes glowed amber. Have fun on thy throne, girl. You’ll bring us to ruin.

Darius had time to reach his hand round the throat of the boy, before Lyra had a chance to respond. With great effortless power he lifted him, and held him suspended in the air as though he were nothing.

Against her speak, and I shall not live to see another moon, said Darius, and his voice was low and deadly.

The boy’s face turned pale. Darius released him, and he fell on the dirt in a gasp. Their silence was not respected and the pack watching did not dare to move. It was the hatred, highly strained.

Lyra’s chest constricted. She despised the way he defended her, not because it was not protection -but because of the violence. The fact that all shows of her superiority cast her into the role is more of the property of the Alpha than the individual.

She heard the whispers in her head that night as she lay in the room that Darius had made her own. Then she put her hands to her ears, not enough to shut them, the uncertainty, the malevolence, the cutting point of the curse were at work again.

Her chest was lifted and down in shallow breathing. Maybe they were right. And possibly it was her that made them have teeth.

The door swung open and Darius slipped in with no noise. And like storm clouds, his presence filled the room. He walked through the distance slowly and deliberately, till he was standing on the edge of her bed.

"You must sleep," he said, with a lower voice than his eyes. “Tomorrow will be harder.”

Lyra flinched, turning away. “Why are you doing this? Why me?”

There was silence between them for a while. Then his hand touched some of the loose hair on her cheek, and his touch was harsh, but caressing. His gaze was molten gold that was searing into her soul.

Fate doesn’t ask, he said.

His speech was a prison and a pledge.

And as he walked out on her in the stifling silence, Lyra understood that it was no longer the enmity of the pack that she feared most. It was he--the man whose caress caused her body to feel a burn, and whose chilly control was gripping her around like fetters.

But beyond in the distance she heard still another—the rasp of an elder blown by the wind, a sharp and certain voice:

“The curse has awakened.”

The words had the smell of smoke as they slithered through the night, coiling around the chest of Lyra and wrapping themselves around her lungs. She rose in bed, her blood racing, all her senses alert. There had not been a murmur in the wind. It was clear. Intentional. Nearly as though it had been spoken to her ears.

She got out of bed, sliding her naked legs on the cold rocky floor. There was too little movement, too little sound in the chamber, except the beating of her heart. She crept slowly up to the small window, and looked down at the courtyard.

Moonlight gave the stones silver paint. Some of the guards lingered at the gates, shoulders strained, and their eyes were sweeping over the woods. No other person, however, appeared to respond. No one else had heard.

Lyra laid a hand to her forehead. Was she losing her mind? Are the voices she heard in her mind only echoes of the hatred of the pack... or of something worse?

The door groaned a little behind her. She stood still and glanced around, but the room was bare. There were not even footsteps. No sign of breath stirred. And yet, she wasn’t alone. She touched it--a crawling eye that was crawling over her body.

Her breasts up and down went shallow, frantic. Who the hell is there? She said to the black.

No answer. Only silence.

Then--it was a low voice, and very close, and almost against her ear, yet nobody was anywhere.

“Run before the moon bleeds.”

The wall struck the back of Lyra as she jolted, the coldness of its surface a shock against the storm that was brewing inside of her. The shaking of her hands was beyond her control; the nails of her fingernails had sunk into her palms, the agony was a far-off echo to the stifling hold of terror that had suddenly covered her heart. Her breath came as a silent scream. The sound hadn’t been hers. It hadn’t been imagined.

And before it could have come, the presence was gone, and only the hollow throb of her fear remained.

Torches in the hallway flicked. Somewhere out there in the fortress a wolf howled--a noise that made her shudder down her backbone.

Lyra dropped to her knees, and said to herself," I do not belong here. I don’t belong here.”

But some truth in her heart was pushing, insistent.

Whatever the cause was, the wolves were wary of... she was breathing it already through her veins.

.

And she would know why all right before the next blood moon appeared.