Luna Priestess

What the Temple Doesn't Tell You

They didn’t let me finish the ceremony.

One second, I was standing at the altar with the whole Coastal Court watching, and the next Maren had a hand clamped around my arm and was dragging me out a side door like I was a drunk acolyte who’d embarrassed herself at dinner.

Which, honestly, wasn’t far off.

“Smile,” she hissed under her breath. “Smile like nothing is wrong.”

I smiled. It probably looked like I was in pain, because I was.

Behind us I could hear the murmurs turning into actual words. Alphas asking their Betas what they’d just seen. Somebody’s mate laughing, high and nervous.

And under all of it, the thing I didn’t want to think about.....Kaius Draven’s boots on the stone floor, following us, until one of his own Betas caught his arm and said something too low for me to catch.

I didn’t look back. I didn’t trust myself to.

The second the door shut behind us, Maren let go of my arm as it had burned her.

“What,” she said, “was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lyra.”

“I don’t know, Maren, I swear on the Goddess I don’t know.” My voice came out higher than I wanted it to.

“One second I was fine, and then he walked in, and it just...it went out. Like someone snuffed a candle.”

Maren stared at me for a long moment. She’s not an easy woman to read.

Sixty years old and still built like she could break a grown wolf in half if he looked at her wrong, which, to be fair, she probably could.

She’d been Head Elder since before I was born. She’s the closest thing to a mother I’ve ever had, which isn’t saying much, because mothers, as a concept, were never really part of my life.

“Has this ever happened before?” she asked. Not really a question. More like she already knew the answer and wanted to hear me say it out loud.

“No.”

“Not once. Not even a flicker.”

“No, Maren. I would have told you.”

She turned away from me and pressed two fingers against her temple, the way she does when she’s doing that thing where she thinks so hard you can practically hear it.

“Alright,” she said finally.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. You are going to go to your room. You are going to stay there. You are not going to speak to anyone about this, especially not Alpha Draven, and if he tries to speak to you, you are going to say you’re unwell and walk away.”

“Maren...”

“I am not finished.”

I shut my mouth.

“Tomorrow morning, I will consult the Council. Quietly. This does not leave this hallway until I say it does. Do you understand me?”

I nodded. I understood the words fine. What I didn’t understand was why she looked so scared saying them.

Because Elder Maren does not get scared.

Not during the war eleven years ago, not during the fever sickness that took half the western villages, not the time a rogue wolf broke into the Temple grounds and she put him down herself with a kitchen knife.

I’ve seen the woman handle disaster with the same face she uses to order tea.

She was not using that face now.

My room in the Temple is small. Stone walls, one window, a bed too narrow for anyone who isn’t used to sleeping alone. I’ve slept alone my whole life, so it fits me fine.

I sat on the edge of it for a long time after Maren left, just staring at my hands as they belonged to someone else.

I kept waiting for the Sight to come back. That’s the thing nobody tells you about having a gift...you don’t notice it, not really, not until it’s gone.

It’s like breathing. You don’t think about your own lungs until you can’t fill them.

I closed my eyes and reached for it, the way I’d been taught since I was six years old. Reach past your own thoughts. Past your own wanting. Let the Goddess in.

Nothing.

Just my own thoughts. My own wanting. Loud and messy and entirely, embarrassingly mine.

And underneath all of it, if I was honest, which I try not to be about this particular thing...the memory of gold eyes finding mine across a crowded hall, and my whole body going still like a held breath.

I hated that I remembered it that clearly.

I hated more that some small, traitorous part of me wanted to remember it clearer.

Rhys found me an hour later. He didn’t bother knocking, because he never bothers knocking, a habit I’ve given up trying to break him of since we were twelve.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” I said, not looking up.

“You’re not supposed to lose your Sight in front of five packs either, but here we are.” He shut the door behind him and dropped down next to me on the bed, close enough that our shoulders touched.

“How are you doing. Actually.”

“Fantastic. Never better.”

“Lyra.”

“I don’t know, Rhys.” I finally looked at him.

He’s got this way of looking at me like he’s already three steps ahead of whatever I’m about to say, which is annoying, because he usually is.

“I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know if it’s coming back.”

“It’ll come back.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he admitted. “But you looked terrified back there, and I figured you needed someone to say it anyway.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and leaned my head against his shoulder.

He smells like cedar and gun oil, which shouldn’t be a comforting combination but somehow is, because it’s just Rhys.

It’s been Rhys since I was six years old, and he was eight, and he stole an extra roll from the kitchens and gave half to me because I was the new kid crying in the corner, and nobody else would talk to me.

“What do you think it means?” I asked quietly.

He was quiet for a second too long.

“I think,” he said, “that whatever it means, it’s got something to do with him.”

I didn’t have to ask who he meant.

“That’s insane,” I said. “I’ve never even met the man. I looked at him for maybe four seconds before everything went black.”

“Four seconds is enough for a mate-pull, Ly.”

“I’m a Priestess. That’s the whole point of what I am. It doesn’t happen to Priestesses.”

“It’s not supposed to,” Rhys said. “Doesn’t mean it can’t.”

I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that nineteen years of Temple law couldn’t just be wrong about the one thing my entire life had been built around.

But I was thinking about the sketch. The jaw. The throat. Drawn before I’d ever laid eyes on the man in real life.

I didn’t say anything at all.

Maren came back just after midnight, when the Temple was quiet, and most of the acolytes were asleep.

She didn’t sit down. She stood in the doorway with a candle in one hand and an expression I’d never seen on her before, and it took me a second to place it, because it looked so wrong on her face.

She looked afraid.

“I spoke with two of the Elders,” she said. “Quietly, as I told you I would.”

“And?”

“And they agree this cannot be made public. Not yet. Not until we understand what it is.”

“What do they think it is?”

She didn’t answer that.

Instead, she crossed the room and sat down across from me, close enough that the candlelight threw long shadows up the wall behind her, and she asked me the question I’d been dreading since the second the black had swallowed my Sight in that hall.

“Lyra. I need you to answer me honestly, and I need you to understand that your honesty is the only thing that can protect you right now.”

“Okay.”

Her eyes held mine, steady, unblinking, the way they used to when I was small, and she was testing whether I’d learned my lessons.

“When you looked at Alpha Draven,” she said. “Did you feel something for him?”