Luna Priestess

Rival Blood

Maren’s face went very still.

“Lyra.”

“I’ll try,” I said, which wasn’t a promise, and we both knew it wasn’t a promise, but it was the most honest thing I could offer her.

She held my eyes for a long moment, like she was deciding whether to push harder. In the end, she just let out a breath through her nose and stepped back.

“Try harder than you’re trying right now,” she said. “I have to ride back before dark. I don’t like leaving you here, but pulling you out now would look worse than leaving you in. Just...be careful. Please.”

“I will.”

She left within the hour. I watched her grey mare disappear back through the tree line and felt the ground under me tilt a little further out of true, the way it had been tilting all week.

Two days later, Alpha Damon Voss arrived a full week early for the summit.

Nobody expected him.

Kaius’s whole pack scrambled to prepare for it...extra places set at dinner, guest quarters aired out, Betas sent running with messages I wasn’t shown.

I found out about it the way I found out about most things in that pack house, secondhand, from Rhys, who came to find me looking like he’d rather be delivering any other piece of news.

“Voss is here,” he said. “Early. Nobody knows why.”

“Why does that matter to me?”

“Because,” Rhys said, “as the acting High Priestess present in Ashen territory, you’re expected to perform the same border blessing for him that you did for Kaius. Territory claim, right of contest, all of it. It’s tradition. You can’t refuse one Alpha and not the other, not with a Supreme Alpha vote coming.”

My stomach dropped somewhere around my knees. “You’re joking.”

“I wish I were.”

I thought about Maren’s face. You do not touch that man again. She’d meant Kaius, obviously, but some sick, tired part of me almost laughed, because apparently the universe had decided one forbidden Alpha wasn’t enough of a problem.

Damon Voss did not look like a man who needed anyone’s permission for anything.

He met me in the courtyard with none of the careful distance Kaius always kept...strolled up like we were old friends, all easy charm and a smile that probably worked on most people.

Dark hair, sharper features than Kaius’s, a kind of loose confidence that filled a room without seeming to try. If Kaius was a wall you ran into, Voss was a current that pulled you under before you noticed you were swimming.

“So you’re the Priestess everyone’s talking about,” he said, before I’d even introduced myself. “I have to say, the rumours undersold you.”

“I don’t know what rumours you mean.”

“Sure you don’t.” His grin widened. “Shall we get this over with? I hear you’re good at this.”

I didn’t like him already, and I hadn’t even touched him yet.

The rite was the same one I’d performed for Kaius...salt, words, the offer of a hand.

I told myself, walking through the steps, that whatever had happened at the border with Kaius was a one-time thing. A fluke tied to him specifically.

That was the only version of this that made any sense. A mate-pull only happens once, with one wolf. Every text I’d ever read agreed on that much.

I held out my hand.

Voss took it, and the second our palms touched, the ground dropped out from under me exactly the way it had before.

Black.

Not fire this time. Not a vision at all. Just that same total, swallowing dark, my own heartbeat suddenly the loudest thing in the world, and somewhere very far away I heard him say my name, low and startled, in a voice that had lost all its easy charm.

When the world came back, I was gripping his hand so hard my knuckles had gone white, and he wasn’t smiling anymore.

He was staring at me the way you stare at something that’s just proven a rule you didn’t know could be broken.

“That’s not supposed to happen,” he said quietly.

“No,” I agreed, pulling my hand back so fast I nearly stumbled. “It’s not.”

Around us, a few pack wolves had stopped what they were doing to watch, and I could feel the murmur starting the same way it had at the summit, that low ripple that meant everyone in earshot had just witnessed something they didn’t have words for yet.

I didn’t wait to find out what words they’d land on.

I turned and walked back toward the pack house as fast as I could without breaking into a run, my whole body shaking, my mind racing through the same terrible thought over and over.

It wasn’t just Kaius.

Whatever this was, whatever the Goddess had done to me in that summit hall, it wasn’t a mate-pull tied to one man.

I’d been telling myself that for days, clinging to it like a life raft, because a mate-pull was frightening, but it was at least a known thing, a rule I understood even if I hated it.

This wasn’t that.

This was something else entirely, something I had no name for, something no text I’d ever studied had prepared me to face...and if it could happen twice, with two different men, in the space of a single week, then I had no way of knowing where it stopped.

Or whether it stopped at all.