The Ashes of The Rejected Queen

Chapter 5 — What Mara Told Me In The Morning

I didn't sleep much.

Juno stayed until almost midnight — talking, asking questions, occasionally answering some of mine in the rapid-fire way of someone who has been starved of new company. I learned that she had been at the Hollow Sanctum for six months. That her Alpha had tried to sell her contract to another pack without her knowledge. That she had run the night she found out and hadn't stopped until she reached these trees.

I learned that there were forty-three wolves living in the Sanctum. Rogues, rejected wolves, wolves who had simply chosen to leave systems that weren't built for them. That Dax — the man on the fence — had once been the Beta of one of the most powerful packs in the northern region and nobody knew why he'd ended up here, and anyone who asked got a look that stopped the question in its throat.

I learned that Mara had been running the Sanctum for longer than anyone could accurately remember.

"How old is she?" I asked.

Juno shrugged. "Old. Very old. Past the point where it's polite to ask." She paused. "Her eyes weren't always silver, apparently. Someone who's been here longer than me said they used to be brown. They changed somewhere along the way."

I thought about those silver eyes. The way they moved over my face like they were reading something.

"She knew my name," I said. "Before I told her."

"She knows things," Juno said simply. "It's not worth trying to figure out how. I tried for a month and all I got was a headache and three conversations that made me feel like I was missing something obvious." She stood up, stretching. "Sleep. Mara will want you early."

She left.

I lay in the dark and listened to the Sanctum settling around me — small sounds, wind in the trees, someone moving in a building nearby. Real sounds. Living sounds.

Eventually I slept.

Mara came at dawn.

She sat across from me at the small table in my room with two cups of something hot and dark that tasted like coffee's more serious older sister, and she told me.

All of it.

"The Black Luna bloodline is not a gift from birth," she began. "It is a designation. The Moon Goddess chooses one wolf per generation — sometimes fewer. She places something inside them, a seed, and she seals it. And she watches."

"What is she watching for?" I asked.

"Whether the wolf is broken by the world or broken open by it." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "Most wolves who carry the seed never have it activated. They live normal lives, never knowing what they held inside them. Because the breaking-open never comes — or it comes too late, or in the wrong way."

"What's the wrong way?"

"Bitterness." Mara said it quietly. "Hatred without purpose. Some wolves are broken by rejection or loss and they turn inward — they collapse. Some turn outward in a way that is only destruction. The Moon Goddess does not activate the seed for those wolves. She waits for the one who will break open and then — not break. Who will feel everything and still stand up."

I thought about last night. About the road. About the three rogues.

About getting up.

"You were watching to see which kind I was," I said.

"I have been watching since your birth. I knew you carried the seed. I did not know whether you would break open or break down until last night." She tilted her head slightly. "You broke open."

"I cried for twenty minutes alone on a road."

"Yes. And then you stood up. And then you followed me." She almost smiled. "The crying is not the data point, Sera. The standing up is."

I looked down at my cup. Let that settle.

"What does the Black Luna actually do?" I asked. "What does the power mean in practice?"

"Speed beyond what any Alpha can match. A force that moves from you like a shield or a wave — you felt the edges of it with the rogues. A connection to the mate bond system that allows you to sense violations of it — broken bonds, forced bonds, true bonds being ignored." She paused. "And Nyx."

"My wolf."

"She is not simply your wolf. She is ancient. Older than you. She has been waiting in your bloodline for four centuries, since Calla died, moving from carrier to carrier, waiting for the right one to be woken in." Mara met my eyes. "She chose you, Sera. Before the Moon Goddess made her designation official, Nyx chose you. That does not happen."

I felt my wolf stir at her name. Warm and enormous and deeply present.

"Why me?" I whispered.

Mara was quiet for a moment.

"I have wondered that myself," she said finally. "I have watched you for eighteen years. And what I think — what I believe — is that Nyx chose you because of the specific way you love. Most wolves love possessively. Territorially. You loved Zane Carter for two years and never once tried to claim him, never manipulated the bond, never used what you were feeling as a weapon." She looked at me steadily. "You just — loved him. Quietly. Without asking for anything back. Nyx has been waiting for someone who knows how to love without making it about power. Because the Black Luna will have more power than almost any living wolf. And power without that knowledge—" she didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.

I sat with that for a long time.

Then I put down my cup and looked up.

"When do we start training?"

Mara's eyes did something. Not quite a smile. Something older than a smile.

"Now," she said. "We start now."

She stood. And as she moved toward the door something fell from her cloak — a small piece of paper, folded. She didn't stop to pick it up.

I reached over and unfolded it automatically.

It was a letter. Old — the paper was yellowed, the ink faded. But the words were still readable.

At the top, in handwriting I didn't recognize, was a date. And below the date, a name.

Sera Blake. Born to carry what was lost. Beware the bond that breaks before it should — it will wake the thing inside her. When it wakes, keep her safe until she is ready. Then step back. She will not need you after that.

The letter was dated eighteen years ago.

The day I was born.

Someone had known. Before I took my first breath, someone had known exactly what was going to happen to me. And the signature at the bottom of the letter was not Mara's. It was a name I recognized immediately. A name that made my hands go cold.

It was my mother's.