Chapter 2

I do not kneel.

I stand there with my mouth open and the whole hall waiting, and for one long second I do not know what my body is going to do. Then Fabrice laughs, easy, like he was only testing whether I would break, and waves a hand toward the doors.

"Later," he says, already bored of me. "The Hunt will not wait."

The hall exhales. Someone refills a cup too fast and spills it. I sit back down with my heart slamming against my ribs and understand, distantly, that later is a promise, not a mercy.

The warriors leave within the hour. I watch from the steps as Fabrice mounts his horse without looking back at me once, Sana already beside him in a fur lined cloak I have never seen before. The Hunt riders thunder out through the gate, forty strong, off toward the eastern ridge where the Blood Moon will rise over open ground.

I am not riding with them. I never do. A luna's place during the Hunt is the healing tent, needle and thread ready for whatever comes back broken.

The camp goes quiet fast once the horses are gone. Only the healers remain, along with the pups too young to fight and the old wolves too tired to. I spend the first hour rolling bandages I hope no one needs and trying not to think about the word later sitting in my chest like a stone.

By the second hour, the light outside has gone strange. Not sunset yet, but something close to it, a deep red bleeding into the sky earlier than it should. The Blood Moon does that. Even before it rises fully, it stains the air.

"Feels wrong tonight," says the healer working beside me, threading a needle with hands that are not quite steady. "Too quiet."

She is right, though I only notice it once she says it out loud. No birds. No wind moving through the pines outside the tent. The whole forest is holding its breath.

Then the screaming starts.

It comes from the east, from the direction the Hunt rode toward hours ago, and it does not stop. Not one scream. Many, layered over each other, warriors and horses both, and underneath it something else, something low and wrong that does not sound like any wolf I have ever heard.

The healer beside me drops her needle.

"Stay here," I tell her, though I do not know why I say it, since staying here is exactly what I am supposed to do. A luna does not run toward danger. A luna waits for the wounded to be carried back to her.

I run anyway.

The forest path is dark under the pines, the Blood Moon light barely reaching the ground, and I am halfway to the tree line before I understand what I am running toward. Shapes move between the trunks ahead, low and fast, too many of them, and none of them wear the marks of our pack.

Rogues.

Not a scouting party. An ambush, dozens of them, already inside the outer camp before anyone raised an alarm. I skid to a stop at the edge of the clearing and see what they have done. Tents torn open. A young warrior on the ground, unmoving, one of the boys who used to steal honeycakes from the kitchen when he thought no one was watching.

This was planned. The thought arrives cold and clear even as my legs keep carrying me forward. Someone knew exactly when the Hunt party would be spread thin along the ridge, exactly when the camp would be left with nothing but healers and old wolves to guard it. Rogues do not usually plan. Rogues do not usually wait for a night this convenient.

A rogue wolf turns toward me before I can back away.

He is huge, easily twice the size of any wolf in our pack, fur matted dark with blood that is not his own. His eyes find mine across the clearing and something in them sharpens, the way a predator sharpens when it spots something smaller than itself standing very still.

Somewhere behind me, deeper in the ruined camp, I hear a healer scream my title instead of my name, the way everyone here has always called me. Luna. Not a person. A role standing frozen in a clearing with nothing in her hands but a needle and thread meant for other people's wounds.

I should run. Every instinct built by ten years of being careful tells me to run.

I do not run.

The rogue crosses the distance between us faster than anything that size should be able to move, jaws already open, and I have half a second to understand, with total clarity, that I am about to die in a healing tent's shadow with a needle still tucked into my belt.

Then something under my skin answers.

It is not fear. Fear would make sense. This is something older than fear, something that has been asleep so long I never knew it was there, and it opens its eyes inside my chest a heartbeat before the rogue's teeth would have closed around my throat.

My spine locks. My vision goes red at the edges, redder than the Blood Moon above the trees. Every bone in my hands feels wrong, too long, too sharp, like they are trying to become something else entirely.

The rogue's jaws snap shut an inch from my skin.

And stop.

He is staring at something behind my eyes now, not at my throat anymore, and for the first time since he found me in that clearing, I watch something I never expected to see on a rogue wolf's face.

He looks afraid.