The Moon Goddess's Wolfless

The full moon hangs over Silverpeak territory, turning the pines to black lace and the hall's stone steps to bone. I sit on the sacred bench outside the elders' chamber, my thumbnail worrying at the runes someone carved here before my grandfather's grandfather was born.

Next week I turn twenty. In seven days I run the Race of the Moon Goddess.

Every wolf in Silverpeak runs it once. The Goddess watches, and the wolf who crosses her stone first is called blessed. The rest are merely counted. But a wolf who cannot shift cannot run, and a wolf who cannot run has no claim.

The Claim is what keeps a pack wolf alive. The Alpha holds it over every one of us, a promise written in blood and breath that says this one is ours, touch her and answer to us. Without it, I'm unclaimed. Unclaimed wolves are rogue by law. Rogues are fair game for any pack that crosses them.

The door opens behind me and light spills across the steps. I know who it is by the way the night goes quiet.

"You should be inside." Orion doesn't ask. He never asks. "The elders are speaking of you."

"Then they can do it without me."

His hand closes around my jaw, not roughly, which is somehow worse. It's practiced. He tips my face up until the moon is in my eyes and his shadow is everything else.

"You will shift next week," he says. "You will run. You will cross that stone. Because if you don't—"

He lets it hang. His thumb presses against my pulse and stays there. I'd rather he'd finished.

I twist free. He lets me, which tells me it's because he wants to. "Say it."

"The Alpha can't hold a claim on a wolf who failed the Race. It's the law." His voice is flat, like he's reading me a lease. "The elders will put you to the Binding. A mate-bond moves the claim from him to a stronger wolf, and you stay pack, stay safe, stay mine. Or you go to the Moonless Lands."

Stay mine. He doesn't even dress it up.

I've heard of the Moonless Lands the way children hear of the thing under the bed. A strip of ash-grey country between the territories where no pack holds the claim, where the outcast and the unwanted drift until a stronger pack finds them. Nobody has ever been sent there and come back to tell it.

"And the elders have already chosen who the stronger wolf is," I say.

Orion smiles. It's the smile of someone who has already won. "They chose when you were a month old."

My stomach turns over. "That isn't a choice. It's an inheritance."

"I was four years old when the Alpha carried you in." He steps closer, and I'm back against the cold stone. "The elders walked me to your cradle and told me you were mine. I've spent twenty years making myself worthy of the word. Do you think I'll watch a ghost of a wolf, a girl who can't even shift, walk off into the Moonless Lands and waste it?"

"I'm not a possession."

"No." His hand finds the back of my neck, gentle in a way that makes my skin crawl. "You're a promise. And I keep mine."

He leaves me there on the bench with the moon on my face and the sound of my own pulse. Behind the hall door, I hear the elders laughing.

The laughter from inside the hall cuts through the heavy night air like a dull blade. I stand up from the sacred bench, my legs stiff, the cold stone having leeched all the warmth from my bones. I can't stay here. If I stay, listening to the elders map out my life like livestock at a winter market, I will choke.

I slip down the steps, keeping to the long shadows cast by the pine trees. In Silverpeak, everyone is always watching. But I've had nineteen years to learn how to move like a ghost among predators.

My mentor taught me this—not with words, but with patience. Move like you're already somewhere else, he'd say. Don't think about where you're going. Think about where you've been. Make your body small. Make your breath quiet. A predator only hunts what it notices.

I keep my footfalls light, distributing my weight to the outside edges of my feet the way he showed me. No snapping branches. No displaced stones. The path I take to the river is the one I've memorized a thousand times—the one that keeps me downwind of the outer sentries, the one that lets me disappear into the forest like I was never there at all.

The air changes when I reach the true wild. It gets colder, sharper, smelling of damp earth, pine needles, and rushing water. I drop to my knees at the Blackwood River's edge, the mud soaking through my dress. I don't care.

I scoop up the freezing water and splash it over my face, gasping as the shock hits. I scrub at my jaw, at the back of my neck, trying to wash away every trace of Orion's touch. My hands shake as I work. The wolfsbane oil—the bitter sage that Minsi has been boiling into my skin every morning for nineteen years—swirls away in cloudy streams.

To the pack, that oil meant I was sickly. A wolf so weak her own body couldn't produce proper pheromones. They pitied me for it. They never questioned it.

What they don't know is what lies beneath: the clean, sweet scent of something that was never meant to wear fur.

I sit back on my heels, looking up at the moon through the canopy. Next week, when the horn blows and the entire pack shifts into a tide of muscle and claws, the illusion breaks. The elders will see that their "inherited promise" cannot run. Orion will claim his prize through the Binding. And I will be erased—either into the Moonless Lands or into a cage wearing Orion's name.

A twig snaps.

The sound is sharp, fracturing the river's steady rush.

My heart leaps, but I don't move. Don't react to the threat; listen to it first. Another of my mentor's lessons. I tilt my head slightly, ears straining, eyes closed to sharpen my hearing. Footsteps? No. Too deliberate. Too heavy.

Not Orion. He moves like he owns the ground.

Something else. Something that hunts.

I stand slowly, backing away from the riverbank until my spine hits the rough bark of an ancient pine. My fingers scrape against the wood, but I stop myself. Don't telegraph fear. Don't show you're cornered. I force my hands to still, my breathing to level.

The forest has gone dead. Even the crickets have stopped.

The shadows between two massive oaks detach themselves.

At first, I think it's a bear. The silhouette towers over the underbrush, colossal. But it steps into the silver patch of moonlight, and my breath stops entirely.

A wolf. But not ours.

Silverpeak wolves are lean grey runners, built for the high peaks. This beast is massive—easily the size of a small horse—with fur the color of midnight, so deep it seems to drink the moonlight. Its shoulders are heavy with muscle, its chest rising and falling with a slow, terrifying rhythm.

But it's the eyes that lock me in place.

They aren't the yellow or amber of our pack. They're a piercing, icy silver, glowing with an intelligence that feels ancient and dangerous.

A rogue. It has to be. A rogue of this size could tear through our sentries without breaking a sweat.

The massive black wolf steps closer, its paws sinking into the mud without making a single sound. My instincts scream at me to run, to scream for the guards, to do anything. But I force myself to stay still. Running triggers the chase. A human cannot outrun a monster.

The wolf stops five feet away. The heat radiating off its body cuts through the freezing air, smelling of winter frost, smoke, and an overwhelming, crushing power.

It lowers its massive head, its dark muzzle twitching as it takes a long, deep breath.

It's scenting me.

Panic cascades through me. The river water has washed away most of the sage oil. My fear sweat is pouring off my skin. Right now, I don't smell like a sick wolf. I don't smell like a Silverpeak outcast.

But that should be all the wolf smells. All the wolf should be able to smell.

The massive black wolf has frozen. Its silver eyes are wide, fixed on my face with an intensity that burns right through me. It tilts its head, ears twitching, as if it's listening to something inside its own mind. It takes another step forward, so close I can see the silver scars lacing its muzzle, and lowers its nose until it's inches from my trembling hand.

It doesn't bite. It just breathes me in, a low, heavy huff of air against my skin.

And then, before I can process what's happening, the wolf begins to shift.

The sound of cracking bones and shifting muscle fills the quiet woods. The transformation is terrifyingly fast—faster than anything I've ever seen, faster than a normal wolf should be capable of. In seconds, a man stands in the moonlight.

He is tall, his shoulders broad enough to block out the river behind him, his dark hair falling wildly around a sharp, aristocratic jawline. He is completely unbothered by the cold, his chest bare, his silver eyes still locked onto mine with a fierce, burning hunger.

He steps into my space, trapping me between his massive chest and the stone-hard pine tree. He doesn't touch me like Orion did. He doesn't look at me like a possession. He looks at me like a man who has just found something he thought was a myth.

He reaches out, his large, scarred hand hovering just a hair's breadth away from my cheek. The heat of his skin makes my breath hitch.

"What are you?" His voice rumbles, deep and rough, vibrating right through my chest. He leans in closer, his nose brushing against the pulse point on my neck, drawing in a long, shuddering breath. "I've never... you don't smell like anything I've ever encountered."

My heart threatens to burst out of my ribs. "Please," I whisper, my hands flat against his bare chest, feeling the terrifying, steady thud of his heartbeat. "Don't tell them."

The stranger's lips curve into a slow, dangerous smile that sends a completely different kind of shiver down my spine.

"Tell them?" he murmurs, his silver eyes flashing in the dark. His hand finally touches my cheek, his thumb brushing across my skin with a gentleness that contradicts the predatory intensity of his gaze. "Little bird, the only question is what I'm going to do with you now that I've found you. And that answer depends entirely on what you are—and who you belong to. Now I'm the predator and your my sweet prey."

The word prey hangs in the frozen air between us, heavy and dark.

The stranger doesn't move, but his silver eyes track the rapid, frantic flutter of my pulse. His bare chest is warm against the freezing night, and for a terrifying second, I wonder if he can hear the thoughts screaming in my head. If he wanted to, he could snap my human neck before I could even draw breath to scream.

Instead, he slowly drops his hand, his knuckles brushing the air just an inch away from my cheek.

"Go back to your nest pajarito," he murmurs, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly vibration that stirs the hairs on my arms. "The wind is turning. Your pack's border patrols will be changing guards in ten minutes. If you are caught out here with another packs wolf scent on you, our little secret ends before it even begins."

My breath hitches. "You're letting me go?"

A slow, dangerously handsome smirk edges his lips. "For tonight. But next week, when the horn blows for the Race... I will be watching you from the high ridges, Selene. Don't let them break you before I can claim what is mine."