Luna Eclipse: The Eclipsed Saga (Every Wolf Has A Dark Side)

(Luna)

The track burns gold under the late afternoon sun, and I love it. I love the way the heat comes up off the rubber in waves, the way my lungs ache in that good way, the way Coach Pearson’s whistle cuts through the thick Tennessee air like it’s the only sound that matters.

“Set!”

I drop into my stance. Fingers pressed to the line, heels lifted, every muscle in my legs coiled tight and ready. Behind me, the rest of the girls shift and breathe, but I don’t look at them. I never look at them. This is between me and the clock.

The whistle shrieks and I’m gone.

Four hundred meters isn’t a sprint and it isn’t a distance race, it’s something meaner than both, a test of how much pain you can hold onto without letting it slow you down. My arms pump, my ponytail whips against my neck, and somewhere around the two hundred mark my lungs start screaming at me to stop, to just ease off. I tell them no. Not today.

Around the last curve, something strange happens. The world goes quiet in a way that isn’t quiet at all - I can hear Coach Pearson’s watch clicking from thirty yards off, hear the individual gasps of the girls behind me, hear my own pulse like a drumbeat inside my skull. It should be overwhelming. Instead, it sharpens everything, makes my legs move faster like my body finally caught up to something my ears already knew. Then it’s gone, and my legs are on fire, and my vision narrows to a tunnel as I throw myself across the line like it owes me something.

“Fifty point two!”

Coach Pearson’s voice cracks with something close to disbelief. I bend over, hands on my knees, sucking in air that tastes like rubber and cut grass, and I can’t help the grin that spreads across my face even though I probably look like I’m dying.

“Three seconds, Willow.” He jogs up to me, stopwatch still clutched in his fist like it’s precious. “Three seconds. You know what that means? You’re three seconds off Olympic qualifying times. Three. Keep this up and we’re talking nationals. I mean it, Luna.”

“I heard you the first time, Coach.” I straighten up, still catching my breath, and swipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist. My heart is still hammering, but it isn’t the good kind of exhaustion talking anymore. It’s something closer to pride.

This is mine. Nobody handed it to me. There’s no mystery to it, no destiny, no invisible hand pushing me toward it. Just mornings before school when the sky is still bruised purple and I’m the only one crazy enough to be running loops around the football field. Just months of shin splints and burned lungs and the slow, stubborn shaving of seconds off my time until fifty point two became a number I could actually hit.

I look up at the bleachers out of habit, and there he is. Jace Calloway, cap pushed back, notebook balanced on his knee, pencil moving fast like he’s trying to catch me before I disappear. For half a second, right where the sun hits the metal bench behind him, I could swear I see something glint back at me - gold, animal, gone the instant I blink. Probably a soda can. Probably nothing.

“Take five, ladies,” Coach Pearson calls out, and the rest of the team scatters toward the water fountain, but I walk straight for the bleachers instead.

“You know staring is creepy, right?” I say, climbing up to sit beside him.

“Not staring. Sketching.” Jace doesn’t even look up, his pencil still moving in short, sure strokes. “There’s a difference.”

I lean over his shoulder to look. It’s me, mid-stride, captured in that half second where my whole body is leaning into the run like gravity doesn’t apply to me. He’s gotten the tilt of my shoulders right, the blur of motion in my legs, even the fierce, furious concentration on my face that I didn’t know I made until I saw it on paper enough times to recognize it.

“I look mad,” I say.

“You look fast.” He finally glances up at me, blue eyes squinting against the sun, and something in my chest goes soft and warm the way it always does when he looks at me like that, like I’m the only thing worth looking at in a whole stadium of people. “Fifty point two, huh? Guess I better start running faster if I’m gonna keep up with you.”

“You’d have to actually run for that to be a problem.”

“I run. Just not in circles for no reason.” He closes the notebook and hops down off the bleachers, offering me a hand I don’t need but take anyway. “C’mon, Willow. Mae’s got the fryer going. I can smell it from here.”

“You cannot smell the diner from the track, Jace.”

“I can smell it in my soul.”

I laugh, and it feels easy, the kind of laugh that doesn’t cost me anything. We walk off the field together, my legs still humming from the run, his hand loose around mine, and for a second I think about how normal this is. How boring, in the best way. Small town, small school, a boy who’s known me since freshman year and still looks at me like I’m new every time.

I don’t know yet that this is the last day it gets to be this simple.

Mae’s Diner sits two towns over from Little River, tucked right off the road that follows the curve of the Pigeon River, close enough that you can smell the water on a hot day, mixed in with fry oil and coffee that’s been on the burner too long. My grandmother’s been running it since before I was born, and half the town treats it like their second kitchen.

The bell over the door jingles when Jace pushes it open, and Nana Mae calls out from behind the counter without even looking up. “There’s my girl.”

“Hey, Nana.”

“Fifty point two,” Jace announces before I can even sit down, sliding into our usual booth by the window. “She’s basically an Olympian now.”

“Is that so.” Nana Mae raises an eyebrow at me, wiping her hands on her apron as she comes around the counter. She’s got flour on her cheek and that look she gets, half proud, half like she’s trying not to worry about something. “Well. Somebody better bring that girl a milkshake, then.”

“Chocolate,” I say, “and don’t let him steal my fries this time.”

“No promises,” Jace says, grinning.

He steals my fries anyway, the second Nana Mae sets the basket down between us. I smack his hand, he laughs around a mouthful, and we spend the next hour arguing about absolutely nothing that matters, whether the diner’s jukebox needs new songs, whether Coach Pearson secretly likes us more than the boys’ team, whether Jace’s truck is actually going to survive another Tennessee winter. It’s a stupid, perfect, ordinary Tuesday, and I don’t appreciate it nearly enough while I still have it.

Then, walking past the kitchen doors, everything hits me at once. The fry oil and coffee sharpen into something almost unbearable, layered underneath with a dozen other smells I shouldn’t be able to separate - onions from three tables over, the bleach Nana Mae used on the counter that morning, someone’s perfume from clear across the room. Under all of it, wet earth and pine, sharp and out of place, like the woods themselves wandered in and sat down at the counter. My ears fill with sound too, the hum of the refrigerator, six different conversations, my own pulse loud enough to drown them all out. I grip the edge of the booth to steady myself, and for a second the room tilts.

“Luna?” Nana Mae’s voice cuts through it, closer than I expect. She’s stopped mid-step, dish towel forgotten in her hand, staring at me with an expression I’ve never seen on her before, somewhere between confusion and alarm. “Baby, your eyes just did something strange.”

“What? No, they didn’t.” The words come out fast, too fast, before I even think about whether they’re true. I blink hard, and the noise recedes, the smells fade back to just fry oil and coffee. “I’m fine. Just got up too quick, that’s all.”

She doesn’t look convinced, but Jace, halfway through a fry, doesn’t seem to notice anything at all. “You did look a little green,” he offers unhelpfully. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say again, sitting back down like nothing happened, like my heart isn’t still hammering harder than it did after the race. “Long day. Sit down, Nana, your fries are getting cold.”

She sits, eventually, though she keeps glancing at me sideways for the rest of the hour, like she’s waiting for whatever she saw to happen again. I shrug it off and go back to my fries, and if my hand shakes a little around the milkshake glass, I don’t let anyone see it.

By the time Jace drops me off at home, the sky’s gone the color of a fresh bruise, purple bleeding into black, and my legs are finally starting to ache from the run in that deep, satisfying way that means I’ll sleep good tonight.

I don’t.

The dream comes fast and it comes wrong, like my mind skipped past the part where things make sense and went straight to the part where they don’t.

I’m running again, except it isn’t the track and it isn’t Little River. It’s a forest made of silver, trees that look like they’ve been carved out of moonlight, and I’m not on two legs anymore. I’m low to the ground, fast in a way my body has never been fast, four legs eating up distance my human legs could never cover. My breath comes out in a fog and my heart pounds in a rhythm I don’t recognize as my own. The air smells like wet earth and pine, sharp and familiar in a way that makes my chest tighten.

There are others running with me. I can feel them more than see them, shapes moving through the trees on either side, and somewhere ahead of us a voice calls out. Not in words exactly. More like the shape of a name being pulled up out of somewhere old, somewhere buried so deep I didn’t know it was there. Ahead, low in the brush, a pair of eyes catches what little light there is and flares gold, holding steady on me like it’s been waiting.

It isn’t my name. I don’t know whose name it is. But it feels important, feels like if I could just run a little faster, get a little closer, I’d understand.

Then the ground drops out from under me, and I’m falling - not through air, but through something colder, darker, something that knows my name even if I don’t.

I sit straight up in bed, gasping, my sheets tangled around my legs and soaked through with sweat like I actually ran that forest instead of dreaming it. My heart slams against my ribs so hard it hurts. For a second I don’t know where I am - the dark feels too big, the walls too far away - and then my phone glows on the nightstand and I remember. Little River. My room. My bed.

Just a dream.

I press a hand to my chest and feel my own heartbeat slowing back down under my palm. A shaky laugh escapes me, aimed at myself. Track practice must have wiped me out harder than I thought. That, or too many fries and not enough sleep.

But the smell won’t leave me - wet earth and pine, the same scent from the diner kitchen, the same scent from the dream, like the forest followed me home and crawled under my sheets. And the eyes. Gold, steady, waiting, the same flicker I dismissed on the bleachers, the same flicker Nana Mae swore she saw across the diner table.

I lie back down and pull the sheets up, but I don’t tell myself it was nothing this time. I can’t.