Moonshade Oath

The rain hammered the windshield like a thousand angry fists.

I gripped the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles white against the dark leather. The road ahead twisted through the dense woods surrounding Greywood University, slick and shining under my headlights. It was past midnight, and I was driving back to campus after a late shift at the campus café. My eyelids felt heavy, the kind of exhaustion that seeps into your bones after pulling an all-nighter for midterms and then working until closing.

“Just ten more minutes,” I muttered to myself, blinking hard. “Ten more minutes and I’m in bed.”

The curve came too fast.

I yanked the wheel, but the tires hydroplaned. Time slowed. The world spun—headlights flashing across wet trees, the scream of rubber on asphalt, the sickening lurch in my stomach. Then impact.

Metal crumpled. Glass shattered. Pain exploded everywhere at once.

And then… nothing.

Darkness. Cold. Silence.

I thought that was it. The end. Nineteen years old, Evelyn Harper, literature major, part-time barista, dead on a rainy road because she was too stubborn to call for a ride.

But I was wrong.

A voice—clear, genderless, impossibly calm—cut through the void.

[Restart initiated. Returning to T-minus 72 hours.]

What?

Light flooded in. Not the harsh white of hospital fluorescents, but warm, golden, familiar.

I gasped awake in my dorm bed, heart pounding like I’d just run a marathon. The room was quiet except for the soft breathing of my roommate, Sophie Carter, asleep on the bunk across from mine. Moonlight filtered through the half-open blinds, painting silver stripes across the posters on our wall—vintage book covers, band photos, the usual college chaos.

I sat up slowly, clutching my chest. My body felt whole. No pain. No blood. Just the faint ache of a nightmare that felt too real.

A dream? It had to be a dream.

But the details were too sharp: the rain, the skid, the crunch of metal. I could still taste the metallic tang of fear in my mouth.

I glanced at my phone on the nightstand. The screen lit up with the date and time.

December 22, 2025. 2:17 AM.

That couldn’t be right. I’d been driving back on the 25th—Christmas night. I remembered it clearly because I’d been listening to holiday music on the radio, some overly cheerful pop version of “Jingle Bells.”

Three days. I’d gone back three days.

My hands trembled as I set the phone down.

“This isn’t real,” I whispered. “You’re losing it, Evie.”

Then it appeared.

Floating in my vision like an augmented reality overlay, translucent blue letters materialized in the air in front of me. No phone, no screen—just words hanging there, glowing faintly.

[Moonshade System Activated.] [Host: Evelyn Harper] [Bloodline Status: Latent (Werewolf – Dormant)] [Warning: In 72 hours, on the night of the full moon, Greywood University campus will become a battlefield between werewolf and vampire factions.] [Your death flag has been detected. Probability of survival: 0%.] [Objective: Awaken your bloodline. Survive the Crimson Night.]

I blinked hard. Once. Twice. The text didn’t vanish.

I waved my hand through it—nothing. It stayed perfectly still, like it was burned into my retinas.

Werewolf? Vampire? This had to be some kind of hallucination. Maybe I’d hit my head harder than I thought in the… accident that apparently hadn’t happened yet.

But the fear crawling up my spine felt real.

I pulled my knees to my chest, staring at the glowing warning.

Seventy-two hours.

Three days until everything went to hell.

And apparently, I was supposed to be right in the middle of it.

Outside the window, the full moon hung low and swollen in the sky, three nights away from its peak. It looked almost… hungry.

I swallowed hard.

“Okay, Evelyn,” I said quietly, my voice shaking. “If this is real… what the hell do I do now?”

The system didn’t answer.

But deep inside me, something ancient stirred—just for a second—like a wolf stretching in its sleep.

And for the first time in my life, I felt truly, dangerously awake.

To be continued...