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“Arlene.”

The voice is not a sound so much as a pressure behind my sternum, warm and immovable. A woman stands at the center of the light. Her face keeps slipping out of focus, but her eyes are steady and clear and very old.

“Do you know why I gave you all a wolf spirit?” She does not say it with anger. “It’s not only to find your fated mates, but to steer you away from danger and protect yourself. So you don’t have to rely on anyone else to protect you.” She says it the way you state the position of a star. “I am giving you a door. One chance due to the prayers of one of my daughters. It will not open twice.”

“My pups… all of my pups.” It’s not every day you get to speak with the Moon Goddess. So I take my chance. This time, I may be able to save all of my pups.

“What would you give to save your pups?”

“Anything.” I say without hesitation.

“Go back.” She tilts her head, and the moonlight shifts with her. “You will wake before all of your pups die. Don’t waste this chance. Head south to the Silver Moon Pack. Look for Selena.”

I want to ask her more. I want to ask her everything. But the field is already dimming at its edges, and her face is becoming the inside of a tent ceiling, and the ground beneath me is a bedroll, and the air smells of lavender, vanilla, pine and moonlight. But before everything is gone she whispers one final sentence, I barely pick up, but it’s the price I will have to pay.

I stir something hard under me. I slowly open my eyes and I’m back in my tent as if everything I just experienced was a bad dream.

It was not a dream. Mother Moon gave us a second chance. We need to leave. Her voice comes low and certain… Someone’s here.

I sit up. Gray pre dawn light presses against the tent fabric. At the entrance, a tall muscular silhouette stares at me. “Who’s there?” I sniff deeply… I know that scent.

3

Darian's POV

The dirt tastes like blood.

I spit it out, rolling onto my back, and the sky above me is wrong. Pale blue. Morning. Not the stone ceiling of Candice’s cell, not the green pulse of suppression runes, not the dark, just open sky and pine branches and the kind of clean air that hasn’t been breathed by anyone dying.

I’m alive.

The thought doesn’t land gently. It hits like a fist to the sternum, and I jackknife upright, hands flying to my throat, my neck, the base of my skull where the needle went in. No collar. No burn. No silver singing through my veins like liquid ice. Just skin, warm, whole, unbroken.

Mate? I throw the thought outward before I’ve fully decided to, and the bond answers instantly, bright, steady, humming the way it hums when she’s sleeping and doesn’t know she’s reaching for me.

“Alive.”

Darian. A voice. Not Arlene’s. My Wolf. The one that’s been part of every thought since I was five years old and it first whispered mine about a stuffed wolf I wouldn’t share.

Darian. Breathe. My wolf comforts me. I breathe.

I returned to the time when I was finishing my scouting mission, two months before Arlene lost our unborn pup and a year before our family died. The memories arrive all at once, not like remembering but like being hit by them. Candice’s needle. Zeke’s hands. Arlene chained to the wall. The pups dropping one after the other, their small bodies hitting the stone like something discarded. The swords. The dark. The...

“We died. You’re back.”

I never left, my wolf says, I was just... unconscious. I’m here. He’s here. The bond is…

Mate.

“Arlene.”

I’m on my feet before the thought finishes. My body moves on instinct, legs carrying me through the trees at a pace that would kill a normal wolf, branches whipping past my face, the camp materializing through the trunks like something I’m running toward and away from at the same time.

“Please let her be alive. Please let her be alive. Please.”

We try to reach out in the mindlink, but there’s no response. I push harder. Faster. The camp smells the way it always smells at this hour… like rot, decay, sewer, and foul odors of unwashed wolves.

My family tent is where it’s always been. Canvas and patched canvas and the small window Arlene cut herself because she said she needed to see the sky or she’d forget what color it was. I stop at the entrance. The flap is closed. I pull it open slowly. Morning light falls across the bedroll in a long pale rectangle, and Arlene is lying there peaceful, one arm thrown above her head, her dark hair fanned across the pillow, her chest rising and falling with the slow, even rhythm of sleep.