The laughter slithered through the trees like a living thing...hollow, echoing, wrong in ways that made Selene's bones ache.
Kael's grip on his dagger tightened, his knuckles bleaching white. Moonlight carved his profile in silver and shadow, catching on the fresh scar where she'd drunk from his palm. The wound should have healed by now.
It hadn't.
Selene flexed her fingers, testing the absence of pain in her back. The ghost-blade's poison was gone, but something else thrummed beneath her skin...a restless, hungry thing that hadn't been there before.
His blood. His power.
The tether between them pulsed like a second heartbeat.
Another peal of laughter, closer this time.
Kael's lips peeled back from his teeth. "Roran."
"No." Selene caught his wrist before he could charge into the dark. "That's not him."
The realization settled over her like frost. Ghost wolves mimicked voices, but this laughter was older, threaded with a malice that made her shadows recoil.
Something moved at the tree line.
Not a wolf.
Not quite.
A figure emerged...skeletal, draped in tattered pelts, its elongated limbs moving with spider-like grace. Where its face should have been, there was only smooth skin stretched over bone, the features erased as if they'd never existed.
No mouth. No eyes.
Yet it laughed all the same, the sound vibrating from somewhere deep in its chest.
Kael shifted to stand between Selene and the creature, his Alpha power rolling off him in waves. "What the fuck are you?"
The faceless thing cocked its head. When it spoke, its voice was a chorus...Roran's snarl layered with Liora's sweetness and Cyrus's rasp.
"The first shadow."
Selene's magic screamed in recognition.
The creature lunged.
Kael met it mid-air, his claws slashing. They collided with a sound like cracking ice, tumbling into the underbrush. Selene's shadows surged forward, but the tether yanked...
...and suddenly she was seeing through Kael's eyes.
The creature's skin parted like water, revealing nothing beneath. No blood. No bone. Just endless, hungry dark.
Its hand plunged into Kael's chest.
Not to rip out his heart.
To borrow it.
Selene gasped, the vision shattering as Kael's agony flooded the tether. She didn't think...just moved, her shadows forming into jagged spears that she drove into the creature's back.
It shrieked, the sound shredding the night air.
Kael collapsed, clutching his chest where the thing's fingers had vanished inside him. His breath came in wet, ragged gasps. "It...it touched something..."
The faceless creature writhed, her shadows burning through its stolen pelts. For a heartbeat, she thought they'd won.
Then it smiled...
...its skin splitting ear to ear in a grotesque mockery of a mouth.
"Little heir," it crooned in Orric's voice. "You taste like your mother."
Kael roared.
Selene barely caught him before he could charge again. "It's baiting you!"
The creature tilted its head, the yawning black maw of its mouth dripping something thick and iridescent. "She hasn't told you, has she? What her shadows truly crave?"
Kael froze.
Selene's stomach dropped.
The creature laughed, its form blurring at the edges. "Ask her why Roran feared her. Ask her why the Blood Moon rises for her kind."
Then it dissolved...
...into a swarm of moths that scattered into the trees.
Silence fell, heavy and suffocating.
Kael turned to her, his golden eyes glowing in the dark. "Explain."
The command in his voice tugged at the tether between them, pulling the truth up her throat like a hooked fish. "I don't know what that thing was."
"But you know what it meant."
Selene swallowed hard. Her shadows coiled tight around her ribs, as if trying to shield her. "Ghost wolves... they're not born. They're made."
"By what?"
"By the Blood Moon." She forced the words out. "And the only thing that can summon it is..."
"A shadow wolf's sacrifice," Kael finished, his voice hollow.
The truth hung between them, ugly and unavoidable.
Selene had always known her magic was different. Had felt it in the way her shadows hungered, in the way packmates flinched when she passed. But this...
Monster.
Cursed thing.
Should have drowned her at birth.
Kael took a step back. Then another.
The hurt was worse than any blade.
Selene wrapped her arms around herself, her shadows mirroring the gesture. "I didn't know. Not until Roran..."
A howl cut her off...real this time, close enough to shake leaves from the trees.
Orric's hunting cry.
Kael's head snapped toward the sound. When he looked back at her, his expression was shuttered. "Run."
"What?"
"Run, Selene." His voice broke. "Before I have to choose."
The unspoken between you and my pack hung between them.
Selene's vision blurred. She wanted to argue. To beg. To remind him of every stolen moment, every whispered promise.
But the howls were getting closer.
And the tether between them was pulling, urging her toward the mountains where the Blood Moon waited.
So she ran.
The River
Selene didn't stop until her lungs burned and her legs gave out.
She collapsed at the river's edge, her reflection staring back at her...wild-eyed, streaked with dirt and blood. The tether stretched taut between her and Kael, a fraying thread of pain and longing.
She couldn't leave him. Not like this.
A twig snapped behind her.
Selene whirled, her shadows rising...
...only to freeze at the sight of Cyrus.
Her half-brother leaned against a birch tree, his face a mess of bruises, one arm clutched to his broken ribs. But it was his eyes that stopped her breath...glowing the same eerie blue as Liora's corpse.
"You shouldn't have come back, little shadow," he said...
in the faceless creature's voice.