I woke again to silence.
Not the quiet of an empty room or the hush before dawn. This was absolute. The kind of silence that only exists in the space between heartbeats, between breaths, between one moment and the next when time forgets to move forward.
My eyes opened.
Silver grass stretched in every direction, each blade perfectly still despite wind I could feel but not hear. The sky above was neither day nor night, caught in perpetual twilight that turned everything the color of old photographs.
I sat up slowly, waiting for pain that didn't come.
My chest should have been screaming. The rejection bond should still be tearing me apart from the inside. But there was nothing. No burn. No silver blood. I pressed my hand against my shirt and felt only smooth fabric, no wound beneath.
I looked down. My clothes were the same ones I'd worn to Ethan's house, but they looked wrong somehow. Faded. Like I was looking at them through frosted glass.
My hands looked the same way. Solid but not quite real.
I pushed myself to standing. My body felt weightless, like gravity had loosened its grip and forgotten to hold on properly. Each movement was too smooth, too easy, muscles responding before I'd finished thinking the command.
"Hello?" My voice came out flat, swallowed by the silence before it could travel more than a few feet. "Is anyone there?"
The silver grass didn't stir. The twilight sky didn't answer.
I turned in a slow circle, searching for anything that looked familiar. Trees dotted the landscape, their bark pale and smooth as bone. In the distance, structures rose like broken teeth, buildings or ruins that shimmered at the edges as if they couldn't decide whether to exist or not.
No pack bonds hummed at the back of my mind. That constant awareness of other wolves, the invisible threads that connected every member of the pack, had vanished completely.
I reached for my wolf.
Nothing.
The hollow space where she used to live was still empty, still echoing with absence. Luna had burned her out and death hadn't brought her back.
"No." I pressed both hands against my chest, trying to feel for any spark of her. "Please. You can't be gone. Not forever."
The silence pressed in from all sides.
I started walking because standing still felt like giving up. The silver grass made no sound beneath my feet. The bone-white trees cast no shadows. Everything here existed in that same twilight limbo, neither bright nor dark, neither warm nor cold.
The air hummed.
I stopped, head tilting. It was so faint I'd almost missed it. A vibration in the atmosphere itself, like standing too close to power lines or old machinery. The sound, if it could be called that, came from everywhere at once.
Static.
That's what it reminded me of. The white noise between radio stations, the crackle before a storm, the hiss of something trying to break through from the other side of reality.
I kept walking toward the distant ruins. They seemed closer than they should be, distances warping and shifting when I wasn't looking directly at them. One moment the structures were miles away. The next they loomed just ahead, close enough to see the way their walls flickered like candle flames.
A figure moved between the buildings.
My heart, which I'd been half-convinced had stopped beating entirely, jumped in my chest. "Wait! Please, I need help!"
The figure disappeared around a corner. I ran after it, my weightless body eating up distance impossibly fast. The silver grass blurred beneath me. Wind that made no sound rushed past my face.
I rounded the corner and stopped.
An empty courtyard stretched before me, paved in smooth white stone that reflected the twilight sky. Archways lined three sides, leading into darkness. The fourth side opened onto more silver fields, more bone trees, more endless nothing.
No figure. No one at all.
"I saw you." My voice still died too quickly, swallowed by the oppressive quiet. "I know someone's here."
Movement caught my eye. Not in the courtyard but in one of the archways. A shadow that didn't quite match the darkness around it, shaped like a person but wrong somehow. Too tall. Too still.
I backed up a step. "Who are you?"
The shadow didn't answer. It watched me with attention that had weight, even though I couldn't see its eyes.
Another shadow appeared in a different archway. Then another. Then another. They ringed the courtyard now, dozens of them, all standing perfectly motionless in the dark.
Watching.
"What do you want?" My hands clenched into fists even though I had nothing to fight with. No wolf. No strength. Just this weightless half-real body that didn't feel like mine anymore.
One of the shadows stepped forward into the twilight.
It wore the shape of a wolf, but not like any wolf I'd ever seen. Its body was translucent, made of smoke and starlight, eyes burning with pale fire that cast no light. When it moved, it didn't walk so much as drift, paws never quite touching the ground.
A ghost.
The word came unbidden. These were ghost wolves. Dead things. Like me.
"Am I..." I couldn't finish the question. Didn't want to hear the answer.
The ghost wolf tilted its head, studying me with those burning eyes. Its mouth opened but no sound came out. Just more of that static hum, louder now, vibrating through my bones.
It turned and drifted back into the archway. The other shadows followed, melting into darkness one by one until I was alone again in the empty courtyard.
I stood there shaking, arms wrapped around myself, trying to understand what I was seeing. What I'd become.
The static hum grew louder. The air itself began to vibrate, making my teeth ache and my vision blur. I spun in a circle, searching for the source, but it came from everywhere. From the stone beneath my feet. From the archways. From the silver fields beyond.
The sky darkened.
I looked up and my breath caught.
The twilight was gone. In its place, night had fallen so suddenly it felt like someone had thrown a switch. Stars blazed overhead, more than should be possible, so many they blurred together into rivers of light.
And hanging low on the horizon, close enough to touch, was the moon.
Not the pale ghost I was used to. Not even the Blood Moon from the rejection ceremony.
This moon was red. Deep crimson, the color of fresh arterial blood. It pulsed like a living thing, swelling and contracting with a rhythm that matched a heartbeat I could feel but not hear.
The static hum resolved into words.
"Welcome to your Reckoning."
The voice came from the moon itself, or maybe from the spaces between stars, or maybe from inside my own head. Female. Ancient. The same voice that had judged me in the pack square.
Luna.
I stumbled backward, my weightless body suddenly too heavy. "No. I died. I drowned. This isn't real."
"Death is a threshold." The voice wrapped around me like smoke. "The Reckoning lies beyond it."
The crimson moon swelled larger. Its light spilled across the silver fields, turning everything the color of old blood. Where the light touched, the ghost wolves reappeared, hundreds of them now, thousands, filling the landscape as far as I could see.
All of them watching me.
"What is this place?" My voice cracked. "What's happening to me?"
"You have been judged." Luna's voice carried no warmth, no mercy. "Found wanting. Cast into the Veil where broken wolves go to face their truth."
The moon's light intensified. I raised my hand to shield my eyes but the glow came through my fingers, through my skin, lighting me up from within.
"Nine trials await you." The words echoed across the silver fields. "Survive them, and you may return to the world of the living. Fail, and your soul dissolves into nothing."
"I don't understand." Panic clawed up my throat. "I don't want this. I just want to go home."
"Home." Luna's laugh was colder than the void between stars. "You have no home. No pack. No wolf. You are nothing but the memory of what you were."
The crimson light blazed brighter. The ghost wolves began to move, circling closer, their burning eyes fixed on me with hunger that made my skin crawl.
"Welcome," Luna whispered, her voice fading into static, "to your Reckoning."