Moonbound
First-Person POVAlphaTwist
Wren Ashcombe has spent six years insisting she's just a healer, nothing more, ever since her mother died in an "accident" that never quite added up. But when a wasting curse called the Hollow Rot starts dragging half-shifted wolves across the border into her town, she can't hide from what she really is: the last daughter of the Marches' vanished line of curse-readers.
Kael Blackthorn, alpha of a pack losing its people one hollowed-out body at a time, comes to Fenmarch hunting the source of the plague and finds instead a woman who can read what killed his father, what's killing his pack now, and what really happened to her own mother. He needs her knowledge. His pack needs her gift. And the bond building between them, half instinct and half choice, is the one thing his enemies didn't plan for.
As Wren digs deeper into Blackthorn territory, uncovering a conspiracy that reaches into the pack's own alliances, she has to decide how much of her mother's dangerous legacy she's willing to claim, and whether the man asking her to stay is offering her a place, or just another cage with better company.
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Chapter: CHAPTER FOURThe boundary stones at dawn looked smaller than I remembered, three weathered markers leaning at their own private angles in the mist, and I had crossed within sight of them a hundred times in my life without ever once stepping past the line they marked. Fenmarch's edge. The place where the fiction my whole town lived inside, the one where packs and Free Towns simply didn't see each other, finally had to admit it was a fiction at all.Kael was waiting with four riders and a covered wagon for the wolves too weak to ride, and beside him stood a woman I hadn't met yet, younger than him by several years, dark-haired and sharp-eyed, wearing the same collar-mark I'd seen on the message two days before."Rhian," she said, before I could ask, offering a hand in the human way rather than whatever greeting pack custom might have called for. Her grip was firm, assessing, not unkind. "Kael's sister. Beta of Blackthorn, which mostly means I do the parts of his job he's too proud to admit he hates.
最後更新: 2026-08-12
Chapter: CHAPTER THREEI waited until midnight to open the shelf, because some decisions need the cover of dark to survive their own making.The house was quiet by then. Beren had gone home to his own bed after checking the patients a final time, and the four sleeping Blackthorn wolves breathed slow and even in the next room, watched over by nothing but a low fire and my own uneasy conscience. I sat on the stillroom floor with a single candle, the shelf's little painted door open in front of me for the first time in eight years, and looked at what my mother had left behind.There were more books than I remembered. Six of them, bound in plain leather, none labeled, stacked in an order I didn't recognize but that felt, somehow, deliberate, the way everything my mother did had always felt deliberate even when I couldn't see the reason. I'd opened the first of them once before, the year after she died, gotten three pages into her cramped, slanting shorthand, and put it away again because grief and confusion tog
最後更新: 2026-08-10
Chapter: CHAPTER TWOThe stillroom smelled like it always did, dried yarrow and beeswax and the faint green bitterness of willowbark, but with Kael Blackthorn standing in the doorway it felt like a different room entirely, too small, too close, every jar on every shelf suddenly aware of being looked at.He crossed to Sten's bed first. Didn't touch him. Just stood over him with his jaw set, reading the wound the way I imagined he read tracks in snow, patient and total."How long has he been like this?" he asked."Nine days since he came in. Whatever it is started before that. I can't tell you how long.""You've packed the wound.""Six times. It doesn't take. The dressing comes away dry every time, like it's being drunk instead of soaked." I hesitated, then added, because he deserved the whole truth and because withholding it felt, suddenly, like the kind of small cowardice I didn't want to be caught in. "I don't think it's a wound at all. Not really. I think the wound is just where it's easiest to see."Ka
最後更新: 2026-08-10
Chapter: CHAPTER ONEThe first thing I noticed about the wolf lying on my table was that he was dying wrong.I'd seen dying before. I'd seen it slow, from wasting sickness, the body eating itself in careful order, fat first, then muscle, then whatever the mind could spare. I'd seen it fast, from the kind of wound that doesn't wait for permission. I knew what dying looked like on a human body, because Fenmarch didn't have money for a healer who only wanted to treat the easy cases.This wasn't either of those.The man on my table, because he was a man now, all long limbs and too-pale skin, though Beren Ostler swore up and down he'd dragged in a wolf, had a wound in his side that wasn't healing and wasn't festering. It was just emptying. Every time I packed it, the packing came away dry, like the wound was drinking the substance out of the cloth instead of bleeding into it. The skin around it had gone the color of old parchment, and when I laid my palm flat against his ribs I felt something I had no name for
最後更新: 2026-08-10
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