Chapter 8

Marcus’s POV

The gunshot cracked across the quarry like a whip.

I was already running.

I’d left the car a kilometer back, at the rusted gate, and gone the rest of the way on foot with Kai’s senses sharpening every step. Rain ran into my eyes. Mud sucked at my boots. Behind me, forty of my best wolves fanned out through the scrub, silent as smoke. Aaron ran at my shoulder with the rifle in one hand and my father’s ring hidden in his shirt.

“East wall,” Aaron gasped. “The path. Five men, maybe six.”

“And her?”

“I can smell her. She’s on the cliff.”

I heard a second shot.

Then I stopped thinking, and Kai took over.

It’s hard to describe. It’s like stepping off a high place into warm water. My spine bent. My bones stretched. My clothes tore, and the rain rushed cold across a coat of thick black fur, and the world exploded into a hundred new colors of smell and sound. I hit the path on four legs in a full-out charge.

The first man never saw me.

I took him at the shoulder and slammed him into the granite. The second turned, and his torch swung up, and I went for his wrist. He screamed. The rifle spun out of his fingers, over the edge, into the black, and I heard it strike the water a long time later.

Five men. Six. They fought like men who’d been paid to. But Kai was a hundred and thirty kilos of pure rage, and every man on that path had made the mistake of thinking he was fighting a man.

I heard a voice above the din.

“Marcus!”

Serena.

I looked up.

She stood pressed against the cliff wall, on a ledge no wider than my boot, with a drop of a hundred feet at her heels. Her hair was plastered to her face. Her clothes were soaked through. And a big man in a black jacket was edging along the ledge toward her, one hand outstretched, a knife in the other.

“Come on, love,” he said softly. “Don’t be stupid.”

Kai screamed in my head.

I couldn’t reach her. The path was blocked. Two men held me on the far side of a fallen rock. I threw one into the wall and turned for the other, and I was too slow, too slow, and the man reached out a hand and grabbed her wrist.

She looked at him.

And in the light of the men’s torches, in the pouring rain, her eyes went silver.

Not gray. Not pale. Silver, bright as new coins. It came up from deep inside her like a lamp being turned on.

The man let go.

He stumbled back. His face was white. He opened his mouth and said one word.

“Moonline.”

The air split.

She didn’t scream. She just let go. A ripple ran through her body, a long liquid shudder, and she seemed to fold and unfold at once, bones sliding, skin flowing, and in the space of one heartbeat there was no woman on the ledge.

A wolf stood there.

She was small. Smaller than any wolf I’d ever seen. Slim and lithe, with a narrow head and long legs, and a coat of pure silver, so bright it seemed to shine on its own. Black lines ran along her flanks and down her legs. Fine curving marks, as if someone had drawn on her with a brush. Ink. She was covered in ink.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Kai went absolutely still.

The man on the ledge screamed. She leaped. I had never seen a wolf jump like it. Five meters, straight across the gap, a bolt of silver against the black, and she hit him square in the chest and drove him off the ledge onto the path. He tumbled. His knife clattered away.

She landed on top of him and snarled, and every man on that cliff took a step back.

I shifted.

Fur to skin in one breath, the way I’ve done since I was sixteen, but this time it felt like breaking a spell. I stood on the wet path, naked and gasping in the rain, and stared at the small silver wolf with the ink on her sides.

She turned her head and looked at me.

Her eyes were dark brown again. Serena’s eyes. But there was a presence behind them, huge and warm and ancient, that looked at me as if it had waited a hundred years.

The golden thread came out of my chest.

I felt it go. A bright shining line, fine as silk, unspooling from my heart and stretching across the space between us. She saw it. Her ears pricked. It touched her chest, and it caught, and it wrapped, and a flash of gold lit up the whole quarry.

Kai roared.

I heard it in my head, and in the air, and in the ground under my feet. It was a sound like the birth of a star.

Mate.

And then, small and warm and clear, from the wolf on the path, a voice I’d never heard but knew as well as my own heartbeat.

There you are, said Serena’s wolf.

I fell to my knees on the wet stone.

“Serena,” I whispered.

She trotted across the rock. She pushed her silver head against my chest. She smelled of ink and oranges and warm paper and rain, and I put my arms around her neck and buried my face in her fur and shook.

Behind us, Aaron’s wolves cleared the last of the men. It was over. I hardly heard. All I knew was the soft, fast beat of a heart against my own.

She shifted back in my arms. Human again. Small and shivering and beautiful, her hair in my hands, ink on her cheek, her eyes wide.

“Marcus,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“I have a wolf.”

“I know.”

“She’s been asleep. Someone tied her. Priya said...”

“I know.” I laughed. I was crying. “You’re my mate.”

“I know,” said Serena. And she started to cry too.

“Well,” said a quiet voice above us. “How touching.”

We looked up.

The old office stood at the top of the quarry road, a low concrete building with a single light. Jason Ho stood in front of it in his black leather jacket, one arm wrapped around Natalie’s throat, a long knife against her collarbone. Her face was gray. Her eyes were wide. She didn’t struggle.

“Let her go,” I said.

“Give me the ring.”

“I have it.”

I held up my hand. The fake gold band glinted in the torchlight.

Jason smiled.

“Throw it.”

I threw it. He caught it one-handed and turned it over. He ran a thumb across the crest. His smile widened.

“Brass,” he said pleasantly. “Twenty years old. Uncle Lim, wasn’t it? From Bugis?” He dropped it in the mud and crushed it under his heel. “Did you think I wouldn’t know? I’ve been in your family’s house since you were a boy.”

My blood turned to ice.

“But that’s all right,” said Jason. “I never really wanted the ring.”

He looked past me. Past Aaron. To the small, shivering woman in my arms.

“Hello, little silver,” said Jason Ho softly. “Your mother hid you very well. Twenty-two years of knots and bitter teas and bad lies. But you can’t hide the moon forever.”

Serena went rigid in my arms.

“What did you say?” she whispered.

His eyes glittered.

“Didn’t she tell you, child?” He tightened his arm around Natalie’s throat. “You’re the last daughter of the Moonline. And your family’s been running from me since before you were born.”