Chapter 2

Elara's POV

The smell hit me before I saw anything, thick and metallic, wrong in a way that made every hair on my arms stand up.

I stopped walking immediately and my first thought was that an animal had made a kill nearby, a deer maybe, something the forest did every night without anyone caring.

But this smell was heavier than that, it clung to the back of my throat.

I should have turned around, I know that now.

But my whole body was still buzzing from the rejection, and some reckless part of me wanted to keep walking, wanted to be anywhere that wasn't behind me.

That was how I found a wounded warrior.

He was young, maybe a year or two older than me, wearing the gray of the Ashwood border patrol.

He was on the ground with his back against a tree, one hand pressed to his side, blood soaking through his fingers.

"Help," he rasped, when he saw me. "There are Rogues, three of them. please get back to the pack house."

I froze, rogues didn't come this close to Ashwood land, not since the border wards had been strengthened years ago.

Rogues meant wolves with no pack, no laws, nothing left in them but hunger and rage.

"I can't just leave you here."

"You have to go please." His voice cracked on the words. "They're close, run."

A branch snapped somewhere behind me, too loud to be the wind.

I turned, and that was when I saw the first one step out from between the trees.

He was already shifted halfway, patchy fur and too many teeth, eyes that didn't look like they belonged to anything that used to be a person.

I didn't have a weapon, I didn't have training, I didn't even know how to fight.

Ryker had been right about that part, even if I hated him for saying it out loud in front of everyone.

I had never won a single sparring match in my life.

"Run," the warrior whispered.

I ran.

Branches tore at my dress, the same dress Mira had spent three days making perfect, and I didn't care, I just kept moving, lungs burning, heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my ears.

Behind me I heard something crash through the underbrush, fast, faster than I could ever hope to outrun.

I tripped over a root and hit the ground hard, pain shooting up through my palms.

When I twisted around, the rogue was already there, close enough that I could smell the bad smell coming off him, something sour and rotten underneath the blood.

He lunged towards me.

I threw my arm up, like that would stop anything, and I braced for teeth that never came.

Instead there was a blur of black fur and a sound I felt more than heard, a snarl low enough to rattle my chest.

Something slammed into the rogue from the side and the two of them went rolling into the dark, and for a second all I could do was lie there on the forest floor, shaking, trying to understand what had just happened.

The fight didn't last long, it shouldn't have been possible for it to end that fast.

When it was over, a wolf the size of nothing I had ever seen stood over the rogue's body, chest heaving, fur soaked dark down one side.

He was easily twice the size of any wolf from my pack, black as midnight, with eyes that caught what little moonlight came through the canopy and turned it silver.

I should have run again, because every instinct told me to run again.

I couldn't move.

The wolf turned toward me, and for one long moment neither of us did anything.

Then his body began to shift, bones cracking and reforming in a way that used to make me look away as a kid, until a man stood there naked instead, tall, broad, dark haired, with blood on his hands that wasn't his own.

"Are you hurt?" His voice was low, rough at the edges, like he wasn't used to using it for anything but orders.

"There's another warrior," I said, before I could think about how strange it was that I was still talking about someone else's injuries when I had just witnessed a near death experience.

"He's by the trees, back there. He's bleeding badly."

Something moved across the stranger's face, surprise maybe, like he hadn't expected that answer.

"I'll send someone," he said. "Stay still."

He crouched in front of me, and up close I could see how tired he looked underneath all that quiet control, shadows under his eyes.

He reached for my arm, very carefully, like he expected me to flinch away.

I did flinch, it was an old habit.

He didn't touch me right away, He just waited, watching my face, until I made myself hold still and let him.

The moment his fingers closed around my wrist to check for injury, heat shot up my arm so fast it knocked the breath out of me.

It wasn't painful, It was something closer to lightning, spreading from where his skin met mine all the way up to my chest.

He sucked in a breath like he felt it too.

I looked down at our joint hands and was frozen, as a mark began to burn itself into the skin of my wrist, dark lines curling into a shape I didn't recognize, a crescent moon wrapped in thorns.

"That's not possible," the stranger said, and for the first time his calm cracked wide open.

"What is that?" My voice barely came out. "What did you do?"

He pulled his hand back like I'd burned him, staring at the same mark now etched into his own skin, and something in his expression shifted from surprise into something closer to dread.

"Who are you?" he asked, low, urgent, like the answer mattered more than anything else in the world right now. "What's your name?"

"Elara." I could hardly get the word out. "Elara Ashwood."

He went very still.

"Ashwood," he repeated, like the name meant terrible to him.

His jaw tightened, and when he looked at me again, there was something almost like fear underneath all that power. "You have no idea what you just did."