4: THE ASH LEFT BEHIND

I woke up choking on smoke.

No fire. Just the aftertaste of something scorched—burned wood, fur, and air gone bitter with magic.

I sat up fast. My fingers glowed. Faint, silver markings crawled across the backs of my hands, curling over my knuckles in tiny loops and teeth like lines. I didn’t recognize the script, but I knew what it meant.

Moon-blessed, and moon-marked wolves were rarely left alive. 0My heartbeat thundered.

I looked around. I was alone in the cot behind the healer ward. My cloak was still damp with dew from the forest. My boots were muddy. The smell of the spring clung to my skin like vapor.

And beneath that—ash. I scrubbed my hands raw in the basin until the silver faded, blinking back panic.

I caught my reflection in the water. The same hollow eyes. But something behind them had changed. Not healed. Not angry. Awaken.

The healer ward was already full by the time I walked in. Warriors bled onto bandages. Apprentices shouted for tinctures. Someone howled as his shoulder was reset in the back room.

I pushed through the mess and grabbed my ledger from the shelf. A shadow moved near the door. Someone was watching, and I glanced up, it was Elder Vessa.

She turned away quickly when I met her eyes, but her posture was stiff, shoulders squared. She was monitoring, not visiting. So the Council had sent someone to keep tabs on me, wonderful.

I wrote a quick entry in my journal beneath the bandage log, hiding it between pages:

Observed Scent: Displaced. Mine fading. Cassia’s growing stronger.

Symptom: Headache, dizziness, no wolf response. Aura distortion?

I closed the ledger fast and shoved it under a stack of linen. No one could know I was tracking scents again. The last time someone in this pack spoke openly about scent magic, they were exiled or worse. Still… the scent I’d inhaled on that warrior yesterday— was Cassia’s.

Sweet. Perfect—Almost too perfect. Like a replica. A perfume with no flaws, but Cassia hadn’t touched him. Her scent was leaking, clinging, too persistent to be natural.

Which meant one thing, Aura projection.

I remembered the stories. My mother had whispered them late at night, when I was just a pup and didn’t yet understand why she buried her old scrolls in the floorboards and pretended not to read.

“Some wolves steal the moon,” she’d said, brushing my hair. “They cut out someone else’s scent and wear it like silk.”

“Why would anyone do that?” I’d asked.

“Because a stolen Luna smells just like fate—until the real one wakes up.”

I hadn’t understood then, I did now!

“Hey, Mouse,” someone called behind me. Only one wolf called me that with a smile and not a sneer.

Toma, the youngest apprentice, about seventeen and too clever for his own safety. He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, mischief all over his face.

“You’re late.”

“Didn’t sleep,” I said.

“Me either. Too much blood and ego in one room.” He winked. “Guess who limped in this morning with a cracked rib and tried to blame a training dummy?”

“Cassia?”

He laughed. “Close. Darius.”

I looked up fast. “Darius?”

Toma nodded. “She’s been riding him like a show horse, apparently. Tried to claim a mating injury. You’d think a bonded Alpha would be stronger than that.”

My stomach turned, not jealousy, it's a recognition.

He shouldn’t have bonded to her. His wolf must’ve fought it, that would explain the scent displacement. The exhaustion in his aura. But no one else seemed to notice, because no one else smelled what I did.

I thanked Toma and walked past him, head down, thoughts racing.

If Cassia had truly used scent-magic to fake a bond, there would be signs. Residual energy, strange emotional echoes. Wolves she hadn't touched reacted like she had, and if I could prove it…I might not be able to undo the bond. But I could tear away her lies.

That night, I waited until the ward went quiet. Then I crept to the back door, unlatched it, and stepped into the cold. A soft wind passed over me. I smelled moonflower, mint—And something sour underneath, decayed.

Cassia had walked this path just hours ago and her scent smells stronger than ever. Too strong it was spreading and that meant one thing:

The ritual hadn’t just stolen my scent.

It was feeding on it.

He shouldn’t have smelled like her. That was my first thought when I leaned over Joren’s bandaged chest and caught it—that sickeningly perfect lavender-and-moonflower blend clinging to his collarbone like perfume left on skin after sex.

I flinched so hard the sutures slipped from my fingers. Joren didn’t notice, he was too busy groaning. “Sorry,” I muttered, tying the last stitch. “I’ll bring you pain root in a second.”

“Don’t bother,” he muttered. “Just needed someone who could use a needle without passing out.”

I gave a weak smile. He wasn’t the problem, his scent was. He had no reason to smell like her. He wasn’t ranked high enough to be around Cassia, let alone touch her. Yet her scent curled from his skin like smoke from a burned offering—thick, syrupy, wrong.

Not natural.

Not real.

I stepped back and turned toward the supply shelves, heart pounding. This wasn’t a coincidence. Cassia’s scent was showing up where it didn’t belong. On warriors. On she-wolves in the mess hall. In the practice arena dirt. In places she hadn’t been.

The false aura wasn’t just covering her anymore, it was infecting others. Aura projection wasn’t just illegal, it was cursed. 

Old stories said wolves who wore another’s scent too long eventually lost their own, turning feral and scentless—unable to be tracked, bonded, or accepted into any pack. It was the ultimate exile.

And worse—The projection could spread to others.

A virus of scent.

A web of fake bonds.

A pack with no truth.

I spent the rest of the shift in silence, nose half-buried in my sleeve, breathing through gauze. I made a map in my head. Mentally traced where Cassia had been in the last three days, versus where the scent had surfaced. It didn’t match, the trail was too wide, too fast.

And the scent was too perfect. No variation—No animal musk, just floral and heat, layered over something I couldn’t name. Until I smelled it again in the drying room. There, clinging to a discarded scarf near the window, I finally recognized the base note.

Moonvine root. My blood ran cold. Moonvine was rare. Dangerous in high doses. Its pollen fused with scent markers—binding, amplifying, and corrupting them.

A scent anchor. In ancient rites, it was used by rogue seers to mask divine signatures. Only a Luna-blessed wolf could even detect it. Ordinary wolves would only smell the top notes—love, lust, bond.

Not the rot beneath. I wrapped the scarf in a cloth bundle and hid it under the floorboards. My fingers shook as I wrote the next entry in my secret scent ledger.

ENTRY 04

Victim: Joren

Contact: None known.

Aura trail: Present (8 hours)

Marker: Moonvine root confirmed

Theory: Scent curse replicating. Ritual designed not to mask, but to override territory-level mating instincts. Possibly tied to mate-claim throne politics. Dangerous.

A knock startled me. I slammed the book shut and shoved it beneath the washbasin.

“Apologies,” said a deep voice. “Healer Ayla?”

I turned. Two armored wolves stood in the doorway. Royal insignias on their shoulders, black leather, and golden chains. Guards.

“I’m needed?” I questioned.

They nodded once. “Alpha King Kael requests your presence at the Luna Council reception. He wishes to observe the healer ranks.”

Bullshit! Alpha Kings didn’t “observe” healers. They hunted threats, and somehow… I’d become one.