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Hunter in the Pines

Author: SHARON CHRISTIAN
last update Last Updated: 2025-09-17 19:03:43

We moved before the runner’s breath learned how to be a story. East, where the line isn’t a fence but a rumor trees tell each other. Vivian gave us the shape of the errand with five words—“Look first, decide later”—and the kind of look that means a decision can be a weapon if you let it. Jasper, Lyra, two of the quiet ones who translate silence—Edda and Thorn—and me. Jason watched us go with that flat, shiny politeness men use when they’ve already decided what your return will mean.

The forest woke around us. Frost a thin scab on dead fern, sun caught in spider silk like a child with both hands in a jar. My cheek throbbed where his elbow had signed its name. The bruise in my ribs turned each step into an opinion. The necklace lay neutral at my sternum, as if it had graded me and found an acceptable answer. Elara’s blue strip warmed where it touched skin, a secret that liked being close to a heartbeat.

“Say it,” Lyra murmured from my left, eyes on the ground.

“What?”

“That you’re think
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  • SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA   Shadows of Tomorrow

    The dawn before Court tasted like coins and pine sap. The Holdfast rose early without needing to be called. The air had that tense, clean feeling of a kitchen scrubbed after a long night—ready to be made messy again, but proud of the shine for a heartbeat. Children peered from doorways they were not supposed to leave; elders wrapped shawls around shoulders that remembered older trials with worse poetry; the creek put itself to the work of going, which is all water can be begged to do.Vivian stood on the porch step and tied Elara’s blue back on the beam with deliberate fingers, as if knotting it now would help it hold when hands were shaking later. Jason checked his lists with the intensity of a man who knows the difference between order and the appearance of it. Lyra tucked three knives into places where a court would pretend not to notice them. My mother pressed a heel of bread into my hand and said nothing because there are days when even mothers know words would be rude to the thr

  • SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA   The Alpha’s Choice

    The Holdfast refused to sleep. Smoke from the cookfires braided with the medicinal bite of boiled yarrow. Children with bandaged knees blinked stubbornly at blankets. Men and women swapped out blood-wet shirts for clean ones and pretended the change made breath easier. The rebuilt kitchen’s door stood open like a mouth daring the night to feed it more emergencies.I sat on the step with Jasper’s torn shirt in my lap and my palms sticky with someone else’s red. The night moved around me, a body with too many hands. My wolf paced in the cage of my ribs, not wild, not calm—alert, ears pricked toward a pressure building in the dark.The pressure walked into the yard on quiet boots.Orion.No rogues flanked him this time. No camera handlers hovered. He carried his weapon openly: Jasper, wrapped in linen, head tucked against his shoulder. The whole yard inhaled like a hive tasting smoke. I stood too fast and the world tilted, caught on the point of the crescent burning under my shirt.He cr

  • SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA   The Showdown

    Dawn came like a held breath—thin, brittle, the sort of light that makes everyone look more guilty than they are. The Holdfast moved with an economy born of men who have practiced disaster and claim to be finally bored of it. We set traps not because we liked violence but because we understood that choice looks tasteless if you offer no consequence to those who choose wrong.Word ran like a rumor with good timing: Ronan’s forces were near, not a mass but an advance. Scouts had seen movement along the ridge. Cameras—some ruined, some repaired with cheaper lenses—blinked like injurious beetles in trees. The ash-eyes had been scraped and re-scraped; Thorn had stayed up all night with a soft knife and a grimmer patience. The ledger sat in the kitchen now like an accusation with pages, and people ate with the sort of neat hunger that has little time for dessert.Vivian convened the circle at the creek. The sky was hard and white. Packs from neighboring lines—neutral until the sight of bloo

  • SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA   The Rising Wolf

    Blood Moon is a lie and a truth at once. The moon doesn’t bleed; we do. But the sky does turn to a bruise, and the light does arrive wrong—thick, red, as if the night has held its breath too long and is ready to exhale something we can’t swallow.They led me back to the hollow as evening thinned to a rim. The torches were already staked, the twelve notches carved cleaner, the sinew lines retensioned until they hummed. The iron basin had been scrubbed bright, an altar pretending it wasn’t a bowl. Ronan stood with his hands behind his back like a man about to give a lecture at a school he burned, and the shard heir waited in the center like a punctuation mark that believes itself a sentence.The bone shackles had learned me by then. They sang before I stepped into the circle. The cords between wrists—mine and my mother’s, mine and Ronan’s, mine and the boy’s—vibrated with the excitement of creatures that believe they’re about to be promoted to myth. Cameras winked at the edges, red, red

  • SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA   The Ritual

    They took me through a forest that did not know my name.The path was not a path so much as a decision the rogues kept making with their boots. We moved in a file that swallowed noise. Nets hissed along branches and gathered back like patient spiders. The bone shackles sang under my skin, a cold hum that taught my wolf the shape of a cage. Every time she lunged, the hum tightened. Every time I breathed, it counted.The shard heir walked ahead as if the trees had been taught to part for him. His shoulders were straight in the way boys learn when someone corrects them with silence. He didn’t look back. Ronan didn’t need him to. The rogues flanking me smelled of cheap electricity and old river iron and a discipline I didn’t want to admire.We broke from pine into stone. The hollow was not a camp; it was a diagram. Torches stabbed the ground in a twelve-point ring, notched at each post with old symbols—wolf, river, blade, moon, home, debt. Between the posts, corded lines of sinew stretche

  • SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA   The Taking

    The day began without warning it would be stolen from me. That’s the way abductions work—ordinary first, then sudden. Morning smelled of bread and damp ash. The rebuilt kitchen smoked politely, children chased each other with sticks too short to be swords, and the Holdfast carried itself like a house still bruised but determined to look steady for its guests. I was halfway through mending a ripped sleeve when the first thread of wrongness pulled tight.The wrongness wasn’t noise. It was absence. A bird cut off its song mid-phrase. The dogs at the fence stiffened but didn’t bark, as if someone had taught them manners with a blade. My mark warmed once, not in alarm, but in recognition: he’s near.Vivian noticed too. She was stirring a pot when her wrist paused, spoon held like a weapon. “Where’s Jason?” she asked.“North fence,” Jasper said. He hadn’t been looking at her, but he always knew the ledger of our bodies. “Lyra?”“Hunting mushrooms with the twins,” I said. I stood, sleeve for

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