Chapter Five – Kira

Two weeks into living among the Wilders, I still hadn't shifted. I had, however, started noticing the moonlight following me often enough that I'd stopped pretending to myself it was a coincidence.

“Again,” Lucian said, for what felt like the hundredth time that morning, standing across a small clearing he'd started bringing me to at dawn, before the rest of the camp was awake to watch whatever this was turning into. “Same as before. Don't try to shift. Just reach for whatever you felt at the fire that first night.”

“I don't know what I felt.”

“Then stop trying to name it and just reach.”

It had become something like a routine over the past two weeks; dawn training that wasn't really training so much as two people standing in a clearing while I failed to do something neither of us could properly describe. I'd asked him once why he bothered showing up every morning instead of leaving it to Leo, who at least had some idea what he was looking for. “Leo's better with the old stories,” he'd said. “I'm better with people who don't believe in themselves yet. Different jobs.”

I closed my eyes, mostly to humor him, and thought about moonlight pooling around my bare feet like it had somewhere it needed to be. Nothing happened, the way nothing had happened the six mornings before this one, and I opened my eyes ready to tell him this was a waste of both our time.

The clearing had gone silver.

Not moonlight, not exactly. It was midmorning, the sun fully up. But a low, pale shimmer clung to the grass at my feet, the same quality of light I'd seen pooling around me that first night, except now it didn't fade the moment I noticed it. It spread, slow and deliberate, in a circle that widened with every breath I took, like something in me had finally stopped holding a door shut and the light was simply what leaked through the gap.

Lucian didn't move. His wolf, lying at the treeline, came up onto all four feet, ears pinned, alert in a way I hadn't seen from him before.

“Kira.” His voice had gone very careful. “Look at your hands.”

I looked down and found my own skin threaded through with the same pale light, faint patterns running just beneath the surface like veins lit from the inside. It didn't hurt. That was almost the strangest part; just a feeling like something folded too small for too long was finally being allowed to unfold the rest of the way.

“What is this,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt.

“I don't know,” Lucian admitted. “I've never seen it. Leo might.”

The light receded the moment my concentration broke, leaving me standing in an ordinary clearing with ordinary grass and hands that looked like they'd never done anything unusual in their life. I sat down hard on the nearest rock before my legs decided to make that decision for me.

Leo, when Lucian brought him an hour later, didn't ask a single question before crouching to examine the grass, running his fingers over blades that had gone faintly, permanently silvered, like frost that had decided not to melt.

“Moon-marked ground,” he said, half to himself. “Haven't seen that since I was a pup, and even then it was in a story, not a clearing.”

“What story?”

Leo studied me now instead of the grass. “The old bloodlines didn't just skip the wolf shift. They marked the ground wherever their power surfaced, same way a wolf marks territory, except this kind of mark doesn't fade. Supposedly the Council had the last known site of it salted and burned, generations back, to make sure nothing grew there that might remember what it used to be.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because power that old doesn't answer to treaties,” Leo said. “And anything that doesn't answer to a treaty scares people who built their whole world on one.”

I thought about the wolfless word, the diagnosis dressed up as a life sentence, nineteen years of being told exactly how small I was allowed to be. I thought about Damien Cross's face closing like a door in front of four hundred witnesses.

“Good,” I said, surprising myself with how much I meant it. “Let it scare them.”

Lucian's mouth curved, not quite a smile, but close enough that something in my chest loosened for the first time in two weeks. “That's the first thing you've said since you got here that sounded like you actually believed it.”

“Maybe I'm starting to.”

Mira found us on the walk back to camp. “Still nothing?” she asked, nodding at my hands.

“Still nothing, and also apparently everything,” I said, and told her what had happened. She took it in without much surprise, the way she seemed to take most things.

“Whatever's in you took nineteen years to even crack the door open,” she said. “I'd be more worried if it came pouring out the first week you asked nicely. Things that old don't rush for anybody.”

“That's supposed to be comforting?”

“It's supposed to be true,” Mira said. “Comforting's extra.”

That night, for the first time since the ceremony, I didn't dream about Ashwood, or the crowd, or the particular way Damien Cross had said no. I dreamed instead of a crown made of black antlers sitting on ground gone entirely silver, and a war I didn't recognize but somehow already understood I'd been born, however late, to finish.

I woke before dawn, and for the first time in two weeks, I didn't go looking for the moonlight.

It was already waiting for me, gathered in a thin silver ring around the edge of my cot, patient as anything that had apparently been waiting considerably longer than two weeks for me to finally notice it. I lay there a long moment, watching it pulse faintly with my own heartbeat, and found myself thinking, for the first time without any grief attached to the thought at all, that whatever I was, it had never actually been nothing.

Ashwood had simply never bothered to look hard enough to find it.