Surrounded

Chapter 3:

The trees were full of eyes.

Luna saw them catch the last red light of the dying moon, dozens of them, pale and low to the ground, blinking into existence in the dark spaces between the black trunks like stars appearing in a clouding sky. She counted six before she gave up counting, her heart slamming so hard against her ribs it hurt to breathe.

"Don't move," Kade said, low, and stepped in front of her without seeming to think about it at all, his bare shoulders still marked with drying blood from the rogue wolf he'd killed minutes ago. "Whatever happens, stay behind me."

"Who are they?"

"Scouts." His jaw was tight, his pale gold eyes moving across the tree line, tracking every shift of shadow. "Which means whoever sent them already knows something crossed the border tonight. Which means we have less time than I thought."

A branch cracked to their left. Luna spun toward the sound, and a wolf stepped into the open — smaller than the rogue Kade had killed, sleek and gray, with intelligent eyes that were nothing like the mindless yellow of the dead thing at their feet. This wolf was pack-trained. Controlled. Sent.

Another stepped out behind it. Then another, until Luna and Kade stood in the center of a loose, tightening circle of at least eight wolves, all of them watching, none of them attacking yet.

"They're waiting for something," Luna whispered.

"Someone," Kade corrected.

As if summoned by the word itself, the circle of wolves parted, and a man walked through the gap between them, shifting from wolf to human in one smooth, unhurried motion the way Kade had, the way Luna was beginning to understand only the oldest, strongest bloodlines could manage. He was broad and scarred, silver threading through dark hair at his temples, and he wore the kind of authority that didn't need to be announced. Every wolf in the clearing had gone still the moment he appeared.

"Kade Ashford," the man said, and his voice was pleasant in a way that made the hair on the back of Luna's neck rise. "I did not expect to find you standing over a Moonfire girl at the border stone tonight. Small world."

"Garrick." Kade's voice had gone flat, careful. "This isn't your territory."

"No," Garrick agreed easily. "It's no one's territory. That's rather the point of the Forbidden Woods, isn't it? No pack can claim what happens here — which makes it the perfect place for whatever you've been doing out here all these years." His eyes slid past Kade, landing on Luna with a slow, assessing weight that made her want to disappear into the ground. "Hello, little wolf. I felt your blood wake up from three territories away. Do you have any idea what you are?"

"She doesn't," Kade said, before Luna could answer. "And you're not going to be the one to tell her."

Garrick smiled, unbothered. "Territorial. Interesting, for a man who claims to have no interest in the old bloodlines anymore." He took a slow step closer, and the wolves around the clearing shifted with him, tightening the circle another few feet. "The King Alphas have been waiting a hundred years for a Moonfire heir to surface. Do you understand what that means, girl? Every treaty, every fragile peace holding this kingdom together, was built on the promise that your bloodline was extinct. And now here you stand."

"I don't want any part of this," Luna said. Her voice shook, but she made herself say it anyway. "I don't know what a Moonfire even is. I want to go home."

"Home." Garrick's smile widened, and there was something cruel underneath it now. "You mean the pack that watched their Alpha reject you tonight? That home?" He tilted his head, and Luna felt her face burn with humiliation on top of everything else, the wound from tonight still raw and open. "No. I don't think you're going home, little wolf. I think you're coming with me, where the King Alphas can decide what to do with a bloodline they thought they buried."

"She's not going anywhere with you," Kade said.

"That wasn't a request I was making of you." Garrick's eyes hardened. "Step aside, Ashford. This doesn't have to become a war between us. Not tonight."

"It became a war the moment your scouts crossed into these woods."

The air went very still. Luna felt it change the way she'd felt the forest change when she crossed the border stone — a held breath, a held moment, the world balanced on the edge of something about to break.

Garrick's smile disappeared entirely. "Take her," he said.

The wolves moved as one.

Everything happened too fast for Luna to process in pieces — it happened as one long, terrifying blur. Kade shifted mid-motion, silver fur exploding outward where a man had stood a heartbeat before, and he was already moving, already meeting the first two wolves head-on with a violence that made Luna's stomach turn. She stumbled backward, tripping over a root the way she tripped over everything, and hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from her lungs.

A gray wolf broke from the fighting and came straight for her.

Luna scrambled backward on her hands, every instinct screaming, but her body was too slow, too human, too clumsy even now with strange silver fire still humming under her skin. The wolf's jaws opened, closing the last few feet between them—

And something inside Luna simply broke open.

She didn't decide to do it. There was no thought, no plan, nothing but pure animal terror colliding with whatever ancient thing had woken up in her blood under the blood moon. Silver light exploded outward from her chest, and the gray wolf was thrown backward through the air like it had run into an invisible wall, hitting a tree trunk hard enough to crack the bark, and then lying still in the underbrush.

Luna stared at her own shaking hands. They were glowing — actually glowing, faint silver light pulsing under her skin like something alive, keeping time with her racing heartbeat.

I did that, she thought, and the thought was so strange, so impossible, that for a moment she forgot to be afraid.

Then the fear came back, bigger than before, because five more wolves had turned from the fighting to look at her instead, and this time they weren't hesitant. This time they looked hungry.

"Luna!" Kade's voice cut through the chaos, and Luna turned to see him locked in a vicious tangle with Garrick himself, who had shifted into a huge dark wolf easily twice the size of the others. Kade was losing ground, blood matting through his silver fur, and Luna understood with sick, sudden clarity that he could not fight off Garrick and protect her from everyone else at the same time.

Run, her wolf said. But it didn't sound like fear this time. It sounded like something else. Something steadier.

No, Luna thought back, surprising herself. He saved my life. I'm not leaving him.

She didn't know what she was doing. She had no training, no control, nothing but pure instinct and whatever strange power had cracked open in her chest a moment ago. But when the nearest wolf lunged for her, Luna threw her hands up without thinking, and silver light flared outward again, catching the wolf mid-leap and hurling it sideways into two of its pack-mates, all three of them going down in a tangled, snarling heap.

It cost her something to do it. She felt it immediately — a deep, bone-tired ache spreading through her chest, her vision swimming at the edges, her knees threatening to buckle. Whatever this power was, it wasn't free. But it had bought a few seconds, and a few seconds might be enough.

"Kade!" she screamed.

He heard her. In the space of a single heartbeat his pale gold eyes found hers across the chaos of the clearing, and something passed between them that Luna had no name for — not quite hope, not quite understanding, something rawer and more immediate than either. Then he tore free of Garrick with a violence that left the bigger wolf snarling in pain, and he was moving, fast, a streak of silver cutting across the clearing toward her.

"We have to go," he said, human again, grabbing her arm with a grip that would have hurt if she'd had room in her body for one more kind of pain. Blood ran freely down his side from a deep gash along his ribs, but his eyes were sharp and clear, already scanning the tree line for a way out. "Now, Luna, before Garrick recovers—"

"I can't," Luna gasped. The exhaustion from whatever she'd done was crashing over her in waves now, her legs shaking, black spots crowding the edges of her vision. "I don't have anything left, I—"

"You don't need anything left. You just need to run." Kade's voice was fierce, urgent, and underneath the urgency was something that sounded almost like fear for her rather than of the wolves closing in around them. "I've got you. I'm not letting them take you. Do you understand me? Not tonight, not ever."

Something about the way he said it — like a vow, like a promise carved deeper than the words themselves — steadied something in Luna's chest even as her body screamed with exhaustion.

Behind them, Garrick's snarl rose into a full-throated howl of fury, and across the clearing, more shapes were already moving through the black trees, drawn by the sound.

"Which way," Luna gasped.

"Away from the border stone," Kade said, already pulling her into a run, one arm wrapped tight around her waist to keep her upright when her exhausted legs threatened to give out beneath her. "Deeper into the Woods."

"Deeper? Kade, everyone says nothing that goes deep into the Forbidden Woods comes back out—"

"Everyone is wrong about a great many things tonight," Kade said grimly, half-carrying her now as they crashed through the underbrush, the sound of pursuit crashing through the trees behind them. "Including you, about what you are. Trust me, Luna. It's the only card either of us has left to play."

Luna didn't have breath left to argue. She ran, or was carried, or some desperate combination of both, the black trees blurring past them in the dying red light of the blood moon, the howls of Garrick's wolves rising behind them like a chorus promising this was not over, not even close to over.

They broke through a wall of thorny brush into a small clearing, and Luna's exhausted legs finally gave out completely. She would have fallen if Kade hadn't caught her, pulling her against his chest, both of them breathing hard, both of them bleeding, both of them very much alive when they had no real right to be.

For one suspended moment, the world went quiet. The howls behind them sounded farther away, muffled by distance and trees. Luna became aware, in the strange sharpened way exhaustion sometimes brings, of how close Kade was holding her — one arm banded tight around her back, her cheek pressed against the warm, blood-marked skin of his chest, his heartbeat slamming under her ear almost as fast as her own.

"Are you hurt?" he asked, low, his voice rough with something that wasn't just exhaustion.

"I don't know," Luna admitted. "I don't know anything anymore."

He was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully, like she was something that might shatter if he moved too fast, he tilted her chin up so she had to meet his eyes.

"You saved my life back there," he said. "You didn't have to do that. You could have run."

"You saved mine first."

Something shifted in his expression — surprise, maybe, or something warmer that he seemed to be fighting against showing. His thumb moved, just slightly, against her jaw, and Luna's breath caught in her throat for reasons that had nothing to do with the wolves still hunting them through the dark.

"We need to keep moving," Kade said finally, but he didn't let go of her right away. "There's a place I know. An old den, hidden deep enough that even Garrick's scouts won't find it easily. We can rest there. Figure out what to do next."

"And then what?" Luna asked. "You still haven't told me anything. What a Moonfire is. What happened to my father. Why the King Alphas have spent a hundred years afraid of a bloodline they thought was dead."

Kade's eyes darkened, some old grief moving behind them that Luna didn't understand yet but somehow already ached to.

"Then," he said quietly, "I tell you the truth. All of it. Even the parts that are going to break your heart worse than tonight already did."

Before Luna could ask what that meant, a new howl rose through the trees — closer now, sharp with triumph instead of pursuit, and this time it was answered by a dozen more voices, converging fast from every direction.

Kade's whole body went rigid.

"They've found the den," he said. "Which means someone else already knew where I was hiding."

Luna's blood ran cold. "Someone told them?"

Kade's gaze snapped toward the tree line, toward a lone shape stepping into view at the edge of the clearing — not Garrick, not a scout, but a smaller, familiar figure in a torn green dress, golden hair loose and wild, green eyes wide with something that looked horribly, unmistakably like guilt.

"Ivy?" Luna whispered, disbelief crashing through her exhaustion like ice water.

Her cousin stood at the edge of the clearing, shaking, tears streaking her face, and behind her, more wolves were already emerging from the black trees.

"I'm sorry," Ivy said, her voice breaking. "Luna, I'm so sorry — they made me. I didn't have a choice—"

"A choice about what," Luna said, though some sick, sinking part of her already knew.

Ivy's face crumpled. "About leading them straight to you."