Chapter 9: The fountain

The clock struck eleven before the maid worked up the nerve to knock.

I hadn't changed out of my trial dress. Three hours in it and the collar still felt like a hand at my throat.

"My Luna." She didn't wait to be invited in just crossed the room, set a folded paper on the table, and stepped back like it might bite her. "No one saw me bring it. Burn it after."

She was gone before I got her name out.

The paper was cold. Not chamber-cold *outside* cold, like it had been carried through frost instead of hallway.

*If you want the truth about Selena, come alone to the old fountain when the moon is highest. Trust no one. Not even the Alpha.*

I read it twice. Then a third time, because some idiot part of me was checking whether the handwriting looked familiar. It didn't.

Here's what I knew: someone had watched me lose everything in that council hall today, and their first instinct wasn't sympathy it was *leverage*. That should have scared me more than it did.

I went anyway.

The eastern gardens hadn't been tended in years. Nobody wanted the old fountain touched some superstition about the first Luna's prayers still soaked into the stone so ivy had taken the whole courtyard for itself, and the pines around it grew close enough to blot out most of the sky.

I stopped at the treeline and made myself breathe before I stepped into the open.

Nothing moved. Water, black under a thin skin of moonlight. Wind combing through branches that needed cutting back. I almost laughed three notes and a threat, for *this*.

Then the air changed.

I didn't hear him arrive. I felt it, the way you feel a door open in a house you thought was empty a pressure shift, a wrongness in the quiet. He was already there when I turned. Hooded, still, close enough to the treeline that the shadows hadn't finished deciding whether to give him up.

"Who are you?" My voice came out steadier than I expected. Small mercies.

He didn't answer. Didn't need to whatever he was, *talking to me* clearly wasn't the assignment. He flicked his wrist. Something small left his hand and hit the fountain's stone lip with a sound too heavy for its size — metal, and old.

By the time I looked up, he was already three strides into the dark, and moving in a way that no one born in Mooncrest moved. Wolves are fast. This was something that had unlearned the need to make noise.

I chased him anyway, which was stupid, and I knew it was stupid while I was doing it. Branches opened three thin lines across my forearm. I lost him in under ten seconds.

Whoever trained that thing to move like smoke hadn't done it for my benefit.

The pendant was waiting where he'd dropped it. Moon steel, dark enough to drink the light instead of catching it, and set into the center a fang. Crimson. Carved from something that wasn't glass and wasn't quite crystal either.

I'd seen that mark exactly once, at a gathering of packs I was too young to understand the stakes of. My mother had gone stiff beside me and said one word *Bloodfang* — like it cost her something to say it out loud.

Bloodfang didn't send couriers to Mooncrest. Bloodfang didn't *do* anything without a reason expensive enough to matter.

Under the pendant, a second note, smaller, the ink still slightly wet at the edges like it had been written in a hurry.

*The child is not what they believe. Ask who visited the south wing on the night of the red moon.*

The red moon. Three nights ago. The same night a maid with shaking hands had watched a hooded stranger vanish into these same trees while Selena stood by the fountain and called it *fresh air*.

Someone was building me a case. The question I couldn't answer yet was against whom.

A branch snapped behind me deliberate, not accidental, the kind of sound something makes when it *wants* to be heard.

I turned to a courtyard that had gone wrong in a way I couldn't name. The cold had teeth in it now. My wolf came fully awake for the first time all night, every hackle up, every instinct screaming *not ours, not ours, not ours* at whatever was standing just past where my eyes could resolve it.

The voice, when it came, didn't come from a direction. It came from *inside* the quiet.

"You're already too late, Luna."

I didn't scream. I want that on record. I turned in a slow circle with my pulse hammering in my ears and found exactly nothing empty stone, empty trees, water gone still as glass.

When I looked down into the fountain to steady myself, my own face looked back.

For half a second, it wasn't alone. Something stood behind my reflection that had no business standing anywhere hood low, and where the face should have been, two points of red that weren't reflecting the moon. They were making their own light.

I spun. Nothing there. I looked back down and it was just me, pale and wide-eyed and breathing like I'd run a mile.

I put the pendant in my cloak before my hands could decide to shake.

Kane thought this ended in the council hall, with his careful, cowardly *I cannot say with certainty.* He was wrong. Selena thought she'd won something today. She was about to find out what she'd actually started.

Whoever had sent that hooded thing hadn't done it out of kindness. They wanted me hunting. That was fine.

I'd hunted before.