The Night They Killed Me, My Dark Wolf Awakened

For nineteen years, I believed I was lucky.

I had no wolf. My wounds healed far slower than any other pack member's, and I never heard the call that echoes in every werewolf's mind at the full moon.

But the Ashbourne family gave me their name. My father, Garrick Ashbourne, taught me how to keep the territory's ledgers. When fever kept me in bed, my mother, Helena Ashbourne, sat beside me all night and held my hand. My two brothers, Adrian Ashbourne and Lucas Ashbourne, once took turns carrying me on their backs for a mile through snow-covered ground.

Stranger still, even without a wolf, I received a special blessing from the Moon Goddess, and Damian and I were recognized as fated mates!

Damian himself once said it out loud in front of all the Elders, "Even if she can never shift, she is still my fated mate."

So when he loosed his Alpha power and ordered me to kneel, I was still scrambling to find an excuse for him.

It was a family dinner, and the moonstone lamps lit the great hall white. Viola curled into Helena's arms with a hand clamped over her own arm, blood seeping bright red between her fingers. My silver dinner knife lay at her feet, the tip smeared with blood.

"My sister was just angry," she said, her voice thick with tears, each word catching. "Mom showed me the moonstone necklace. She said it should have belonged to Evelyn, and I wanted to give it back to her, and then she..."

"I never touched you." I looked down to the far end of the long table. "The handle was next to your hand the whole time. Damian saw all of it."

Damian's eyes went to the knife on the floor, and he paused.

For two solid years, Viola had shredded my gowns and told people I was jealous of her, that I did not want her shining at parties. She quietly destroyed the letters Helena wrote me and spread it around that I was terrified of the real daughter coming home. She mixed up Garrick's medicine, then turned around and pretended to soften and ask the family to forgive me. Taken one at a time, none of it seemed catastrophic. Only now did it hit me that all those small things had stacked into a thick, high wall, with me on one side and my entire family on the other.

Helena went straight to Viola to check the wound. Garrick lowered his voice and demanded, "Is everything you already have not enough for you?"

"All I am asking is that someone look at the handle of that knife."

"This is a family dinner," Damian cut in before I could finish. "Do not make a scene."

I looked up at him. The truth here was easy to check. If he spoke up, the guards in the room would repeat exactly what they had seen.

Instead he loosed his Alpha power.

"Evelyn Ashbourne. Kneel."

With no wolf to shield my mind, the invisible weight felt like it was snapping my kneecaps, and I went down hard on the cold stone floor. The hall fell dead silent. Viola leaned on Helena's shoulder and glanced up at me, and behind the tears there was not a trace of panic.

A moment later Damian reached down and helped me up. His hand was as warm as ever, his voice low, the same voice he had always used to soothe me.

"Let the dinner end quietly first. Afterward I will hear your whole explanation."

I nodded. I was still naive then. I believed that love kept in private could cancel out humiliation handed out in public.

After the dinner broke up, I walked past the kennels alone. The wolfhounds, vicious on any ordinary day, stopped barking all at once. One after another they flattened themselves to the ground and pressed their foreheads toward my shadow.

I assumed they were still cowed by what was left of Damian's Alpha power. I bent down to calm the smallest hound, but it would not touch my hand. It only nudged the ground under my feet with its wet nose.

"Even dogs know who is supposed to bow." Viola's voice came from behind me.

She pulled the wooden door of the kennel shut. In her hand was a little silver knife that belonged to my aunt, Maeve Holloway.

"I just heard that Agatha forbade anyone to hurt you with silver." The tip of the blade lifted my chin. "What makes a stray with no wolf worth nineteen years of special treatment from this whole family?"

"Put the knife down."

"Aunt Maeve used to recite an old rhyme, too. A daughter born of the eclipse hides a wolf in her shadow." She laughed. "If you really have a wolf, call it out."

The knife broke the skin on the side of my neck, and the sting was several times sharper than the pain from an ordinary blade. I flinched back on instinct, but Viola had a fist knotted in my collar.

"There is nothing in there, is there?" She leaned close to my ear. "None of it is yours. Not your parents, your brothers, Damian, or your place as Luna. Every bit of it was charity from the Ashbourne family."

Drops of blood ran down my neck and fell, but not one seeped into the cracks in the stone.

In the instant the lamplight wavered, the shadow at my feet seemed to open a mouth and swallow that falling drop whole.