ASH AND ANSWERS

The priestess's chambers had become a tomb.

The body was already removed by the time Nyx arrived—Caelan had made sure of that, a rare courtesy born from his understanding that seeing Orin dead would break something in the fortress that couldn't be reassembled. But courtesy didn't extend to keeping Nyx away from the scene itself. If his bride was bonded to the creature the priestess had been investigating, then maybe she had answers to give. The room smelled of burnt flesh and something else—something that made even Nyx's evolved Skinwalker senses recoil in primal revulsion: ozone and divine fire. Lightning that came from outside reality, from the space where gods lived and looked down on the mortal world with designs that no wolf could comprehend.

And the books. Every text in Orin's personal library had been reduced to ash. Not in a normal fire—the walls were undamaged, the stone unmarked, not even scorched. It was as if the books themselves had combusted from the inside out, as if some divine power had reached into each volume and burned them from their very essence. Someone had deliberately destroyed Orin's research. Someone had burned away every scrap of knowledge the ancient priestess had accumulated about blood tethers and the First Kind and the species that should have been extinct.

"The restricted section," Nyx said quietly, moving through the destroyed chamber with the precision of someone searching for something specific.

"What?" Caelan looked up from where he was standing in the center of the chamber, looking more unsettled than she'd ever seen him.

"The priestess would have kept her most important research in the restricted archive. Anything about the blood tether, about Skinwalkers, about the First Kind—she would have kept it somewhere protected. Somewhere that required permission to access." Nyx moved deeper into the chamber, stepping carefully around bits of charred paper and burned binding. "But this? This she kept here. This was the research she was actively working on. These were the books she was trying to finish."

Under the priestess's desk, in the small gap between wooden leg and stone floor, her fingers found something: a fragment of parchment, the edges scorched but the center untouched by flame. It was small—barely the size of a wolf's paw—but it was written in the priestess's careful hand. The words made her blood stop moving in her veins. *blood tether — pre-lunar bond — designed for the First Kind — SHE KNOWS.* The final two words were scored so deep into the paper they'd nearly torn through entirely, as if Orin had been writing them in desperate haste, as if she'd known something was coming.

"Someone knew," Nyx said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Someone knew what I am. And they came here and killed the priestess before she could share what she'd learned. They burned the books so no one else could find the answers."

"Who?" Caelan demanded, crossing the room in three strides.

"I don't know." Nyx clutched the parchment fragment, and as her skin made contact with the surface, something extraordinary happened. Not a vision, exactly. Not a memory. But an image, burned into the very fibers of the paper by the priestess's desperate grip in the moments before she died. A woman. Made of moonlight. Vast and terrible, impossibly large, existing in dimensions that human eyes weren't designed to perceive. She was staring down at the mortal world from a throne of cold silver light, and her expression was raw, furious, *terrified*. And she was looking for someone.

The image lasted only a heartbeat, but the words that accompanied it echoed through Nyx's entire being—spoken in a voice like the moon pulling tides, like gravity given sound, like the Goddess herself reaching across dimensions to scream into existence: *Found you.*

Nyx gasped and dropped the parchment like it had burned her. It fell to the stone floor and landed among the ashes of the priestess's life work. Through the tether, Caelan felt her terror and crossed the room, pulling her against him. "What did you see? Nyx, what did you *see*?"

"The Goddess," Nyx whispered into his chest. "The Moon Goddess is looking for me. And she just remembered I exist."

In the silence that followed, they could hear nothing but their own heartbeats and the distant sound of wolves moving through the fortress, entirely unaware that the sky above them was about to change. Entirely unaware that a deity had just turned her attention toward them like a predator spotting prey. In that moment, Caelan understood: the real danger wasn't political. It wasn't the Hunters who would eventually come. It wasn't even the Skinwalker itself, powerful as she was. The real danger was that he'd just bound himself to something the Moon Goddess herself had been hunting for three thousand years. And now she knew exactly whe

re to find it.