All Chapters of Moon Touched : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Selene woke up with someone's hand over her mouth.She grabbed the wrist and twisted hard enough to feel the bones shift."It's me."She stopped twisting.Kael. Crouched in the dark. Eyes on the window. One finger to his lips.She looked at the window.Nothing. Just trees and snow and black sky.Then she heard it. Not a sound exactly. The absence of one. The forest had stopped.Every bird. Every branch. Every small moving thing… stopped.She was out of bed before he said a word.They went out the back window.Kael first, then his hand reaching back for hers, and she took it without thinking and dropped into the snow beside him and they were moving before her boots were fully under her.He ran fast. Low. Cutting between the shadows of cabins, away from the central fire. She stayed at his shoulder and matched him stride for stride and didn't ask where they were going because she could feel where they were going north.Something was pulling at her chest like a hook. Something that had Di

She read the first line three times before the words stopped moving.My darling girl, If you're reading this then you made it. And if you made it then everything I did was worth it. Every single thing.Selene's breath came out unsteady.She pulled the blanket around her shoulders and held the letter closer to the dying fire and kept reading.I don't know how old you are right now. I don't know what you remember or what was taken from you. I don't know if you found your way to the wolves or if they found you first. But I know you found this letter. Which means you're exactly where you're supposed to be.Your name, your real name is Saoirse. It means freedom in the old language. I called you Selene in the human world because it was safer. Because Moon-touched names carry power and power attracts attention and I needed you to survive long enough to become what you are.I hope you'll forgive me for that. For the hiding. For all of it.Selene stopped.Said the name out loud in the empty ca

She woke up in Dian's chair.Someone had put a blanket over her at some point. The fire was freshly stoked. Outside the window the sky was the pale gray of very early morning, not quite dawn, not quite night.Dian was already up.He was sitting at the table with his hands around a cup he wasn't drinking from, looking at nothing with the expression of a man who had been sitting with something difficult for several hours.She watched him for a moment."You didn't sleep," she said."No.""How long have you been sitting there?""A while."She pulled the blanket tighter. "Tell me."He looked at her."I need to show you something first." He stood. Crossed to the shelf above the fire. Pulled down a small wooden box, old and dark with age, the kind of thing that had been handled so many times, the wood had gone smooth. He set it on the table in front of her.She looked at it. Then at him."Open it," he said.She opened it.Inside was a pendant. Simple. A dark stone on a thin cord, carved with

She found him at the grave.She hadn't been looking for it. She'd been walking the settlement perimeter the way she'd started doing in the evenings, learning the shape of the place, where the wards were strongest, where the shadows pooled, and she turned a corner behind the eastern cabins and there it was.Two markers. Simple stone. Side by side under an old pine.And Dian sitting in the snow in front of them with his elbows on his knees and his head down.She stopped.He didn't hear her this time.Or if he did he didn't move.She stood there for a moment. Thought about leaving. Thought about the pendant at her throat and her mother's voice and don't waste it being careful.She walked forward and sat down beside him in the snow.He looked up.Looked at her.Looked back at the markers.Neither of them said anything for a while.The pine moved overhead. Snow fell from a branch in a soft collapse. The settlement sounds were distant here. Deliberately distant, she suspected."You don't ha

Selene heard her coming.Not footsteps. Just a shift in the air. The specific quality of someone who moved like they had never once in their life needed to announce themselves.She didn't turn around.She was at the water basin outside the main cabin, washing her hands after training, and she kept washing them while Vara stopped a few feet behind her and waited."You can say whatever you came to say," Selene said."I haven't decided how to start," Vara said pleasantly."Take your time.""I will." A pause. "You're getting better. The training. I watched this morning from the ridge."Selene dried her hands.Turned around.Vara was dressed simply. Hair loose. She looked, not threatening. Not cold. Just a woman standing in the morning light having a conversation.That was always the problem with Vara.She looked so reasonable."What do you want?" Selene said."To talk." She gestured toward the bench outside the cabin wall. "Sit with me.""Why?""Because I have things to say and I'd rather