All Chapters of The Blood Moon Prophecy : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

AnaraI woke up before him.This had become a pattern over the weeks since the marking, the bond pulling me toward consciousness slightly before his did, as if my body had learned to wake first and spend a few minutes simply existing in the specific warmth of the space between sleep and morning before the day made its demands.The room was grey with early light. Not the cold grey of before-dawn but the soft transitional grey of a sun that had just decided to arrive and was taking its time about it. Kaelen was on his side facing me, deeply asleep in the way he slept when he had no early council meeting, without the compressed quality that sleep had when part of him was already preparing for the day.I lay still and looked at him.This was something I did not often let myself do during the waking hours. There was always something to attend to, the pack or the balance sessions or the correspondence or the training or the dozen things that a Luna's days contained. But here in the grey mor

AnaraI found it in the back of the wardrobe.Not my section. His. I was looking for the spare blanket that Liora had mentioned was stored there and I pushed through the row of his formal jackets and found, hanging behind them, a garment bag that did not belong with the rest of his clothes.I should not have looked.I looked.Inside was a dress. Dark blue silk, floor length, with the specific quality of something that had been chosen with great care and significant expense. The kind of dress that was not purchased casually or functionally but deliberately and with a specific person in mind. I held it up and the silk moved in the light the way very good silk moved and I stood in front of the wardrobe for a long moment trying to understand what I was looking at.Kaelen came in while I was still standing there holding it.He stopped."You found it," he said."Yes," I said. "What is it?"He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed with the expression of a man who has been caught do

Anara"I want something," I said.We were in the south garden in the late afternoon, the warm end of an autumn day that had been mild enough to make sitting outside pleasant, and I was on the bench and he was beside me and the pack house was quiet behind us and Lyra was in the library and Zephyr had gone for the day."Tell me," he said."I want a day," I said. "Just the two of us. No council meetings, no balance sessions, no correspondence, no briefings. One day where we are not the Alpha and the Luna and we are not managing anything."He looked at me."Just a day," I said. "Outside. The territory. Running if you want to run. Or not running. Somewhere that is not the pack house.""When?" he said."This week," I said. "Before the source arrives and everything becomes what it is going to become."He was quiet for a moment. I felt through the bond the specific calculation of a man who ran a large and complex community and was working out how to give it one day without him and give me the

KaelenShe had been restless for two nights.I felt it through the bond before I saw it in her, the specific quality of restlessness that had no clear object, not anxiety about a specific thing but the general hum of a body that was carrying something it had not fully processed. The bond between us was sensitive enough now that I felt her moods the way I felt changes in air pressure, not with precision but with enough accuracy to know the difference between the restlessness of worry and the restlessness of something else.This was something else.The second night I woke at two in the morning to find her sitting up beside me with her knees drawn to her chest and her hands pressed flat against the mark on her neck in the gesture she had when the bond was doing something she was not sure how to interpret."Anara," I said."I'm here," she said. "Go back to sleep.""What is it?" I said.She was quiet for a moment. "The mark," she said. "It does something at night sometimes. Something I do

AnaraThe forest at night was different from the forest at day in the same way that Kaelen sleeping was different from Kaelen waking. The essential thing was the same. Everything external was quieter and the essential thing was therefore easier to see.We walked in without a lamp. Kaelen's wolf vision handled the dark and Seraphis handled mine and between us we moved through the old trees without difficulty, following the path we had taken on Thursday without needing to look for it.The stream was audible before we reached it. A small, continuous sound that had been there on Thursday too but had been covered by the larger sounds of movement and conversation. In the dark, with neither of us speaking, it was the primary sound in the world.We sat on the bank.I took my shoes off and put my feet in the water which was cold in the specific way that moving water in autumn was cold, clean and immediate and not unpleasant once you had adjusted to it."Cold," Kaelen said."Yes," I said.He to