All Chapters of THE CRIMSON MOON PACT: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

The scent hit Wren before the sound did, copper and rot underneath the cold pine smell of the border woods, and she knew before she cleared the ridge that this patrol was already a failure.She had taken this stretch of the Ashwood border a hundred times since she was old enough to run it alone, past the marker stones her grandfather had set into the ground before her father was born, down through the hollow where the creek cut close to the tree line before it bent east toward vampire territory. She knew the shape of every rock in the dark. She did not know the shape of what she found when she came down into the hollow that night.Three of her own lay in the frost-burned grass. Tamsin, who was seventeen and had begged for a place on this patrol for a month. Osric, who still had baby fat in his cheeks under all that fur when he shifted. And Bram, who had made her laugh two nights ago over nothing at all, some stupid joke about the cook's stew, and now lay with his throat opened in a wa

They left three days later, at first light, with an escort of six wolves Wren had trained beside for most of her life and a wagon full of things her father insisted she would need and she was fairly certain she would not. Garrick rode ahead of the column, already tense in a way that told her he had spent every one of the last three days rehearsing whatever he intended to say to Nocthaven's council when they arrived.Wren rode in silence for most of the first day, watching the mountains she had grown up in fold slowly down into foothills, and then into the flatter, colder country that marked the edge of Blackthorn territory. She had never been this far east. None of the wolves in her escort had, not the young ones anyway, and she could feel their nerves running under the surface of the column like a current, quiet but constant.By the second day the land had changed enough that she barely recognized it as the same country. The trees here grew differently, older and darker, planted in t

The rooms they gave her overlooked the city rather than the mountains, which Wren supposed was meant as some kind of courtesy and instead felt like the last small cruelty in a day already full of them. She stood at the window long after the palace had gone quiet around her, watching lantern light move along the streets below, and tried to reconcile the beauty of the place with everything it had cost her.She did not hear the door until the second knock, quiet and almost hesitant, nothing like the confident stride she had watched Alaric use to cross the great hall. When she opened it, he was standing in the corridor alone, without Seraphine, without any of the court that had surrounded him all evening, dressed more simply than he had been at dinner."I didn't expect a visit," Wren said, not quite an invitation."I didn't expect to make one." He glanced past her into the room, then back to her face. "May I come in. There are things about the binding you should understand before the coun

They moved her to different rooms before dawn, deeper into the palace, closer to the wing where Alaric himself kept his quarters, and Wren was too exhausted from the wolfsbane and the blood loss to argue about what that proximity might mean by the time Seraphine finished overseeing the transfer. She slept in fits for what remained of the night, waking twice to check the door was still barred, and finally gave up on rest altogether when grey light started to creep in around the curtains.By midmorning, the palace was operating as though nothing had happened at all, courtiers moving through the corridors with the same practiced composure as any other day, and Wren understood, with a kind of tired disgust, that this was simply how Nocthaven functioned. Whatever violence occurred behind closed doors, the court's surface stayed smooth, because a smooth surface was easier to control than an honest one.Alaric found her in the gardens in the early afternoon, the same quiet corner she had cla