All Chapters of The Barren Luna Reckoning: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

Lena POVI sit on the edge of the bed with my phone in both hands and wait for it to light up.9:12. I type: Please come back. I need to tell you something important. I look at it, deleteimportant, and send it.Delivered.I watch the word until the screen dims. I tap it awake. Still delivered. Not read.I call. It rings five times and goes to his voicemail, his own voice telling me to leave amessage. I hang up before the beep. I call again at 9:40. Again at 10:15. The third time itdoesn't ring at all, just goes straight through.Downstairs, the house is loud. Doors, footsteps, a man's laugh, a woman telling someoneto mind the stairs. At eleven someone pops a bottle. A cheer follows it, short and ragged,and then a lot of voices saying the same word. Heir. Heir. A glass breaks and they laugh atthat too.I take off the heels I forgot I was wearing. My feet are swollen and red where the strapswere. Our door is open. Nobody closed it after he walked out with her, and I haven't gotte

Lena POVThe voices come before the dark lifts.A wolf-less Luna.I'm in the great hall and every seat is full, and I'm standing in the middle of the floor inthe green dress with the box in my hands. Nobody has looked at me. They are all lookingat the doors.A Luna who can't give us a pup.Elder Pryce is laughing. Joel from the gate. Rourke, with his feet on the table. Marta hasher back to me, folding a towel. I say her name and she keeps folding. I try to open thebox, and there's nothing in it. The tissue paper is empty. I look up and the hall is silent,and then all sixty faces turn toward me at once.Hen, someone says. Hen. Hen.Water hits me in the face.I come up off the carpet with a sound I don't recognize. It's in my nose, my mouth,running down my collar. It's cold enough to hurt. I roll onto my side and cough, and myhand finds the carpet and it's soaked, and I hear a hollow plastic clunk as something isset down beside me. "Wow," says a voice above me. "You really were

Vera POVThe lobby mirror is the only one in the building I don't look away from.It runs along the wall behind the security desk, floor to ceiling, and every morning at 8:14I pass it on the way to the elevator. A tall woman in a charcoal suit. Black hair cut blunt atthe jaw. Gold eyes. Nobody in the Sinclair Meridian lobby looks twice at her, except tomove out of her way.I used to have brown hair that never stayed where I put it. I used to have green eyes. Iused to take up less space than anyone else in a room, and I was good at it.Five years ago, in a county hospital bathroom in another state, eleven hours after mydaughter was born, my bones moved. I held on to a metal rail with both hands and bitthrough my own lip, and when it stopped I was on the tile and the person who stood upwas somebody else. A nurse found me and went pale. She said she had never seen a firstshift that late. She said it had never come on all at once.The first winter I worked nights on a loading dock