All Chapters of The Wolfless Luna: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Chapter 1: The Moon RiteEvery year on the night of the Moon Rite, Silvercrest pack lit two hundred torches along the ridge and pretended I didn't exist.I had made my peace with that. Mostly. There is a kind of freedom in being overlooked. Nobody expects anything from you, so nobody is disappointed, and you can spend the whole afternoon of the biggest night of the year in a small stone room at the bottom of the hill, grinding yarrow, without anyone coming to fetch you.The herb room had been my mother's for twenty years. It still smelled like her: dried lavender, beeswax, the green bite of crushed comfrey, and underneath all of it something I had never been able to name, a cool, faint scent like river stones. Her jars lined the shelves in tidy rows, each one labeled in her small, slanted handwriting, in the old healer's script that almost nobody in the pack could read anymore. Valerian. Willow bark. Feverfew. Goldenseal. She had taught me to read those labels when I was six, sitting

Chapter 3: The JudgmentThey locked me in the old cold store under the stone hall, where the pack kept ice in the summer and prisoners in the winter. It had a stone floor, a heavy oak door with a grille, and no window. I sat on an upturned crate in my blood-stiff dress and waited for the sun to come up and for someone to decide what to do with me.I was not afraid yet. That came later. Right then I was only tired, a bone-deep, swaying tiredness, and confused, and somewhere underneath both of those, so far down I could barely feel it, angry.Someone had stolen my mother's recipe. Someone had made it, with care, in the right proportions, and poured it into the guards' cups on the one night of the year when every eye in the pack would be on the ridge. Someone had let rogues into Silvercrest. Two wolves were dead. And they had made sure the trail led back to the herb room.To me.I kept trying to think who. I kept coming back to the same small, horrible list: the people who knew about the

Chapter 6: The First ShiftNobody tells you how loud it is.In my mother's books, the first shift was a page and a half. The bones lengthen, the books said. The skin gives way to fur. The young wolf may feel discomfort. Discomfort. I had sat with women in labor for two days straight, I had held Tobin Hale's leg together with my bare hands, and I would have traded every one of those nights for that single minute on the stone floor of Lucan Draven's house.It was the sound that frightened me most. Not the screaming, though I was screaming. The cracking. Every joint in my body popping open one after another like knots in a burning log, my spine bowing up off the floor, my ribs spreading with a noise like green wood splitting. My jaw stretched forward and my teeth went with it, and I tasted blood. My skin burned and then my skin was gone, or not gone, only buried, under something thick and soft and cold.Don't fight it. The voice again. The calm voice in my head that was not mine. You're