REBORN ALPHA

Silver and Moon

Don't let them take Sable alive. Not even if it means killing me.

"No," I said out loud.

"What?" Sable shouted, ducking a tracker's net.

"I was talking to your brother."

"Then tell him to shut up and fight!"

Brutus came into the tunnel like an avalanche. He didn't shift. He didn't need to. He caught a tracker who got in his way and hurled him against the wall like a rag. Behind him, Draven walked slowly, hands clasped behind his back, like a man strolling through his garden.

"Rowan," Brutus said, grinning with every tooth. "Been a long time, little one. You still carry my mark on your ribs. Can you feel it?"

I feel it, Rowan whispered inside me, and his rage burned my throat. Let me take him.

No. This one's mine.

I let my wolf out.

The tunnel was too narrow for two beasts our size. Brutus slammed into me and we hit the rock so hard the ceiling shed a rain of stones. His claws sank into my side. My fangs found his shoulder. Neither of us gave an inch.

"Sable, run!" I roared into Rowan's mind, and he shouted it with my voice.

"I won't leave you!"

"Run!"

She didn't. She grabbed a fallen torch and smashed it into a tracker's face, and the smell of burning fur filled the air. Two more wolves closed in on her. She backed against the wall, spear raised, panting.

And then Seraphine moved.

We all saw it. The key was in her hand and her eyes were fixed on Draven, and for an instant she looked like a woman about to leap off a cliff.

"You said no one would be hurt," she said.

Draven sighed, almost tenderly.

"Seraphine. I promised you what you needed to hear."

"You said Kael would live."

"And he will." He smiled. "Just not in that body."

I saw it on her face before I understood it: the certainty that she had been deceived, just as I had been. Draven had never wanted the ritual completed. He wanted it broken, with Rowan and me inside it.

Seraphine's eyes fell on me. Fifteen years of lullabies and storms passed between us.

Then she did the one thing nobody expected.

She threw the key into the air.

"Sable!" she cried.

Sable caught it without thinking.

Brutus roared and tore himself free of me, but Seraphine had already raised both hands, and a silver glow poured from her fingers, one I recognized from the stories of my childhood: the magic of the ancient Lunas. The ones who could call down the sky itself.

"Go!" she said, her voice breaking. "Now!"

The tunnel ceiling began to crack.

We ran.

I don't know for how long. Sable ahead of me, the key clenched in her fist, and me behind in human form, with Rowan talking nonstop inside my head: Right. There's an exit behind that boulder. My sister knows these tunnels, follow her.

Behind us, the mountain collapsed with a dull thunder. Dust, stones, screams. And beneath it all, a woman's voice singing, steady, beautiful, and growing fainter.

She's covering our escape, I said.

I know. Rowan was quiet for a moment. And I don't think she's coming out.

We burst onto a wooded hillside just as the sun finished rising. We fell to our knees on the wet grass. Sable gulped air, and for a long time neither of us spoke.

"She stayed," Sable said at last, watching the smoke rise from the mountain. "She saved us. After everything she did."

"Don't forgive her yet," I said, though my voice faltered.

"I wasn't planning to." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "But I won't forget she stayed, either."

Then she winced and pressed a hand to her side.

"Sable."

"I'm fine. Just a scratch."

"Let me see."

"Kael, I'm..."

I pulled up the blood-soaked cloth. Beneath it, just above her ribs, was a clean, thin wound, almost a line, as if made by a silver blade. It wasn't bleeding much.

But it was glowing.

A faint, pale, cold light, like moonlight, pulsed beneath her skin, and fine silver veins spread from the wound, creeping slowly toward her heart.

No, Rowan whispered, and something in his voice froze me to the bone. No, no, no. That's the ritual's mark. They put it on her.

"What is it?" Sable asked, staring down at herself with wide eyes.

I couldn't answer.

In the distance, among the trees, Draven's howl rang out. Long, triumphant. And beneath it, other howls answering, dozens, hundreds, from every pack in the territory, joining into a single chorus.

A call to war.

Three nights, Rowan said. The full moon is in three nights. And they've just chosen who to sacrifice.