The Last Blue Lycan

The Fake Dagger

The horn blew three times. Morning Offering.

Kael knew the timing of that horn better than his own heartbeat. 6:00 a.m, every single morning. For nineteen years, that horn had meant the same thing: stop, kneel, bow your head to the Moon Temple on the eastern hill, and listen to Alpha Moros the second thank the Moon Goddess for keeping the kingdom pure.

If you knelt slow, the guards whipped you. If you were an Omega or a half-caste like Kael, they whipped you even if you knelt fast, just to remind you that you were lucky to be allowed to offer at all.

Kael was still on his knees at the foot of the Stone King, his bucket overturned, dirty water soaking his pants. He dropped his forehead to the cold cobblestones, his hands flat in the puddle. The lye smell stung.

The entire Royal Courtyard went silent. Hundreds of wolves; warriors, mothers, pups, merchants, all kneeling, all facing east.

Only one figure was allowed to stand.

Above them, on the high balcony of the Alpha House that overlooked the courtyard and the statue, Alpha Moros the second appeared.

Kael didn't need to look up to picture him. He had seen him every morning of his life. A man in his late forties, shoulders like a bull, beard trimmed to look like a wolf's muzzle. And black eyes. The mark of pure Black Wolf blood. The Black Wolves prided themselves on it; we are pure black, we are night, we are the ones the Moon Goddess chose after she cursed the blue-eyed Lycans.

On his hip, on a belt made of woven gold and black wolf leather, hung the dagger.

The Alpha Dagger.

Kael had heard the story in every Offering since he was a child, until the words were burned into his brain.

Alpha Moros the second raised his massive arms. His voice was trained to boom across the courtyard without shouting, a trick of Alpha command.

"Daughters and Sons of the Night! We kneel!"

"We kneel!" the courtyard roared back.

"We thank the Moon Goddess for this day! We thank her for our pure blood, for our black eyes, for keeping our pups safe from the Lycan curse!"

"We thank her!" Hundreds of voices.

Kael mouthed the words. He had to. The guard nearest him was watching the back of his neck.

"Twenty years ago, on this very ground, my father, Alpha Moros the First, ended the Blue Lycan tyranny! The Blue Lycans were kings, but they were cruel! They had ice-blue eyes that could freeze a wolf's heart! They ate pups! They stole mates! And their King refused to bow to the Moon Goddess!"

It was the same lie every morning. Kael had read enough forbidden scraps in the Omega trash piles to know the real Blue Lycans were healers and warriors, not pup-eaters. But he kept his head down.

"And with the Magical Alpha Dagger forged by the moon Goddess herself, my father drove the blade through the Blue Lycan King's heart! And the Goddess was so pleased, she turned the tyrant to stone so his evil could never return!"

The crowd howled. It was a practiced howl.

Kael, with his face to the ground, was directly under the Stone King. The statue was twenty feet tall, kneeling, head bowed. Even kneeling, the Stone King was taller than the Alpha House. His stone hands rested on his stone knees. And right in the center of his chest, buried to the hilt so only the crossguard and pommel showed, was a dagger.

Kael had cleaned that dagger's pommel a thousand times. He knew it by touch.

"And now," Alpha Moros the second shouted, and Kael heard the leather creak as the Alpha drew the weapon on his hip, "we still carry the Goddess's blade! The true Alpha Dagger! The proof that Black Wolves are the true Alphas!"

He held it high.

The morning sun, just cresting over the Moon Temple, hit the blade.

It flashed silver.

And Kael, whose face was still down, looked up just a little through his wet bangs because the light flashed right into his eyes.

That was when his cursed blue eyes betrayed him.

They burned. Like ice. Like someone had poured winter water directly into his pupils.

Kael gasped before he could stop himself. He clapped a hand over his mouth.

Because he saw it. The dagger in Alpha Moros's hand was beautiful. Anyone else would have said it was magnificent. Silver blade, polished so bright you could see your reflection. Hilt wrapped in black leather, pommel shaped like a snarling black wolf head with tiny red ruby eyes.

But it was dead. It had no light of its own. No pulse. The flash was just sun on metal.

Kael looked up, just an inch higher, at the dagger in the Stone King's chest, ten feet above his head.

That dagger was not beautiful. It was old. Its hilt was wrapped in faded blue leather, cracked with age. Its wolf head pommel was smaller, less snarling, more sorrowful. And every four seconds, a faint blue light pulsed from where the blade entered the stone, like a slow heartbeat. Thump. Like the stone King was still alive in there.

The Alpha's dagger didn't thump.

And the runes...

Kael's breath caught. The old Omega who taught him letters in secret had shown him one page from a burned Blue Lycan book before she died. It had a drawing of the Alpha Dagger. Around the base of the wolf head, in tiny Old Wolf script, it said: MUN BLOD, MIN SJEL, meaning, Only Blood Of My Blood Can Wield Me.

Kael had memorized those runes because he thought they were pretty. He had traced them a hundred times on the Stone King's dagger while cleaning.

He stared at the Alpha's dagger, held high in the sun.

There were no runes. The smith who made it had tried to fake them with decorative scratches, but they were just scratches. No meaning.

It was a fake. A complete, expensive, well-made fake.

The real Magical Alpha Dagger; the one that chose the true King, was still stuck in his grandfather's stone heart, pulsing blue.

Which meant the Alpha's entire claim to the throne was fake. Moros the First never pulled the dagger out after killing the King. He couldn't. Only Blue Lycan blood could pull it. So he made a copy and told everyone he did. And his son was still holding the copy twenty years later.

Kael's mind screamed so loud he was sure the whole courtyard could hear it.

IT'S FAKE! HE'S HOLDING A FAKE! YOUR ALPHA IS A LIAR!

He jerked up to his knees without thinking, his mouth opening.

He was going to shout it. He was going to stand up in the middle of the sacred Morning Offering and point at the Alpha on the balcony and call him a liar. For nineteen years he had taken beatings and taken starvation and taken being called half-caste, and now he had proof that the man who ordered it all was a fraud.

He got halfway up, his blue eyes blazing so bright now that the puddle under him reflected blue.

Then he felt it. A stare, from the Moon Temple balcony, to the left of the Alpha's balcony.

Elara. She stood behind her father, the High Seer. She was supposed to have her head bowed, eyes closed, channeling, as all Seers did during the Offering.

Her eyes were wide open. She was staring directly down at Kael. And she was shaking her head. Tiny, frantic, almost invisible shakes. 'No. No. No.'

Her lips mouthed one word: Don't.

In that half second, Kael's brain, which had been on fire with truth, went cold with reality.

If he shouted, what would happen?

He was a half-caste scrap, kneeling in dirty water at the foot of the cursed statue, with no family, no wolf, no name. The Alpha was the Alpha, with fifty guards on the balcony and three hundred wolves in the courtyard who had been told since birth that Kael's blue eyes were demon eyes.

If he shouted "Fake!" during the Offering, it would be blasphemy. Punishable by immediate ripping of the throat. Alpha Moros would not even need to give the order. Jorn would do it happily.

And Elara would be punished for associating with a blasphemer.

Kael collapsed back down, pressing his forehead so hard into the cobblestones that his healed cut reopened. Blood mixed with dirty water.

He swallowed his scream. He forced his eyes shut to hide the blue glow.

Above, Alpha Moros finished.

"For the pure blood! For the Black Wolf! For the Goddess!"

"FOR THE GODDESS!" the courtyard roared.

The Alpha slammed the fake dagger back into its sheath. The clang echoed.

The horn blew twice. Offering over.

Wolves stood, stretching, talking, going back to work.

Kael stayed kneeling and shaking. A small footstep in the puddle next to him.

Elara had somehow slipped down from the temple in the crowd. She knelt beside him, pretending to pick up his overturned bucket.

Her whisper was so low only he could hear, and it was full of fear.

"Your eyes were glowing blue like the statue's heart. Kael, what did you see?"

Kael looked up at her. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her that her father served a liar. That the dagger her father bowed to every morning was a toy.

But if he told her, she would tell her father the High Seer. And the High Seer, whose family swore loyalty to the Blue Lycans, would have to choose between his oath to dead kings and his oath to the living Alpha who could kill his daughter.

Kael looked at the fake dagger glinting on Alpha Moros's hip as the Alpha walked back inside, and then looked up at the real dagger pulsing blue in his grandfather's stone chest.

He made his choice.

"Nothing," he whispered to Elara, his voice raw. "I saw nothing. My eyes were watering from the soap."

He lied to the only person who ever loved him. Elara stared at his lying blue eyes, and her own gold healing light flickered in her palms, desperate to heal his new cut, but for the second time, when her gold touched his skin, it didn't stay gold.

It flickered blue. And neither of them knew what that meant yet.