Luna Lola: The Moon Wolf novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Line

Her first shift tears through her at the Crown line, and a white wolf faces down a ring of silver rifles until Caelen orders them to lower. She wakes in his coat at Highmoor, and his Beta sees the scar on her shoulder is a Crown round.

The man with the lantern was Caelen Caldwell, and I didn't know that yet.

All I knew was that he was standing on the wrong side of the river for any wolf I had ever met.

My bones kept moving.

I pressed my forehead into the cold mud and tried to breathe through it.

"Don't fight it," he said, low and close. "Let it come."

"Get away from me," I said, though my jaw was already too long for the words.

I don't know what I looked like in the middle.

I know that the white thing in my chest finished what it had started, and the girl who had been rejected an hour ago went down under it.

When I could think again, I was on four legs.

My paws were enormous.

Fur the color of milk hung in front of my eyes, and the lantern light made it shine.

Around me, in a ring, stood men in dark jackets with rifles at their shoulders.

There were eight of them, and every barrel was aimed at my head.

The air stank of metal.

Silver.

My scar lit up between my shoulder blades.

"Hold," the big man said.

Nobody lowered anything.

"Rogue on Crown ground," said a man to my left. "That's the law, Caelen. You know the law."

"I know it."

"She's packless. She just came across the Ashfall bridge, and she's in half a shift."

"I know what she is."

My lips pulled back from my teeth.

I hadn't decided to do it.

The wolf was doing it, and the wolf wanted every one of them to take a step back.

Three of them took a step back.

Caelen did not.

He put the lantern on the ground, slowly, and walked into the ring with his palms open and nothing in them.

"I said hold," he said again, and this time the whole forest heard it.

I felt it in my legs.

It was an Alpha's voice, and I'd heard Dane use a smaller version of it all my life.

This one was much bigger.

The rifles came down.

One at a time, the muzzles dropped to the dirt.

Caelen knelt in front of me, so close that I could have taken his throat.

His eyes were grey-green and tired.

"There you are," he said, very quietly.

I made a sound I'd never made before.

It wasn't a growl.

"You don't know me," he said. "I know. But you crossed on my side of the line on a full moon, and you've got a bond pulling at you right now, and I have it too."

He swallowed.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

I wanted to believe that so badly that it frightened me.

Then my legs folded.

The wolf let go of me all at once, and everything went black.

I woke up warm.

The ceiling was dark wooden beams, a long way up.

I was in a bed so big I could have lain across it, wrapped in a man's wool coat that smelled of pine smoke and iron.

My own clothes were gone.

I was human again, and every joint in my body ached.

"She's up," said a man's cheerful voice.

A broad man with a red beard sat in a chair by the fire.

"Don't jump," he said. "No one here is going to hurt you. I'm Harlan. You're in Highmoor, which is the Crown's hall, and that's Caelen's coat, so you're to give it back when you're dressed."

"Where is he?"

"Downstairs, arguing with a hall full of old men about whether to kill you."

He said it so cheerfully that I thought I'd misheard.

He saw my face and held up both hands.

"He's winning. Mostly."

I sat up, holding the coat shut at my throat.

The movement pulled my left shoulder, and Harlan's eyes went there before he could stop them.

The collar had slipped.

The scar on my shoulder blade was out in the lamplight, white and puckered, the size of a palm.

Harlan stopped smiling.

He got up, crossed the room and looked at it for a long moment without touching it.

"Who gave you that?" he asked.

"I fell. When I was twenty-one."

"No, you didn't." His voice had gone flat. "That's a silver round, and it has a star-shaped mark. I've seen it before, and only on our own ammunition."

I stared at him.

"The Crown's border guard loads that round," he said, "and nobody else does."

Footsteps hit the stairs, fast.

The door opened and Caelen filled it, his shirt dark with rain and his face closed.

"Dawn," he said to Harlan, without looking at me yet. "They want her dead at dawn, and the law is on their side."

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