I Refused to Be His Luna Again novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Name on the Form
Reborn on registration day, Marit writes Linnea's name on the mate line before the whole pack, and the Council gives Anders ninety days to find a lawful Luna, ending on the night she knows she died.
At Midwinter, in front of three hundred wolves, I wrote another woman's name on the mate form.
I knew how that morning would end before I put on my coat.
I had lived it once already, and I had died twenty years after it.
I woke up in my old bed that morning with my own twenty-year-old hands in front of my face.
I laughed, and then I was sick in the washbasin, and then I got dressed.
The Moon Hall was packed to the rafters by noon.
The whole Ironwood Pack stood along the log walls with their breath steaming, waiting to see their Alpha-heir get his Luna.
I waited in the side room with a wool blanket around my shoulders, because the stove had gone out.
Linnea Falk had brought the blanket.
She came in with a tin cup and a smile, small and pale in her grey cardigan, moving carefully.
"You're shaking," she said. "Here. Honey tea. Drink it, it'll settle you."
She pressed the cup into my hands and folded my fingers around it.
The tea smelled of honey and something faintly bitter underneath.
I held it and did not drink.
"Whatever you decide today, nothing changes between us," Linnea said. "You'll still have your tea at your door every Sunday."
Then she looked at my coat, where it had ridden up over my ribs.
"Does the old burn still ache in the cold?"
I touched the place under my coat.
The silver scar ran along my left side, shiny and pale, from a night four years ago that I had never been able to remember.
I had woken in my grandmother's infirmary two days after the Ashfall raid with the burn and a blank where the fight should have been.
"It aches," I said.
"Poor thing," Linnea said, and kissed my cheek.
Through the door I could hear Anders Kroll's voice, low and steady, talking to the Council.
I had loved that voice for twenty years.
I had also learned, over those years, exactly where I stood in it.
In my last life I had stood at that registry table and written my own name, because the pack asked me to and Linnea had no wolf to carry a Luna's seat.
Anders had thanked me for it.
Then he had spent two decades running to Linnea's side every time she coughed.
I put the cup down untouched on the windowsill and walked out into the hall.
Three hundred faces turned to me.
Anders stood beside the registry table in his dark coat, broad and tall, with the old claw scar through his right eyebrow.
He looked at me the way he always had.
An elder of the Council held out the pen.
"Marit Solberg," he said. "Write the name of the one you register as mate."
The hall went quiet enough to hear the stove tick.
I took the pen.
On the line marked Mate to be registered, I wrote in my clearest hand:
Linnea Falk.
The elder read it aloud, and then read it again because nobody breathed.
A noise went through the hall like wind through a pine wall.
Anders's face changed.
"Marit," he said, very softly. "What are you doing?"
"Giving you what you wanted," I said. "She's the one you'd have chosen."
"I never said that."
"You never had to."
The elder cleared his throat and took the form from me.
"Linnea Falk was born without a wolf," he said to the hall. "The Council can't register a Luna who has none. This form is void."
Hallvard Kroll stepped forward from the front row, the Alpha's brother and the pack's regent, grey-streaked and kind-faced.
"Then my nephew stands unmated," he said gently. "By the old law, he has ninety days to bring the Council a lawful Luna. If he can't, the seat stays with me."
He did not look at me with anything but concern.
Behind me, there was a small, soft sound.
Linnea had come to the doorway of the side room, one hand pressed to her chest.
Her knees folded, and she went down in a heap of grey wool.
Anders was across the hall before the first gasp finished.
He caught her before she hit the boards, and he lifted her.
He did not look back at me once.
I had watched him carry her out of rooms for twenty years.
This time I picked up my blanket and left through the other door.
Outside, the cold hit my face, and it was the cleanest thing I had ever felt.
Footsteps crunched in the snow behind me.
Torben Rask caught up, the pack's Beta, out of breath and wide-eyed.
"Marit, have you lost your mind?" he said. "Do you know what you just did?"
"Yes."
"Ninety days. If he has no Luna, Hallvard keeps the seat, and he'll be Alpha when the Blood Moon comes."
I stopped walking.
I knew that moon.
It was the night the rogues came through the East Gate, and the night I held it alone, and the night I died.
Ninety days from Midwinter was the Blood Moon, and I had just started the clock.
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