Luna Lola: The Moon Wolf novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Stone
Dane asks Wynne to hold his hand for luck, then rejects her on the Stone before the whole pack. She accepts it aloud, walks out, and at the river a stranger in the trees says one word: mine.
Dane Redfern rejected me at moonrise, in front of my whole pack.
Before he did it, he asked me to hold his hand.
He always asked before a gathering, a patrol or a challenge.
"For luck, Wyn," he said, and held out his palm. "One minute. Just stand with me."
I took it.
His hand was warm, and mine was cold by the time he let go, the way it always was.
Below the granite slab we stood on, the meadow was full of wolves, two hundred of them, all looking up at the rising moon.
Ilsa stood at the front with the visiting wolves from the coast.
She had braided my hair that afternoon in the pack-house kitchen, and she'd asked what hour I was born so she could write it in her little green notebook.
"He's going to do right by you tonight," she had said, pinning the last strand. "I can tell."
I believed her.
I was twenty-four, I had been Dane's fated mate for six years, and I thought tonight he was finally going to say so out loud.
Dane stepped to the edge of the Stone, where every rejection and challenge in Ashfall was spoken, and the meadow went quiet.
"Pack, I have something to say about my mate."
I smiled.
"Wynne Tarrant," he said, in the warm voice he used for everything, "I, Dane Redfern, Alpha of Ashfall, reject you as my mate and my Luna."
The bond tore.
It hurt in my ribs and my teeth and the backs of my knees, and for a moment I couldn't see.
When I could see again, nobody in the meadow was making a sound.
"She has never shifted," Dane told them gently. "In twenty-four years she has never once been a wolf. The pack needs a Luna who can lead it into a fight."
Somewhere near the back, a man laughed and then stopped himself.
"I'm sorry, Wyn," Dane said, and he looked sorry. "Be kind to her, everyone. She's still one of us."
He reached for my hand again, to guide me off the Stone.
I stepped back from it.
The law says the rejected wolf answers, and I knew it, because I had sat through three rejections as a girl.
I could cry or I could beg.
I could say the words.
"I, Wynne Tarrant, accept," I said, and my voice carried farther than I expected. "Find your own luck, Dane."
His smile slipped, just at one corner.
I looked for Ilsa.
She had both hands over her mouth and her eyes were wet, and she mouthed, I'm so sorry.
She had her green notebook open against her coat, and she was writing something down.
It struck me as a strange moment for it.
Then I stopped thinking about her.
So I stepped off the Stone.
The pack parted for me.
The little girl I babysat grabbed my sleeve, and I told her to go back to her mother.
I didn't go to the pack house for my things.
Everything I owned in that building belonged to the Alpha's household by morning anyway, and I wasn't going to ask Dane for my own socks.
I walked down the meadow and through the pines to the Black Fir River.
On the far bank was Crown land, and no Ashfall wolf crossed it without a summons.
The only road out of the valley ran along the far side.
It was a wooden footbridge, and the planks were slick with frost.
The moon was full above the water.
I was halfway across when the old scar between my shoulder blades started to burn.
Dane had always said I got it falling out of the hayloft at twenty-one.
It burned the way a hand does when you put it too near a stove, and then it spread.
My spine bent.
My knees went out from under me, and my hands hit the planks and did not look like hands.
I had never shifted in my life.
I had been told every year of it that I never would.
Something huge and white shoved up through my chest, and it wasn't asking.
I got to the far bank on my elbows, with my own claws in the mud.
A lantern swung out of the trees.
A man stepped into the light, and he was the biggest man I had ever seen.
He took one look at me, half girl and half something else, and I felt every part of me that Dane had just cut loose go straight toward him.
"Mine," he said.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend