The Alpha Hunts Every Runner, and I Took Him Down novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Hunter's Moon
Greta comes home after eight years to run the pack's Hunter's Moon, tackles the Alpha at the creek to slow him, feels the mate bond hit on skin, and claims her boon at sunrise, only to remember his is the name on her father's exile order.
Eight years after the Blackfir pack threw my father and me out of the valley, I walked back into it to run the Hunter's Moon.
The whole pack was gathered at the Standing Stone on the ridge, two hundred wolves in the dark with lanterns.
Orrin Dahl was the first to speak.
He is the chair of the Council, a big man with a silver crew cut and a smile that stops short of his eyes.
"Greta Halvorsen," he said. "You've got a nerve."
"I'm twenty-seven, I'm unmated, and I was born on this ridge," I said.
"The Run is open to any Blackfir wolf over twenty-one."
"Say it's not."
Dell whooped from the back, my best friend since the first grade, waving both arms.
"The Run is open," said a voice from the far side of the Stone. "She stays."
I looked across the clearing.
I hadn't seen Soren Brekke up close in eight years.
He had been a lean young Alpha then, and the man in the lantern light was six foot four and broad as a barn door.
He had black hair and pale amber eyes, and he looked at me for exactly one breath.
Something warm turned over in my chest, and my wolf lifted her head.
I told her to lie down.
"Runners go at moonrise," Soren said, to the crowd and not to me.
"I hunt from midnight."
"Anyone who touches the Stone at sunrise uncaught may ask me for one boon in front of the pack."
"And no hand on the Alpha," Orrin added quickly.
"It's a foul, and the entry is void."
"You've said that every autumn for thirty years," said an old woman's voice from the dark, dry as a cough.
Nobody laughed.
The moon cleared the trees, and we ran.
I had a plan, and it was a bad one.
Six summers of jumping out of planes into burning forests will teach a woman a few things about falling.
I took the long loop through the cedars and came to Cutler Creek at the sixth mile with my lungs on fire.
A cedar leaned over the ford, with a limb as thick as my waist.
I climbed it and lay along the bark and waited.
At midnight a howl came down the ridge, long and low.
It wasn't a hunter's howl.
It sounded like a man calling someone's name.
He came down the bank twenty minutes later, walking, not running, with the moon on his shoulders.
He stopped at the ford, and I swear he smiled.
I didn't think.
I dropped.
I hit him between the shoulder blades with my full weight and both arms around his neck.
We went into the creek together in a spray of ice-cold water.
My palms landed flat on his bare chest where his shirt had torn, and the world went white.
Heat shot up both my arms and down into my belly.
A hum started under my breastbone that was not my own.
A silver light flickered in the middle of my right hand, shaped like a thin new moon.
His palm was under mine, and it was glowing too.
Every wolf on earth knows what it is, and I had told myself for eight years that I would never get one.
"Mate," I said, stupidly, with creek water in my mouth.
Soren lay in the shallows with his hair plastered across his forehead and his hands open at his sides, not touching me at all.
"Well," he said, very quietly. "Caught."
His voice shook on the last word.
I was straddling his hips in a freezing stream, and I wanted him so badly my teeth hurt.
I kissed him.
I grabbed his jaw and did it hard, with all the anger I'd packed for the trip.
He made a sound against my mouth.
His hands came up and found my waist and held on.
He tasted of woodsmoke and cold water.
I pulled back, shaking, with my lips stinging.
"I didn't come for you," I said. "I came for a boon."
"I know."
"If you follow me, I'll hit you."
"Then I won't." He took his hands off my waist, one finger at a time. "Go and get it, Halvorsen."
I ran the last three miles with his taste in my mouth and my right palm burning.
I touched the Stone at the first gray light.
I was the first one up the hill, soaked to the hip with my braid half undone, and the pack stared.
"Boon," I said, between breaths.
"Foul!" Orrin bellowed. "She laid hands on the Alpha, I'll swear to it, her palm is lit like a lantern, the entry's void!"
Soren came up the last of the hill with his torn shirt hanging open and creek water running off him.
The pack turned to look at him, and at the hand he held open at his side, lit silver.
"She laid no hand that I object to," he said. "The boon stands. Ask it, Halvorsen."
I turned around to face the whole valley.
"Eight years ago you drove my father out of here as a thief," I said.
"He's dead now."
"I want his name cleared, and every ledger on the table in front of everyone."
Orrin Dahl went the color of ash.
"Granted," said Soren.
The pack erupted.
I stood there with the sun in my eyes and my whole body singing, and then I remembered what I'd spent the whole night forgetting.
My father's exile order had one signature on it, in thick black ink.
Soren Brekke's.
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