(Luna) I lie on my bed fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, my whole body wound tight with worry over Kael.
The worry sits like a stone in my stomach, heavy and immovable, no matter how many times I tell myself he’s fine, that he’s done this before, that I have no real reason to believe otherwise.
He hasn’t come back.
I don’t know how I know that, exactly, except that the grounds outside my window have stayed dark and empty every time I’ve checked, and something in my chest keeps insisting he’s still down there.
That certainty unsettles me more than I want to admit, a quiet, gnawing thing that refuses to be reasoned away.
I’m halfway convinced I’ll just lie here all night listening for footsteps that never come, when the whisper starts again.
It’s fainter than it was on the new moon, but unmistakable all the same, that same wordless pull settling behind my ribs and tugging me toward the door.
I sit bolt upright, heart already pounding.
The last time I felt this, Maren nearly died.
I know that.
I told myself, afterward, in the raw hours when the school went into lockdown and nobody would say her name out loud, that I would never follow it again, that whatever wanted my attention down there could go on wanting.
And yet here it is, and here I am, already reaching for my shoes.
I try to talk myself out of it.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my hands pressed flat against my knees and force myself to think it through instead of just moving.
It only ever comes at night, I realize, and only when I’m alone, and only when something in me is already unraveling.
Tonight it’s Kael.
Two weeks ago it was the fever that gripped me after the wards shattered, that long, helpless night when I couldn’t tell dream from waking and no one could tell me if I’d survive it, a private terror I never told anyone the full truth of, one I thought was mine alone until the whisper found it anyway and used it as a door.
My hands go cold at the thought.
Something patient wants me.
Something that watches and waits for the exact moment I’m too raw to resist, and calls to me only then.
I don’t know if it’s warning me or luring me, and not knowing is its own kind of torment, because I can’t decide whether ignoring it is the responsible choice or the reckless one.
What if it leads me to Kael.
What if it leads me to whatever Maren found.
What if those are the same thing.
My pulse hammers against my throat as I sit there, torn, my rational mind screaming that I should stay put, that whatever answered this pull last time nearly cost a girl her life.
But underneath that scream is a smaller, more insistent voice reminding me that Kael is still out there somewhere in the dark, and that the whisper has never once, in two weeks, led me anywhere Kael wasn’t already involved.
That’s the thought that decides it.
Not curiosity.
Not recklessness.
Kael.
I follow it anyway.
The pull guides my feet down a different path than the one I took two weeks ago, skirting wide around the main stairwell where I know the guards are still posted, curling instead through a narrow gap behind a tapestry in the Den’s lower hallway that I never would have noticed on my own.
The passage beyond it is tight and low, cold stone pressing in on both sides, close enough that my shoulders brush rock on either side, but it leads down all the same, deeper and deeper until it opens into the same tunnels I remember from the new moon.
The air here tastes different than it did upstairs, thick with something old and faintly metallic, and my pulse climbs another notch with every step.
“Kael?” I whisper, my voice swallowed almost instantly by the thick, wrong air of the Undercroft.
There’s no answer.
I strain to hear anything at all, footsteps, breathing, the faintest scrape of movement, but the silence swallows even that hope.
I press forward, following the whisper’s pull deeper into the tunnels, my breath coming faster now, until the passage forks in three directions I don’t recognize and the pull itself seems to scatter, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.
“Kael!” I call, louder this time, my voice echoing off cold stone and coming back to me distorted, wrong, as if the tunnel itself is mocking the shape of his name.
Silence answers.
Complete and absolute, the kind that presses against my eardrums like a physical weight.
My own heartbeat sounds obscenely loud in comparison, a frantic drum I can’t quiet no matter how hard I try to steady my breathing.
I’m alone.
A cold spike of fear shoots through my chest.
I turn in a slow circle, trying to remember which direction I came from, panic clawing at the edges of my composure, when the whisper returns, low and insistent, curling around me from every direction at once like it’s coming from the walls themselves.
Then, underneath it, a growl.
Low.
Guttural.
Close.
Every hair on my arms rises at once, some ancient, animal part of me recognizing danger before my mind can fully catch up.
I spin toward the sound just as something detaches itself from the shadows at the edge of the tunnel, a shape built from darkness that shouldn’t hold together the way it does, four legs, a lean, wrong-angled body, and eyes that burn a deep, furious red in a face made of nothing but shifting black.
A shadow wolf.
It lunges before I can even think to run.
Terror and instinct collide inside me all at once, and something breaks loose, something I’ve spent two weeks failing to find in the Shifting Circle no matter how hard I reached for it.
There’s no reaching this time.
No grabbing at smoke.
My body simply tears apart around me, bones reshaping, skin giving way to fur, a violent, roaring rush of pain and release that lasts only a heartbeat before it’s done.
I land on four legs, low and coiled, my vision sharpening into something far more precise than my human eyes ever managed, and when I catch sight of my own foreleg, black fur catches faint silver light that seems to pour directly off my own skin, a corona of moonlight clinging to a body dark as the space between stars.
For one strange, suspended moment, wonder chases the fear from my chest, and I forget everything except the astonishment of finally, finally holding this shape without having to fight for it.
The shadow wolf recoils.
It skitters back a step, red eyes narrowing on me like it’s recalculating something it thought it already understood, and in the space that hesitation gives me, I don’t think.
I don’t calculate.
I attack.
I drive forward, teeth bared, a snarl tearing out of my throat that doesn’t sound like anything my human voice could have made, and the shadow wolf meets me halfway, all claws and smoke and red-eyed fury.
We collide hard, and pain lances through my shoulder where its claws catch me, sharp and blinding, but something else surges up underneath the pain, hot and bright and furious, gathering behind the mark still burning silver on my forehead.
Light bursts from me all at once, blinding, silver fire pouring out from the center of my mark and washing over the shadow wolf in a wave I don’t understand and didn’t choose to summon.
The power tears through me like a current, burning hot behind my ribs, and something vital drains away with it.
The creature shrieks, a sound like tearing metal, and where the light touches it, its shadowed body simply comes apart, dissolving into wisps of black smoke that scatter and vanish into the cold tunnel air until there’s nothing left of it at all.
The tunnel goes silent again.
My legs buckle, and I barely catch myself before I collapse, the light flickering out and leaving me hollow.
I stand there on four legs, shaking, blood welling from the claw marks on my shoulder, my breath coming in ragged pants that don’t sound remotely human.
Alone in the dark, the whisper gone now, the growl gone, nothing left but the echo of my own pounding heart.
Exhaustion crashes over me almost as violently as the fight itself, my legs trembling with the effort of simply holding me upright, grief and confusion tangling together until I can’t tell anymore which one is winning.
I tip my head back and howl.
The sound tears out of me raw and enormous, grief and fear and fury all tangled together into a single note that rises up through the tunnel, and somewhere deep in the old stone around me, the walls themselves seem to shake with it.
Then, from somewhere down the left-hand fork, an answering sound: footsteps, quick and uneven, breaking into a run.
I tense, hackles rising, too drained to shift back and too raw to trust my own senses anymore.
The footsteps grow louder, accompanied now by a light that bobs and swings against the tunnel walls, and a voice follows close behind it, hoarse and disbelieving.
“Luna?” Kael calls out, his voice cracking with disbelief.
He rounds the corner with a torch held high, and stops dead at the sight of me, silver-marked and bleeding, crouched low in the dark.
His face drains of color.
“What did you do,” he demands, his tone sharp with accusation and fear tangled together.
It isn’t a question.
Behind him, deeper in the tunnel, something answers with a low, resonant crack, like stone splitting far beneath our feet, and the ground itself gives a shudder that neither of us imagined.