LUNA POV I sit on the porch steps while Orion loads my bags into the trunk of a car I don’t recognize, black and sleek and out of place against the gravel driveway I’ve known my whole life.
My mark still blazes faint and hot on my forehead, a steady pulse of heat that hasn’t faded since it burned itself into my skin.
Every time I catch my reflection in the dark window behind me, I flinch.
Nana Mae sits down beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, and for a while neither of us says anything.
The night is warm and thick with cicada song, same as it’s been every summer of my life, and it feels wrong that the world can sound this ordinary while mine falls apart.
I focus on that sound instead of the ache building behind my ribs, because if I let myself feel the full weight of what’s happening, I don’t think I’ll be able to stand up again.
“What were you planning?” she asks finally, quiet.
“Before all this.
What was the plan?” “The Olympics.” I say it before I even think about it, because it’s the truest answer I have.
“I was three seconds off the qualifying standard.
Three seconds, Mae.” “That’s close.” “That’s gone.” My throat tightens around the words.
“I can’t compete now.
Wolf strength, that’s cheating, right?
I built that speed myself.
Every morning run, every rep, every second I shaved off my time, that was mine.
Nobody gave it to me.
And now – ” I stop, because I don’t know how to finish the sentence without my voice cracking clean in half.
Nana Mae takes my hand in both of hers, the same way she always has, since I was small enough that her hands felt huge around mine.
Her palms are rough from decades of gardening and dishwater, and the familiarity of that texture nearly undoes me more than anything else has tonight.
“The speed’s not gone, baby.” Her voice is soft but sure.
“Just the competition.
You’re still fast.
You’re still you.” “I don’t know who that is anymore.” The admission scrapes its way out of me, raw and honest in a way I haven’t let myself be all night.
“Two days ago I knew exactly who I was.
I was Luna Willow, I ran track, I had a boyfriend who stole my fries and drew me in his notebook, I was going to UT on scholarship.
Now I don’t even know what I am.” “You’re still all of that.” She squeezes my hand hard enough to hurt, like she’s trying to press the truth of it straight into my skin.
“A mark on your forehead doesn’t erase seventeen years of you, Luna.
Whatever you’re about to become, you’re becoming it as yourself.
Don’t you forget that, no matter what they tell you up at that Academy.” I don’t have words to answer that, so I just lean my head against her shoulder, and we sit there together for a while, the cicadas singing on like nothing in the world has changed.
I breathe in the smell of her, lavender lotion and the faint trace of woodsmoke that never quite leaves her cardigans, and I try to memorize it, terrified some part of me will forget by morning.
Eventually she reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out an envelope, worn soft at the corners like it’s been carried and set down and picked back up more times than she’d ever admit.
“This is from your parents.” She presses it into my hands, careful, like it might break.
“Your mama wrote it a long time ago, in case this day came.
Don’t open it until you’re ready.
You’ll know when that is.” I turn the sealed envelope over in my hands, my own name written across the front in handwriting I don’t recognize.
My fingers trace the looping letters, and for a moment I let myself imagine her hand moving across the page, young and afraid and hoping.
“Okay,” I whisper, and tuck it carefully into my bag like it’s the most fragile thing I own.
Jace is waiting by his truck at the end of the driveway, arms crossed, jaw tight in that way it gets when he’s trying not to fall apart in front of somebody.
I walk toward him on legs that don’t feel steady, and the second I’m close enough, he pulls me in.
He smells like the same cedar soap he’s used since freshman year, and the ordinariness of it makes my eyes sting.
“I’ll find you,” he says, before I can say anything at all.
His hands come up to cup my face, thumbs brushing just under my eyes like he’s trying to memorize every part of it before I disappear.
“Whatever this is.
Wherever they’re taking you.
I’ll find you, Luna.
I’m not just letting you go.” “Jace.” “I mean it.” His voice shakes but doesn’t break.
“You don’t get to just vanish out of my life because some guy with weird eyes showed up and said you have to.
I love you.
That doesn’t stop because you’ve got some mark on your face now.” I don’t have an answer good enough for that, so I kiss him instead, slow and desperate, trying to hold onto the shape of this exact moment because some part of me already knows it’s the last normal one I get.
He kisses me back like he’s trying to do the same thing, one hand sliding into my hair, careful of the mark still tender at my hairline, the other arm wrapped tight around my waist like he could keep me here through sheer force of will.
When we finally pull apart, neither of us says anything else.
There’s nothing else to say that wouldn’t just make it harder.
He presses one last kiss to my forehead, right beside the mark, so gentle it almost doesn’t hurt at all.
I walk to the car without looking back.
If I look back, at Jace standing in the driveway, at Nana Mae on the porch with her hand pressed to her mouth, I know I won’t be able to make myself get in.
So I don’t look back.
I get in the car, and Orion pulls out onto the road, and Little River disappears behind us into the dark.
I press my palm flat against the cool glass of the window and watch the porch light shrink to a pinprick, then vanish entirely.
The radio stays off, the silence thick enough to touch.
Barely a mile past the town line, I work up the nerve to ask the question that’s been sitting in my chest since the diner parking lot.
“Jace has been having dreams too.” I watch Orion’s profile in the dim dashboard light, waiting for a reaction.
“Wolves, silver forests, since we started dating.
What does that mean?” Orion doesn’t answer right away.
His hands stay steady on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road, and when he finally speaks, his voice carries the same clipped certainty it’s had all night.
“Some humans dream the wolf world.
It’s rare.
Dangerous, sometimes, depending on what’s calling to them.” He glances at me once, brief.
“I don’t know what it means for him specifically, only that it’s real, and that it matters.
I’d rather tell you that plainly than hand you a guess dressed up as an answer.
Right now my only job is getting you through those gates alive.
Everything else waits until you are.” “That’s not an answer.” “It’s the honest one.” His eyes stay fixed on the road ahead, dark mountains rising up on either side of us, black against a sky just barely lighter than they are.
“There’s a great deal about this world I understand well, Luna, and Jace isn’t one of those things.
I won’t pretend otherwise just to make you feel better.” “Then answer me this instead.” I fold my arms, refusing to let the silence swallow me the way it’s swallowed everything else tonight.
“What happens to me at this Academy?
Not the vague version.
The real one.” “You train.
You learn control.
You survive the change instead of fighting it.” He glances at me once, brief.
“Beyond that, I won’t guess at what you’ll become.
Nobody can, not even you.” He doesn’t offer anything else, and I’m too wrung out to chase it.
The mountains grow steeper and closer together the deeper we drive, the road narrowing until the trees on either side lean in close enough to brush the windows.
My eyelids grow heavy more than once, but each time I catch myself drifting, I jerk back awake on purpose, unwilling to let sleep take the last few hours I have left as only myself.
The mark stays quiet through all of it, a low simmer of heat instead of anything sharper, as if it, too, is only waiting.
And then the air changes.
It happens all at once, a pressure against my skin like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, thick and electric.
The trees seem to lean in even further, branches curling toward the car like they’re curious about what’s passing beneath them.
Overhead, clouds cover the sky in a solid grey sheet, and yet moonlight brightens anyway, silver and impossible, pouring down through cover that should be blocking it out entirely.
The mark flares hot, a sudden pulse that makes me gasp, and I understand with a small cold jolt that it isn’t reacting to my nerves or exhaustion at all.
It’s reacting to power – to wolves, or wards, or whatever unseen border we’re about to cross.
“We’re passing through the wards,” Orion says, confirming what my own skin already told me.
I press my hand to the window, watching the strange light ripple across the glass, and the mark pulses again in answer.
My heartbeat kicks up, some instinct older than thought recognizing danger, or maybe home, and I can’t tell which frightens me more.
If it flares like this for a boundary I can’t even see, I wonder what it will do surrounded by hundreds of wolves at once.
The car rounds one final bend, and there it is.
Hollowcrest Academy rises up out of the mountain valley below us, ancient stone buildings clustered together like they grew straight out of the rock itself, ivy climbing walls carved with symbols that glow faint silver even in the dark.
Towers stretch up toward the cloud-covered sky, and scattered across the grounds I can see shapes moving, some human, some not, wolves loping alongside teenagers like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
My breath catches in my throat at the sheer scale of it, at how impossibly old it looks, like it existed long before anyone thought to build roads leading here.
Orion pulls the car through an iron gate that swings open on its own, and the moment we cross onto the grounds, every single wolf in sight stops moving at once.
Every head turns toward the car.
Toward me.
The mark answers them before I even understand what’s happening, blazing hot enough that I press my palm to my forehead on instinct, and through the windshield I watch marks flicker to life across the wolves scattered on the lawn, all of them the same double-crescent-and-moon pattern Orion showed me back in Nana Mae’s kitchen, glowing faintly in shades of blue and crimson and violet and amber and silver-white.
It isn’t a coincidence, I realize.
Mine is calling to theirs, the way it called to the ward, the way it called to whatever power hums beneath these old stones, and every mark it touches seems to shrink back from it.
One by one, every single one of those marks dims, fading quiet and small next to whatever is burning on my forehead right now.
Nobody moves.
Nobody speaks.
The whole grounds of Hollowcrest Academy goes utterly, unnervingly still, dozens of eyes fixed on the car, fixed on me, like they’re all waiting to see what I am before they decide whether to be afraid of it.
I sit frozen in my seat, hand still pressed to the glass, my mark throbbing steady and certain against my palm, and I understand, finally, exactly what it’s been trying to tell me the whole drive here: I am not walking into this world quietly.
Whatever I am, it already outweighs anything currently standing on that lawn, and every wolf out there just felt it happen.
Give me more motivation!