(Luna) Nobody moves.
Dozens of eyes lock onto the car, and the silence stretches so tight I hear someone’s breath catch, a low growl cut short.
Then Orion kills the engine, and the spell breaks.
Wolves shift their weight, teenagers murmur and cast glances over their shoulders as we get out.
My legs feel unsteady beneath me, like the ground itself hasn’t decided whether to hold my weight.
“Don’t look at them,” Orion warns quietly, coming around to my side of the car.
“Not yet.
It’ll only make it worse.” “Worse than everyone staring at me like I grew a second head,” I mutter.
“Yes,” he answers flatly.
He doesn’t elaborate.
He just puts a hand lightly at my back, guiding me forward across the grounds toward the largest of the stone buildings, its doors carved with the same silver-glowing symbols I saw from the car.
“The Grand Matriarch is waiting for you.” My stomach drops.
“The who,” I breathe.
“Seraphina Moonshadow,” he explains.
“She leads Hollowcrest.
She’ll want to see your mark for herself.” I don’t get a chance to ask anything else before we’re through the doors and into a grand hall lit by candlelight that somehow never flickers, stone walls rising up into shadow overhead.
The air smells faintly of wax and old stone, and my footsteps sound too loud against the floor, like the building itself is listening.
A woman stands waiting near the center of the room, and the second I see her, I understand why every wolf outside went quiet at the sight of my car.
Raven black hair falls past her shoulders in a smooth, unbroken sheet, her skin pale as porcelain, violet eyes catching the candlelight like they’re lit from somewhere inside.
She moves toward me slowly, every step deliberate, chosen instead of simply taken.
There’s something ancient in the way she carries herself, a stillness that makes me feel very young and very small standing in front of her.
“Luna Willow.” Her voice comes warm and musical, almost reverent, as she says my name like she’s been waiting a long time to say it.
“We’ve been expecting you.
Though I confess, nothing quite prepared me for this.” Before I can answer, her fingers reach up and brush lightly against my forehead, tracing the mark there with something close to reverence.
Her touch is cool, almost weightless, and yet I feel it everywhere, like it reaches past skin and bone into something older underneath.
Her expression flickers, quick and gone before I can name it.
Surprise, maybe.
Or something colder underneath the surprise.
I can’t tell.
“Remarkable,” she murmurs to herself, her tone hushed with disbelief.
“A thousand years, and here you stand.” “A thousand years since what,” I ask, my voice small, swallowed almost instantly by the vastness of the hall.
“Since anyone has worn a mark like yours,” she says, her hand falling away, the warmth gone from her face now.
Instead, she studies me the way I once watched a hawk study a field mouse from a fence post, patient and assessing.
“Show me your wolf.” The demand catches me flat-footed.
“I don’t, I don’t know how,” I stammer.
“You shifted once already, by Orion’s account.
Violently, painfully, without any instruction at all.” Seraphina tilts her head, considering, and the candlelight slides strange across her violet eyes.
“Do it again.
Now.
Deliberately.” “I can’t just,” I start, glancing at Orion, hoping for some kind of rescue, but his face has gone carefully blank, unreadable as stone.
“I don’t know how to control it.
That’s supposed to be why I’m here, isn’t it.
To learn.” “You’re here because that mark on your forehead is unlike anything this academy has seen in a thousand years, and I intend to know exactly what I’ve welcomed through my doors.” Her voice stays warm, musical even, but something harder moves beneath it now, a current under still water.
“Every wolf who walks these halls proves themselves to me eventually, Luna Willow.
I’d simply prefer to know now, rather than later, whether you’re a student I’m nurturing or a danger I’m containing.” My pulse pounds against the mark on my forehead, an echo of that same fevered ache from the barn floor.
“And if I can’t do it.
If I just stand here,” I press, my voice shaking.
“Then I’ll have my answer regardless.” Her expression stays fixed, unblinking.
“Ignorance is its own kind of information.” The silence stretches, and I feel the weight of it pressing down on me, the same way the whole hall seemed to hold its breath when I first walked in.
I close my eyes, reach for whatever had clawed its way out of me in Nana Mae’s kitchen, the fire under my skin, the moon-pull I still don’t have a name for.
Nothing answers.
No fur, no claws, no fever.
Just my own heartbeat, too loud, and the humiliation of standing empty-handed in front of a woman who clearly expected more.
“Nothing,” I admit, my voice cracking around the word.
Something shifts in Seraphina’s expression, not disappointment exactly, but a recalibration, like she’s moving a piece across a board only she can see.
“Interesting,” she says, her tone soft and contemplative.
“The power comes to you, then.
You don’t yet come to it.
That will need to change, and quickly, before it changes on its terms instead of yours.” “What does that mean,” I demand.
“It means you’re not safe yet, and neither is anyone standing near you when it happens again,” she replies, her tone brisk and clinical.
She turns from me, already moving toward a woman waiting near the doorway, murmuring something too quiet for me to catch.
The woman nods and disappears down a side hallway.
“You’ll be placed in Spiritwalker Den.
It suits your nature.” A murmur ripples through the small handful of wolves gathered near the hall’s edges, low and startled.
I catch pieces of it.
Empty in decades.
No new member.
I don’t understand any of it, but the way Seraphina’s smile settles back into place, smooth and immovable, makes my skin prickle anyway, an unease I can’t quite name settling low in my stomach.
“Is that bad,” I ask, my voice tight.
“That depends entirely on you,” she answers, her smile fixed but her eyes sharp, measuring.
“Rest well, Luna.
Tomorrow we begin finding out what you are.
I’d advise you to hope we find it before it finds us.” Spiritwalker Den sits at the far edge of the grounds, half hidden behind a stand of ancient trees, smaller and older than the other buildings I passed on the way here.
Dust hangs faint in the entrance hall, catching moonlight through tall windows in slow, drifting motes, and the whole place feels like it’s been waiting a long time for someone to come home to it.
My room is at the top of a narrow staircase.
I drop my bag at the foot of the bed and pull out Nana Mae’s letter, still sealed, still unread, and set it on the pillow like it might bruise if I hold it too long.
I can’t open it yet.
Not tonight.
I pull out my phone instead and call Jace.
It rings twice, then dies to silence.
No bars, no signal, nothing but a small red X where the reception should be.
I try again anyway, pressing the phone hard against my ear like proximity might force the call through sheer will.
Nothing.
I sink onto the edge of the mattress and type instead.
Me: I’m safe.
I think.
I’ll explain when I can.
The message sits there, undelivered, a tiny exclamation point blinking beside it like an accusation.
I imagine him back home, phone clutched too tight in his hand, waiting for words that will never arrive.
Movement outside the window catches my eye, and I look up to find the Moonpool glowing faint silver through the glass, its surface unnaturally still.
The second I look at it, the mark on my forehead gives a sharp, sudden throb, like something inside it recognizes something inside that water.
I press my palm flat against the skin there, half expecting heat, but it’s cool, almost sore, like a bruise pressing back against my hand.
I don’t know what that means yet.
I only know it means something.
A knock sounds at the door before I can decide whether to be afraid of it.
I open it to find a girl standing there, mocha skin warm even in the dim hallway light, her braids threaded through with tiny silver beads that catch what little moonlight makes it through the windows.
She’s got a plate of cookies balanced in one hand and a folded blanket tucked under her arm, and she’s smiling at me like we’ve known each other for years instead of seconds.
“Hey.” She holds up the plate, her tone bright and easy.
“I’m Sage.
Tideclaw Den.
I heard the new girl got dropped into Spiritwalker with zero warning and figured you looked like you needed cookies and a blanket.
Maybe both at once, honestly.” I stare at her, at the plate of cookies still slightly warm, at the soft, worn blanket, and something in my chest that’s been clenched tight since I left Little River finally cracks open.
I feel my eyes fill before I can stop it, the kindness almost harder to bear than everything else that’s happened tonight.
“Oh, hey, no, don’t cry on me, I haven’t even said anything sad yet,” Sage says, her voice teasing but gentle.
She steps inside without waiting for an invitation, setting the cookies down on the small desk by the window and wrapping the blanket around my shoulders like she’s done it a hundred times before.
“Sit.
Talk.
Or don’t talk, and just eat cookies.
Whatever you need.” I sit.
I talk.
It comes out messy and out of order, track practice and Jace and Nana Mae’s kitchen floor and Orion’s claws and Seraphina’s strange, measuring smile, and Sage just listens, tucking her legs up under her on the end of my bed, nodding in all the right places, handing me another cookie whenever my voice starts to shake too hard to keep going.
There’s something steady in the way she listens, like she’s absorbing every word so I don’t have to carry it alone.
We talk until two in the morning, the Moonpool glowing steady and silver outside my window the whole time.
My shoulders loosen.
My breathing slows.
Somewhere between the cookies and the quiet, I let myself believe, just for a moment, that maybe Hollowcrest won’t swallow me whole after all.