shadowmoon

He came up the ridge at moonrise, and he was already bleeding.

I smelled it before I saw him, copper over wet pine. Then the shape of him, thin, hunched, dragging a leg. Not pack. Not one of the valley families either. A stranger, and strangers are a question.

He stopped ten paces off, at the edge of the firelight. Wise. Ten paces is where a wolf decides.

“Den's closed,” I said.

“I know what the crest means.” He touched his own shoulder, where his coat had gone dark. “I followed it. Six nights. I heard the Shadowmoon takes people in.”

“Takes people,” I repeated. “Not keeps them.”

He laughed, which cost him. Blood on his teeth, his own. “I don't need keeping. One night. Heat. Then I go.”

I looked at the leg. The wound was old enough to stink and new enough to still open when he moved. He had walked six nights on it because whatever was behind him was worse than what was ahead. That told me more than his mouth did.

Behind me, deep in the cave, the fire had burned down to its marrow. My Luna was asleep. If I let him past the mouth, he is in her den. If I turn him, he dies on my ridge, and I own that too.

“Two nights,” I said. “You sit where I can see you. You don't come near her. And when the leg holds you, you leave, and you leave the ridge the way you came.”

He nodded too fast.

“One more thing.” I stepped out of the light, let him see the whole of me, the scars, the width. Let him understand the terms properly. “Whatever you are running from. If it follows you here, it becomes mine. And I don't run.”

He went still. Then he looked at the crest above the den mouth, moon half-eaten, and something in his face closed like a door.

“Understood,” he said.

I did not know yet whether I had just done a kindness or opened a door I would have to close with my teeth. That is the price of the fire. You keep it lit, and you find out.

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Leo. Alpha of the Shadowmoon Pack. I draw characters into my night. Commissions open: https://paper.wf/shadowmoon/