The old Alpha died at midnight, and with his last breath, he cursed us all.
I knelt in the frozen mud of the sacred grove, the cold biting into my bare knees like wolves' teeth. I didn't move. Didn't flinch. Pain was an anchor, and I needed to be anchored. Tonight, the world was shifting beneath my feet, and if I let myself feel it—really feel it—I'd shatter.
To my left, my brother Isaac kept his head bowed so low I could see the knobs of his spine pressing against his skin. Typical. Always submitting. Always shrinking. Even now, on the night that would change everything, he couldn't lift his gaze.
I could. I was fire and fury and the rightful heir. Anthony, firstborn of Vilkas, carved from the same stone as our father. My wolf stirred beneath my skin, pacing, eager, certain. This is our night. This is our throne.
The sacred grove was packed with the pack—every wolf old enough to stand gathered in a silent semicircle around the stone altar where my father's body lay. Vilkas. The great Alpha. Reduced to a heap of fur and bone beneath the moon's cold gaze. The smell of death clung to him, sweet and rotting, mixing with the sharp pine of the forest and the copper tang of the iron-rich spring nearby.
I'd watched him take his last breath. Watched his chest rise, fall, and never rise again. I'd felt something crack in my chest when it happened—not grief, exactly. Something harder. Colder. The realization that I was now the shield between this pack and the darkness pressing in from all sides.
Or I would be. Once the moon did its work.
The Moon Priestess circled the altar, her ancient face a map of wrinkles and shadows. She'd performed this ritual for three generations of Alphas. Her voice, when it came, was a dry rasp that somehow carried to every ear in the grove.
"Great Goddess, Mother of Packs, your servant returns to you. Guide your light to his worthy successor so that the hunt may continue and the pack may never hunger."
The words were old. Older than the stones beneath my knees. I'd heard them at my father's own Binding, thirty years ago, when I was too young to understand what they meant. Now I understood perfectly.
Guide your light to his worthy successor.
Me. Guide it to me.
The Priestess raised her skeletal arms to the sky. "The Alpha has joined the Ancestor Moon! Let her light choose!"
A hush fell over the grove. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. And then—
Light.
It came from the crescent moon above, a thin, impossibly bright beam of silver that seemed to tear through the fabric of the night itself. It was liquid and solid all at once, alive with a purpose that made my skin prickle. It touched the earth at the altar's foot with a soft hiss that echoed in my bones.
And it began to move.
Toward me.
My heart slammed against my ribs. Yes. Yes. I could feel it coming, the warmth of it, the weight. This was it. The moment I'd been born for. I lifted my chin, baring my throat in submission and claim. Take me. Choose me. Make me.
The light touched my boot.
A jolt ran through me—electric, alive, right. This was it. This was—
It passed over.
It didn't stop. It didn't hesitate. It didn't so much as flicker. It moved past my foot like I was a stump, a rock, or a nothing. The warmth drained from my body, replaced by a cold so deep it felt like drowning.
No.
My eyes tracked the light as it flowed—inevitable, inexorable—to the left. To Isaac.
He flinched when it touched him. Flinched like it burned. His head snapped up, his face pale, his expression pure, stupid confusion. The light didn't care. It climbed on him. It wove through his unkempt hair, lit the humble planes of his face, flooded his wide, horrified eyes—eyes that now glowed with a brilliant, guilty gold.
He looked at me across the frozen ground, and I saw it in his face: panic. Apology. Fear.
"I… Anthony, I didn't—" His voice cracked.
He didn't want it. The moon had chosen the one brother who didn't have the guts to take it.
The pack gasped. A collective intake of breath—that was the sound of the universe tilting. I heard my mother's stifled cry. Saw Goran the Beta's face go carefully blank—the look of a man recalculating every assumption. Saw the young warriors at the edge of the circle exchange glances, already measuring, already choosing.
And I felt it. The thing inside me that had held together for twenty-eight years, the careful structure of pride and patience and certainty—it shattered.
The sound that tore from my chest wasn't human. It was raw, guttural, the first howl of a war that would drown this pack in blood. My jaw cracked as my canines descended, slicing into my lower lip. The taste of my own blood flooded my mouth, copper-bright and familiar.
I was on my feet without knowing how I got there. My hands were claws. My vision was red at the edges. Every muscle screamed to shift, to tear, to burn the world down.
Isaac took a step toward me, one hand outstretched. "Anthony, please. I never asked for this."
"You never asked." The words were garbled, thick with blood and fury. "You never had to. It was given. Stolen. From me."
I turned my back on the altar. On my father's corpse. On the moon. On my brother. The ultimate blasphemy. The pack parted before me like I was a forest fire.
Behind me, I heard my mother's voice, broken. " Anthony—"
I didn't stop.
At the edge of the grove, where the darkness of the true forest waited, I paused. Just long enough to let my voice carry back to them—low, clear, and dripping with a promise that would hang in the air long after I was gone.
"This isn't over. The moon made a mistake tonight. And I'm going to prove it. In blood."
I walked into the shadows.
Behind me, silence. No howl of acclaim for Isaac. No whisper of dissent. Just the heavy, bleeding silence of a pack that knew, deep in its gut, that the dying had only just begun.