Bound by the Moon

Synopsis

The alliance that made the Aegis Core broke four centuries ago, and the world has been coming apart slowly ever since: a forest that grows wrong, two moons that no longer keep time, and things that walk down out of the trees at the dark of the small moon and are not quite wolves any more. Scarlett Everine was seventeen when the hunters came into her valley with a list. They killed thirty-four people in one night, checked each of them off, and left her alive. She has spent the nine years since running, alone and on purpose: no pack, no debts, nothing anyone can take away from her. And every month the moon calls, and nothing in her answers, and the calling does not stop. A four-day hunt drives her north into the Ironfang Mountains, to the ruins of Eldwynd Temple — and to Kaiden Draven, an exiled alpha whose own pack was destroyed eleven years ago by the man who taught him everything. He has not turned since. He lives in the ruin mending wards nobody will ever need, and for six months he has been listening to a howl he knows is not there. They meet over drawn blades, with drones an hour behind her and an altar under the temple cut with a mark Scarlett has worn at her throat since she was six. Then, in the middle of the fight, the howl comes again — and they both flinch at the same instant. Neither of them has a wolf. Both of them keep hearing one. And what was done to Scarlett's pack was never a raid, and the people who did it have not finished.