2. Full Moon Run

2

Full Moon Run

ANNALISE

I snarled at the early summer wind that teased and pulled at the ends of my wildly curling hair and the ragged edges of my tattered clothing, carrying my scent away from me into the night. To my left, the frogs on the shore of the lake trilled like giggling schoolgirls, making me feel every one of my fifty-eight years. Even the moon, the first full one of the season, seemed to be laughing at me as it lit up my face.

My aging, ugly face.

I’d jogged close to the still water, and I kneeled for a drink, setting down my bag. While I rested, I glanced idly into the lake, surprised that my reflection was visible by moonlight. I almost smiled. It was no wonder the moon hadn’t sent me a mate. She’d probably made me and then thrown in the towel.

A memory surfaced from forty years earlier, of a handsome face and a quick smile, the male I’d seen across a crowded field moments before he’d been killed. I’d never even spoken to him, but his profile was burned into my mind. I shook the memory away before I grew morose, and stared more deeply into the water.

I had plain brown eyes, and dark hair that curled how it wanted to around my face and shoulders. My only vanity was my lips, full and almost sensual, with a natural deep brown color, though it wasn’t visible now.

My body wasn’t soft and curved like males seemed to like, so I’d never seen a reason to try and dress it up. I sighed down at my increasingly ragged cotton shirt and drawstring trousers. They’d lost almost all color over the years from washing. I would have liked something brighter, but I’d heard another female in the pack whisper that giving me nice clothes was like putting lipstick on a pig. I would have bitten her for the insult, but I had eyes. She hadn’t been lying.

I had plenty of good qualities. I was strong, capable. I had muscles and a flexible, powerful body I’d earned from decades of living in the wilderness. The Alpha had allowed me to settle a hundred miles from the nearest pack cabin, where I made artwork that I delivered quietly once a year, slipping in and out of the main borders of our pack’s central compound before anyone knew I was there.

I hadn’t spoken to anyone in two decades except Ida, the Alpha’s mother, who always met me at the kitchen door and exchanged the staples I needed for the things I made. The treasures. I smiled as I thought of the shifters who would receive these gifts, and how they might react. Shifters who would never know who’d made the trinkets, or even know my name, though I knew all of theirs.

The bag made a rattling sound as I shifted it over my shoulders again, then set out. Remembering what I was here for muted my sadness, and I half-closed my eyes as I walked. I would be eating Ida’s cornbread in the next half hour. Maybe even some of her pound cake. The prospect was enough to lighten my mood.

As I approached the Alpha’s Den, the air filled with the howls and shouts of the members of our pack who were going on the full moon run. I grimaced, wondering how I’d let that slip my mind. These nights were special ones, when the Alpha would help young shifters find their wolves. Then they would run together, getting to know what it meant to be a wolf, and hoping to find their true mates in our pack.

Or, if not here, they would travel to the other, smaller packs and touch hands or paws to every other wolf they found, hoping to feel the spark. If that didn’t work, the Conclaves that occurred every four years brought all the larger packs in North America together… and if that also failed, our Alpha would allow a shifter to go abroad, visiting other packs that had ties to our own.

Finding your true mate, the other half of your soul that the Mother Moon promised Her children, was one of the things that made a wolf shifter’s long life bearable. If you were lucky, you had a lover who ran beside you on these nights for a hundred years, or even a few more.

I was not lucky. I’d never met another male that even caught my eye, not after that first, disastrous Conclave I’d attended at Southern—the one that had sparked the eventual war, devastating all the packs.

Still, I’d tried to find my mate.I’d touched every wolf in every pack, even ones that made my hackles rise. I’d visited all the smaller packs. I’d even gone abroad, and barely made it home alive.

Alive, but still alone.

I stilled as a dozen wolves ran past me, yipping and howling as they celebrated the moon. They were gone like a swarm of bees in seconds, their sounds lost on the wind, but my gut clenched as I heard something else. Suffering. A wolf in agony, and the Alpha commanding it to shift.

I broke into a jog, my bag rattling a warning, almost like a snake’s tail. Inside me, my own wolf raised a tired head and sniffed… then began howling.

Run, she urged. Run.

I dropped the bag and obeyed. Listening to my wolf was the only way I’d stayed alive this long alone in the wilderness. When her instincts said to climb a tree, I climbed, and escaped human hunters with guns. When she sent me clambering up a cliffside eight years before, the sight of the flash flood washing hundred-year-old pines away beneath me reminded me to always listen, to never question her wisdom.

Now she was practically baying for me to go faster.

I came out from under the trees into the clearing where the pack rituals took place at a dead run. I had less than a second to take in the scene. The Alpha was leaning over a wolf caught in mid-shift. The poor young shifter was a mess of parts—wolf and human—blended in a way that the moon never intended. He let out a soft howl and stared up at the full moon just as a cloud moved in front of it, his face slackening, blood pouring from his nose and ears.

He was dying.

“No!” I leaped for him, knocking the Alpha away as much as I could to lay my hand on the bloody mess that he was focusing on.

Alpha Samuel snarled at me, his waves of dominance beating at me like a flash flood of their own.

“Get back! You’re hurting him!”I bared my suddenly sharp teeth and slapped his hands away from the male, wrapping my own arms around him, prepared to fight my own Alpha if he didn’t let me hold him.A swell of sensation moved like electricity through me where my skin met the young male’s body, but I ignored it. I knew what that feeling meant, but it wouldn’t matter if Alpha Samuel didn’t let me do what was needed.

The Alpha began to shift, his teeth elongating, claws forming at the ends of his fingers, but I set my feet on the packed earth and prepared to fight him. I would lose, but I had to try.

“Annalise,” he growled. “Leave him!”

“Never! He’s mine!” I shouted, feeling my wolf take over completely, her connection to the moon all that could save him now.

All that could save us both, since this young male was my true mate, and if he died, I would follow.