The Reckoning (Bloodlore #2)

Chapter 1

Full Cold Moon

There are banshees moaning their lullabies up in the trees while the full moon shines down.

It’s like she’s singing along. The moonlight makes the woods around me stark and gleaming as I hurry along the old wolf path that winds its way through them.

I have to look up past banshee hair on the breeze and all those gaping mouths to see the moon herself, high above the nearest mountain.

The full moon, I think as I gaze at her serene ripeness in the night, can bite me.

To say I’m sick of the monthly drama would be putting it mildly.

Not exactly a great look for a werewolf, but then, I’ve never been quite like other girls.

Literally. Back in high school, way back before the Reveal set all of the Kind free to be our monstery selves when and where and how we liked, I was a werewolf walking around in teenage human girl form, blending in with the rest of them as best I could.

They didn’t like me any more than my pack likes me now, no matter how many of them followed me around, because I was a mystery they couldn’t solve. That was how I learned that people like questions a lot more than they like answers.

I keep picking my way through the dark woods all the same, because it’s the night of the full moon and I’ve been back here in Oregon since the Reveal crashed through the academic plans that were my only escape from all this, however temporarily.

But that escape ended abruptly along with everything else the day the old prophecy came true and I was ordered to come home.

Now when duty and tradition call, I’m honor bound to answer.

Showing up for pack rituals is basic, entry-level diplomacy—not to mention, good manners—and it won’t hurt me to employ some of that.

I’m still a little shaky from the last couple of moons we’ve had this fall, and I can’t really afford to be shaky.

I need to show my face, little as anyone wants to see it these days.

Something that isn’t likely to change until I comply, which I won’t be doing tonight.

That’s the thing. Even before I see the fresh remains of some kind of a mammal on the path to the pack’s den—though it smells like a murder instead of a hunt—I already know that tonight’s full moon celebration is going to suck.

The way they all do for me these days, and tonight there’s no hoping that the rise of a long-prophesized death goddess might shift attention off my various failures for a time, like it did for the past couple of months.

We fought her and we won, and now I almost miss the crazy bitch, sunk back down deep beneath Crater Lake where she belongs.

Vin?a, destroyer of worlds and princess of pestilence, was an excellent distraction from the narrowing window that is my life.

I’m already late. I can feel the moon’s power up above me in the cold November sky, rising high and sending out its silver beckoning deep into bone and blood.

The bitten—those turned into werewolves instead of born—will already have succumbed.

They’ll already be roaming down from the hills and into the places where the humans hide, in search of tasty prey.

I’m blood, not bitten, and that means I get to choose whether or not to surrender to the moon’s seductive pull. My toxic trait is imagining that this means I should get to make my own decisions in other arenas too.

I think of my forbidding mother’s narrow gaze and grim mouth, and sigh. This is the same female who once told me that if it were up to her (it wasn’t), she would have broken my legs to keep me home where I belonged so there’d be none of what she calls—to this day—my entitled disrespect.

That was back when I was eighteen and leaving for college, the first wolf in my pack—in any of the packs that roam North America, no big deal—to ever do such a strange, inconceivably human thing. The first wolf who would want to, my mother said derisively.

I decide not to think about her anymore when I’ll be seeing her shortly. Just like I do my best not to think about Ty either, while I’m at it, because his pull on me makes the moon’s seem almost silly.

The truth is, there are very few moments in a day where I’m not thinking about Ty Ceridwen. The leader of our pack and the Rix of the Western Wolves. Which is an old way of saying he’s the king.

He’s also the bane of my existence.

Not to mention, the love of my life. The asshole.

I should hurry down the last and steepest part of the overgrown path that leads to what looks—to humans and other poor, powerless creatures—like the ruins of an abandoned mine tucked away out here in the Coastal Range that marks the western edge of the Rogue Valley, the southernmost valley in western Oregon down by what used to be the California state line.

I should duck inside the dire-looking exterior, bare my teeth at the sentries though I’m still wearing skin instead of fur, and surrender to the inevitable shit show I know is waiting for me on the other side.

I should, but I don’t.

I stop and investigate the carcass instead, because I don’t want to face my pack on another full moon night when I don’t intend to comply. And also because everything about the mess in the middle of the trail is weird.

The location, first of all. Humans might have spent centuries unaware of the fact that werewolves live this close to them in their pretty little Old West towns, where they imagined they could strip the hills of gold and steal the most fertile land, blah blah blah, happily ever after human-style.

But we were always here. And the bitten werewolves wouldn’t dare risk pack displeasure and punishment by littering their kills around.

I would be able to smell the bitten signature scent if any of them had been that stupid tonight.

Meanwhile, the other kinds of creatures who kill for fun know better than to provoke us and aren’t generally foolish enough to get their kicks right here.

Not just in werewolf territory, but essentially at our front door.

I crouch down and take a moment to figure out the scent profile.

There’s so much blood that it’s hard to tell what animal it is at a glance or even a quick inhale.

It would be easier if I shifted into my wolf form, but I don’t.

I can’t. The moon is too full, and it would be too easy for me to get caught up in it, this close to the den.

Then there would be no avoiding the inevitable.

I swallow back the driving urge to just surrender that’s with me all the time now, no matter how much I pretend otherwise, and rely on the pretty spectacular sense of smell that’s still available to me in my human form instead. It’s safer.

I take a deep breath in and realize that it’s a skunk, though it didn’t spray before it was killed. That’s weird enough, but there’s something else I don’t like about it.

I frown down at the remains. The positioning, I think.

That’s what keeps poking at me. The fact that someone—or something—went to great lengths to place the kill here.

And to leave it the way they placed it, like some grisly art exhibition in the dark November woods.

When it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to kill a small mammal, dissect it, and leave what meat there is in the end of a cold fall to steam into the night.

Most things that hunt and kill small mammals are hungry when it’s this cold, not out to make artistic statements.

It feels like a message, and even though this is nothing but a poor, hapless skunk, I know better than to ignore the kind of message that comes with entrails.

I inhale the scent again, but it’s not the smell of death that bothers me.

That’s natural. There’s something else to it that I can’t quite name.

All I know is that it makes my hackles rise, which in this form means the back of my neck prickles and goose bumps shiver down my arms. I’m wearing a tank top, so I can see them.

It might be December tomorrow, but I’m still a wolf. I don’t get cold.

Though whatever it is about this skunk, it’s making me more shivery than I’d like.

I stand up again and look around me, keeping still enough that I can hear the murmuring of the forest.

I’m not afraid of the woods. That’s a human thing, and fair enough, because chances are, they would be eaten the minute they step three feet into a bunch of trees.

There’s no telling what lurks out here at any given moment these days, but again.

It doesn’t make sense that anything would be lurking here, specifically.

In the woods, yes. In the woods outside the wolf den where the most powerful wolf in this part of North America lives? Unlikely.

I know that something must be lurking, not only because I can feel that little tingle of awareness but because the kind of creatures that typically hunt and kill—and I’m one of them—might do it for fun.

But they’d enjoy the snack when they were done, and no one does that in the middle of a wolf path when the moon is high.

Unless they’re psycho. I can suddenly see Vin?a’s creepy minions in my head, plague masks and cloaks and too much blood on an altar stone.

Suddenly it seems creepier out here than before, and I decide I’d rather deal with the usual melodramatic banshees than whatever this is. I start moving down the path again, but I can’t get that torn-up little creature out of my mind or the way it seemed placed on this path for me to find.

Specifically me, because every other wolf around here is either one of the bitten, who would have been turned into a terror at moonrise, or blood like me and therefore already gathered with the rest of the pack. I’m the only wolf who’s always late. That’s not a secret.

I’m also the only wolf who lives apart from the pack. I’m the only one who has to make my way over here instead of simply rolling out of my private den into the communal caverns.