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.

Vinča, 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 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.

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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.

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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 Vinča’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.

Leave earlier, my frosty mother suggested the last time I pointed that out. Or are you too addicted to making a spectacle of yourself?

That’s Johanna Hemming for you. She never bothers to lift a claw when she can use her words instead. But all of that is pack shit, and given that I’m about to walk into the greatest possible expression of pack shit there is, I need to make sure I remember to tell Ty what I saw out here.

When he’s in the mood to listen to me again, that is. After the full moon it usually takes him a minute.

But now that I think about it, the way the skunk was ripped apart and splayed open reminds me a little of that black magic crap that the death goddess’s freaky minions liked to play with. All those blood sacrifices and ponderous rituals that they found so important in the run-up to Halloween.

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It reminds me of them—but they should be gone. Like she is.

Like she’s supposed to be.

It’s easier to be a wolf. You chase or are chased. You eat or are eaten. Tooth and claw, howl and hunt—wolves are simple creatures, really. Even wolves with too many ideas, like me.

This is what I tell myself as I make it to the old mine’s entrance. It looks like a ruined, run-down piece of shit, the way it’s supposed to. A derelict, blackened structure that should have fallen to pieces years ago and might still, at any moment.

I walk to the front door, or what’s left of it, and make my way into the unappealing rooms within. Debris is strewn about, looking dirty and even a little dangerous. It looks like fires have been stamped out, questionable parties thrown, and there’s even graffiti on the walls.

All lies, of course. Smoke and mirrors.

Any creature that dares to spend any time between these walls uninvited never leaves again. Wolves take territory seriously.

On the other side of the creaky, treacherous wood floor, I open another door and I’m outside again, in the narrow space between the godforsaken old house and the hill behind it. The old mineshaft is still propped up overhead, defying gravity with every passing second.

I don’t look around for the sentries I know are watching me. I don’t need to, because they make sure that I can hear them growling as I saunter by. My special little greeting from my people, so sweet.

I give them the finger and a little smile for good measure, and then, between two giant rocks that make it look as if nothing could be behind them but more rock, I slip into the shadow that is really an opening and enter the den itself.

Legend has it that the first wolves built our cave system long before the miners showed up. Then they watched and waited as the rude, foolish humans built the pack a perfect little camouflage. As a thank-you, the wolves ate the whole mining company. A celebratory snack.

We tell our young this story around the fires when we gather, embellishing it more and more each time, so that a little wolfling might labor under the impression that “miner” is another word for “meat.” Something that does not go over well in human public schools, as I know from experience.

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As I navigate my way into the narrow passage, deliberately unlit, I can already hear the howling and the barking from up above, high on the top of this hill that is too treacherous for anyone to climb without four legs and the sort of supernatural athleticism werewolves are all born with. It’s all sheer rock and treacherous crevasses. It keeps us safe. It keeps us hidden.

It also keeps us in the Stone Age, but no one likes it when I say that.

I can smell roast meat, venison if I’m not mistaken, because on full moon night there’s always a feast. For those who run, but also for those who need to stay behind. The old and infirm. The pregnant females. The young. I can hear the drums from up above. Down here, there’s music. Wolves love a full moon party. I used to myself, before I was old enough to understand what it would mean for me.

The caves roll out in all directions, covering miles beneath the lush Oregon wilderness, but the main cavern is where we come together. This is where blood werewolves operate our tight community and raise our families, exactly the way we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

Wolves live a long time. And they don’t like change.

I keep finding this out the hard way.

Inside the main cavern I see the very young, the very old, and the very, very pregnant sitting on the many couches and lying on the floor. In case I’m tempted to think it’s only the more active members of the pack who resent me, the moment I step inside and everyone scents my presence, I can hear a little more of that quiet growling.

Not loud growling. Nothing aggressive. No one would actually come for me. No one would dare mess with something that’s Ty’s. They’re just sending a message, like their version of an artistically eviscerated skunk.

I was born the long-awaited mate to the king himself, because that’s how it goes in werewolf packs. Every king gets a fated mate. If he doesn’t, he’s not a real king, though there’s usually a century or so of leeway on that. If she dies, he sometimes gets another. If you believe the myths, it’s the moon who makes these decisions as it suits her, letting the males fight to the death for their position and then presenting winners with a worthy female to stand by their side, produce their young, and keep the den in line while the males are away.

They knew I was coming before I arrived. They could scent me on the wind.

But then they got me.

Expectations are a bitch.

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I nod at the old ones, because it’s never a weakness to show respect, especially if they’re already not pleased with me. I smile at the little cubs who are tumbling around, switching in and out of their forms as they go, roughhousing it up with abandon. And I nod my head at the pregnant females—trying to make it clear that not wanting to become just like them doesn’t mean that I think I’m better than them, just different.

I can see they don’t believe it.

I greet them all, but I don’t stop. I keep going and I climb the stairs that wind around the cavern walls and lead to a door near the top. This, too, would be easier on four legs, but I can’t risk it. Two months ago I came much too close to losing my head on a different mountain, Ty and me in wolf form and that moon madness gripping me hard—

Luckily, that night there was that terrible, bloody ritual, horrible death goddess minions to fight, and the new local oracle—my friend and landlord Winter Bishop—to try to save. Enough distractions that I didn’t forget myself.

Better to stay in skin tonight.

I push my way through the door. It opens onto the top of the hill, where we gather for the moon every month. The moon that makes us and marks us. The moon that guides us and watches us.

The moon who does with us as she will.

It’s loud out here, and for a moment I stand near the jagged rocks that hide this upper entrance to the caves below. My pack is spread out all over the hilltop, basking in the moonlight and the cool night air. There’s a part of me that loves this place and these people. Exactly as it is right now. The laughter. The carousing. The pack of it all.

This is where I grew up. This is where I played as a cub. These caves are where I slowly came to understand that Ty Ceridwen, so golden and powerful, and nothing short of astonishing even to a child, was mine.

These are my people, rough and wild.

Before the Reveal, Ty and his lieutenants—some of those being my brothers and cousins, and no, they don’t support me, because loyalty to Ty and to pack comes first—hid in plain sight out there in the human world. They were outlaw bikers, causing a commotion wherever they went. They fought. They did their share of carousing. They involved themselves in all manner of things, most of it what humans consider shady.

Then again, it was only ever the human biker gangs who got caught and thrown in prisons.

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Wolves have bigger teeth.

Out in the human world, they all looked like big, powerful men with tattoos and bad attitudes, alarmingly afraid of nothing at all. They liked loud Harleys, easy sex, and the ability to do whatever the hell they wanted, whenever the hell they wanted to do it.

They still do.

Back then they also ran protection for various not-exactly-legal industries all up and down the West Coast, from the ocean to the Rockies. Now it doesn’t matter much what’s legal, because there’s no one around to do anything about it. After the Reveal, while many other creatures were enjoying the all-you-can-eat buffet that was suddenly on hand everywhere, the wolves were thinking ahead.

Or Ty was. He wasn’t thinking about stuffing his face like everyone else. He was thinking about supply chains.

He’s the reason there’s food in the valley, along with most other conveniences that not only humans rely on. Him and the relationship he built with a few manky creek-side mages out in Eagle Point. He’s also why other pockets of wolves across the continent are similarly positioned to weather whatever storms might come in their areas, though he couldn’t do that himself. He could only share what he’d done out here with the rest of the packs.

North America is divided into pack territories. It’s only in the past fifty years or so that these packs have stopped trying to murder each other and have maintained a peace treaty. This isn’t just so that wolves can trot around, howling at the moon without having to fight over where they’re doing it. It’s also because werewolves like power. Money before the Reveal, control after, and more of both if we’re not at war with ourselves.

No one’s better at this than Ty, but that’s another point of contention between us.

I step out from the protection of the rocks before everyone catches my scent and starts some new narrative about how Maddox Hemming can’t even come to the full moon gathering on time and then tries to hide when she does. I move across the hilltop, the moonlight like a spotlight. I walk like I crave the shine.

The moon up above isn’t quite to its highest point tonight. Not yet.

But we can all feel it coming.

On regular nights the bitten women hang out up here or in the adults-only parts of the caves, talking and dancing and fucking around—I mean that literally—with the full-blooded wolves. Blood wolves are mostly male. I was the only full-blooded female born into this pack in more than forty years, just to pile on those expectations. When male wolves want to mate, they have to depend on finding females from other packs.

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They used to go on raiding parties and take the females they wanted, but we’ve evolved. Or so we like to claim.

These days, all the North American wolf packs gather every five years to sort out things like territory disputes, protection capacity on different routes, enemies who need a more comprehensive spanking, and mating bids. The next gathering will be here, when the Wolf Moon is new next month, and it will run straight through to the winter solstice.

Wolf week, I like to call it. I think I’m hilarious.

Male wolves will use the week to fight for the available females. Theoretically any female can decline a mating at will, but in practice, that would cause a pack war. It never happens.

Most female wolves are better behaved than me.

On the other hand, no one will be fighting over me, either. They never have and they never will. Everyone knows I’m Ty’s and only Ty’s.

So really, I have nothing to complain about, as Johanna always reminds me. She was stolen by my father from one of the Canadian packs, and the way she carries herself reminds me of the stories she used to tell when I was small. Stories all about the place she came from. Winter forever. Very little warmth. Sharp, overbearing mountains and ice stuck to her fur like daggers.

A lot like her gaze sticks to me now from across the hilltop, but I don’t look that way for long.

Ty is sitting on the rocks on the far side of the hilltop up above everyone else , and I can’t help but look at him. He’s lounging on the highest rock like it’s a cozy sofa, still wearing his skin, and not for the first time in my life—or even the first time today—I’m forced to contend with the fact that I find this man irresistible no matter what form he’s in.

Man. Wolf. Both. All.

I was fucked before I was born. Full-on fated mate fucked.

It could be worse. At least he’s hot.

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Though hot doesn’t do him justice. He’s the biggest male here. He measures over six foot five in his human form, and he’s much, much bigger in fur. He’s wearing a ripped black T-shirt and old jeans, his feet in his favorite motorcycle boots, and the rest of him is nothing short of a festival of hard muscle. He’s beautiful, covered in ink that adores him like everyone else here, all of it highlighting his dark gold splendor.

His hair is like gold at night, long and thick when I grip it. He’s wearing it back tonight, but it never stays there. His beard makes him look both less pretty than he really is, with those remarkable cheekbones that could make another man seem angelic, and significantly more dangerous even in relaxing moments like this would be if we weren’t us and tonight wasn’t a full moon.

His mouth is a sacrament and, like a sacrament, is often cruel. Deliciously cruel, exceptionally mobile. And usually dirty as hell.

Everyone can see that he’s ripped. I know exactly how ripped, because I’ve had my own mouth on every single part of his fascinating body. More times than I could begin to count. There’s no part of him I haven’t climbed, worshipped, or both.

Nothing makes me feel more like the typical sweet, soft, subservient wolfling girl I’m not than Ty. He’s the only thing that ever has, if I’m honest. But that’s private.

As usual, even glancing at him pokes that simmering fire that’s always inside of me and always about him. Ty is heat and fury, a mighty howl, and a bottomless longing within me. Before he was all of that, he was still there. As a new cub, when I was fractious, he alone could soothe me. As I got older, long before there was anything sexual between us, I still felt drawn to him.

I knew he was mine before I knew what that meant.

And even though I know he was fully aware I was here before I set foot into that falling-down building—he can feel me wherever I am, the same way I can feel him, and that’s less a superpower than a curse sometimes—he deliberately doesn’t look at me now.

Just a little slap to remind me of my place. Luckily for me, I like it rough. I like him rough, even when I know he’s furious with me. Maybe especially then.

We fight fire with fire, Ty and me. We’ve been doing it for years.

I stay where I am, standing there outside the ring around the fire with my head slightly bent toward the rock where he’s sitting. It’s a show of respect, because no one can join the pack without the king’s acknowledgment.

I don’t mind it when he takes his time. He needs to show everybody else that he’s not as pussy-whipped as the very daring have been known to suggest—though never directly to him, of course. No one’s that suicidal.

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The truth about Ty Ceridwen is that he does what the fuck he wants when the fuck he wants, the end.

In the outside world, he’s all leather and threat. In these hills, he’s the king, undefeated by all challengers for a hundred years. In bed—or anywhere else we might find ourselves—he’s demanding. Endlessly creative. Gloriously sure of himself, and me.

Tonight, when he finally deigns to look at me, his gaze pounds into me like a blow.

He does that on purpose too.

I need to talk to him about that poor skunk, but I can tell by the way he’s lounging there—his dark, brooding gaze on me like he already knows how this night is going to go and is already deciding how he’ll punish me for it—that it’s not particularly wise to try his patience now.

When he inclines his head just enough that I can call it an acknowledgment, I move into the crowd instead.

Males with mates are hunkered down with them, always touching, their gazes loaded with the run they have ahead of them. Full moons are the only times female wolves are fertile. And we can only be fertile in wolf form.

That’s why I’ve been avoiding full moons with Ty for years now. Because if I run with him, he will complete the ritual that was my fate before I was born. He will claim me beneath the full moon, no doubt knock me up, and that will be that. The only wolf to ever have gone to college, learning the human world from the inside out, will be relegated to litters, nursing, demure smiles from my place behind him, and den politics ad nauseum.

That’s how it’s always been. That’s how it will always be, unless someone changes it. And since no one else around here seems to even imagine there could possibly be a better way, I guess that in addition to requiring my fated mate to like me, personally, instead of what I represent to him—I might also have to mount a small revolution.

But that’s getting ahead of myself.

Right now I have to survive the night, which is easier said than done when I can feel the moon all over me like Ty was earlier, making me want to give him whatever he wants. Making me ask myself why on earth I wouldn’t when I can feel him still, his handprints on my ass, his bitemarks on my neck, and I know that he would make all those demure smiles and tiny-stakes domestic battles feel good. Making me wonder if everyone is right and there’s something wrong with me, after all—because I can’t stop fighting the fate that I’ve always known will claim me, in the end.

The gorgeous werewolf king who’s obsessed with me who I couldn’t stay away from if I tried.

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And it’s only a matter of time before fate stops waiting and takes what it wants.

Ty too.

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