The mud on the path up to Pinegrove's outer gate has turned to slurry, and Clara has her brother on her hip, his thin limbs dangling, his breath a shallow rattle against her neck. The guards tell her no outsiders past sunset. Pack law.*"Please. I walked six miles carrying him. He won't last the night if I have to turn back."*The man who comes up the path behind her wears no coat, only a wet linen shirt, and his knuckles are a grid of pale burn scars too regular to have come...

Three nights to the full moon, one trespasser limping across the eastern boundary, and a pack already looking for a reason.Gideon's boots hit the forest floor before his wolf has fully settled back into his bones. Knees bent, fists clenched, breath sawing in and out. The scent hits him again, wrong wolf on wrong territory, and he forces his lungs to slow, forces the animal back down into the dark place where it lives.Three minutes out from the boundary, tracking her since s...

A dried marigold petal on the windowsill, crushed between Lorna's fingers and tipped into her apron pocket. Useless, like every remedy she has tried.Her brother Tobias lies on his side facing the wall, three cold cups of tea going mouldy on the nightstand beside him. The physician has given him until the next blood moon. *"Don't pretend it's working."*The moonflower grows in exactly one glasshouse: white petals, blue veins, blooming only under the blood moon. That glasshous...

Hazel Vance is poaching on pack land because her brother is dying and venison is what she has to give him. She draws on a buck, releases, and *the arrow was still in the air when the wolf hit her.*The enforcer who calls the wolf off knows her on sight. *"The Vance girl. Your brother's the sick one."* He tosses her a pouch of pack jerky instead of a citation. Enough for three days, maybe four.So she asks him about the thing a trader once told her: a cave in Silver Creek terr...

Rosalind Marlowe kneels against the apothecary wall at the Stone Gate and packs a gash in a Lycan boy's ribs. It is a crime. No human healer touches Lycan flesh without a writ from the palace, and she has watched what the patrols do about it.The boy whispers that they shot him with silver. Silver arrows are outlawed in Thornwood. His mother presses a pouch of coins into Rosalind's hand. *"Take it and forget you saw us."*Rosalind does not forget. She carries the silver strai...

The camera is staked fifty yards up an old logging road, where the Douglas firs thin into alder. Callie Hendricks lifts it off the tree and the housing comes apart in her hands, strap chewed through, seal already pried at. The card still reads. She clicks through two months of deer and raccoons and one bobcat with a limp, and then she reaches day thirty-eight.A wolf walks up to the lens. Pale, heavy, unhurried. It stops. It stares into the camera, not past it, at it, and it does no...

The specialist in Edinburgh wants eight hundred pounds for the consultation alone. The treatment runs into the thousands. The waiting list is six months, and the doctors have started using words like aggressive and progressive, which Fia MacLeod has learned to translate as they do not know what is wrong with her brother.Hamish is eight. He has been out of school for a week.So when Connor McRae walks into her bookshop after closing, asking for a green leather ledger from the...

The scent is wrong for the inner boundary. *Not deer, not fox, not any of the half-dozen game trails he could name by smell alone.* Soap. Something floral. Lavender.Graham Munro tracks it downhill through pines planted generations back for some landlord's shooting estate, and finds a trampled fern, a woman's boot print with a worn heel, and a torn piece of waxed jacket, olive green, snagged on a thorn at waist height and still holding her body heat, with one blue thread off a scarf...

The clock on the nightstand reads 6:47. Thatcher Hawke will be here in three hours.Vera Lennox swings her legs off the bed, crosses to the bathroom mirror without turning on the overhead light, and reaches behind the toilet for the bottle of dark brown dye she keeps hidden in an old coffee can. She mixes it one-handed, watching a reflection she has learned to lie to. She works it through the white strand at her temple until it is not there any more.Gone. Beta again....

*"You're on Pack land."*Nora stops mid-stride, bare feet in the cold pine duff. She shifted back two miles ago and left her clothes folded under a hollow log, so she arrives at the Crescent Pack border at dusk with nothing, smelling of blood and distance. She does not raise her hands. She angles her neck, drops her shoulders, and asks permission to cross.The sentry takes one look at the silver scar along her collarbone and goes to fetch the Alpha.Bennett Shaw fills ...

Mairi walks the eastern border every night, and every night it is quiet. Then the wind comes from the north carrying something she does not know. Male. Wolf. Not from her pack.She finds him half-hidden under a rowan, a big grey wolf, dark along the spine and silver at the flanks, built heavier than anything in Glen Braonan. The careful choice is to slip away and let the pack decide. She goes at him instead, because she is the alpha, even if nobody knows it.The fight leaves ...

Rain drips from the hemlock branches while Sasha Vance drags her brother toward a healer's cabin she is banished from reaching. Nori is twenty-one. The curse has hollowed him out, and the full moon is six nights away. Sasha is twenty-four, and what she has brought for protection is three inches of steel with a chipped handle.The patrol finds them first. *You're banished, Vance. You don't get to ask for anything*, says Callum Hayes, who gave her the scar above her eyebrow when they ...