Akira Stone's Arc

Chapter 1 of 10

Akira Stone knelt in the wrong part of the woods and knew it too late. The claw marks on the pine above her head were fresh, cut deep, set at the height of something that walked on two legs when it wanted to. She was five miles past the boundary her mother had drawn on the family map, and she had crossed it on purpose, because the bloodroot she needed only grew where wolves kept the deer thin. She was an elf, twenty-two, five foot five, and she had been trading herbs at the border market since she was twelve. She knew which plants stopped bleeding and which stopped hearts. She did not know werewolves, except by rumor. Rumor said the pack in this valley had an alpha, and the alpha did not warn twice. Akira wanted a man who could stand in this forest without flinching. She had watched every elf boy in her village ask her mother's permission before speaking to her. She was done steering. She wanted to be met. She smelled the pup before she saw it. Copper and wet fur, close. She parted the fern and found a wolf cub the size of a lapdog, hind leg pinned under a fallen branch, a snare wire cinched above the joint. Its eyes were yellow. Its teeth were already too many. She should have walked away. Instead she opened her leather satchel and laid out what she had: bloodroot, a bone needle, a coil of thread, a pinch of dried moonmoss for the spell. She spoke the elven words low. The moss warmed in her palm. She cut the wire, pressed the moss to the wound, and held the pup's muzzle shut with her bare hand while it thrashed. It stopped thrashing. The skin knit under her fingers, pink, then closed. She set the pup down. It licked her wrist once and bolted into the ferns. Akira exhaled. She started packing her satchel. The shadow on the ground in front of her did not belong to a tree. She looked up slowly. He was standing ten feet away and she had not heard him arrive. Dark hair, wolf ears laid flat against it, eyes the color of a struck match. Leather jacket. Bare hands at his sides, not fists, not yet. He was breathing through his nose. He was smelling her. "That was my sister's pup," he said. His voice was flat. Not grateful. Not angry. Weighing. Akira stayed on her knees because standing would have looked like a move. "The snare would have killed him by morning." "I know." He tilted his head. Something behind his eyes went sharp, then careful, then sharp again, like he had been hit from the inside. "You're on our land." "I know." He took one step closer and stopped hard, as if the ground had pulled on him. "Jasper," he said. "You're coming with me."