Luna Paige's Arc

Chapter 10 of 10

The pack led Luna deeper into the fae wood. The silver wolf walked at her hip. She did not look back at Michael in the flowers. She could not. If she looked, she would run. They stopped in a broad clearing she knew from her girlhood. Grass and wildflowers ringed a patch of packed dirt. Tree roots humped up through the moss at the edges. This was where the pack held old rites. This was where a curse was meant to end. The speaker turned to her. "Kneel in the center. Speak the words. The human tie snaps. You come back to us." Luna walked to the center. She did not kneel. The silver wolf sat at the tree line and watched her. "Say the words," the speaker said. She opened her mouth. The old words were there. She had known them since before she had known human speech. She could feel her wolf shape waiting under her skin, close as breath. One sentence and she would drop to four legs in the grass. One sentence and the ache in her chest since chapter one would end. She thought of Michael in the dirt. His hand closing on the ring she pressed into it. His full name in his own mouth, breaking a curse that was not hers. "No," she said. The speaker's face did not move. "You gave your word." "I gave my word to come. I came. I did not swear to cut him." Her voice was steady now. "The half-claim holds. I will not break it from this side." "Then you stay as you are." He stepped closer. "Human. Half-bound. No wolf. No pack. No man." "I stay as I am." A low sound came from the tree line. The silver wolf stood. He walked into the ring of grass and stopped between Luna and the speaker. He showed his teeth. The speaker looked at him a long time. "You witness this?" The silver wolf did not move. "Then it is on you both." The speaker stepped back over the roots. The others faded into the trees behind him. "When the human dies, the tie dies with him. Then we come for what is left of you. Do not send a petal to the stones again." They were gone. Luna sat down in the dirt. Her hands were shaking. The silver wolf pressed his head against her shoulder and held it there. She put her face in his fur. "I know," she said into him. "I know what I chose." She stood after a while. Her body was still human. It would stay human. The road out of the clearing ran back toward the boundary stones and the pale mansion on the hill. She started walking. The silver wolf walked with her. Somewhere ahead, a man was kneeling in a ring of flowers with two rings in his hand, waiting to see what came back to him.