The Feral Luna

The pine needles are slick with something that is not rain. Zara has one hand twisted in the back of her little sister's coat collar and the other pressed flat against her own sleeve, where a bite is still bleeding warm. She had planned this for six months. She had memorised the trails, cached food at three waypoints, and the emergency cash lifted out of her mother's locked drawer. She had planned for everything except her mother stepping between the girls and her father's wolf. The running does not stop after that. Lily is nine now, light as kindling across Zara's back. The last of their money went on gas at a truck stop where the clerk looked at Zara's scar a beat too long. Two weeks before that, Zara came back to a motel room with ice for Lily's fever and found a man holding a knife to her sister's throat. She killed him in the bathroom with the cartoons turned up loud next door. He belonged to Gregor Hartmann, and Hartmann's people burned the motel down to bury it. The eastern border of Timber Creek territory lies somewhere ahead, and past it, on the map Zara memorised at that truck stop, unclaimed land. No packs. No questions. She does not get past it. What Timber Creek offers instead is the Iron Claw trial. One moon cycle of service to the pack, and then a vote on whether a feral stranger can stay. The alpha, Cade McCullough, grey-eyed and short two fingers on his left hand, grants it over the open objection of his own council. Mira wants her thrown out. Marta quotes the law at everybody. The healer says the wound in Zara's ribs has gone septic and needs treating rather than interrogating. And Gregor, who has no business knowing anything about her, says he knew Zara's father, and fought beside him once, before the fire. Zara has been sure of exactly one thing her whole life: who her father was, and what he did. Every single thing she learns inside Timber Creek pulls at that thread, and so does the locket she has carried since the night on the ridge, the one with a crescent moon and a star cut into it that she has always taken for a pack emblem. A wolf shifter pack story about a feral woman who has kept her sister alive by whatever it took, an alpha who stakes his own authority on a stranger, and a family history that turns out to have been written by somebody else entirely.