Chosen by the Beast

Mira crumbles the last of her dried wolfsbane into the mortar and counts what is left. *Five leaves left. Maybe enough for two more nights if she stretched the dosage thin.* Behind the thin wall, her brother Răzvan coughs the way their mother coughed. Same rattle, same fever that never breaks, same too-bright eyes. Her mother died two years ago, just as the church bells began to ring for mass over Raven's Hollow. Mira has spent every day since apprenticed to the village hedge-witch, learning every herb that grows in the valley, and none of it touches what is eating her brother. The one plant that helps grows deep in the forest, past the boundary ward, past the iron stakes the village drove into the soil to mark where the beast's territory begins. So she crosses. What waits on the other side is a man who walks on four paws when he chooses to, bound to the trees and unable to leave them. Iancu tells her what nobody in the village ever did: her mother made a pact with the old powers and swore her firstborn would serve the forest, then ran, married a man, and had children anyway. *"The wasting sickness is the forest calling him home."* The silver pendant Mira has worn since childhood has grown into her skin. Tear it off and she bleeds out. It is one half of a locket that was broken in two, and the other half hangs at the throat of her aunt, Domnica Vornic, who stood in the doorway measuring how much broth her dying sister drank and how long she went between breaths, and who has worn that locket every day for fifteen years. Iancu is working against a clock of his own. Seven weeks until the blood moon crests the ridge. If the pact is not broken by then, he stays in wolf flesh. In the village, Sorin Cojocaru sleeps with a wolf-tooth necklace and his dreams of killing the beast. He has spent ten years learning to hunt the thing that clawed his father open, he has decided he is going to marry Mira, and he keeps turning up on the path she is trying not to be seen on. Her friend Leta Munteanu begs her to stay out of the trees. Then the pendant is torn from Mira's neck, and the seal on the curse comes off with it. *"You have until the blood moon. Bring me the pendant, and I'll let Răzvan live."* A paranormal romance set in the Carpathians, with a cursed guardian, a healer who keeps walking back into the trees, an aunt with her own altar, and a village happy enough to try a woman for witchcraft. Two narrators: Mira in third person, Iancu in first. The romance is closed-door.