Marked by Moonlight

The trail to the game camera has been churned to mud by something heavy. Not a bear. Bears don't walk in straight lines with a measured, almost human stride, and they don't drag their left foot like it's injured or healing wrong. Lena Marchetti crouches and presses her fingers into the deepest print. Five toes. Claw marks at the tips. A stride that belongs to a tall person trying not to leave a trail and failing. The camera housing is twenty feet downhill, pried open, the lens gone. The memory card is still wedged in the slot; nobody thought to check. What's on the card is a burst of three shots, timestamped at 2:47 in the morning: a figure at the salt lick, then a hand reaching for it, then the hand mid-transition. *fingers elongating, knuckles thickening, dark fur pushing through the skin like needles through cloth* - with the flannel sleeve still on the arm. *"The Accord is a piece of paper," Ida says. "Paper doesn't stop what's already awake."* The tracks lead east, over the pencil line Lena's grandmother Ida drew on the county map, onto Holloway land, past a wire fence hung with faded signs: PRIVATE. KENNEL. BEWARE OF DOGS. Jace Holloway answers with a hammer in his hand and a dog named Brass at his heel. His brother Owen walked off this property three years ago and never came back. The sheriff filed it as voluntarily missing after Owen's truck turned up at the ferry terminal with the keys still in the ignition. And the woman standing at his fence is holding Owen's dogtag, which she found in the moss at the base of a fence post on her own land. The Marchettis and the Holloways have not spoken in a generation, and the letters locked in Lena's father's desk explain why. Dominic Marchetti was engaged to Elena Holloway. Then came a warning in sharp, angular letters: moon-touched bloodlines do not mix. Then Elena vanished. Thalia has been circling the Marchetti bloodline for years, and she has already taken Leo, Lena's twin, into her coven's inner circle with an initiation mark and a promise that he could be more powerful than anyone in the bloodline in generations. Lena's twelve-year-old sister Mira has been drinking something Leo gave her, and Thalia is happy to explain what it will do the first time the girl shifts. A closed-door shifter romantasy about two feuding families, a missing brother, and a woman who finds out what she is by tracking it through her own woods.