It’s not as if it’s easy to refuse the call of the moon. I don’t actually enjoy pissing off my family, letting down my pack, and making Ty feel betrayed again and again.
Not that anyone ever asks me why. They just tell me what an asshole I am.
“I can feel how high the moon is, Mother,” I say lightly, that ticking inside me so loud now it’s all I can think about. “Can you imagine being moon numb? I think I’d rather be dead.”
“It might come to that,” Johanna replies, hard as fucking nails.
“I love you too,” I murmur.
She turns her head to look at me, her eyes dark. I brace myself for whatever she’s going to hit me with, but she doesn’t get the chance.
The drums get louder. We can all feel it, that surge deep inside.
In the distance, we can hear the young cubs and the old ones howl from inside the cavern. Farther still, the thin howls from thebitten. Even the regular wolves join in, some of them already here on the hill with us—not exactly pets. More like companions.
This is the moment we wait for every moon. The pack begins to howl too.
I can feel it inside me, like a song I can’t help but sing, flowing through me, opening me up, desperate to make meexactlywho I’m meant to be—
But I wrench myself back. I tamp it down, and it hurts.
It always hurts. It’s always hard.
I fight until I think I have it under control and when I do, I find Ty’s gaze on me again from the other side of the hilltop.
Suddenly, he’s all I can focus on. That forbiddingly gorgeous face of his. His mouth in a grim line. His dark eyes flashing.
All around us, the sound of the drums is replaced by the thunderclap bursts of energy asbloodwolves shed their skin, bristling and stretching andbecominginto their fur. When they do, they howl louder.
I can feel my body shake because it wants so badly to change. I can feel the heat between my legs, the power in my blood, and the song in me that connects me to the moon, and my pack, and most of all, Ty himself.
His eyes are dark and gleam like gold, but they have that ring of indigo at the edge, and I can feel him all over me, commanding me to do this thing at last.At last.
But I still don’t change.
I am vaguely aware of wolves all around me. All fur and claw now, they run.
They pour down the steep sides of the hill and take off in all directions. They run for the pleasure of it. They run for the moon. I can see whatthey’re doing in a different part of my brain, bursting out into the night, covered in moonlight and catapulting themselves into the pure joy of it all.
They will run and run until they drop. Some of them will drop together, the males mounting their females, biting down hard on their necks and then thrusting in deep. Sometimes this is simply sex, though it comes with the possibility of young, thanks to a full moon night. Sometimes this is mating between a bonded couple.
When I finally take this run with Ty, it will be a claiming. A howl to the moon, answered in the shine around us and the way he will mark me with his teeth, his claws, and when we are done, the crown tattoo he will place on my throat.
A sign to anyone who can’t scent the truth that I am his.
I can feel it as if it’s already happening. As if the claiming that I refuse to accept is already a part of me, a memory that hasn’t occurred yet. I can feel Ty on my back, hot and heavy, and his snout in my ear, that enormous cock of his driving deep and then swelling inside me until we’re stuck, tied up tight—
Once again, I have to fight, hard, to bring myself back to skin. These bones that are not a wolf’s shape and that I won’t let stretch, though they ache. The stone beneath me and the breath inside me and whatever the hell else I need to do to keep myself in this human form while the moon and my own desires fight against me.
It goes on and on.
It feels like an eternity. One by one, in bursts and dribbles and mad, wild rushes, all the wolves in our pack disappear into the night. The regular wolves follow.
Only Ty remains. Ty and me, his recalcitrant queen.
Neither one of us moves. He is still waiting, lounging there on that high rock that might as well be a throne. I wouldn’t call itpleading, much as I’d like to. The way he’s looking at me is too demanding.
Too furious.
