Prologue

The First Sacrifice — One Hundred Years Ago

The moon had never looked so hungry.

It hung low over the silver spires of the Lunaria Coven's sacred city, bloated and pale, a great eye that refused to blink. On the altar at the city's heart, a girl of nineteen lay chained to carved stone, her silver hair pooling around her like spilled milk, her eyes open and fixed on that hungry moon.

Her name was Selene. She had been the Lunar Witch of her generation—born once a century, the only vessel of the moon's true power, the only soul who could call the tides and bend the moonlight to her will.

And tonight, the coven was going to kill her.

"You understand the honor," the High Priestess said from the shadows, her voice dripping with practiced mercy. "You are a gift to the Moon God. Your sacrifice will quiet his wrath. Your blood will hold back the shadow monsters for another hundred years. The packs of the Moonhowl Territory will be safe because of you. The world will remember your name."

Selene turned her head—slowly, the way the dying do, as if every movement cost her something—and looked at the High Priestess.

"What a comfort," she said, her voice scratchy and dry. "I'll be dead, of course. So I won't be around to enjoy the world remembering my name."

The High Priestess's smile froze. Behind her, the assembled elders shifted, scandalized. A Lunar Witch did not speak to the High Priestess that way. A Lunar Witch lay still and beautiful and grateful, and she died the way the moon itself set: quietly, beautifully, without complaint.

Selene had never been good at dying quietly.

"If you're going to kill me anyway," she went on, as the priests began their chanting, as the silver chains began to glow, "at least have the decency to be honest about it. You're not feeding me to a god. You're feeding me to a story. A story you tell yourselves so you don't have to admit the truth."

"And what truth is that?" the High Priestess asked, her voice turning cold.

Selene smiled, and for a moment the moonlight seemed to gather in her teeth, sharp and bright. "That the monsters aren't coming from the moon. They're coming from something much closer to home."

The chanting stopped. The High Priestess's eyes went wide.

Then the chains tightened, and the moonlight poured out of Selene like a river of silver blood, and the screaming began.

They buried her body in the sacred grove, wrapped in white silk, with flowers in her hair. The priests sang hymns about her sacrifice for three days. The people of the coven wept and prayed and told each other that her death had bought them a century of peace.

And in the deep places beneath the temple, in a chamber lit by candles that burned with black smoke, the High Priestess stood before a mirror and watched the stolen moonlight swirl inside her own chest like a captured star.

"It worked," she whispered, and her reflection smiled back at her with Selene's dying light. "It worked."

Outside, in the darkness, something black and hungry stirred beneath the earth. It had been born the moment Selene's power was torn from her—an echo of stolen magic, twisted and made monstrous.

The first shadow creature opened its eyes.

It began to hunt.