Chapter One

*

The Sacrificial Moon

One hundred years later, the moon was hungry again.

Lunar Vale stood at the foot of the altar steps, barefoot on cold white stone, and stared up at the bloated moon hanging over the Lunaria Coven's sacred city. Her silver dress dragged behind her like a wedding train. Her hair—silver, always silver, like every Lunar Witch before her—hung loose around her shoulders, glowing faintly in the dark.

Behind her, the city was silent. Ten thousand people had gathered in the great plaza, ring upon ring of white-robed figures, their faces upturned, their eyes bright with a mixture of reverence and morbid excitement. They had come to watch her die.

Lunar had spent nineteen years preparing for this moment. Nineteen years of being told she was special, chosen, blessed. Nineteen years of being fed the same story like bland gruel: The Lunar Witch is born once a century. The Lunar Witch is the moon's beloved. The Lunar Witch sacrifices herself to keep the world safe.

She'd believed it, once. She'd been six years old and proud, standing on this very altar during a festival, watching the crowds cheer for her, thinking: I am important. I am loved.

Then she'd grown up. She'd started to notice things. The way the elders looked at her when they thought she wasn't watching—not with love, but with calculation, like farmers appraising livestock. The way the High Priestess smiled at her, always smiling, never once touching her with anything warmer than a perfunctory hand on the shoulder.

The way the moon itself seemed to whisper to her at night, in a voice that didn't sound like the worshipful hymns the priests sang. The moon sounded... angry. Or maybe just tired. It was hard to tell.

The girl who'd once believed she was beloved had slowly realized she was a tool. A beautiful, compliant, well-fed tool whose only job was to die on schedule.

And the worst part? She was going to do it. Because what else was she supposed to do? She'd been raised for this. Her whole life had been a countdown to this single night. Every book she'd been allowed to read, every lesson she'd been taught, every prayer she'd been made to recite—all of it pointed to one conclusion:

You were born to be the sacrifice.

Lunar took a breath. Then she took another. Then she took a third, because the first two apparently hadn't done the job.

"Easy," she muttered under her breath, forcing her shoulders to relax. "You're a Lunar Witch. You have dignity. You have grace. You are the moon's most precious—"

She stopped. The crowd had gone quiet in a way that made her skin prickle. She looked up.

The High Priestess Isolde was waiting for her at the top of the altar steps, resplendent in robes of moon-white silk, her silver hair coiled into an elaborate crown, her face arranged into an expression of serene, maternal compassion that Lunar had learned to distrust with every fiber of her being.

Behind Isolde, the four senior priestesses stood in a semicircle, each holding a silver bowl filled with a liquid that glowed faintly blue. The ritual was about to begin.

"Come, child," Isolde called out, and her voice carried across the plaza like a bell, smooth and warm and utterly without feeling. "The moon awaits her bride."

Her bride. Lunar almost laughed. She'd never met the moon. She'd never met anyone. She'd spent nineteen years in this temple city, surrounded by people who called her "blessed" and treated her like a piece of furniture.

The most action she'd ever gotten was the time she'd snuck into the library at midnight and read a romance novel about a wolf shifter falling in love with a human girl. She'd cried for an hour. Not because the book was sad—it was ridiculous, frankly; the wolf shifter kept growling about "claiming" her, which sounded less like love and more like a property dispute—but because it was the first time she'd ever imagined a life where someone looked at her and saw a person, not a sacrifice.

A life where she got to choose.

Lunar climbed the steps. One. Two. Three. Her feet were cold against the stone. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

You were born to be the sacrifice, the voice in her head reminded her. This is your purpose. This is your honor.

"Yeah, yeah," she whispered back, because if she was going to die, she was at least going to die talking to herself. "Tell that to the moon."

She reached the top of the altar. Isolde smiled down at her, and Lunar felt the familiar prickle of unease crawl up her spine. There was something in that smile that had never quite felt like compassion. Something that looked at her the way the elders did, with that same calculating hunger.

"Kneel, child," Isolde said softly.

Lunar knelt. The stone was cold and rough against her bare knees. The four priestesses moved forward, their bowls held high, and began to chant in that ancient, rolling language that made the air itself feel heavy.

The ritual began.

The silver chains—kept in a velvet-lined chest, blessed and re-blessed for a hundred years—were lifted from the altar. They were beautiful, Lunar thought, in a horrible sort of way. Fine-linked and gleaming, they looked more like jewelry than shackles.

The priestesses wrapped them around her wrists. The metal was cold against her skin.

"By the light of the sacred moon," Isolde intoned, her voice rising, "by the blood of the hundred generations, by the covenant that binds the world—"

The chains began to glow.

Lunar felt it immediately: a pulling sensation deep in her chest, like a hook catching hold of something inside her and tugging. The power that had always lived in her—the moonlight that slept in her bones, the tides that answered her heartbeat—was being woken up. Dragged out. Pulled toward the sky, toward the bloated moon, toward something vast and hungry that was waiting for her.

It hurt. God, it hurt. It felt like being torn open from the inside, like every cell in her body was being forced to give up something it couldn't spare.

Lunar bit down on her lip. She'd been told, in exhaustive detail, how to die with dignity. How to hold still. How to be beautiful about it.

She hadn't been told it would hurt this much.

"Isolde," she gasped, the name slipping out before she could stop it. "Please—it hurts—"

"Shh, child." Isolde's voice was soothing, absolutely serene. "This is the pain of becoming one with the moon. It will pass."

Lunar wanted to tell her that she didn't want to become one with the moon. She wanted to tell her that she'd changed her mind, that she'd rather live a boring, ordinary, slightly disappointing life than die beautifully for a story she wasn't sure she believed in anymore.

But she couldn't speak. The pulling was getting stronger. The moonlight in her chest was being dragged out in long, silver ribbons, and the world was starting to blur at the edges—

And then she heard it.

A howl.

It came from far away—so far away it should have been impossible to hear over the chanting and the crowd and the roaring of her own blood. But she heard it. Everyone heard it. It cut through the night like a blade, splitting the chanting in two, making the priestesses falter and the crowd gasp.

It was not the howl of a contented wolf. It was the howl of a wolf that had just realized the thing it had been searching for its entire life was about to be ripped away from it.

Lunar's heart stuttered.

She didn't know why. She'd never heard that howl before. She'd never even met a wolf—the packs kept their distance from the coven, an ancient truce between two peoples who tolerated each other's existence and nothing more.

But somehow, impossibly, she knew that howl was for her.

"What was that?" someone in the crowd shouted.

"Silence!" Isolde snapped, and for the first time, Lunar heard something real crack through her serene facade. "Continue the ritual!"

The priestesses resumed chanting, faster now, urgent. The chains tightened. The pulling in Lunar's chest redoubled, and she gasped, the silver light pouring out of her like a river—