The Rise of the Fire Moon

  ***

  It was dark, unusually so. Even Alanki noticed it as she stalked back across the fields to her forest in a seething rage. Thunderclouds were still rising before her vision, sparking with anger and pushing against the walls of her skull. They hadn’t listened to her. She hadn’t expected them to.

  But it was a savage sort of pleasure, yelling at that alpha wolf. Alanki knew she hadn’t taken her seriously, but she didn’t care. One thing she had learned about living creatures is that most of them don’t take anything seriously until there has been a death.

  The sky was cloudy, black, and moonless. It was the beginning of the very darkest of nights. The fields were visible only as a sea of rippling shadows; in her rage, Alanki thought she saw shapes moving out there—wolves and insects and things with fiery eyes, the things from her nightmares. And as the wind whipped across the wide expanse of grass, they hissed and roared like living creatures. The dead leaves Alanki had seen in the forest had been mild and harmless, like the deer; but the fields mirrored her snarling fury.

  It was easy for Alanki to imagine she was walking through the land of the dead.

  By now, her fury had boiled down and frozen hard into ice. Cold, smooth, lethal—and controlled. Her mind was already forming the beginnings of a plan, a plan that involved blood—and yes, revenge. She flattened her ears in the wind. Suddenly, all shapes in the darkness were visible to her with striking clarity. She could see every blade of grass whipping in the icy wind. She could almost hear the frigid waters of the dark Lake, tainted with Sundew’s blood, lapping against the stony banks somewhere out in the blackness. And something else was moving out there in the wind-torn shadows. Alanki could taste the scent on her tongue, and she knew exactly what it was—wolf, fear, and…blood.

  Her heart began to pound.

  She slowed her pace, sinking down into the grass. Dark, struggling shapes were moving across the fields a few feet away from her, dragging something heavy. She watched them as they fought their way across the fields, straining through the solid darkness. They did not know she was there, but she could feel the ground vibrating with their labored pawsteps, and their breath was rasping and loud to her ears. They weren’t imagined shadows; they were real. They were alive. She moved closer.

  Two wolves. Alanki narrowed her eyes against the wind. They were carrying something, something big. Bigger than both of them combined. Alanki crept closer, so close that she could feel their fear vibrating like insects in the air. But the fear around the bundle was frozen, paralyzed, like the last fear a creature experiences before it dies. And with a shot of horror, she realized what it was.

  ANOTHER. THEY TOOK ANOTHER.

  The black grass fell away and Alanki slashed right and left, snarling with the wind, feral in her rage and beyond her own control. The wolves cried like children, their terror sour and heavy in the air. She fell upon one of the them, the larger one of the two. The creature struggled beneath her like prey. Her prey. Alanki gave it a swift, firm blow to the head, and her cold fangs met the wolf’s neck.

  She tore away in a fierce, abrupt motion, fangs snagging in fur and flesh. Blood trickled down her neck and seeped into her fur; it scalded her skin and fed her rage. Her victim thrashed beneath her like a rabbit, and Alanki soaked up the scent of the wolf’s fear, her heart racing with savage pleasure of bloodlust. Again and again she slashed the wolf’s neck, sinking her fangs in deep and tearing away—it was possible she had killed the wolf instantly, but she neither knew nor cared. The wolf may as well have never been alive. To her, it was a sack of empty flesh that was hers to destroy, as if destroying it would bring her peace.

  She finally tore out its throat with a swift, brutal crack.

  Blood. Seeping out over the dark grass like a hot river, blood red as the anger burning in Alanki’s eyes. Staining the grass crimson, spattering in her face and running over her paws. The very taste of revenge, washing away Tormentil’s blood with that of the murderer’s. Life blood, running until there was none left.

  The wolf was motionless in the cold grass.

  Alanki spun around, spraying blood in all directions. She blinked through the red screen over her vision, searching for the other wolf, but it had vanished into the night.

  She could scent it, of course. And its cries and shrieks of sickening, blind terror echoed across the fields. But Alanki let it go. Let it bring the news to its pack. Perhaps the alpha would take her seriously now.

  Alanki limped away from the dead wolf, whose blood was shimmering in a pool on the grass. She moved towards the heavy burden the wolves had been dragging, and bowed her head.

  Alanki licked the dead stag’s blood-encrusted antlers. For a moment, her anger was enveloped by a heavy sorrow. Sundew had not been enough for them. Nothing would be enough for them. But this was enough for Alanki, more than enough—it was too much. She hated the wolves more than ever.

  Alanki sat down in the grass beside the shadowy lump that was the carcass of the stag. She refused to cry; that would not do. But the anguish inside of her was much worse than any form of tears, and Alanki grieved in silence.

  “Don’t you worry, Eryngo,” she said to the dead stag, her voice trembling. “I shall avenge you as well.”

  And Alanki lifted her head to the moonless sky and howled.