Chapter 1 The Broken One

Zara's POV

The mop bucket clattered against the marble floor as Zara Night pushed it down the empty hallway of Shadowmere Academy.

At three in the morning, the elite werewolf school was finally quiet.

No more laughter echoing from the common rooms.

No more whispers about "the broken omega" who couldn't shift.

Zara squeezed the dirty water from her mop and sighed.

While other nineteen-year-olds were sleeping in comfortable dorm rooms, she was cleaning up their mess.

Again.

"This is pathetic," she muttered to herself, pushing a strand of black hair from her sweaty forehead.

"Even the other omegas can shift. What's wrong with me?"

She'd been asking herself that question for five years.

Five years since her parents dropped her off at Shadowmere Academy's gates and never looked back.

The academy claimed to prepare the strongest werewolves for leadership roles in modern society, but Zara knew the truth.

She was here because her pack didn't want her.

A broken omega who couldn't shift was worse than useless.

She was an embarrassment.

Zara pushed her bucket toward the computer lab, where tomorrow's elite students would learn advanced tactics for something called "The Final Hunt."

She'd heard whispers about it, some kind of important mission that only the strongest werewolves could handle.

Not that anyone would ever explain it to her.

The computer lab door was already open.

Strange.

Professor Hayes always locked it after classes.

Zara flicked on the lights and gasped.

Every computer in the room was destroyed.

Screens cracked, keyboards smashed, cables ripped from the walls.

It looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to everything.

"Great," she groaned.

"They'll probably blame me for this."

She started sweeping up the broken glass, careful not to cut herself.

As she worked, something caught her eye.

One computer in the back corner looked different.

The screen was dark, but it wasn't cracked like the others.

In fact, it looked completely untouched.

Zara walked over to investigate.

The computer looked normal enough, but when she got closer, she noticed something odd.

The screen had a faint crack running down the middle, but it was perfectly straight.

Too perfect.

Like someone had drawn a line with a ruler.

"What the hell?" she whispered, reaching out to touch the crack.

The moment her finger made contact with the screen, everything changed.

The computer hummed to life, its screen blazing with brilliant blue light.

But instead of the normal login screen, symbols appeared.

Strange, flowing symbols that looked nothing like any language Zara had ever seen.

Yet somehow, impossibly, she understood them.

HARVEST PROTOCOL ACTIVATED

SUBJECT IDENTIFICATION: INCOMPLETE

SCANNING...

Zara jerked her hand back, but the screen kept glowing.

More symbols appeared, scrolling faster now.

GENETIC MARKERS: ANOMALOUS

POWER CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN

RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE EXTRACTION

"What is this?" Zara breathed, her heart pounding.

The symbols made no sense, but she understood every word.

How was that possible?

A new message flashed on the screen:

WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED

INITIATING SECURITY PROTOCOLS

The screen went black.

Then, slowly, the crack down the middle began to glow with the same blue light.

Zara realized it wasn't a crack at all.

It was some kind of scanner.

Before she could move, footsteps echoed in the hallway.

Someone was coming.

Zara grabbed her mop and bucket and rushed toward the door, her mind racing.

What had she just seen?

What did those symbols mean?

And why could she understand them when she'd never seen anything like them before?

The footsteps got closer.

Zara quickly turned off the lights and slipped out of the computer lab, pulling the door shut behind her.

She hurried down the hallway, trying to look like she was just doing her job.

But she couldn't shake the feeling that everything had just changed.

The symbols on that screen weren't from any human technology she knew.

They looked... alien.

And they'd been scanning her.

As Zara pushed her bucket toward the basement stairs, she didn't notice the security camera in the corner following her movement.

Its red light pulsed once, twice, then began transmitting data to coordinates far beyond Earth's atmosphere.

The hunt was about to begin.