Chapter 2 The Wolves of the Mountain

Running was not what she had expected.

She had expected terror. She had expected the wrongness of an unfamiliar body, the

disorientation of four legs where two had been. She had been on her hands and knees in the

dirt screaming - that was the last thing she remembered as herself, as the version of herself

she recognized.

The wolf did not experience any of that.

The wolf ran the way breathing happened - without instruction, without negotiation,

with the precise fluid certainty of something doing exactly what it was made to do. The

mountain opened around her. The dark was not dark at all: every tree was distinct, every

stone, the air itself carrying information she had always sensed and never been able to name.

She moved through it with a joy so physical it registered in her bones, and she recognized it,

dimly, as the correction completing itself. The directional wrongness of eighteen years,

finally resolved.

A sound to her left: the deliberate not-hiding of something that wanted to be found.

She stopped.

Three wolves stepped from the shadows of the cedar grove. Not silver like her - these

were earth-colored, brown and gray and the dark amber of old wood - and they moved with

the particular economy of people who knew exactly where they were and were simply

waiting for her to catch up. The largest of them - female, the leader, something in her

posture said so clearly that the translation was instantaneous - sat down and regarded her

with amber eyes.

Well, said a voice from somewhere behind Marisol's own eyes. Not her voice. A voice

that was warm and unhurried and faintly amused, the voice of someone who has been waiting

patiently in a waiting room for a very long time and is genuinely pleased the door has finally

opened. There you are.

12The Crescent Bloodline Chronicles

"Who are you?" she said. It came out as a sound rather than words, but somehow the

meaning arrived.

My name is Sol. I have been with you since before you were born. I am the warlock half

of what you are - the part they tried to keep separate. They failed, as you have perhaps

noticed.

Something warm moved through the wolf-space beside Sol's voice - not the same, not

the same kind of warmth, but complementary. Older, quieter. The wolf-self, the Lycan

instinct that had been running pattern drills in her blood for eleven generations. If Sol was the

amber room, this was the open mountain - wide, patient, certain. Marisol filed it away. She

would understand the difference between them, in time. For now she simply ran.

The female wolf - Vanessa, some instinct supplied the name - lifted her chin in a

gesture that was unmistakably Come. The pack spread around her as she moved, not herding

her, not threatening - simply present. Running beside her in the way that said: you are not

alone in this.

She had been alone in everything since she was old enough to understand what alone

meant.

She ran with them.

By the time the fortress appeared through the trees - the Purple Crescent Moon,

impossibly large, torchlit against the dark mountain - she had stopped being afraid. She had

started being curious.

Good, Sol said quietly. Curiosity is a much more useful starting position.

The gates opened before they reached them.

A woman stood at the center of the courtyard in the torchlight. She was tall, and

caramel-skinned, and she had Marisol's exact jaw, and her eyes - her eyes were the color of

a mountain storm at its stillest point, the gray-blue of absolute attention - and she was

looking at Marisol with an expression that was trying very hard to be composed and was not

entirely succeeding.

The wolf stopped.

The woman stopped.

They looked at each other across fifteen feet of cobblestone courtyard, and the distance

between them was not fifteen feet. It was eighteen years. It was every birthday that had

passed without a card. Every night Marisol had pressed her back against the wall of the

dormitory and thought, with the particular loneliness of children who have learned to be quiet

13BELLA DE LA LUNA

about loneliness, that someone somewhere must have had a reason.

The reason was standing in front of her.

She shifted back.

She was on her knees in the courtyard, in the ruins of the birthday dress - the blue one,

the one Lacy had sewn - and the woman crossed the distance in three steps and knelt in

front of her and said, in a voice that had been waiting eighteen years to speak directly rather

than from three hundred miles away:

"Bella. My Bella." Her hands came up to Marisol's face - careful, asking - and

Marisol let her, because something in her body had already decided, before her mind had

arrived at any decision. "I know you don't know me. I know I don't get to - I know this is

not how this should have gone. But I am here now and I am not going anywhere and I need

you to know that every single day-"

"I know," Marisol said.

Not I forgive you. Not It's all right. Just: I know.

But she let her mother hold her, there in the cobblestone courtyard with the violet

torches burning and the pack keeping a respectful distance and the mountain cold arriving

from all directions, and she understood for the first time in her life what it felt like to be held

by someone who had been waiting specifically for her.

It felt like the plan she'd built for five years had been a drawing of a door, and this was

the actual door.

Behind them, at the gate, something else arrived: the sound of footsteps stopping. A

breath held. The weight of a presence that had followed at a careful distance, as it always had,

keeping to the shadows, waiting.

She didn't turn to look.

Not yet.

But she knew - the way she knew things she had no explanation for - that whoever

stood at the gate had her eyes.