I walked for three days before I found the woman in the silver cottage at the edge of the old forest. She was waiting for me. She had been waiting, she said, for twenty-three years — since the night I was born, since the Blood Moon that had preceded my birth, since the moment she had felt the ancient power stir in the bloodline and known that eventually it would find its way to her door.

Her name was Maren. She was old — older than she looked, older than any wolf I had met. She was the last of the Moon Keepers, a lineage of wolves who had served as guardians of the old power for generations.

She told me what I was. Not a rejected mate. Not an exile. The heir to the Blood Moon gift — a power that appeared once in several generations, that could not be trained or earned, that chose its vessel and waited for the right moment to wake.

The right moment, apparently, was rejection. The old power did not wake in comfort or safety. It woke in rupture. In the moment when everything you thought you were was taken away.

I sat in her cottage and I listened and I thought about Kael. About the way he had looked at me before he spoke the words. Not cold. Afraid.