A Luna's Revenge After Betrayed

The porch light hummed above me. A moth was beating itself against the glass.

I heard that. I heard the moth's wings before I heard my own voice come out of my throat.

"Mom. Mom, please—"

Her hand was still in mine. The weight had changed. A hand that's still alive has a weight to it, even when it's limp. Hers had gone past that. It was the weight of something put down.

"No." I shook her hand. Stupid. Like I could wake her up. "No, no, you said run, you said it, you have to keep talking, you have to—"

The branch outside snapped again. Closer.

I dropped her hand. I scrambled across the floor on my knees through my father's blood and I grabbed the curved knife off the table because it was the only thing in the room that wasn't soft. The handle was sticky. I didn't look at what it was sticky with.

I crouched in the open doorway.

"Come out," I said. My voice came out shaking and small and I hated it. "Come out, you coward, come out—"

Wind moved the trees. Nothing else.

I waited. I counted my breaths the way I'd counted the chandelier tinkles an hour ago. *Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.* My knees were soaked through. My father's blood had stopped being warm.

Whoever it was, they were gone.

Or they were watching.

I lowered the knife slowly and I crawled backward into the kitchen, and when my back hit the leg of the kitchen table I finally let the sound out of my throat.

It wasn't a scream. A scream is a clean thing. This was a noise an animal makes when its leg is in a trap. It came up out of my stomach and tore my throat coming up and I couldn't stop it once it started. I was rocking. I had the knife in one hand and my mother's wrist in the other and I was rocking and making that noise and the moth kept beating itself against the porch light.

I don't know how long.

When I came back to myself my mouth tasted like iron and my jaw hurt from being open.

I reached for the bond.

*Jasper.*

I pushed it down the mate link with everything I had. *Jasper. Jasper, my father is dead. My mother is dead. Someone was here. I need you. I need you to come.*

The bond felt like pushing my hand into cold mud.

I waited. I sat on the floor between my parents and I waited for him to answer.

I waited the way a child waits for a parent.

The bond stayed cold.

I pushed again. *Jasper. Please.*

Nothing.

I pushed a third time, and this time I felt him on the other end. Just for a second. A flicker. Awareness. He knew I was there. He knew I was calling.

And he closed the door.

I felt the link go flat the way a phone goes flat when someone hits decline.

I put my forehead down on the kitchen floor.

I stayed there.

I think I might have stayed there until morning if my radio hadn't gone off.

It was clipped to my belt under the torn silk. Pack issue. Old. Crackly. The voice that came through it was Marco, the night warden at the south checkpoint.

"Luna? Luna, this is Marco, over. We got a report of trouble at the Beta house, over."

I lifted my head off the floor.

I picked up the radio. My thumb left a print on it.

"Marco." My voice was a stranger's. "Get two warriors to the Beta cabin. Bring a stretcher. Bring two."

A pause.

"Two, Luna?"

"Two."

"...Copy. On our way."

I put the radio down.

I made myself stand up. My legs didn't want to. I made them. I made my hand let go of the knife and put it on the table where I'd found it. Evidence. Some part of my brain was still working. Some part was already cataloging the boot print on the step, the three notches on the handle, the way my father had fallen — forward, surprised, not defending — and the way my mother had fallen — crawling, reaching, trying to get to him.

I walked outside before Marco arrived because I didn't want them to see me break again.

I sat on the porch step next to the boot print and I waited.

The warriors came. They were quiet. They were good men. Marco took one look at me and took his jacket off and put it over my shoulders without asking, and I almost broke a second time at the kindness of it.

"Luna." He crouched down. "Who do I call?"

"Nobody."

"Luna—"

"Bury them at the family plot by the river. Tonight. Now."

"The Alpha should—"

"The Alpha knows."

Marco's face did something. He looked at his boots. He looked at the boot print next to me — not mine, not his — and he looked back at his boots.

"Yes, Luna," he said.

They wrapped my parents. They carried them out. I followed them down through the woods to the river plot where my grandmother and my grandfather were already buried, and I stood barefoot on the cold dirt in my torn green dress while two warriors dug two graves by lantern light.

I didn't cry again. I didn't have anything left to cry with.

When it was done, Marco offered me a ride back to the Pack House.

"No," I said. "I'll walk."

"Luna, it's two in the morning—"

"I'll walk."

He didn't argue.

---

I don't remember most of the walk.

I remember the cold under my feet. I remember the moment I realized I was on Main Street, downtown, instead of on the path back to the Pack House. I had walked the wrong way. I had walked toward the lights.

The pack town was small. Six blocks. The bakery, the hardware store, the pharmacy, the one bar, and at the end of Main, the restaurant.

*La Roca.*

White tablecloths. Candle in every window. The place Jasper had taken me on our anniversary every year for seven years.

I stopped on the sidewalk across the street.

I stopped because I saw them through the window.

Jasper. In a fresh shirt, navy blue, the cuffs rolled twice. Leo, in the little gray button-down I'd bought him for picture day. And Juliana, in a soft pink sweater, her braid undone now, her hair loose around her shoulders the way mine had been at nineteen.

They were at the corner table. The good one. The one by the window with the white roses.

Jasper was lifting a piece of something — fish, maybe, the way the candlelight caught it — and putting it on Juliana's plate. She laughed. I could see her laugh through the glass even though I couldn't hear it. She put her hand on his wrist and squeezed.

Leo was sitting in the chair I had sat in for seven anniversaries.

He had his elbows on the table the way I had told him a thousand times not to. Juliana noticed. She tapped his elbow with one finger and said something, and he giggled — *giggled*, my son who had never once giggled for me — and took his elbows off the table and looked up at her like she was the sun.

She kissed his forehead.

He said something to her. I read his mouth through the window. Two syllables. Easy. Round.

*Mom-my.*

I stood on the sidewalk in Marco's jacket over my torn bloody silk gown with dirt from my parents' graves still on my bare feet, and I watched my five-year-old son call another woman *Mommy* across a candlelit table while my husband smiled.

The pavement was cold. I could feel each individual pebble under the ball of my left foot. My jaw was locked so tight I could feel a muscle jumping in my temple.

I waited for the break. The one I'd had on the kitchen floor. The animal noise.

It didn't come.

Something else came. Something quieter. Something that sat down behind my sternum and got comfortable, like it had been waiting a long time for me to make room for it.

I took my phone out of the small bag I had somehow still been carrying this entire time. The screen was cracked across the corner. I didn't remember cracking it.

I scrolled to a number with no name. Just a string of digits I had memorized two weeks ago and never called.

I pressed it.

It rang once.

A voice picked up. Low. Patient. Neither male nor female in any way I could pin down.

"Luna Yolanda."

"The thing you asked," I said. "I'm in."

A pause.

"You're certain."

Inside the restaurant, Juliana fed my son a bite of bread off her own fork. He opened his mouth for her like a baby bird.

"I'm certain."

"When."

"Tomorrow. I leave Blood Moon Pack tomorrow."

Another pause. Longer.

"Good. I'll send the car at first light. Pack nothing they would notice. Bring only what is yours."

"Understood."

"Luna?"

"Yes."

"Don't look back through that window again. It will only make it harder."

The line went dead.

I lowered the phone.

I did not look through the window again.

I turned and I started walking back toward the Pack House, and I made it three steps before something across the street caught the streetlight.

A black town car. Parked. Engine off. Windows tinted.

I hadn't noticed it pull up.

The back window slid down two inches.

A gloved hand came out, holding something small and pale between two fingers, and dropped it onto the sidewalk in the pool of light from the streetlamp.

The window slid back up. The car pulled away from the curb without its headlights on.

I crossed the street.

I bent down.

Sitting on the wet concrete was a single pearl-tipped hairpin.

The same one Juliana had picked up off my foyer floor three hours ago.