If She Drinks, She Will Die

POV: Sera

"Give her your blood."

I went rigid where I stood, listening to that long-absent voice. It was Feral — my wolf.

Everyone believed I was a broken thing, a shifter who couldn't summon her other half. Only I knew the truth: Feral had always been there. She wasn't absent. She was simply trapped, the same as me, behind the same wall of old fear.

She spoke sometimes — fragments, impulses, something closer to sensation than language. Never a complete sentence. This was the first time her voice had formed itself into words inside my mind with such clarity.

I closed my eyes. The familiar copper taste of blood rose in my throat, the way it always did when that memory surfaced. Our first Shift. Our only one.

The forest canopy had been so dense that the afternoon light could only squeeze through in narrow columns, and Seraphina moved between them like she belonged there — like the whole wood had arranged itself around her.

"Watch," she'd said, her voice bright with barely contained excitement. "It doesn't hurt. I promise, not even a little."

She was lying. I understood that later. Or perhaps she genuinely didn't feel pain. Perhaps for some wolves, the first Shift is a blossoming — not a tearing open. Perhaps Seraphina was made for it, and I was not.

She had gone down on one knee in the soft rot of fallen leaves, and then the Shift took her. One moment my sister stood before me — tall and pale, ivory skin, silver hair falling past her shoulders. The next, a wolf stood in her place.

Pure white. Every inch of her.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Something in my chest wrenched hard at the sight of her, and a voice pressed up against the inside of my ribs: Yes. Yes. Like that. I want to become that.

Seraphina's great white muzzle nudged against me — "come on, come on, run with me" — and we ran. Through corridors of thornbush, over roots and stones. I couldn't keep pace with her in my human body, but I tried. God, I tried. The wildness burned inside me the whole time, bright and urgent, coiled and ready.

But we ran too far.

We stumbled onto the humans hunting Damien.

He was slumped behind a thicket with a steel bolt through his leg. Even then he was already taller than most grown wolves, but he was folded against the ground, his breathing coming in a wet, terrible rattle. The hunter's crossbow swung toward me, and pain split my consciousness like a flash of white light — and Feral screamed awake inside me.

Neither of us was ready.

The Shift was not a smooth unfolding. It was bones breaking and resetting at wrong angles. It was skin splitting from the inside, thin as paper being torn. I heard something that felt like the soul being wrenched out by force.

I don't remember what happened after that. Memory shattered in the white pain, and when I came back to myself, Seraphina and Damien had already been pulled to safety. My body was mapped with scars — fissures that had cracked open from within and healed over — like a ceramic bowl that had been smashed and glued back together in a hurry.

From that day on, those scars stood between Feral and me.

She had never left. I could feel her hunger, her anger, the low constant pressure of her presence. But every time I reached for her, every time I tried to let her come forward, the memory of that tearing hit us both at once. She recoiled. I recoiled.

"Your blood is Alpha. She has not submitted. If she drinks, she will die."

"Would that not be good?"

Her tone was terrifyingly innocent — the guilelessness of a pup who doesn't understand why prey screams.

"No, Feral." I stopped her quietly but firmly, somewhere in the deeper part of my mind.

She let out a low, disgruntled whine and began pacing in restless circles through my consciousness.

Even without the ability to Shift, I was still an Alpha. Whatever that meant ran in my blood, as fixed and inarguable as bone. Which meant the answer was no. I would not let Lydia drink from me. That had nothing to do with mercy — it simply was not something I would do.

I swept the broken glass into the corner, composed myself, and let the rest go.

Morning light had barely broken through the clouds when a knock came at the door — unhurried but insistent. It was Lydia's handmaid. She stood in the corridor with an expression of practiced deference that didn't quite hide the impatience underneath.

"Luna, Miss Lydia's medicine should be ready by now? Alpha Damien specifically requested that you deliver it personally..."

The moment Damien's name left her mouth, I felt something in me go very still, and then very cold.

I lowered my eyes, keeping my expression even, and picked up the small glass vial. "Lead the way."

Lydia had been given the West Wing of the Main Manor. It should have been the Luna's quarters by right, which made her presence there a provocation in itself. More telling still was what Damien had not done: he'd made no arrangements for my own rooms. On paper I shared his space; in practice I had no corner of this manor I could call my own — a guest in the house of a pack I was supposed to lead.

I had been out of my Apothecary for all of two minutes before I began missing it. The Apothecary, and the Evening Primrose Garden. That was my ground.

Every pack member I passed in the corridor lowered their head on reflex, yet I could feel their eyes follow me after I'd gone by. I couldn't read what was in those looks, but respect wasn't it.

Lydia's room smelled of unfamiliar incense — nothing like her usual taste. I frowned slightly as I crossed the threshold. There was something recognizable in that scent, something recent, but I was too tired to place it and had encountered too many people today to untangle one smell from the rest.

She was propped against velvet cushions, and when she saw me approach, a faint smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.

I stopped at the bedside and looked down at her, holding out the vial. "Drink it." My voice came out flat, without inflection. "Though you might want to think carefully before you do. Damien won't touch anything I've made with my own hands — so the question is whether you're braver than he is."

Her hand froze halfway to the vial. Her pupils contracted slightly, her gaze moving back and forth between the bottle and my expression. She was a suspicious person by nature, and the directness of what I'd said had found something tender in her. After a brief hesitation, she let out a small, affected laugh, withdrew her hand, and gestured toward the low table beside the bed. "Set it there for now. My stomach's been bothering me."

I placed the vial on the table. It made a quiet, precise sound against the wood.

"Speaking of which — I've been meaning to congratulate you, Luna." Lydia lifted a hand to smooth a loose curl back over her shoulder, and the gleam in her eyes sharpened into something openly satisfied. "The Pack Council has apparently grown quite concerned about the state of things. They feel you're being stretched far too thin — all that tending to the injured, all that time at your worktable. So they've arranged for two young women of good bloodline to come and assist with your duties." She let a small, deliberate pause fall before she continued. "It's almost the Autumn Equinox Full Moon Festival, after all. Someone has to help with the preparations. Though privately" — her smile deepened — "people are saying these two are the elders' preferred candidates for Luna. Because you and Damien still haven't completed the Marking."

I said nothing. I simply looked at her.

Feral was showing her teeth.

I felt my scent shift — the change moving through me like a weather front rolling in. What had been faint and cool began to settle and press, carrying the particular edge that comes in the last silence before a blizzard. It filled the room slowly, completely.

Lydia's smile stiffened. She drew back against the bedding, a flicker of confusion crossing her face. She was trying to work out where the pressure was coming from — but it clearly hadn't occurred to her that it was coming from me.

"Mind yourself, Lydia." I turned away, leaving that cold weight behind me in the air beside her bed. "Before the Full Moon Festival comes, pray you're still standing well enough to watch how things unfold."

I closed the door on whatever expression she was wearing, and walked away.

The exhaustion hit me in the corridor — the kind that comes after a sleepless night, slow and patient, moving in like a tide. All I wanted was my Apothecary: a chair, a moment of quiet, the relief of closing my eyes. But as I turned toward the staircase, the manor's head steward came down the far end of the hall with unusual purpose in his step.

He stopped and gave a slight bow, something uncertain in his face. "Luna. You have a visitor. He's waiting in the Great Hall."

In a pack where everyone had learned to look through me — who would come to Bloodmoon asking for me by name?