The Night the Moon Remembered
The town of Hollow Pine smelled like sugar and woodsmoke, and Soren Kade had not felt this invisible in years.
He stood at the edge of the square where lanterns hung strung between the pines like a net of captured stars, their paper skins glowing amber and rose and pale blue. Somewhere a fiddle sawed out a reel, and a cluster of children shrieked past his legs chasing a firefly that blinked in and out like a small, uncertain heartbeat. Nobody looked at him twice. Nobody bowed their head or lowered their eyes or stepped hastily out of his path the way they did back home, in the great stone halls of the Dark Wolf Clan, where every gaze that touched him carried the weight of expectation.
Here, he was only a tall stranger in a plain gray shirt, hands in his pockets, watching a festival he had no history with.
It was exactly what he'd wanted. It felt like nothing at all.
He'd told his second-in-command, Talon, that he was going hunting alone in the northern ridge for three days, the kind of half-truth that bought him solitude without inviting the older wolves to send an escort. In truth, he'd driven six hours south with the windows down and his father's voice still ringing in his…