Prologue

‘Okay, one more, one more hill, and I am in safe territory,’ Serah thought as she ran through the bushes, below the hills, counting as she passed each one. Her sight blurred as sweat and fog fought to blind her. She was bleeding from her legs—injuries created from the multiple falls on the way here. She was not healing fast enough, and she did not know why.

Her white nightdress had been torn by short branches and other elements of the wild. The dress was also no longer white; it was a faded brown with dark red spots on her thighs and ribs.

Behind her, the howls grew louder, and she wondered if they were really after her life or if they were making a joke at her expense. She had to get home to her husband and her children. She had no business being in werewolf territory.

Serah had always been a wanderer. Her mother would often tell her when she was younger, ‘You have your heart in places where your heart should never be,’ and Serah would reply, ‘When I get older, and I turn, I shall be strong and unkillable. Alas, with adulthood came the revelation that she could be killed by a number of things, and one of them was the bite of these beings running behind her. She saw a tree and used the rest of her power to climb onto it.

‘Finally safe,’ she thought until she heard growls just beneath her. Werewolves could climb; what was she thinking? She closed her eyes tight and willed herself to jump, but she had no more strength. She was spent. She was beginning to heal, but she needed to rest. The growls came again, and Serah decided to make that jump. One foot in the air, and it dawned on her that this was a mistake. Serah lost control and fell down the tree.

‘Oh no, what was she doing?’ Gonzalo thought and threw his paws up in a bid to catch her. ‘Wait, what was he doing?’ he thought again as the other four members of his pack looked at him. He was sure that they had the same questions.

Everything happened so fast. Gonzalo leapt to catch her but caught only her legs. She hung from a branch with a tip that could not be described as sharp, but was shaped in a way that, with the right force, could impale a person—a vampire.

Serah stared at the beautiful sky above her. She could clearly see the stars and the receding full moon. From the side of her lips, blood trickled carefully as if afraid to fall. She smiled and allowed the burning tears to finally blur her sight as she finally shut her eyes to everything—to the pain, to the rustling of the bushes, to the crackling sounds underneath her. It was all over.

Gonzalo groaned as his bones cracked with each second the moon receded. He had not yet mastered the art of turning whenever he felt like, so as the moon left, his human form returned unsolicited. His pack shifted as well. They stood up, looking at themselves—five men who had inadvertently committed a murder.

“What do we do?” Alfred asked.

“We walk away,” Gonzalo said. “We walk away, and we never speak of this again, not even if this comes back to the werewolf community. We deny all responsibility. We do not speak of it.”

His pack nodded, and slowly the five naked men walked into the dark of the night, amidst the cold which they did not feel. The howling of wolves filled their ears. They walked away and never looked back.

Elsewhere, Abel Alarick rolled over to the other side of the bed and tried to touch his wife. He found an empty bed beside him and rolled his eyes.

Yes, vampires were nocturnal beings, but wasn’t that the point of the potions they took every day? It was supposed to help them live like normal humans, to give them the circadian rhythm of an average human being to enable them to have a working relationship with their food.

But no, not Serah, not the night wanderer he married. Every night since they had been married, Serah would wander into the night and return in the morning, tired from her sojourn into the forest. For a while, Alarick would stay up late, fighting sleep because he had taken the potion and had not thought that he would have to wait for his wife to return home. That is, until he began to sleep through the night because it seemed the wandering vampire could take care of herself.

Five hours later and Serah had not returned home. Alarick was now worried. Serah could wander all night long and still make it home in time for breakfast. If she was not home by now, something was amiss. But he was not going to rattle the vampires over something that may not be a problem, so he decided to search for her by himself.

As he trudged through the bushes hoping to catch a whiff of her wild rose scent, he thought of the first time she disappeared on him in the night. They were just a few years into their marriage. She was a hard-to-read woman, so half the time, he was worried that Serah did not really want him. She was betrothed to him according to the customs, and as such, obligated to marry him. Serah always had this blank stare behind her stoic expressions. She was indeed a hard woman to read.

Alarick would often catch his wife staring from the windows out into the hills, and he would wonder why. One day she said, “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” He had been watching her for a while, and he did not know she knew he was there. They had not been turned at this point, so she was cautious about going into the woods.

“Yes, yes, they are beautiful,” Alarick replied, focusing on her and not the woods.

“I like to think of all the elements of the wild as one, as one large body that calls to me, so yes, it is beautiful,” she said, and for the first time since they were married, she smiled faintly. Alarick went weak in the knees. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her smile was like a witch’s enchantment. Like the kind that was cast on the potion that they drank that made some part of them human. The enchantment that made it possible for vampires to procreate and have human children. The good kind of enchantment.

“I should smile more often,” she said as she turned to look at him. “You seem to lose all that hardness on your face when I do.”

‘Yes, yes, smile more often,’ he thought.

“Come,” she said. “Let us lay under the stars tonight.” He went with her, and they laid under the stars.

The first night she disappeared, they had just been turned. They felt all their power at once. Alarick woke up in the morning, and she was gone. He ran to her parents. After telling them that she was gone, they began to laugh. They explained her wandering spirit to him, and after that night, he accepted that she would always wander. It was why he did not raise the alarm this time around. It was why he was under the sun right now looking for his wife.

The further he went into the woods without finding her, the faster his heart beat with fear…until it stopped beating. He saw her. She was hanging from a sturdy tree branch that jutted out from her chest with dried blood on her cheeks. He saw her, eyes shut peacefully, and what seemed like a smile on her lips. He saw her.

He walked slowly and felt the kind of cold they said only happened when a vampire crossed into the great beyond. He touched her fingertips as if to be sure that this was really Serah. Then he screamed. He took sharp breaths and began to take her off the branch that had impaled her. As he pulled her off, a fresh spurt of blood pumped as if she was still alive, but she was not. He brought his face down to hers and muttered inaudible words.

Alarick walked into the vampire community, Serah limp in his hands, and crumbled to his knees once he was inside. Dez Alec, the leader of the vampires, rushed toward him and took her from his hands. That was when they both saw it. Right there on her thigh, were four lines in fading black—the unmistakable mark of a wolf paw. At the same time, both their eyes went red. They would get revenge, but first, they would mourn their dead, and they would send her home.