Blood Moon (MalexMale Paranormal Fantasy)

Chapter 1 ∞ REEVE

A tug in my chest alerts me to the rising moon. I look up to it as the sweet, euphoric effect of the smoke bleeds through my limbs.

My surroundings blur.

There's heat swelling my chest as I turn in each direction, orienting to a distorted view from Arym's Rock. A blinding, milky white clouds the clear river water below, taming the rush of the current and settling the wild of the forest. There is calm and silence. And blinding white.

I hear what's coming next before I see it. Feel it stir deep in my marrow. From the east, a colony of bats swoops overhead. Thousands of them dive at the river and fill in the trees, blacking out all but the white water and the bright moon. The piercing shrieks and fluttering wings call to me. Mine, they say, marking me, claiming every inch of my existence.

At the far edge of the forest, the moon flares with a wolf's howl then blows apart into tiny brilliant fragments, showering me. "Yours," it sings. And I think it must be Satu herself.

I kneel.

Upon my back and neck, glittering flecks of moon melt into my skin and the bats converge on me, pressing on me and stealing my breath as they consume me.

Blood dribbles from my nose. I scream into the emerging night. Scream from the stabbing wounds. Scream as the bats and the light are ripped away from me.

The vision slips away. Beyond my reach.

I crumble to the soft earth and everything goes black.

"Wake, Reeve."

My eyes snap open, absorbing the inky sky and the unnerving lack of sensation. It's like waking in a void after the most filling of dreams, a dream of crippling extremes, wrenching me from bone-deep fear to joyous rapture. Never have I felt so alive and so stripped raw.

I rub over my heart where a sudden clawing emptiness grows and am given no time to linger as Omi throws my arm around his shoulders and hurries us down the trail away from the stones. I have no energy to fight him to let me stay and cling to any trace of what I've seen...to this place that feels suddenly smaller and inexplicably fragile.

"We must get you to your father," he breathes out as we rush over bulging mounds and ankle-twisting dips in the ground.

I search the sky, holding my breath in hope. "There were bats—" I begin, but cut myself off at hearing the sharp spike in his heart rate. The moon amplifies his fear-washed pallor, a sickly color I've rarely seen on him before.

"We must hurry," is all he says, and that's when I understand the magnitude of what's occurred. It's all real. What happened at Arym's Rock was more than some drugged dreamstate, it was an actual vision—an alpha's vision—the rarest of a wolf's divine blessings. My father never had one, nor did his father.

The weight of it is too much as it presses on me, in me, churning my gut and dropping like lead into my feet.

Omi keeps an urgent pace, his strides long and sure through the Moon Field toward the shortcut down to the pack house. The further we get from Arym's Rock, the more the emptiness eats away at me. My body shivers, chills making my teeth chatter. Sweat beads at my hairline then a flash of heat incinerates the cold. I sink to the cool ground like a pile of ash and close my eyes. Hoping for a glimpse from my vision; anything to make me feel that alive again.

I wake, wrapped in a blanket, lying beside a small fire in the wolf pit—the small enclosure attached to the back of the pack house where Omi and my father go to seek guidance from Satu. The two males sit on either side of me, watching each other over the modest flames.