Bella De La Luna

The cold came without warning on the night of her eighteenth birthday, and by the time

Marisol understood it was not ordinary cold - not the bite of mountain October, not the

drafts that found the old windows of Saint Elara's with their seasonal reliability - she was

already on her hands and knees in the garden dirt, screaming.

She had felt strange for a week.

It was not illness. She had catalogued every cold and fever and bout of flu she'd had

since childhood with a quiet methodical attention born of growing up in a place where if you

were sick you were a burden and burdens made people like you less, and this was nothing

like any of those. It had no temperature, no sore throat, no identifiable location. It was more

like direction. Like something inside her that had been turned the wrong way for eighteen

years had received a signal and was correcting its orientation, and the correction was not

gentle.

She had been walking the back lane behind the orphanage because she did this every

year on her birthday - a private ritual, not the kind she'd ever named aloud, just the habit of

taking herself somewhere quiet on the one day of the year that most loudly announced she

had been left somewhere. The lane wound behind the property toward a stretch of empty lots

and wild mountain grass. She knew every stone of it. She had walked it in joy and grief and

every emotional state in between, and it had never once surprised her.

The cold that moved through her skin rather than against it surprised her considerably.

The lane was empty. The night smelled of pine resin and dead leaves and beneath both

of those something older, mineral and deep, like water from a spring that had never seen

sunlight.

Eighteen, she told herself. The word arrived with the full weight of what it meant: she

was legally an adult. The orphanage's obligation to her ended in the spring. Her savings

account held enough for a semester at the state college in Millhaven. She had a scholarship

application pending that Professor Alvarado had called exceptional. She had a plan. She had

7BELLA DE LA LUNA

always had a plan, because having a plan was the only thing she'd ever found that reliably

stood between her and the specific despair of people who had no one particular rooting for

them.

She had begun to believe in the plan.

The quaking started in her femurs.

There was no adequate preparation for this. The sensation was precise and physical in a

way that excluded metaphor - not like anything, just itself - a vibration that began in the

long bones of her thighs and radiated outward simultaneously toward her feet and her spine,

and when her spine caught it the whole thing doubled in magnitude and she pitched forward

onto both palms in the dirt before she fully processed that she was falling. Her hands hit the

ground and the impact sent a shockwave up through the vibration already in her bones and

the resulting combination was something her nervous system had no category for.

She screamed.

The sound came from somewhere below her normal voice - lower and rougher and not

entirely human - and she heard, from the kitchen window sixty yards away, the ceramic

clack of Lacy setting something down too fast, and then the hard deliberate strike of Lacy's

heels on the kitchen floor, and the door opened and the light came out across the garden in a

yellow strip and in it was her shadow and it was wrong.

Her shadow had the wrong shape.

She was still human - still herself, still on hands and knees in the dirt of the back lane

- but her shadow on the ground had grown at the shoulders in a way her body had not yet

matched, and the wrongness of that visual was enough to make her stop screaming and start

staring, and in the moment of comparative silence she could hear every heartbeat in the

building. Not feel. Hear. Distinct rhythms, individual and recognizable - she counted seven

sleeping children on the second floor and identified Lacy by the particular pattern of it, the

slightly fast pace of someone who was worried but controlling it.

"Marisol." Lacy's voice. The kitchen light was a sixty-yard stripe between them.

"Mom." The word split in her throat - half her voice, half something else that had no

name - and she heard herself and was frightened by it in the specific way of recognizing

something you've always been but have been pretending not to be.

Lacy stopped three paces from the door. In thirty years of running Saint Elara's she had

seen children through fevers and nightmares and first heartbreaks and the particular despair

of aging out of a system that had never had room for them, and she had stopped at a

8The Crescent Bloodline Chronicles

manageable middle distance from every one of them, because the middle distance was where

she could be present without crowding.

She needed a different gift right now.

What she saw in the strip of garden light: her daughter on hands and knees in the dirt,

shaking. Not trembling - shaking, the whole body, the kind of shaking that came from

something internal rather than external cold. The shoulder blades rising through the back of

the birthday dress she had sewn herself - the blue one, Marisol had asked for the blue one,

had worn it to dinner with the quiet pleasure of someone who did not often get to choose

things - pressing upward and outward against the fabric in shapes that were not quite the

shapes of human shoulder blades. The caramel skin catching moonlight in a way that skin did

not ordinarily catch moonlight. Not reflecting it. Gathering it, like the surface of water

gathers the moon's reflection into something more vivid than the source.

"Tell me where you hurt," Lacy said, and her voice was steady because she had decided

it would be.

"Everywhere." A sound between a sob and something much older than a sob -

instinctive and raw. The sapphire eyes turned up toward Lacy and they were not quite right.

Not wrong, not threatening, but beyond what eyes in a human face were supposed to do: they

were generating light rather than receiving it, a soft blue-white luminescence, the color of

deep water in late afternoon. "Mom, I can hear everything. Every heartbeat in the building. I

can hear the moths at the window - their wings, each wing separately -"

"I hear you," Lacy said. She meant it in every possible sense.

The cracking began.

She had walked these mountain forests, heard ice-laden branches give under their

weight in January. The sound was not identical to what she heard now but it was the nearest

available comparison: a sequence of deep structural adjustments, not the random shattering of

something breaking but the ordered, purposeful sound of something being rebuilt. Marisol's

spine arched. Her hands pressed deeper into the dirt and the knuckles went white and her

whole body understood something her mind was still processing.

Lacy held very still.

She had a half-brother - different mother, same unusual eyes, sapphire and

luminescent in low light. He had given her a phone number four years ago: If something ever

happens with Marisol. Something unexpected. She had not asked what kind of something. He

had given her the look of a man who thought she already knew.

9BELLA DE LA LUNA

The silver wolf that appeared in the garden was the size of a mountain dog and was

looking at her with sapphire eyes.

The wolf's expression was, in the way that mattered, completely legible. I'm still here.

I'm still me. Please don't be afraid of me.

From the forest at the edge of the property, something answered. A howl that climbed

rather than fell - not the sound of a predator announcing territory, but the sound of a path

being named, a direction being given. This way. We've been waiting. Come home.

The silver wolf's head swung toward the sound. Every muscle in the enormous body

went taut and Lacy understood, with the clarity that extreme moments sometimes grant, that

she was watching her daughter be pulled between two things that both had legitimate claim to

her, and that the outcome of this pull was not hers to decide.

"Go," she said. The wolf looked at her. "Baby girl. Go find out who you are." Her voice

cracked on the last word and she did not try to control it. "I will be right here. I am not going

anywhere. You hear me? I am right here."

The wolf crossed the garden in three strides and pressed its great warm head against

Lacy's chest - one single moment of contact, fur against her collarbone, the familiar warmth

and weight of Marisol at her most herself - and then turned and ran, silver light dissolving

into the dark between the trees like a word forgotten at the moment of waking.

Lacy stood alone in the garden.

She stood there long enough for the cold to fully arrive and for her eyes to adjust to the

dark and for something very fundamental in her understanding of what she had spent thirty

years caring for to reorganize itself around new information.

Then she went inside. She sat at the kitchen table. She looked at the birthday cake -

strawberry and chocolate, Marisol's particular favorite since she was four years old - and

she found the phone number her half-brother had given her. She thought about the note she

had read eighteen years ago on a different set of steps. The initials that had shimmered silver.

The child with the impossible eyes.

She dialed.

The phone rang twice.

"I know," said the voice on the other end. Not surprised. The voice of a man who had

been waiting eighteen years for this call and had not let himself think too hard about what he

would say when it came. "Is she all right?"

10The Crescent Bloodline Chronicles

"She's gone into the forest," Lacy said. "She went as a wolf." A pause. "She was

beautiful."

The silence on the other end lasted exactly as long as it needed to.

"There are people coming," he said. "Tonight. They'll explain everything. Don't be

afraid of them."

"I haven't been afraid of anything in thirty years," Lacy said. "Don't start now."

She hung up. She covered the birthday cake. She turned the kitchen light on so it would

be visible from the forest.

Then she sat down and began to wait for her daughter to come home - or for the

people who would tell her why she couldn't