The scent of burned flesh was a brand of shame in Lucien's nostrils, but the memory of the touch was a brand of something else entirely—something he dared not name. He clutched his wrist, the skin already knitting back together in a painful, itching crawl that fought against the witch's purifying magic. The physical pain was a familiar anchor in the storm of confusion she had unleashed within him.
For a fleeting moment, when his skin had touched hers, the war had not just been silenced—it had been answered. In that brief, electric contact, he had felt not just her power, but a flicker of her spirit, a core of warmth and immense, untamed strength. It had been an anchor in the endless storm of his existence. Then, he had ruined it. The beast, feeling threatened by the very peace it craved, had lunged. And she had defended herself with the one thing his kind could never withstand.
"You… you felt it too," Luna whispered, her voice unsteady. She wasn't looking at his wounded hand, but at his eyes, as if she could still see the man beneath the monster. "The connection. Before you… before I…"
"I felt it," he ground out, his voice rough with a confusion that felt like a physical ache. He flexed his injured hand, watching the blistered skin slowly regenerate. "A trick. A witch's lure." He needed it to be a trick. The alternative was too dangerous to consider.
"It was no trick." She took a hesitant step forward, her own hand rising slightly, not in a threat, but as if to show him her empty palm. The moonfire was gone. "My magic does not lie. It responds to truth. To resonance. Your soul… it called to mine." She said it with a simple, devastating certainty that shook him more than any attack.
He wanted to rage at her, to deny it. He was Lucien Vale, the Child of the Eclipse. He did not have a soul that 'resonated'; he had a curse that corrupted. He was the thing that went bump in the night, the legend used to frighten disobedient children of both vampire and wolf lineages. Yet, the memory of that fleeting connection was a ghost he couldn't exorcise. It had been the most profound silence he had ever known.
"This changes nothing," he snarled, but the words lacked their earlier ferocity. He was trying to convince himself as much as her. "Your fire proves what you are. What I am. We are enemies by nature."
"Are we?" Luna's gaze was unwavering. The bloody light of the eclipse cast long, dramatic shadows across her face, highlighting her determination. "Or are we two halves of a balance that was never meant to be broken? My coven speaks of a great schism, a time when the blood of the night and the light of the moon were not at war. What if… what if we are echoes of that time?"
Her words were heresy. They were also a seduction more dangerous than any bloodlust. To believe her was to hope, and hope was a luxury his cursed life had never afforded him. It was a poison more lethal than silver.
Before he could form a retort, a sound cut through the tension—a howl, distant but piercing, rising from the depths of the forest. It was not a sound of hunting, but of naming. Of condemnation. It was answered by another, and then another, until a chorus of wolves filled the night, their voices weaving a tapestry of ancient hatred.
Lucien went rigid. He knew that particular harmonic, the specific cadence of that call. It was the Silvermane pack. And they were singing the Song of the Abomination.
The sound was a physical blow, a wave of pure, undiluted loathing that washed over him. It spoke of fangs bared not in challenge, but in holy purification. It spoke of a hunt that was not for food, but for cleansing. It was a sound that stripped him of his name, of his struggle, of the fleeting connection he had just felt. It reduced him to a single, damning title.
Luna heard it too. Her eyes widened, not with fear of him, but with understanding. "They're calling for you," she whispered, the reality of his world crashing down upon their isolated clearing.
"Their songs are older than their stones," Lucien said, his voice flat, all emotion buried beneath centuries of practiced survival. "They sing of the creature born of corruption, the mistake that must be erased. They do not see a man. They see a symbol of everything they must destroy to remain pure." He could almost smell their intent on the wind—the musky pack-scent, the sharp tang of righteous fury. "My mother was one of them. A priestess of the moon. My father... was a vampire lord who saw her not as a person, but as a conquest. I am the living proof of that violation. That is all I will ever be to them."
The howls intensified, closer now. They were coming. The hunt was no longer an abstract concept; it was a wave of teeth and fury moving through the trees, drawn by the same celestial disturbance that had drawn him to Luna.
He looked at her, truly looked at her, standing there in her pool of defiant moonlight. She had seen the man, however briefly. But the wolves would only see a witch consorting with their ultimate shame. Their fury would extend to her.
"Go," he said, the word torn from him. "Back to your coven walls. This is my curse to bear, not yours."
But Luna did not move. Her silver-violet eyes held his, and in their depths, he saw not retreat, but a terrifying, brilliant resolve. The wolves were singing his name, the name they had given him. But in the silence between their howls, in the space where their connection had sparked, he knew she saw something else. Something that had no name, but felt more real than any legend.
The Abomination's name echoed through the forest, but in the clearing, a different story was being written. One that the wolves, in their righteous fury, could never understand.