Page 1 of Black Moon

1

Linden

The clinic wasn’t really big enough for pacing, but there I was, trying anyway. I could only manage four long paces in one direction, then had to turn and go back the other way.

The place didn’t have to be huge. It was only intended for the Grove pack, and werewolves are notoriously hard to injure enough to require medical intervention. That was why, when I’d decided to go into medicine, my father had quirked an eyebrow at me, like most domineering parents might if their child said they were going to be an actor or an artist.

“Little frivolous, don’t you think?” he’d asked. Then he’d never brought it up again. He hadn’t hesitated to pay for my tuition out of the pack’s college fund, and he’d written the check when I’d asked for upgrades to the pack clinic—a place that had been built in the fifties and then never changed again till I finished med school.

That night felt like I was stuck in the inverse of Christmas Eve. I wasn’t sitting up, unable to sleep because I was so excited about what was to come.

It wasn’t excitement at all. It was fear.

“It’ll be okay,” Skye said from where he was perched on one of the beds. The bed he usually used when he wasn’t feeling well, since he was both my assistant, and my most frequent patient. He was watching me pace, biting his lip nervously.

Clearly, he didn’t think things were okay any more than I did, but I was making the poor kid worry. That wasn’t what I wanted. Skye had enough problems without his doctor and boss adding to his stress level.

I took a deep breath and went to lean against the bed opposite him. There were three beds in the whole clinic, and it was more than we’d ever needed at once. The whole pack was a few hundred hundred people, and more than half had never set foot in the clinic.

“It will be okay,” I finally agreed. “They’ll bring Brook home, and everything will be fine. Everyone will be fine.”

He stared at the floor right in front of my feet for a moment, his eyes suspiciously glassy. “What if they—what if the Reid pack...”

There were so many questions in that unformed sentence, most of them things I didn’t want to think about, let alone address with a scared nineteen-year-old. I was a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist.

The Reid pack had always been our closest werewolf neighbors, geographically. As packs, however, the gap had always been much wider. We were a rural pack, and could be old-fashioned and backward sometimes, but we tried not to be. The Reid pack was practically a feudal society—a single alpha at its head whose word was law, and brutal punishments for anyone who disagreed with him.

Then almost twenty years ago, the Condition had come. Omegas all over the world had gotten sick. It had left a trail of miscarriages and deaths, and lifelong illness even in those who survived. It hurt us—that was impossible to forget, looking at frail Skye, whose difficult birth had been my inspiration to go to medical school—but it had devastated the Reid pack.

It would have been bad enough if it had simply been a matter of a short-term illness, but the Condition had come and stayed with us. It still affected omegas today, usually coming on in times of high stress like pregnancy, puberty, or even birth, and once it had a grip on someone, never letting go. Worse yet, even after twenty years, we still had no answers about how or why.

And omegas? They were vital to werewolves. I’d been raised to believe—and the more I saw of the Reid pack, the more I did believe it—that without an omega mate, every alpha was a ticking time bomb.

Including me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve always handled myself well, and I’ve never seemed to be in danger of going off the rails entirely. But even I have my moments of jackassery that would be tempered by a stable, serene presence in my life. I suspect Skye’s constant work in the clinic helped me. And I know good alphas who struggle with control until they’re mated. It sounds like a toxic tall tale that encourages alphas to act however they want and think they can get away with it, but since the Condition, I’ve watched the lack of omegas slowly unravel my people.

The worst part is that among packs, mine was doing incredibly well.

The Reid pack was the opposite. They didn’t have a single omega left among their number. Not unless you counted the fact that the day before, they had kidnapped one of our pack members.

Brook Morgan, my older brother’s childhood sweetheart, had been grabbed and shoved into a car as he left work at the garage for the night. If not for the scent they left behind and the grocery store owner witnessing the whole thing, we wouldn’t have known who was responsible. We’d simply be floundering.

Instead, we were at war.

And that evening, my father—the pack alpha—and the rest of the pack’s best fighters had gone into Reid territory to get Brook back. So Skye and I waited.

I took a deep breath and tried to shake off my restlessness. This was simply the manifestation of my unmated alpha instincts. I wanted to run and howl and bite someone—preferably a Reid, who’d had the audacity to kidnap my friend and packmate. But since I wasn’t part of the small raiding party who had gone after Brook, I was stuck pacing the clinic, waiting for their return.

Hoping that my underused clinic would continue to be underused when they brought Brook home.

“Why don’t we go ahead and do your weekly physical, Skye?” I asked. “While we wait.”

Skye, usually a stickler for schedules and plans, just nodded and hopped down, rushing over to the scale to weigh himself. I pulled up his file on my tablet, and by the time I had it, he was turning back, shamefaced.

“I’m a pound down from last week.”

I waved him over to the table. “I’ve told you a dozen times, Skye. A pound is nothing. As long as it doesn’t become a trend, it’s fine.”

---