Hour of the Moon

Chapter 9: Bad Dreams

Waya

The dream ripped through me like claws in the dark.

I came up gasping—taste of rain in my mouth, sheets soaked with sweat, pulse sprinting against the cage of my ribs. The vial at my throat glowed fever-white, humming in time with the pain behind my eyes.

Her scent lingered in the air—black currant and crushed lily.

Impossible. The spell should've severed it.

I sat on the edge of the bed, palms pressed to my eyes, shaking. My wolf prowled just under the skin, furious and silent, battering the bars of bone and restraint I'd built to contain him. The herbs inside the vial were dying, burning themselves out like a fuse.

By the time I realized I was moving, the truck was already screaming down the backroads toward Akita's forest.

The sun was only a rumor behind the mist when I reached the tree line. The woods opened like a wound and swallowed the sound of the engine whole.

I slammed the door hard enough to make the frame rattle and stalked toward the Seer's shack. Glamour shimmered faintly across the clearing, but I didn't bother peeling it away. I shouldered through it—the illusion cracked like brittle glass, scattering light across the ground.

"Show yourself!" My voice ripped through the fog. "You lying, Fae-kissed bastard—show yourself!"

Akita stepped from the doorway, bare feet silent, face carved in calm. Only a tremor in his milky eyes betrayed that he'd already seen the storm I carried.

"Your tone is unbecoming of a wolf seeking counsel," he said mildly.

"I didn't come for counsel." My throat burned. "You swore the bond would break."

He inhaled, slow and deliberate, as though tasting the air between us. "It did. Yet something older than sorcery does not yield to it. It yields only to recognition."

"Don't speak in riddles." My hands shook. "She's in my head, in my dreams. I feel her pain. You call that severed?"

"You mistake binding for belonging," Akita murmured. "The potion burned the thread between your bodies, not your souls. The moon remembers what you try to forget."

My jaw locked until I felt enamel crack. "Undo it."

"I cannot. What's woven by the divine is beyond any Seer's hand."

I lunged before I could stop myself, fisting his collar, dragging him close enough that his breath ghosted my cheek. "Then why give me this false cure?"

His expression didn't change. "Because you needed to see what freedom costs. You asked to forget. Now you understand remembering."

I shoved him back. "You toy with lives like riddles."

"And you," he said, smoothing his shamma, "love a ghost you haven't yet met. Tell me, wolf—does she bleed in your dreams?"

The words hit harder than any strike.

I turned away before the beast could answer for me. "Stay out of my head."

Akita's voice followed, low, almost tender. "When she calls again, you will go to her. You were never meant to do otherwise."

I didn't answer. The forest closed around me, thick with pine and prophecy.

⸻

Keiran

I woke with a jolt, lungs clawing for air.

The bedroom was still—curtains breathing softly in the breeze, the faint rhythm of rain on the glass. The taste of storm lingered on my tongue.