Blood of the Moon

What is a family?
Is it a shared bloodline, a shared ancestor, a shared burden?
All of them, the ones assembled into the ragtag pack under the thumb and watchful eye of Verna Smythe grappled with that question; with what it meant to have and to lose a family. And now they have to contend with the question, what makes a family and what keeps it together?
A tangled mess of tragedies and scars and burdens, the Smythe Pack have to work together in order to defend their territory and buy themselves time to prepare for the war that is brewing at their doorstep-a war that their small, mongrel pack is not prepared to fight, let alone win.
Along the way they uncover more secrets about each other's pasts and the difficulties that brought each of them to Alpha Verna Smythe's feet and struggle with themselves about what keeps them from walking back out of it.
Their family, their pack is bound only by the blood of the moon.

"Tell me, Verna, does it make you feel better about your failures lining us up like trophies, like your shiny, broken dolls that you parade around like we can save you, like we can absolve you of your guilt?
We absolve you of nothing, why not bury the rest of us with her?"
Family is pain, but is can also be salvation.