Where the moon once was

The scent hit them first. It wasn't the sweet, comforting smell of a fated mate. It was a chaotic, dizzying perfume of wild jasmine and cold ozone, a smell that felt both utterly right and profoundly wrong.

"Did you smell that?" Finn's head snapped up from his drink, his vampire-wolf senses twitching.

Maeve's cynical sneer vanished. She set her shot glass down with a sharp click, her eyes scanning the crowd. "That's not... that's impossible."

Their gazes locked on the woman who had just slipped in through the bar's side door. She looked nothing like the fragile Omega they'd expected. Her movements were fluid and arrogant, her eyes a flash of iridescent green in the dim light. She held her head high, surveying the room with a primal, predatory calm.

As she stepped closer, the wild scent intensified, a siren's call that pulled at their very cores. Dorian's body went rigid, his hand instinctively moving to the knife at his waist. He was trained to neutralize threats, and his instincts screamed that she was one.

Finn, however, was already moving. He was a whisper of motion, closing the distance in the blink of an eye, his hand reaching for her. "Wait," he breathed, the word a desperate plea.

Her eyes, cold and assessing, finally found theirs. A flicker of something ancient and powerful-a rejection that ran deeper than instinct-flashed through them. In a fraction of a second, her entire demeanor changed. The air crackled with a jolt of energy. The lights above them flickered and went dark.

Maeve cursed under her breath. "She's not a wolf," she whispered, a chilling realization in her voice. "She's something else."