if only we knew (the things we know)

by Just A Little Birdy

"We weren't born to be monsters," Wyatt insists. Willa doesn't even blink. "We weren't born to be anything at all," she replies. It hits him like a punch to the gut.

A/N: For the full experience, listen to the song Spirit Cold by Tall Heights like, ten times before you read this ;)

ooo

IF ONLY WE KNEW (THE THINGS WE KNOW)

It's cold and it's dark, and the streets of Seabrook are damp with the runoff of melting snow.

It's early in the morning, the weak rays of sunlight just barely fighting their way through the thick clouds that hang low in the sky. The grey weather, the press of the storm above and the wild whip of the wind, makes Wyatt restless, but he forces himself to walk slowly along the sidewalk, hands shoved in his pockets and head bowed against the grey light of dawn.

It's late, for him, and he is tired – he should be home, in the den, lazing around or arguing with Willa or watching the pups playfighting – but instead he is here, in a forbidden place, trying not to stare at the strange things surrounding him.

Will would kill him if she knew he was here. Hunting, he'd told her when he'd left, just as the sun was going down. Might stay out a day. She'd accepted it on face value – and he had meant it at the time. He'd only meant to come to the edge of town, just close enough to have a look and then back out into the woods to fulfil his promise to the pups of fresh meat, but something had pulled him closer, had pulled and pulled until he was almost at the very heart of town.

This is where he sees her, in these frozen streets where he doesn't belong. He's walking in the vague direction of the sea, and she is headed towards the big archway behind him that reads Zombietown. They meet in the middle, so close that their arms brush as they pass.

Wyatt jumps sideways, heart leaping into his throat – he'd been so preoccupied, so distracted by the strange things all around him, that he hadn't heard or seen or smelt her coming.

"Sorry!" she throws over her shoulder but doesn't stop, and as she turns away from him, hair flying around her face, he does a double-take – because her hair is white, and her eyes are blue and she is quick and quiet and light on her feet, like any wolf. He wants to chase after her, to call out for her to stop, to ask who she is and where she comes from and why she is here, when she should be in their den leading their pack…but by the time he formulates the words, she has disappeared into Zombietown, past the big wall that he is scared of being trapped by. The words die in the back of his throat.

Wyatt is not the impulsive one. That is Willa.

He does not chase after the girl, to make sure that she was real.

He turns, and he runs away home.

He does not come back to the town again.

ooo

They're not built perfect, like their four-legged cousins, nor descended from any of the same strains of evolution. They are not sleek and silent as a wolf, not grey like the snow or brown as the forest floor, not single-minded – eat, sleep, hunt, repeat. They're from the moonstone, but they don't know what that means; they chase the prophecies written on their walls by ancients long forgotten, but they never know exactly what they're looking for.

They depend on the shard of stone they hang around their neck, the stone set aside just for them in a time before time began.

The forest is silent, not a breath of wind to stir the canopy, nor a drop of rain to soak into his hair. His feet are swift and silent between the bracken and the detritus below, his tall form gliding between the trees, fast enough that it would be hard to spot him unless you know what you are looking for (unless you are one of them, but he tries not to think it too loudly, lest he curse himself just as he flees from the human's fence). His fangs are sharp and his heart beats in time to the hum of his moonstone, and if he listens closely, he can hear the howl of his pack, calling him home.

In moments like this, he feels more like a wolf than a human, no matter how he is built.

Eat, sleep, hunt, repeat.

But no, that's not what he is. He is too cunning to be any animal, smart and methodical and attuned to reason over instinct, pacifism over aggression. It's what makes him a good second, a complimentary pair to his sister's impatience, her domination over what remains of the pack. They will make good elders one day, if they live long enough to become wise.

He drops to a walk as he crosses the river, light-footed as he hops from rock to rock. It's been a pleasant day and the air is still warm, even as the sun dips towards the horizon. He almost stops to sit for a while and watch the lazy fish that wriggle between the rocks beneath him – but the calls are loud and persistent and he has promised to be home before sundown. He casts only one longing gaze at the fish, ears listening for anything that might be following him, and then he sprints on, following the barest of trails as it zigzags through the trees.

Willem meets him at the mouth of the den, slouched against the rocks as he whittles away idly at a stick. "You're late," he says as he inspects the fine point he's been sharpening, turning it this way and that. "She's not happy."

"I said I'd be back before sundown," Wyatt replies, climbing past Willem with practised ease. "And if you look at the sky, you'll see the sun is not down." He smiles with all his teeth. Willem shakes his head.

"Just warning you," he says and throws the stick to the side, pocketing his knife as he rises. Wyatt bites back any sort of comment about his carelessness, the stupidity of leaving handcrafted things right outside their safe place like big flashing signs that say werewolves live here! There's no point wasting his breath. Willem never listens to any kind of warnings. He turns away instead, taking himself into the den without waiting for the other boy.

The path is dim and damp, caught in that time between sun and moon where no light fills the mouth of the cave. Wyatt walks slowly, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness; as he winds deeper into the mountain, he hears whispers and giggles echo around him, and the ring of a shoe against rock. Werepups; and usually he would chase them out of the cracks and crevices they are squeezed into, make a game of hunting them back to the den proper, but it has been hours since he first heard the calls, and Willa's patience will be running thin.

Come home, the howls had said, the loud summons that had echoed through the silent trees. The Alpha calls. Come home. They'd been so loud and insistent he had picked them up from the other side of the forest, so far from home he usually couldn't hear them. He'd all but run all the way once he had heard them, to get home on time.

The cavern is cold and empty when he enters, the fire out and the prophecies thrown across the walls in various shades of blue light. Willa stands in the middle of it all, her back to him as she stares up at the shifting images; the legends they live by, the religion they preach.

She's watching his favourite one; unsurprising, since it's the most relevant of them all right now. Above their heads, a girl spins and howls and dances, surrounded by a halo of white hair. The Great Alpha. He's always been fascinated by the prophecy, ever since he was a pup, and now that it is their task to find her and the moonstone…

"Wyatt!" a voice bubbles from the top of the stairs, and of course Wynter is still here when even the pups have been banished to the tunnels. Where would Willa be without her most loyal lackey to snap at while she mulls over the prophecies? "I'm so glad you're back, we thought the humans found you, did you see them in the-"

Willa's gaze catches her halfway down the stairs and she freezes. "Too much?"

The Alpha rolls her eyes and turns to Wyatt instead. "Where have you been?" she demands, like he has disappeared for days rather than hours. "You're late. We thought something had happened to you."

"Late?" Wyatt questions. "I'm an hour early. The sun isn't even down yet."

"I called you hours ago."

"I know, I heard you." He sheds his jacket, tossing it to one side, and touches his moonstone to make sure it's still around his neck.

"Then why didn't you come straight home?" Willa demands, arms crossed. Wynter hovers at her shoulder, hands clasped in front of her anxiously. She's looking between them like she's worried they might fight. Wynter doesn't like it when they fight.

Wyatt's not in the mood for a scrap with the Alpha anyway. "I came as soon as I heard," he tells her, placating. "I came all the way from the fence, Willa, I wasn't exactly close."

He walks away, the only member of the pack who would have the audacity to turn their back on the Alpha, and goes to the fire pit. It should be roaring but someone has let it burn down, leaving nothing but glowing coals and a pile of old ashes. He starts adding wood and kindling, building up the beginnings of a fire with practised ease.

"Why were you at the fence?" Willa asks behind him, in a voice that would have any of her underlings cowering in fear. Wyatt doesn't look up.

"The humans were there today," he replies, as nonchalant as he can be. "Closer than usual. I wanted to see what they were doing."

"You wanted to see what they were doing," Willa repeats, in a voice that says she doesn't believe a word he's saying.

"Yes," he claims, and keeps his back firmly turned to her.

There's a pause.

"You were looking for that girl again!" she crows, and like a startled bird, he rises to his feet.

"I was not!" he claims, but he's a little too loud and a little too quick, and all she has to do is raise an eyebrow for him to know that she will never believe him. "Why do you always think that? I was just making sure they didn't come into the forest, that they weren't looking for us."

Willa laughs, loud and mocking. "When have the humans ever come looking for us, Wyatt?"

"Uh-h-h," Wynter chimes in uncertainly, raising a finger. "They did come and steal our moonstone, so-"

Willa rolls her eyes at her, and the other wolf's mouth snaps shut. "When in the last hundred years have the humans come here," she amends pointedly. Wynter withers under her stern glare, drifting back several steps in deference.

Wyatt is not so easily tamed. "They haven't come after us because we've been careful," he insists. "And we can't risk it anyway – we don't have the power to fight them, Willa, and until we get the moonstone back-"

"To get the moonstone back, we might have to fight them," Willa argues. "They think we're monsters anyway. Maybe it's time we stopped hiding in the woods, instead of waiting for some fairytale to come and save us."

"I'm not helping you go to war with the humans, Willa." His voice is quiet, but firm, and his gaze stands steady against her angry glare. "The elders didn't want to attack them, and we shouldn't-"

"The elders aren't here," she interrupts him, stiff and abrasive. "And we're running out of time. It's up to us to find the moonstone now, and there's no other way."

"We weren't born to be monsters," Wyatt insists.

She doesn't even blink. "We weren't born to be anything at all," she says. It hits him like a punch to the gut.

He stares. Silence stretches like a fraying cord.

"Is this why you called me home?" he asks when he can bear it no longer, and Willa relaxes, the tension draining from her shoulders.

"No," she sighs. "Mum was asking to see you. She says she has something important to tell you."

His breath catches in his throat. "Is she…?" He's almost afraid to ask, rocking back nervously on his heels.

"She's fine," Willa assures him, in a stilted voice that makes him think nothing is very fine at all. "She just…you'll see when you get there."

"Or you could just tell me now," he reasons. "And save us both the trouble."

"She wants to tell you herself, Wyatt," Willa huffs impatiently. "Finish the fire, and then go down and talk to her, like you should have done weeks ago." She turns away, done with arguing for the night. Wyatt watches her go, wondering if maybe he has pushed her too far…and then he realises he is still not alone in the den, like he assumed he was.

He turns to Wynter. He expects her to go too – she is Willa's shadow, not his, and when Willa is angry with him, Wynter usually is too. She doesn't go this time though, just stands there and stares at him, her hands twisting together nervously.

"Is something wrong, Wynter?" he asks after a moment, when it is clear that she is caught between going and staying.

She pauses in her restless movement, frozen like a deer in headlights, and then checks over her shoulder to see if Willa is really gone.

"Did you see…her?" she asks tentatively, when she is sure his sister won't hear.

He shakes his head and bites back a grimace at the way her face falls, hope draining from her cheeks. "I don't even know if she was real," he admits and turns away, settling back down next to the fire pit. "I only saw her for a second, and it was so long ago. I feel like I imagined the whole thing."

Emboldened by the conversation, Wynter follows him, taking a seat to his right. She's got her legs crossed like a pup listening to the prophecies, her hands jammed in her lap to stop herself from fidgeting. "Willa says you made it all up," she says, and if he was Willa he'd snap at her for being so outright, so brusque and blunt.

But he is not Willa, so all he says is, "I don't make things up, Wynter," in the mildest voice he can muster. "Just because I choose not to throw away the old prophecies while the elders are not here to preach them, doesn't mean I've got my head stuck in the clouds."

He leans over his fire, shifting the coals closer to the kindling. Wynter's eyes drift up to the walls of the den. The prophecies have faded now, all but one – Wyatt doesn't have to turn around to know it is the Great Alpha, spinning and howling and slashing at the air. The prophecy is burnt into his brain, every part of it, every tiny clue that had been left for them in a time before time itself. He's seen it a thousand times by now, dreamt of it hundreds more, amidst Willa's icy comments and blatant disregard for their history, their future.

"I want to believe the prophecies too," Wynter says after a moment, her voice small and distracted. She's still watching the Great Alpha, the saviour who hasn't come. "My momma always said, 'if you don't believe all the way, nothing you wish for will ever find you'." She smiles brightly at the memory, but it fades quickly, replaced by a twist of her mouth and a furrowed brow. Wynter's mum is gone now, Wyatt remembers. She'd been one of the first to fall, to fade away and not come back.

"We'll find the Great Alpha," he promises her with a hand on her knee. "She's out there somewhere. We still have time."

Wynter nods and forces a small smile just for his benefit. She opens her mouth like she's going to say something more, but a cough bubbles from her throat instead, deep and hacking and rising, rising, rising as she fights her way through it. Her moonstone turns a sickly green as she coughs, one hand pressed to her chest – and then just as quickly as it started, it stops, and the stone turns back to a mild blue.

"Are you okay?" he asks when it's over.

"I'm scared," Wynter admits in a small voice. "My moonstone is running out of power…and there aren't any more…"

Her words cut like a knife through Wyatt's skin, slicing him into ribbons. She leaves it unsaid, what comes next, what she is most afraid of, but it's not something that needs to be given a voice anyway. They all know the truth. They all know their fate.

He swallows the urge to scream or cry, to lash out, to throw things around the room until he collapses, exhausted, to the floor. To run, away and away, until he is nothing but flesh and bone and wild instinct, his thoughts blissfully silent. He is Beta now, the leader, the one the pups and his peers look up to. He is not just Wyatt anymore.

"It'll be okay, Wynter," he says, for lack of any better news. The lie tastes like poison on his tongue, sour as it slips between his teeth. He should not speak words he cannot bring himself to believe in, and he knows that these ones aren't true.

"That's what Willa always says," Wynter replies, and manages to find a soft smile that is just for him. "And if the Alpha says something, it must be true, so you must be right."

She straightens her back and widens her smile, determination in her eye, and here is Wynter's strength. She is soft and sweet and dopey at times, more of a lapdog than a werewolf – but she is strong in ways you cannot see, and she can always be relied upon to be the bright light in Willa's dark and hopeless chasms.

Wyatt appreciates that about her.

He's about to say something else, to ask her about how the day has gone, or what they've caught for dinner, or if she thinks the fire might need more kindling, but he's interrupted by the raucous laughter and thundering feet of the pups as they spill back into the den, fed up with being relegated to the tunnels when they could be playing in the open space afforded to them here. There's fifteen of them in all, ranging in age from eleven to fourteen, most of them on the younger side.

Wanda comes with them; Wyatt gets the flames licking at the base of his fire, growing and growing, and then sits back and watches the pups play as he tends it. His little sister is in the middle of it all, ducking and weaving as another girl chases her through the mix, shoving her way through the small pack until she is tagged and another girl starts running and the game begins all over again. He can't help but smile as he watches them. He always likes watching the pups play, ignorant of the greater problems around them.

"Are you going to see your mum?" Wynter asks at some point, feeding sticks slowly into the crackling fire.

"Later," he says and waves her away. "After dinner, maybe. She'll wait." He feels guilty, deep down, but pushes it away, and focuses on watching his sister instead.

It takes ten minutes for Wanda to realise that he is there, and only a few minutes after that for her to get sick of the games and come bounding over to him, throwing herself down at his side, her head on his shoulder as she catches her breath.

"Don't you have lessons tonight?" he asks softly, prodding the coals at the base of the fire with a long stick. "You'll all be tired before you even get there, if you keep playing games like that."

"No we won't," she scoffs in reply and picks up a stick from the edge of the fire, playing with the coals herself. "We're only learning about markings tonight. Will says we might get our pack mark soon, if we get them all right."

"And do you know what they all mean?" he asks indulgently. She sits up, pulling a face at him, disgusted that he would even ask such a question.

"I know all of them," she claims boldly.

"Oh, you do?" He grins, teasing her, and then puts down the stick so that he can hold out his arm for her to see. "Do you know what this one means?" he asks and points, to the big, complex diamond on his forearm.

"That's our pack," she tells him proudly, and reaches out a finger to trace the line softly, up and down and back and forth until she comes back to where she started, a neverending pattern.

"And this one?" he asks and turns his hand so that he can point to the three leaves on his wrist.

"Our family," Wanda replies, and points at each of the leaves in turn. "Mum, and dad, and us." She doesn't take note of the inky black line slashed through the middle of their father's name, but moves down his wrist instead.

"These ones are the trials," she says without prompting, and traces each line, each scar of a claw slashed across his wrist. "Strength, swiftness, bravery, cunning." She leans across him so that she can tap the star on his other arm, small and painted in yellow, painful to acquire. "Next in line," she names it, and gives him a grin that is all teeth.

"You really do listen in your lessons," Wyatt teases her gently, and lets her trace the big star again. Pack and pride, that's what it means, one for each of them when they come of age.

"I told you," she insists, and then reaches up and taps the two lines on his cheek. "I even know what these ones mean."

"Oh yeah?" he goads her, and tries not to laugh. "What do they mean then, pup?"

"They mean you're Beta. Second in command." She smiles, proud of herself, and then pauses as a new thought enters her mind.

"Wyatt?" she asks slowly, and he hums in response. "Why aren't you the Alpha?"

"That's a good question," he says and pulls at one of her pigtails. "Maybe I should be the Alpha. Then I wouldn't have to answer so many questions."

She makes a noise of protest and squirms away from him, out of reach of his hands. "But why?" she insists, when she's sure he won't pull her hair again.

"You know why," he tells her, his laugh fading away into a soft smile. "The Alpha is the strongest wolf, and Willa is the strongest."

Wanda pauses, mulling it over.

"Do you think I could be Beta one day?" she asks eventually.

He raises an eyebrow. "You don't want to be Alpha?" he asks.

"No," she scoffs like he's being silly, and crawls back to his side. "I want to be like you."

ooo

As the sun goes down the next day, far too many hours after he had been summoned to see her, he gathers his courage and walks down into the den to talk to his mother.

It's cool down here, deep in the earth. The main cavern they gather in most often sits on the edge of the mountain, looking out over Seabrook and all the things that once were theirs, but the further into the den you travel, the deeper underground you get; the more rock and dirt and trees are packed in over your head.

Wyatt doesn't much like it down deep – he'd spent his childhood running through these rocky passages, of course, has been down to the underground river at the very bottom of the caves, where the rocks glimmer blue-black in their wolf-sight and the water is sweet and pure. But he doesn't come down here out of any urge to do so, not when there is the wild and the wide open sky to beckon to him each moonrise.

His mother likes it down here, in the cool and the dark, and so she has chosen to rest in one of the deepest rooms they have carved from the rock, slumbering amidst a pile of down and furs. Three other women sleep here too, quiet in the shadows, but he has never seen them wake, hasn't heard their voices since they faded away a year or so ago, no more life left to steal. He tries to pretend they aren't here when he comes down. If he looks at them, at the rest of the pack – if he looks at who is left, strong and healthy - he will crack and break and burn like the forest in a summer blaze.

He is the Beta. He cannot break.

She's sleeping when he enters the room, his eyes adjusting to the darkness with just a touch of help from his moonstone. She looks peaceful, her breath a whisper, her dark hair fanned out behind her head, the one streak of white half-hidden behind her ear. She looks like Willa – or, more accurately, Willa looks like her. Wanda too, the older she gets.

He sits beside her and takes her hand, and waits for her to wake.

It takes several minutes. At first, he thinks she might sleep through his entire visit, or that maybe he will have to wait for hours to speak to her, but then her eyelids flutter and her head turns and she squints up at him with bleary eyes that show no recognition. "Mum," he whispers and squeezes her hand, like he can will her back to life. And maybe if he was brave enough, he could share his moonstone with her…but he doesn't know how much time he has left, how much time she needs to take, and he is selfish and desperate and oh so alive-

"Wyatt?" she croaks, her voice cracking like old leather.

"Yes, Mum," he says and squeezes her hand again. "I'm here. I came."

She looks around, as far as she can, and then back to him. "Where's Willa?" she asks. "Where's Wanda? I told you to stay together, I-"

"You saw them yesterday, remember?" he tells her gently. It is always like this when he comes – she does not remember, and Willa does not come with him to assuage her fears. "I was out in the forest. Willa said you wanted to see me."

"Oh…yes…they were…" Her voice drifts away into the walls of stone pressing in around them. Her other hand rises instead, soft fingers curling gently around the moonstone that dangles from his neck. "Such an ugly shape," she whispers. "Such a waste of a stone."

"I like it, Mum," he replies and pries it out of her grasp, tucking it away into his shirt. It rests cold against his skin, bright and angry like the snows of winter.

"I had a dream about you last night, Wyatt."

He looks up from the stone, and finds her smiling softly up at him, the same smile he's been taking comfort in all his life. "What did you dream about?" he asks, and she almost laughs but it turns into a cough instead, her moonstone lighting up around her neck with a crimson glow. He waits for her to recover, wishing he could do more than just hold her hand (wishing she would forgive him, if he allowed a single drop of his moonstone to course through her veins instead).

The cough lasts a long time, drawing her up from her bed to sit and hack away at her lungs and draw in raspy half-breaths that never have a hope of filling her chest. She's quiet for several seconds when it is over, staring at her lap like she's forgotten what she was saying before.

"Mum?" he whispers, almost afraid of what might happen next.

She only shakes her head and turns to meet his eyes, giving his hand a feeble squeeze. "I dreamt you will find the moonstone," she murmurs, like a secret shared only between them and the darkness. "It was a true dream. A prophecy."

He doesn't know what to say – he frowns, his mouth half open like he might rebuke her, but nothing comes out. A prophecy. No one has spoken prophecy, or even claimed to do so, since the first moonstones were forged. It was a sacred thing that they knew not to mess with, not to take lightly.

Only the pups made any game of prophecies and truth-telling – he had played at it himself, when he was young enough that every dream could be lived for a few hours, standing tall amongst the rocks outside the den and proclaiming to speak the future. But he was far past that age now, his mother even further – and now they sat inside the walls of the den, where true-spoken words were taken as law.

"Do you know?" she asks, in the silence that follows, thinking he has misunderstood. "What a true dream is?"

He nods mutely; he has not forgotten his lessons. Every pup learns about the dreaming, the messages the moonstone leaves to lead them in the right direction. They are taught when they are young that the prophecies were seen in the dreams of the first wolves, that it is part of their power to be able to close their eyes and seek the future. He has never been able to do it, has never seen or heard of anyone else doing it. It's a talent long since lost to them, or a myth fabricated by generations past, the real origin of the prophecies forgotten by time.

"You will find it, Wyatt," she repeats, like she knows he doesn't believe it – and she does, she can see it in his eyes, the hesitation. The disbelief. "And the Great Alpha. I still believe." She cocks her head to the side, staring at him with eyes that reach back a thousand years. "Do you still believe?"

He swallows down the doubt that creeps in from the edges, the sick feeling of doom he gets when the others talk so boldly about how the prophecies are lies and the moon has abandoned them and the Great Alpha has already lived and died, or never lived at all. "I believe," he whispers.

His mother smiles, and then coughs again. When she removes her hand from her mouth, her fingers glisten wet with blood. "You should rest," he says, trying to coax her into lying down again. "Save your strength. It'll be better soon, I promise."

"No," she replies, and struggles against him until he gives up. "I've slept for long enough. I need to talk to you, Wyatt."

"It can wait," he insists; and there is something in her eyes, an understanding that wasn't there before, a dark spot he does not want to uncover.

"No." She is firm, the way she used to be so long ago when they were misbehaving pups and her temper was the worst cruelty they had ever known. His heart aches at the thought of it, at the days that were bright and the black nights that they'd chase each other through, and the warm arms that had always been the first to welcome them home. They'd been strong and firm, and the way she embraced them whispered a promise to never let them go.

Now those arms are feeble and weak, wasting away, and her voice wavers with every word she struggles to form. Now, she is a ghost, and he can barely stand the sight of her as such.

"I'm going to die, Wyatt," she says, as gently as she can.

The words hit him like a brick anyway, rocking him backwards like a boat in a storm. He lets go of her hand like he's been stung, his breath hitching in his throat; no, it can't be true, it can't be real, not yet, not yet, not yet…

"It's okay, little wolf," she says, and reaches for him. He flinches away, from her hand and from the nickname, the thing his father used to call him when he was a child, before he learnt to keep up with the others as good as any. He'd been the smaller twin for most of his life, the runt of the pups born that year, and he'd only caught up to his sister ten or so long summers later. Until then, he'd been the little one, in everything but heart.

"No," he says, and clears his throat like there's something stuck in it. "No, you're not going to – we're going to find the moonstone. You'll get better. It'll just be a little bit longer."

"My stone is out of power," she tells him, and her fingers brush at the nape of her neck, the cord that holds her moonstone, bone-white and cold as night, to her neck. "It's okay, Wyatt. I'm okay."

"No," he says again. He stands up. Something is clutching at his chest, tight fingers squeezing at his lungs until he can't breathe in anymore. His head spins, his vision blurs – it's too dark in here, too cold. There's too many words hiding in the walls. He needs the moon, the air, the ground, the sky. He needs to breathe, he needs to-

"Wyatt!" her voice echoes behind him, but he is already gone, stumbling through the darkness half-blind, desperate for some light. He can still hear her in his head; little wolf, little wolf, I'm going to die, little wolf. It's okay. But it's not okay, she is dying, and he is born to die, and his sister will die too, and Wanda…Wanda…

There are voices ahead of him, cutting through the fog in his head. There's torchlight in this part of the caves, the light of the flickering flames just barely reaching his eyes, soothing a little of the panic that's pushed his feet up and up towards the surface. The voices are coming towards him, and he's dimly aware that he can't been seen like this, unsteady on his feet and gasping for breath and shaking like he's sat in the snow for several hours. He is the Beta of the pack. He must be strong.

He can't be strong.

He ducks away from the voices, into the nearest room he can find, and the deep shadows inside that will gladly hide him.

As the other wolves come past, sauntering downward with feet and hearts much lighter than his, he slips right to the back of the room, into the corner where the shadows are deepest, where a big pillar of stone hides him from view of the doorway. He means to stand and wait and then to leave again, his only thought to get to the surface, to look at the moon and breathe in fresh air until his head is clear again, but as he waits, he feels his legs grow weak beneath him, feels himself crumple to the ground, his back pressed to the cold rock of the wall. He feels hot tears roll down his cheeks and a sob choke its way out of his throat.

He doesn't know how long he stays there. How many tears he cries. How long it is until he draws in his next proper breath, his throat raw and hollow.

When he finishes his climb to the top of the den, he is only thinking of escape. There's nothing else left in him. His tears have been left with the moonstones, his strength of mind with his mother. His spirit with his ancestors, more wolf than he has ever had the power to be.

Willa stops him at the mouth of the cave.

"Where are you going?" she demands.

He whips around, walking backwards, feet steady as ever against the stone floor of the den. "I'm going to find the Great Alpha!" he tells her, his hands spread in a challenge, daring her to make him stay. She is taken aback, left with nothing to say.

He leaves before she can start to argue or reason with him, before Wynter can get in his way long enough for them to corner him. He half expects to hear them chasing after him, to have to bolt from the den and disappear into the forest; but there is nothing but silence.

Willa lets him go without another word.

It's still warm outside, even in the dark that settles between sunset and moonrise. It will be a warm night, he guesses, and muggy tomorrow. Perhaps there is a storm coming for them, rolling in across the sea. It certainly feels that way.

He lopes along through the trees, moving at a pace that won't tire him quickly but also settles the restlessness gnawing at his gut. The den disappears quickly behind him, the river and the fence and the glow of the lights from the human's settlement. He keeps going, on and on, until the moon is full above him and he finds himself in territory he hasn't seen since he was a little pup running amuck on hunting trips, a ghost in his father's shadow.

He slows down in a depression in the earth, breathing in the cooler air that sits between the unfamiliar trees of the gully, staring up at the rocks he can see rising to either side of him. His breath comes in gulps, spent from the hours of steady movement, and his heart pounds in his chest, just loud enough to tell him he is alive.

If he was a wolf, he would turn back now, back to the pack, his energy spent and his territory exceeded. He wouldn't worry about his pride or any long-foretold prophecy, or dread what he might find when he arrives home. He wouldn't know all the things the future held, the dreary, frightful end that creeps closer and closer with each passing day.

He isn't a wolf. There are no territory lines over which to cross, and his mind will not forget the future he was born to die without.

Sometimes, he wishes he wasn't a werewolf either.

Pride won't let him turn back, and neither will despair, the slow realisation that the pack is not forever and his mother is living on borrowed time – time that has already been spent. And then, if he does the maths, Willa-

He stops and coughs, clutches at his moonstone and struggles to breathe through the panic that grips his chest like a vice. He looks into its light, dreading the awful, sickly yellow – but it is only a glimmer in the blue, a touch of green to warn him that time is running short. He stumbles and catches himself on a tree, rests his forehead against its cool bark. He breathes.

He's been so careful. So sparing with its power, so apprehensive of anything that requires him to draw from it, his dwindling life force. His one fatal flaw, strung around his neck like so many pearls. He's tried to figure out its history, to calculate how long he has left. So far, he's gotten eleven years from it – but how long had his predecessor worn it for? Eighty years? Eighty-eight? Had they died young, and unknowingly gifted him life so long that to his generation, he would seem eternal? Or was he down to months now, the hundred years the stone could carry finally wasted away?

What a time to live in. What a wolf to be, out of all the hundreds of wolves that have trekked through these mountains. Had any of his ancestors ever stood in this gully before him, the rising moon hidden behind these tall walls of rock? Had they known how it would end, their descendants clinging to scraps of power from long-discarded moonstones, promised no more than twenty years of bright moons and pounding hearts and wild chases through the den?

But no, they would never have known. They'd thought the Great Alpha would come, that the moonstone would be found, just like he had. They'd lived and died with moonstones they never saw the end of, comforted by the knowledge that they were always meant to be born, that the ancients had provided for them the day the moonstones were created.

Wyatt drops the stone like he's been burnt, and lets his shirt sit between it and his skin. He pushes off the tree and angles across the gully, fighting his way through the bracken towards the great tumble of rocks to his left. The weight of the stone drags at his neck, catching at his feet like a ball and chain, unwilling to be forgotten.

It reminds him always that this is not his life, that this stone has never belonged to him. That when this world began, he was never a thought in the elder's minds. That he is a ghost of something once strong and fierce, a dream of what had once been and might never be again.

He is not a wolf, and he is a poor example of a werewolf, alone and climbing slowly through this valley of ghosts, a stolen moonstone tied choking around his neck.

He finds a cave that he can squeeze himself into, a crack in the rocks with a floor of loose peat and dry leaves. He lays there, his head propped up against a rock and his folded jacket, and watches the bright, round moon as it rises into the heights of the sky.

It doesn't take long for him to feel himself slipping away into sleep, even with his mind buzzing as it is. He's been sleeping fitfully as of late, curled up in a corner far from Willa's sights, his treacherous moonstone wound up in its cord and stashed beneath a rock to preserve its power. Sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night, half-blind and gasping for breath, groping desperately for the warmth of the stone. Tonight, he leaves it strung around his neck, and the hum of its power lulls him into peace.

This would be a good place to die, if any, he notes to himself as he drifts away.

ooo

Deep in the wild, awash in the glow of a full moon, Wyatt dreams of two things.

The first is a memory, from when he was a little pup. He's chasing the others around and around the den, tags tiny, stumbling Wynter and bolts away to the sound of Willa's laughter. The pack is everywhere, so many faces that they blur and fade at the edges. He's laughing as he runs, and then he's coughing, and then he's on the ground wheezing, lungs empty and knees stinging where he's scraped them against the rocks.

His vision blurs, his ears dull until words become muffled roars and he can barely hear Willa's terrified sobs…and then he blinks and his mother is crouched beside him, smiling gently as her hand rests upon his chest. Air floods his lungs at the touch of her fingers, and as he lays there, gulping down great lungfuls of air, he can hear his father approaching. His boots are heavy and his voice is loud and he chases away the other pups – their footsteps, in comparison, are the gentle rushing of field mice as they disappear into the caverns, here one second and then gone the next.

"Be more careful with this one, little wolf," his father says, and fastens something heavy and rectangular around his neck. He takes away the dull white stone Wyatt was already wearing, the delicately chiselled heart he'd worn since the day he was born. He watches it go, sees it one last time cradled in his father's palm before it is gone forever.

"Oh, Wyatt," his mother says, and draws him up from the ground and into her arms. She says nothing more but there isn't anything else she needs to say; it is all there in her voice, in the way her arms cling to him like she'll never let him go.

The second dream is a fantasy, a figment of his imagination. In it, he is in the dark, watching a girl with hair as white as a winter moon dancing in the light, twisting and clawing and reaching for something he cannot see. He won't remember her face when he wakes, or the sound of her voice as she howls to the moon, but he will remember the way he imagines her eyes – blue as a summer sky and glimmering like they hold a secret to which he doesn't have the key.

He wakes up at sunrise with his face pressed to the flat of a grey slab of rock, his chest split in two with desperate longing and his hand stretched out in search of something he will never reach.

ooo

The pack are waiting outside the den for him, lazing on the rocks in the afternoon sunshine. Even the pups are out and about, hanging from the branches of the trees or scratching lines in the dirt. They are a small pack now, he thinks as he approaches, his eyes ranging across his collected family. They are all so young too, none over twenty years – everyone older is hidden inside, unable to help and unaware that it is just them left, just the scraps and the bones, the ones that destiny forgot.

He expects Willa to greet him, or to step up and have a go at him for disappearing, either publicly or in private. What he is not expecting is for Winona to rise from the centre of the pack. The other wolves are gathered at her feet, gazing up at her as she stands upon the tallest rock outside the den.

High and mighty, that's Winona, an impatient curl to her claws and a snarl always pulling at her lips. Wyatt stops at the base of the rocks, well out of her reach, and wonders if he should be worried about Willa.

"Well, look who it is," Winona says, hands planted on her hips, moonstone shining brightly around her neck. "Running home with your tail between your legs, Wyatt? Come to finally lead us?"

"Where's Willa?' Wyatt asks in return, a question for a question. The pit in his stomach yawns wider. He casts his eyes around for his sister, but he only finds Wynter, pressed back between two large boulders where Winona won't see her. She meets his eye and then glances back meaningfully at the den – and then up at Winona, with an unease that makes him think he knows exactly what is going on here.

"Willa is nowhere," Winona says. "She's hiding down deep, right when we need our Alpha the most." As she talks, Wyatt catches Wynter's eye and gives the smallest of nods towards the den. She's quick off the ball; the moment he does it, she's gone, sliding between the crowd and disappearing into the den before Winona finishes.

Wyatt wants to go too, wants to know what could possibly keep Willa inside when there's big trouble brewing just out here – but he's Beta, and they are disrespecting him as much as they are the Alpha, and he cannot let them get away with it.

"Get down from the rock, Winona," he says, in a voice that is calm and coaxing, trying to head off the trouble that is brewing. "Tell me what's happening."

"Why?" she demands, and for a moment he thinks she might stomp her foot like an indignant child. "Why should I listen to you? What gives you the right to tell me what to do?"

Wyatt frowns. "Because I'm Beta?" he points out for her, like she's stupid, and earns himself a few grins from the gathered wolves.

"And who made you Beta?" she demands. "Who made her Alpha? If the elders were still here-"

"No one makes an Alpha," he interrupts. "Wolves don't ask for promotions or power. They take it."

She laughs at him, a breathy, short gasp of mirth as she rocks back on her heels. "They take it," she repeats, like she has not known the way of the wolves her whole life. "Well then, Beta-" She jumps from the boulder, the sound of her boots landing on the rocks below ringing around the clearing as she stalks across it. "This is me. Taking it."

"What?" Wyatt says, but too late – she stands over him and glowers, eyes wolf yellow, moonstone bright as the afternoon sky.

"I'm Alpha now," she informs him. "Your sister has proven before that she's not fit to lead. Remember the hunters? The men from the north?" She turns back to the others, arms spread in search of approval. They shuffle uncomfortably, unwilling to pick a side either way. Wyatt takes note of the few that nod along in agreement.

"She didn't lead us them, and she won't lead us now," Winona claims, turning back to Wyatt.

He swallows down the panic, the urge to fight or flee at the feral look in Winona's eyes. She's much too close for his liking, for the things she is claiming and the threats she is making. Winona is taller than him, well over six feet, and she fights like a bear – a wall of meaty flesh and sharp teeth and angry claws, impenetrable and near undefeatable. He's desperate to take a step back, to put some distance between them, but to yield is to defer power to her. If the Beta defers, the pack will too, and then Willa will be nobody. Nothing.

"Do you know what's happened while you've been away, Wyatt?" she asks, spitting his name into the dirt with bold and blatant disrespect. "Or have you been too busy exploring the forest, searching for myths and legends?"

Another Beta would leap at her throat for saying such things, for questioning his place and his reason for doing the things he has done. Even if another Beta wouldn't fight, they would have an Alpha at their side, ready to step in, to protect them. At this very moment, Wyatt finds himself with no one but himself, and the desperate hope that Wynter will return soon with his sister.

"Tell me what happened, then," he requests of Winona, as calm as she is enraged.

"You don't know," she says, almost laughing at him. She's already satisfied with this victory, with this one bit of knowledge she gets to dangle over his head. "You're supposed to be our leader, and you don't even know what's happened in your own territory."

"I'll never know if you don't tell me."

There's a pause, one Winona deliberately draws out to the breaking point before she folds. "There are humans in the forest," she tells him finally. "They came in the night, closer to the den than they've ever been. Walker almost ran straight into them."

Wyatt struggles to remain impassive. "Where were they seen?" he asks, and thinks back to the last time he'd been watching the humans. Three days ago now, he'd seen them, but they had only been fixing the broken part of the fence that lines their road, not interested in coming any closer.

"They were in the old building by the bridge," Will says from the rocks. Winona snaps around to glare at him, but he only shrugs, rating his own interruption as necessary. "They're just kids looking for ghosts. They're not a threat."

Winona turns back to Wyatt, flicking her hair over one shoulder. "They spent most of the night in the ruins, and then they went down the river."

"Just along the river?" Wyatt asks, looking past Winona to Will, who nods. "They will never find the den from the river."

"And if they cross the river?" Winona asks, her face screwed up in displeasure.

"Then you should go inside, instead of sitting here waiting for them to find you."

"Maybe we would be, if we weren't waiting around for our leaders to show up and lead." They glare at each other, teeth bared.

Winona breaks first, lifting her chin and sucking in a deep breath like she's about to make a decision.

"It doesn't matter now," she says, loud enough for the whole pack to hear. "I'm the Alpha now. I won't abandon the pack for my own needs."

"No one has abandoned the pack, Winona," Wyatt tries to reason.

"Then where is our Alpha?" she demands.

"Right here," a voice says behind her, steady and strong, and Wyatt breathes a sigh of relief.

Winona whips around as the pack scrambles out of Willa's way, and suddenly Wyatt is forgotten, free to take two large steps out of Winona's reach. Willa stands in the centre of the pack, her hands curled into fists and her eyes alight with quiet fury.

Wynter hovers nervously to her right and she has Wanda with her too, the pup half-hidden behind her, a hand curled around her wrist as she peeks out at the rest of the pack. When she spots Wyatt she lets go, darting from Willa's side and slipping straight past Winona to get to him. Willa doesn't move to stop her, doesn't do anything but glare at Winona, aware of the fight that is to come. He catches Wanda as she all but runs into him, his heart in his throat, and wonders what he would have done if the rogue wolf had reached for her on her way past.

"I knew I couldn't trust you, Winona," Willa says, and if looks could kill, Winona would wither away on the spot under the Alpha's gaze. "Did you even wait five minutes before declaring yourself Alpha? Or did you decide to betray me the moment you heard the news?"

There's something raw and open in Willa's voice, a wound that has been hastily bandaged, but Wyatt's not sure what has caused it. Winona is unsympathetic, snarling at the Alpha without any regard to the rules of respect the pack live by. "There are humans in the forest," she snaps, hackles raised. "This has nothing to do with opportunity, only your ability to lead."

"This has everything to do with it!" Willa's eyes flash yellow, a growl gathering behind her words, deep and angry and powerful. The pack take a step back. Wanda ducks behind Wyatt, her fist curled in the back of his shirt. "Everyone knows you want to be Alpha, Winona. You don't care about humans near the den, or the moonstone, or whatever else you've been using to turn my own pack against me. You only care about yourself, and the things you think you're entitled to. Ever since I became Alpha-"

"Ever since you became Alpha, the pack has been weak!" Winona screams the words to the woods, hunched defensively like she knows she is making enemies of everyone that surrounds her. Willa stands tall and proud and doesn't even flinch at her words as the pack shifts nervously around her. Only Wyatt sees the fear behind her eyes, the minute shake of her hands as they clench into tight fists.

"We are all weak," he speaks, because just as it is the Alpha's job to support him, so too is it his job to support the Alpha. "No one has a moonstone with full charge anymore. Willa has protected us as well as anyone can. Better than anyone can."

"What have you done for us, Winona?" Willa adds, stepping forward. "What have I done wrong, that you think I'm not worthy to lead?"

"Everything!" Winona snaps. The sound of her voice echoes off the rocks and up through the trees – if the humans at the river haven't heard them by now, they cannot be much of a danger at all. "You do not lead! You listen to him-" she twists, pointing an accusatory finger at Wyatt, "-more than you listen to yourself, or anyone in the pack! You wander off alone, when we could need you at any time, any day. You let humans wander our territory while we hide under the ground! They don't even know we exist anymore! That they took our moonstone!"

"We don't have the strength to defend ourselves if the humans came after us," Wyatt interrupts. "There's no point fighting a war we're guaranteed to lose."

"So instead we stay in the den and wait to die?" Winona shakes her head. "We're supposed to be werewolves, not rabbits. How can you lead if you can't even honour our heritage? Our birthright? Our way of life?"

She casts her eyes over the gathered wolves, but they are all silent now, edging away from the coming conflict. Even the ones she had thought would support her are hesitant, aware that every word she speaks is a stride further she will be driven from the den when all this is over.

Our birthright echoes in Wyatt's mind. How funny, that she would choose that sort of phrasing when they have known all their lives that they have no birthright at all, no name in the list of prophecies, no moonstone set aside for them centuries ago, like their parents and grandparents before them.

"I should be Alpha," Winona presses on, despite the lack of support. "I was raised to lead the pack. I know what it takes, and I will do what needs to be done for us to survive."

"No," Willa says, firm and final. "There is no birthright to being Alpha. There is only the strong-" she gestures to herself, "-and the weak." Her hand turns towards Winona, and her lips quirk in a cruel smile.

Winona laughs, a sharp and abrasive sound that grates at Wyatt's ears. "You think you're strong?" she asks. "You're a fraud and a cheat. You're nothing on your own – you need your brother for everything, every decision, every fight. Where would you be if you had to do it alone, like the rest of us? If your father hadn't done what he did? If you had no brother at all?"

Willa's eyes move past Winona, seeking her brother. Wyatt meets her gaze; hers is hot and angry, his wary and careful, equally aware of the pup behind him as he is of the danger looming between him and his twin. She's looking for something specific from him – an eagerness to join the fight, perhaps, or an anger that burns as hot as hers. She knows he will have her back, whatever she does. But she doesn't find what she is looking for.

Winona revels in the silence that follows.

"Nothing to say?" she asks, and relaxes just a little. "No defense for your crimes?"

"We've committed no crime," Willa claims, stiff and stilted.

"You've stolen a moonstone!" Wyatt's hand curls, unbidden, around the stone that hides under his shirt. "The last moonstone, the last life we could have had! Our elders agreed, one stone each. The life we get is the life we get. And when his time came, your father stole another moonstone and broke every promise we made to each other!"

"Our father was cast out for that!" Willa shouts. "That choice was his alone, not ours. The price has already been paid."

"And yet, Wyatt still lives!"

Winona turns and fixes him with a glare, icy cold and detached, like he is nothing but the stone around his neck. A shiver runs down his spine. He's never liked Winona, but he's never wanted her dead – and he's never thought that she wanted him dead either. He'd just thought her jealous, entitled to something that isn't hers to have and bitter that no one is around to hand it to her anymore. But this is something else, something bigger, a wound that has cut deep and festered long, that is poisoning her from the inside out until she cannot stand it any longer.

Willa can't stand it either. He sees it before anyone else does, the quiet gathering of the Alpha at Winona's turned back. The leap she takes, claws outstretched and teeth bared.

They go down into the dirt amidst the screeches and howls of the gathered pack, who scramble to get further away, to put some distance between themselves and the fighting wolves. Wyatt takes several steps back to the edge of the trees, grabbing Wanda as he goes, making her turn away. Hoping someone on the other side will chase away the other pups, won't let them watch as the two girls fight for control of the pack.

They scrabble in the dirt, kicking and clawing at each other. It is hard to tell who is winning; at first, Willa has the other girl pinned to the ground, but Winona heaves and slashes and throws her off in a cloud of dust. She rips at Willa's throat with her claws, barely scraping skin, trying to grab her moonstone. The Alpha bares her teeth and lunges again. Her claws draw blood - deep, long gashes in Winona's arm - and Winona howls and stumbles back, reeling. Willa presses forwards relentlessly.

At Wyatt's side, Wanda sobs and hides her face in his jacket, clinging to him so tightly he's not sure he can breathe around her. "Don't look, little wolf," he murmurs and wraps one arm around her, determined to keep her safe, even if they are the next ones Winona comes for. She curls into him, her fist gripping his shirt a little tighter.

He holds her, his little sister, who should never have to see these things, and watches as the eldest of them fights for their place in the pack.

There's a crack of wood splintering, and the heavy thump of two solid objects colliding, and then Willa has Winona pinned to a tree on the far side of the clearing, her forearm pressed to the traitor's throat. Wyatt's grip on Wanda tightens, a reminder to her to close her eyes, to hide her face.

"Do you yield?" Willa hisses, loud enough for the whole pack to hear. Winona spits in her face, a gobful of blood and dirt and saliva. Willa flinches away, howling in disgust.

Winona rips out of her grasp, rams her shoulder into the other girl, and runs.

Willa bolts after her. They disappear into the forest.

"Wynter!" Wyatt shouts urgently, and all but drags Wanda back to the rocks. Have to go, have to help, can't let Willa- Wynter leaps down from the den's entrance, meeting him at the bottom of the rocks. "Take Wanda," he tells her and carefully extricates his sister from his side. He will feel bad later, for leaving her here alone, but right now all he can think about is Willa, Willa, Willa.

"You're in charge," he says as he leaves, and doesn't even notice the way Wynter turns sheet white at the idea of it.

This wild chase through the forest is nothing like the pace he'd set running away two days ago. He bolts, drawing strength from his moonstone, his breath short and his heart pounding like a rabbit running from a trap. He's moving as fast as his feet will carry him, ducking and diving between the trees, whipping through the undergrowth with no regard for the trail he leaves behind him. The girls are ahead of him still, crashing through the forest like a whole herd of stampeding deer.

He reaches them just as they reach each other, bursting from the trees in time to see Winona fall, her knee twisting in all the wrong directions. She hits the ground hard and rolls, only stopping when she slams into a large outcropping of rock that sticks out of the ground like a giant's tooth.

"Yield!" Willa roars, towering over her. A growl gathers in Winona's throat as she struggles to rise. Willa snarls, her moonstone flashing deep blue, and Winona slumps back to the ground, utterly defeated.

"Damn you," she whimpers and spits again, this time at Willa's feet. Her mouth is full of blood, and her lip is fat and bleeding. There's a gash on her forehead too, from a hit that was probably hard enough to make her see stars, and blood runs from the open wounds on her arm, the deep lacerations where she'd felt the edge of Willa's claws.

"You are not part of this pack anymore," Willa says stiffly. "Leave the mountains and never return, or the might of the pack will be turned against you."

Winona coughs, flashing red teeth at them as she splutters and gasps for breath. "Like I want to be part of your pack anyway," she hisses, craning her neck to look up at Willa with eyes that are hurt, angry…sad. "Sitting around, waiting to die. Wasting moonstones on wolves that don't deserve them."

Her eyes slide across the clearing to Wyatt, fixing on him, steady and damning. He is frozen between two trees, unable to move, to escape the accusations she pins upon him, the guilt of knowing that she is right.

In the corner of his eye, he sees Willa looking at him, her eyes turning slowly from angry to anxious. "It's been eleven years," she says, when he doesn't acknowledge her. "Why do you still care? Why do you even remember?"

Winona's eyes snap back to his sister, to the Alpha. Wyatt lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding, as she grunts and pushes herself up onto her knees, swiping at the blood that trickles down her cheek with the back of her hand.

"My brother was the first to die," she snarls. "The first one to be born when there were no more stones to be passed around. You might not remember, but I-"

Her voice hitches and stops, and she swipes furiously at her face. She's crying, Wyatt realises, and creeps slowly into the clearing. She jerks upright at the movement, scrambling desperately to her feet – she is panicking, surrounded by enemies and barely able to stand, her knee collapsing underneath her halfway on her first try. Wyatt almost reaches to help, his mind in turmoil, but stops just short of physical movement. Winona will not thank him for any kind of support. She will probably take the opportunity to rip his throat out.

"I didn't know about your brother," he blurts out instead. "I'm sorry."

Winona stares at him, swaying unsteadily on her feet. "Your father said sorry too," she replies coldly. "The day they sent him away. Do you remember that?" Wyatt nods mutely; he's forgotten the passing of one boy, so close to his own near-death, but time will never wipe away the image of his father walking away, bearing his sentence for a crime Wyatt had not understood as a pup.

It's only in these recent years he's come to realise what it meant, what his father had done. In times like these, he sort of wishes he'd never done it at all.

"Apologies don't bring back the dead," she continues, the hard edge of her voice never softening. "They won't bring back my brother, and they won't bring back my mother either, or my father's broken heart."

She reaches up, wincing at the way the movement rips at the cuts on her arm, and pulls her moonstone off of her neck, clutching it in her fist.

"You took his life," she says, staring at the stone. "You, the little, weak one, who should never have been born at all." She swallows hard, and then throws the stone at Wyatt.

"Here," she says, voice cracking and raw. "Now you can take mine too."

The stone hits Wyatt square in the chest, hard enough that he takes a step backwards at the impact. One hand shoots up to catch it before it falls to the ground.

Willa's eyes widen in alarm. "No," she says, one hand outstretched like she can stop what has already been done. "Winona, take it back. You won't live for a week without-"

"And how long will I live with it?" Winona asks, and uses the rock she'd crashed into to stumble a few steps backwards, away from them. "You aren't sick of not knowing? Living each day waiting to die, believing in some great leader who will never come?" She snorts in derision. "A day is all I want. Long enough to get away from you two and that thing around his neck and the slow death you've spent your lives waiting for."

"Winona-" Wyatt says, and he intends to try and persuade her not to do what she is doing, but he hesitates, and she jumps on the moment of pause he allows.

"You killed me," she snaps, and points an accusing finger at them. "Remember that. Whisper it to the den's walls as you die in there, all alone. Your father killed my brother, and you killed me."

She turns and limps off into the forest, disappearing between the trees. Willa is silent and still as a statue. Wyatt's pretty sure he can feel his moonstone tightening around his neck, choking him…

He pushes it away and thinks of the pack instead, his eyes straying to the trail they left through the forest, the way back home.

"We should go back, Willa," he says, a hand on her shoulder.

She turns and looks at him, and her eyes are heavy and conflicted, unsure where to turn next. A bruise blooms on her jaw, and dirt is smudged over her Alpha marking. There's scratch marks all around her neck, faint lines of trickling blood that her moonstone desperately wants to knit back together. She's preserving its power, choosing to wear the marks rather than erase them.

She stares at him for several long seconds, trying to find the words to describe anything she's feeling and failing…and then her eyes trail down to his hand, to Winona's moonstone.

She blinks.

"Give me that," she demands, and reaches out, snatching it from between his fingers before he can pull away.

"What?" he says, confused. "Why? What are you going to do with it?"

"We have to go," she says instead of answering and grabs his arm, trying to drag him back towards the den. He only takes a few steps, out of surprise rather than compliance, and then digs his heels in and refuses to move.

"We don't have time for this, Wyatt," she insists, and her brow furrows in annoyance, her voice shaking as she says his name. She lets him go, takes a few steps without him, pausing only for a second to see if he is coming. "We have to go now," she insists, and then she can stand to stay no longer, disappearing into the trees without him.

He follows her shadow home, never quite able to catch up and not sure that he wants to. Willa is manic as she moves through the trees, desperate to reach whatever it is she won't tell him about. She hasn't told him she's injured either, but he sees it now in her stride – there's a limp there, a stiffness to the right side of her body, like something is hurting her every time she moves.

She only stops when she reaches the den, slowing down so that she can walk into the clearing with all the confidence and poise of an Alpha, the complete opposite to the mad shuffle he's been following since she took the moonstone from him. She stops halfway up the rocks, when she is standing taller than most of the others around her, and looks down upon them, her gaze as angry as a forest fire.

"Does anyone else want to be Alpha?" she asks, voice booming. No one replies; on the contrary, they all turn away and hide their faces, sufficiently cowed by Winona's loss.

"Don't challenge me again," Willa says, the faintest threat echoing in her voice, and then she continues up the rocks, disappearing into the den.

The pack are silent, eyes to the floor. Willa is gone. Wyatt's head buzzes; where has she been all this time, and where has she gone now? What was it that was so important inside that she had abandoned the pack long enough for Winona to take a hold of her title? He needs answers. He's been away for one day, but one day was far too long, and as the sun goes down he is getting restless, tired of asking questions and receiving no answers.

He makes to follow Willa, but he doesn't get more than a few steps before he is stopped again, a small cannonball running straight into him.

Wanda hugs him tight, almost knocking the wind out of him. "Did you win?" she asks, her words almost lost in the rough fabric of his shirt.

He leans down so that he can hug her properly, trying to be nothing but warm and comforting. Trying to swallow down the jittery, nervous energy that fills his veins, the questions that clamour at the forefront of his mind. "Willa won," he assures her, and then adds, "Were you worried?"

She pulls back so that she can nod, biting at her lip so hard he's afraid she might draw blood. "Why does Winona want to fight?" she asks, small and innocent. "Wynter says it's because of our family…but isn't the whole pack our family?"

He shakes his head and slings one arm around her shoulders. "Don't you worry about it, little wolf," he tells her, and tries to sound just a little bit cheerful even though any joy he conjures up now is flat and hollow. There's nothing in him but concern and confusion now, the churning of his stomach that tells him something is not right with Willa, that this nightmare is not over yet. He swallows the feeling down again and forces himself to relax, at least while he is still holding on to his little sister.

"Want to go inside?" he asks, and steers her towards the den, glancing over his shoulder only once as Wynter falls into step somewhere behind them, wringing her hands. She knows what's going on with Willa, he notes, but resists the urge to stop and question her right there, in front of all the others.

Wanda looks up at him as they enter the den, the long, low tunnel that will deliver them through the mountain. "Are we going to see mum now?" she asks, in a voice that is much too timid to be hers. Wyatt frowns.

"Do you want to go and see her?" he asks, and then curses himself for the wave of reluctance that washes over him at the thought of going down there. He shouldn't be like that, shouldn't wonder if he can hide outside the door and leave his little sister to go in there alone, shouldn't avoid a mother he could only have weeks or days left to see.

She'd scared him the last time he was down there though, with all her talk of prophecies and dying. Even now, the weight bears heavy on his shoulders, her claim that it is his responsibility to find the moonstone. That he must save everyone, that all the things he'd never wanted were his now, Alpha or not.

On his left, opposite from Wanda, Wynter looms like a ghost from the shadows and taps him on the shoulder. "You should go," she murmurs, soft enough that Wanda will not hear. "Willa has been there all day. She's-"

Wyatt stops dead in his tracks, jerking Wanda to a halt too, and the rest of Wynter's words die in her throat. "What-" he starts, but he can't quite bring himself to ask. Wynter's face is just as damning as any answer she could have given anyway – big, sad eyes, and the anxious, jittery movement of her hands that hasn't stopped since the fight outside began.

"Please, Wyatt?" Wanda asks, tugging at his shirt. "Can we go?"

He clears his throat, tries to force a breath down into the depths of his lungs, to push away the dizzy, light-headed feeling that creeps around the edges of his thoughts. "Yeah," he forces out, a funny tilt to his voice. "We can go."

Wanda bounces on her toes, just once, and then, maybe because she sees something is wrong, wraps her arms around him tightly, the only thing she can do that might make him feel better. He breathes in and out, and then squeezes her shoulders in return and forces his feet onward once more, closer and closer to the thing he dreads the most.

Wynter walks the rest of the way in with them, a silent presence at his side, offering what little comfort she can. She melts away once they reach the den proper, slipping off in search of her favourite spot by the fire so that she can wait for Willa to return. He means to warn her that the Alpha is injured, to ask her to take care of it (Willa will not listen to him, but she will sit and be tended if Wynter is the one left to babble on about it). The words won't come out of his mouth though, his throat hollow and raw, his tongue bitter. He walks on in silence, down into the depths of the earth.

The darkness presses in around them, the caves silent and empty except for the sleeping bodies that inhabit them, the remnants of their pack, caught in between life and death with no end to either. The air is cold but Wanda is a constant warmth at his side – she's shrugged her way out from under his arm now and clings to it instead, his fingers wrapped in one of her hands, the other curled around his elbow. He wonders if she's scared of the dark – or, no, she is scared of what she's going to find down there, just like he is.

Little wolf. He can still hear his mother's voice in his head from his last visit, whispering from the walls around them. I'm going to die. It's okay. I had a true dream. I'm going to die.

It's not okay, he had said, and then he had fled, without waiting to hear what she had wanted to tell him. Was that the last time he was going to hear her voice? Is he walking down to find out she is gone, that they will dig a grave as the sun goes down? Should he have left Wanda behind, until he knew what was going on down here?

As if she can read his thoughts, Wanda shifts nervously at his side and trips over her own feet, stumbling and clinging to his arm for dear life. "Is mum going to die?" she whispers when she has righted herself, and her grip is so tight he cannot feel his fingers.

No, he wants to say. She'll be fine, we're just going to visit, but he can't bring himself to lie to her, however much he tries. "I don't know," he says instead, honest enough, though his gut knows what he truly believes.

There's a long pause where he doesn't know what to say – he doesn't want to make her sad, but he's not sure how to make it better either. Look after Wanda, his mother had said once, years ago, when she'd first found herself without the strength to leave the den, and he has tried. He has tried as best as he knows how, with no parents to remember to show him how it is done, with Willa too busy or too distant or too wound up in being the Alpha to even look at their little sister some days. But he doesn't know what to say in times like these, doesn't have any sage advice to offer her. He is as lost as she is right now, barely old enough himself to be leading a pack, to be thinking about digging a grave somewhere high on the mountain.

"I think it will be okay," Wanda whispers to him in the dark, when it is clear he has nothing to say. "That's what mum says. That she'll just watch us from the stars like the elders do when they die, and then we'll never be alone on stormy nights ever again."

A smile rises from somewhere deep within him, bringing with it a breath of clear air. "Maybe we should make you Beta, pup," he says, and touches her cheek where a pack mark will one day go (one day soon, hopefully; the day should have already come, but there are no elders and no one to care about tradition right now). "You're already way smarter than me."

"No!" Wanda replies in faint horror. He would laugh, but he looks up and sees the end of the caves now, the twist in the path that would take them further down than Wyatt ever cares to go. Their mother's room is just a few steps further – through the doorway, he thinks he can see a flicker of movement, a sign that they are not alone. Willa? It must be; no one else would have reason to be this far down, this soon after the fight.

"Can you wait out here?" he asks Wanda, pulling her to a halt. She frowns, put out at the thought of waiting, but nods and reluctantly lets go of him.

All of a sudden, he's nervous again, deepseated dread turning his stomach inside out. He almost doesn't make it into the room, forcing himself forward with every step he takes. The first thing he notices is that it's not quite as dark inside as it usually is; the room is filled with a weak blue light, throwing weird shadows and highlights across the uneven rock of the walls. The second thing he notices is the source of the light - the moonstone hung around his mother's neck.

His sister is crouched at her bedside, bent over her, one limp hand clasped in her own. The glow of the moonstone reveals the deep lines of concentration on her face, the intensity of her gaze, focused solely on the moonstone he'd thought was dead and gone.

"Willa?" he speaks, confused, and she jumps and almost tumbles backwards, dropping their mother's hand.

"Wyatt," she says, her voice icy cold to cover up the guilt underneath, the turmoil of emotions she doesn't want him to see. She regains her balance and stands, dusting herself off idly. "I didn't think you'd come down here."

"Wynter said mum was…" His words stick to his tongue, unable to bring himself to finish the thought. He thinks Willa gets his meaning anyway. "I came with Wanda," he says instead, which is much easier to explain. "Just in case."

Willa glances towards the door. "You brought the pup?" she hisses, voice dropping lower now that she knows Wanda is outside. "Whywould you bring her here now, Wyatt, if you thought mum was going to-"

"She wanted to come!" he replies, trying to keep quiet. "She deserves to be here if – if something happens. If we're never going to see her again."

They both glance towards their mum, eyes lingering on her. Willa moves first.

"We'll talk about it later," she tells him, in the sort of voice that says she will wait until she is guaranteed to win the argument that will ensue before she chooses to talk about it. "Go back upstairs. Nothing is going to happen to mum."

There's something about the way she says it, about how her eyes shift and move away as she makes such a bold promise. Wyatt's gaze moves from her face, twisted unhappily but perfectly unreadable, to her empty hands, and then to the mysteriously recharged necklace around his mother's neck, glowing with a power it hasn't had in months.

His stomach drops.

"What have you done, Willa?" he asks, though he thinks he already knows exactly what she has done.

"It's none of your business," she snaps, cagey and unable to look him in the eye.

"I'm Beta, and your brother," he argues. "I think it's my business."

"Just go upstairs, Wyatt," she all but pleads. "Tell Wanda it's okay and go make s'mores or something. This doesn't involve you."

"Just tell me what you're doing, Willa." He tries to push past her, to get close enough to his mother to confirm his suspicions. Willa stops him with a hand on his chest, pushing him back with the most authority she's ever used against him.

"Pups," a voice croaks behind them, barely more than a whisper. "Don't fight."

Wyatt freezes. "Mum," Willa says and rushes to her side, forgetting all about Wyatt and their argument before the word even leaves her mouth. "Are you okay? How do you feel? Are you-"

"I feel…better," she says, before Willa can find any more questions to ask. "What did you…how…"

Willa's face twists, and that is enough to unstick Wyatt's feet. Desperate to know, to see what she has done, he shuffles forward several steps; and stares at the unfamiliar shape of the moonstone around his mother's neck.

No, not unfamiliar. It is very familiar. It had hit him hard enough in the chest to cause a bruise, not fifteen minutes ago.

"Where's Wanda?" his mother asks, just as he opens his mouth to demand the truth from Willa once and for all.

"She's outside!" his sister hurries to answer, glad of any distraction, and then raises her voice. "Wanda!"

The pup enters the room, going first to Wyatt, so close her hand brushes the back of his. Then she sees her mother, and her waiting smile, and she all but howls as she flies across the room, gripping the woman tight.

Wyatt takes two steps further and grabs Willa by the wrist, pulling her towards the door and ignoring any attempt she makes to escape his grip. "What are you doing?" she demands, more like the Alpha than his stubborn and argumentative twin.

"We need to talk," he replies insistently, dragging her out of the room. "Right now."

"Then talk." She finally manages to rip her arm out of his hand. "Why are you being like this?"

He looks around, at the up and down of such a public place, the twists of the passage that lie either side, easily capable of hiding listening ears. "Not here," he says, and pulls her down the hall, down to the moonstone room, where no one else comes. It is dark and empty, just a sliver of light from one box at the back of the room to show them where to go. The rest of the boxes are dark and dead, filled with nothing but cold stone.

"What do you want, Wyatt?" Willa demands, like she thinks she can intimidate her way out of this.

Wyatt is not fooled. "What are you doing?" he asks, as loud as he likes now. "After everything Winona said, after that whole – after everything – you used her moonstone?"

"I did what I had to do," Willa snarls. "Winona made her choice, and if I didn't do something, mum was going to-"

"We don't know if she was going to die!" Wyatt hisses, and then immediately feels sick. It's the first time he's said it out loud, the first time he's admitted to himself what is coming, what he is most afraid of. His mouth snaps shut and he rocks back on his heels, suddenly finding himself with nothing else to say.

Willa has no such qualms. "She was dying!" she insists, fierce where he is withdrawn. "This morning, while you were gone, she almost died. Not that you would have known anyway, since you never come down here."

She's glaring at him pointedly, knows she has him on the back foot. "I did what I had to do, Wyatt. I took care of her, like I always do. That's how it works, remember? I take care of mum, and you take care of Wanda."

"It's against the rules, Willa," he argues, but feebly. It's not an argument he wants to win, even if what she's done is wrong, wrong, wrong; their mother is alive still, better than she has been in months, and to rip that moonstone away, to put it back in a box, to let her fade away…

"It's too late now, Wyatt," she says, as if she can hear his thoughts. "There's barely any power left in that stone anyway – Winona used it all fighting me." And there was a funny thought; that after all of that, Winona would have faded away in a matter of months anyway. Maybe the way she had chosen was better after all. It was quicker, certainly.

His eyes shift to Willa's moonstone, the heart glowing softly around her neck. "How much did you use?" he asks, almost afraid to know the answer.

Willa scoffs. "Not that much," she insists. "You're such a worrywolf. I know what I'm doing – that's why I'm the Alpha, remember?"

You're the Alpha because you're the only one left, he thinks, but he is supposed to be the sensible one, and the words are cold and cruel, so he keeps them to himself. Willa has done the best she can with what she has been given. "If the others find out-" he starts to say instead, but she cuts him off before he can get all of the words out.

"If you don't say anything about it, the others won't find out," she snaps. "Why would they care anyway? What are they going to do with it? It can't even heal mum. We need to find the moonstone-"

"It's against pack laws, Willa," he points out, and presses on before she can get a word in edgewise against him. "The laws you're supposed to uphold. Stealing a moonstone is the worst kind of crime, remember?"

"Dad did it for you!" she hisses angrily. "I don't see you complaining!"

"Well, maybe he shouldn't have!"

Wyatt's voice is loud, much louder than hers. His outburst shuts her up quickly, at least; she takes a step back, and then another, melting away into the shadows until he can't quite see the full of her anymore. He forces himself to take a deep breath. To calm down.

"Fine," she says, and he can tell from the waver in her voice that she is just inches from going for his throat, brother or not. "Fine. If you don't like it, if it's so wrong, then go and take it from her, and you can hold her hand while she dies, instead of being a coward." Her eyes are bright in the darkness, deep yellow and damning. "And when you're done with that, take your own off too. See if I care."

She storms out, shoving her way past him with no regard for how hard she does it or how careless her words have been. He lets her go, lets her try her best to knock him over and rubs at the wrench in his shoulder as she disappears into the den, heading up and away from him. She's still limping as she goes. He hopes Wynter will take care of her.

From somewhere down the hall, he hears Wanda's voice calling his name. He doesn't feel like answering, doesn't feel like doing anything but sliding to the floor in an exhausted heap – but it is Wanda, and it is his job to look after her, and so he goes.

ooo

"Be strong, little wolf."

The words are whispered over his head, tangling in his hair like snowflakes on the first day of winter. Strong arms curl around him, embracing him hard enough he thinks he might not be able to breathe after this. He doesn't have the room to say anything back; his face is hidden in the rough fabric of the man's shirt, already soaked in his tears, and his hand is clutched around the unfamiliar shape of his moonstone, new and vibrant but different and deadly too.

Somewhere behind him, the baby is screaming and writhing in his mother's arms, as if she knows exactly what is happening, as if she can understand that their father is leaving and never coming back. She sounds like she knows more than he does, Wyatt thinks as he squirms out of his father's grip and rubs at his eyes, trying to vanquish the tears that threaten to fall, and fall, and fall.

"I have to go now," his father says, one big hand resting on his shoulder. His father is impossibly tall, possessing the height and breadth and strength of one of the ancient oaks of the forest. Wyatt is tiny in comparison, shorter than all the other pups and skinny like a stick, no more threatening than a feather in a light breeze.

Willa steps up beside him. She is like their father – she is tall and graceful and she does what she wants, the other pups too scared to try to stop her. Willa doesn't cry, even when facing her father for the final time. Willa is fierce and brave, and Wyatt is…

Wyatt is scared. Wyatt is weak.

Wyatt is nothing.

"I want to go out with you," Willa says, and she hides the way her voice wavers and cracks all too well. "I don't want you to go alone."

"No, Willa," their father says, gentle but firm. Her face screws up in frustration at the thought of missing this moment, this one thing she will never get back again.

"I want to go too," Wyatt says, even though deep down, he doesn't want to go at all. He wants to stay here in the den and watch his father disappear through the caves and he never wants to see the angry faces that will be waiting outside ever again.

Their father stands and looks down at them, a frown creasing his brow. "You really want to come?" he asks, and they nod. "Brave pups," he whispers and smiles for them one last time, offering each of them a hand.

The walk is slow and cold; the passage into the den is low and twisting, and a rainstorm has blown in during the day, the water soaking down through the rocks and making the whole thing wet and slippery. They climb together, hands never letting go of each other, until they reach the other side, until they can hear the thunder that rolls through the sky and the pattering of the rain turning the forest floor to mud and silt and swamp.

Their father stops at the edge of the shadows, a few steps from the view of the elders, the Alpha. "Stay here," he urges them and then lets go of their hands, shoving them gently towards either side of the cave, the trickly little spaces between rocks that a pup can squeeze into for a game of hide and seek or a silly prank. Wyatt does what he is told, crawling into a little round depression in the wall and hugging his knees to his chest. Willa remains where she is until their father disappears, stubborn as a mule.

When they are alone, she crosses the cave and pulls Wyatt from his hiding spot, dumping him on the rocky floor.

"What are you doing?" he asks, scrambling to his feet and rubbing his elbow where he'd scraped it as she dragged him.

"Come on," she says impatiently and grabs him by the wrist, pulling him towards the mouth of the cave.

He doesn't even get a chance to protest, to tell her that no, he doesn't want to go out there, doesn't want to see what happens next. He's so surprised that she does want to watch that he doesn't even try to escape her grip, just lets her pull him along, out into the dark and dreary night and behind a big rock that they can peek out from.

Their father walks down the rocks without fear or hesitation, strolling down the natural steps the same way he has every bright summer day, every night he comes to welcome them home from their lessons in the forest. The Alpha meets him at the bottom, his face set in grim determination, a ragged bit of cloth in his hand.

"You are not part of this pack anymore," he says, and reaches up with the rag to wipe away the pack mark on their father's cheek. It leaves a purple streak, a faint reminder of what had once been that will wash away in the rain before the night is done.

"Leave the mountains and never return," the Alpha continues, throwing the rag to the side and stepping away. "Or the might of the pack will be turned against you."

Their father nods. The pack parts, making him a path that leads into the forest and away from the mountain, from everything he has ever known. Only one remains in the way – a woman, hollow-cheeked and wild-eyed, a tangle of hair pressed against her head by the rain. One of the pups clings to her hand; her eyes are angry and red, threatening to scream or to cry.

"Murderer," the woman says, loud enough for the trees to hear. The rest of the pack is silent, their eyes damning.

Their father walks into their midst, stopping only three paces short of the woman. "I'm sorry," he tells her, steady as he is honest. "My son was dying, just as yours."

"Your son is weak," she spits, and her pup growls. "Mine would have been strong. But you have defied nature, and now it can't be undone." She moves aside, giving him clear passage to the wild, to never be seen again. "Don't give me any more empty apologies," she snaps. "Either take that moonstone from around that pup's neck, or leave here and never return."

Their father looks back towards the den. Wyatt could swear his eyes fall on him, hidden behind the rock. His hand curls around his moonstone protectively, like he is afraid his father might come storming back up the rocks and rip it from his grasp, to give to this angry woman instead so as to earn her forgiveness.

He does not come for the moonstone, or to offer Wyatt one last comfort. He turns away again, eyes forward, mouth silent. He disappears into the trees.

He never returns.

ooo

Willa disappears.

She gets herself patched up before she goes at least, and addresses the pack to put to rest any ideas Winona might have put in their heads. It's a credit to her, Wyatt admits grudgingly to himself, that even distressed as she was, she manages to give them such a good scare that when he returns from the depths of the den there is not a question spat in his direction, not a single wolf that wants to defy him.

In the dead of the night, when the pups have gone out to their lessons and the pack have dispersed through the den or into the forest, he goes out alone to the river. The banks and the crossing are deserted; he finds the tracks of the humans from that morning on the opposite side to the den, but they do not cross over the rocks, and they lead out and back on the same path. Their scent still lingers in some places, like they have only passed hours ago. He wonders how far into the forest they had gone.

He sits on the rocks and stares into the water, looking for the telltale flash of silver of the fish that frequent this place, where the rocks provide shelter from the busy current that always threatens to carry them downstream.

He's always been good at fishing, especially here at the crossing. He has the focus for it, the patience. The quick claws, the deadly swing of his hand. He's passed whole nights before striking idly at fish, almost as many as he has creeping around the edges of human places, campsites and remote cabins and that big building to the north that fills up once a year with kids that throw each other high in the air, fearless of what might happen when they come down.

He wishes he could be fearless. Just for a moment, just long enough to know what it feels like, to sit and organise his thoughts in a way that wasn't ruled by fear of the future, fear of the unknown. Of losing everything he's ever known, everyone that makes the forest a place to call home. Of losing himself, of fading away and never coming back, born and lived a stolen life and died with just a few marks on his arms to show of his achievements.

Take your moonstone off. The words have been haunting him for hours now, ever since Willa had left him down there in the dark. Coward. Hold her hand and watch her die. His fingers close, unbidden, around his moonstone, tied tight around his neck. Coward. It feels like it is choking him, almost, pulling him down towards the water, towards the dirt and the rocks and the promise that if he is buried now, no one will ever come to his grave and know his name.

Take yours off too. See if I care.

The feeling of choking, the fear that shivers its way down his back and worms back up from his stomach, is unbearable. It's not his moonstone, not his life. It's the life of a little boy, a different little brother, and it has been stolen and tied around his neck, a guilt that glows softly in the moonlight for all to witness. It is his father too; an eye for an eye, a life for a life. A sacrifice that he never asked for, to buy his life for a price he cannot stand to have paid.

He should be dead. He should have died at six years old, chasing his sister around the den.

He rips the moonstone from around his neck.

The change is immediate; the night becomes dim, the scent of the water and the deer upstream and the lingering odour of the humans disappear from his senses. The world becomes dull, the shadows deeper, the sounds garbled, the water and the trees in the distance less defined. His moonstone turns white in his hand, saving its power while it can. He wonders if it is glad to be free of him, if he is the stone that weighs it down as much as it is the other way around.

He looks down at the water, black as the sky above without his real eyes through which to see. For a minute, he imagines holding the stone out over the rushing river. Letting it dangle from his hand, the cord slipping through his fingers, the white stone falling, falling, disappearing into the dark current beneath him, washing away down to the sea to never be seen again…

His fingers tighten around it, pressing it against his stomach, where there is no chance he will let it go.

He is too scared to die.

"Please don't tell me you're out here waiting for me."

The voice speaks from behind him, dry and angry and familiar enough that he doesn't even jump when their shadow falls across him.

He looks up. Willa stands over him, only a step back from the distance she would usually give him, only withdrawn enough that he will know she is still angry with him. He wonders if she's still angry enough to want him dead – he runs a finger over his moonstone at the thought, feeling the smooth cut of the stone and the intricate pattern chiselled into the face of it.

"I'm fishing," he replies neutrally, though he is barely doing anything besides watching the fish. Willa snorts and sits down on the rock adjacent to him, one leg tucked beneath her and an arm thrown round the other.

"I'm sorry," she says, the words stilted and uncomfortable as she drags them from her lips. "I shouldn't have said what I did earlier." It's hard for her to say, for her to admit that she was wrong and that she's gone too far.

Take yours off too. "No. You shouldn't have," he agrees, and then clears his throat – his voice feels too soft, too weak, but maybe it is just the difference in his hearing now, without the power of the stone coursing through his veins. "You shouldn't have stolen that stone either."

She freezes. For a second, looking at her, at the tense line of her shoulders, the way one of her hands moves back to brace herself against the rock, he thinks she might get up and walk away again. But she doesn't; she just looks down at the water, as if transfixed by its rippling surface.

"I didn't want to," she mumbles eventually. "I just couldn't – I didn't even think. I just wanted to save her." She pauses, and then asks, "You wouldn't have done it?"

Wyatt shifts uncomfortably, his grip on his moonstone growing tighter. "I don't know," he answers honestly. "I don't think I could let myself do it. But I couldn't watch her die either." He finds the courage to look at his sister, silhouetted in the moonlight. "You're braver than I am," he tells her, a fact that is all too easy to admit.

Willa pulls a face and shifts in her seat on the rock, trying to make herself more comfortable. "Did you do it?" she asks. She doesn't have to clarify for him to know she is talking about Winona's moonstone, that she is asking if he took it back.

"No," he replies, his voice empty and exhausted. "I couldn't do that. You know I couldn't."

"But you still think it was wrong."

"It was wrong," he insists, with a tone that allows no argument. "But it's too late to change it now."

Her face falls; she'd been hoping, maybe, that he would soften, would allow her to think that she had done the right thing, that she hadn't been selfish and abusive of her position in the pack, unfair to all the wolves that trusted them to lead them down the right path. "I'm glad she didn't die," he allows, because it is a dreary enough night without fighting with Willa as well. "Even if it is only a few more months, if we can find the moonstone-"

"Wyatt," Willa says abruptly, and holds up a hand to silence him. He stops in the middle of his sentence, as requested, and her hand drops to her knee again. "We need to talk about the moonstone," she tells him, in a voice that says there is no negotiating this topic.

He frowns, though he's got a feeling he knows exactly what she wants. "What about it?"

"It doesn't exist anymore, Wyatt." The words hit him like a punch to the gut, the way she says them short and sharp, spat out onto the rocks like the blood Winona had spat in her face. "And if it does, it's somewhere we will never reach it."

"The Great Alpha-"

"No," she snaps insistently, like she's tired of him. "The Great Alpha is a myth. She doesn't exist. I know you want to believe in all that stuff, but we're running out of time and…it's not going to happen, Wyatt. There's nothing else we can do."

"Don't say that, Willa," he all but pleads. "If we can't find the moonstone, then-"

"We die." She says it so flatly, in so blunt and matter-of-fact a manner, like they are just talking about the waning of the moon, or the swiftness of the fish tonight. "The pack dies. We become nothing. I know."

"There has to be a way to find it," he insists. "Or to find her. It can't all be gone."

"Wyatt," she sighs and shakes her head, like she is older and wiser than he is. Like there is more than twenty minutes between them, like she is still stronger than him in every conceivable way, like he had never caught up.

She doesn't believe anymore. He sees that in her eyes now, the finality of it, the last spark of hope blown away at the going down of the sun. She'd been sceptical for a long time now, he knows that; he has always maintained that the Great Alpha would come, that the moonstone would find them or they would find it, but Willa is up and down in that belief like the tide, sometimes allowing herself some hope and other times resigning herself to the slow death of them all, the fading of their culture and their heritage and all knowledge that they had ever existed at all. That part has always been hard for him. He has never been able to bring himself to imagine the future without any kind of saviour.

"We have to decide what to do," she says next, when he lets the silence stretch too long. "If there is something else out there for us, to the north or the south, or if we should stay in the den and…" Even Willa can't quite bring herself to finish the thought, her brazen assurance fading the longer she speaks.

"There is nothing we can do," Wyatt says slowly. "There is only one moonstone. If we can't find it, there is nothing else worth looking for."

Willa stares at him, something fleeting and undefined resting in her eyes, and then stands. "We do nothing then," she says, like they have reached a decision, like this has been a meeting of the elders held in the far reaches of the den, sat in a circle to discuss the problems of the day. Wyatt feels sorely lacking compared to them, sitting here in the middle of the river with a moonstone that isn't rightfully his clutched in his hand instead of around his neck.

She's waiting for him to respond, to agree with her. He doesn't want to; there's something final about this conversation, about her wanting him to decide where they will lay down to die – if it will be in their den, surrounded by their ancestors, or out there in the wild, bones scattered to the winter snows like the animals of the forest.

He almost suggests they go to the town by the sea, to ask the humans for help – they were the ones to take the moonstone originally, and maybe they would give it back – but he has only been to the town once and he barely knows the land around it, and humans are not known for being kind to werewolves. They are afraid of them, and fear makes them aggressive, makes them hunters and trappers and killers.

Of all the places to die, Seabrook is his least favourite choice.

"We do nothing," he agrees. The words echo hollow in the trees and come back to him spoken from the voice of a stranger. He could swear the night gets even darker.

Willa has nothing more to say. Maybe she knows that this is not what he wants, that he is dissatisfied with the decision he has made, or maybe she is just as unsettled by the notion as he is, however well she hides it. She nods sharply, two tilts of her head, and then crosses behind him to get to the other side of the river and disappears into the trees, ghosting down the hidden path that will take her to the den.

Wyatt looks down at the moonstone in his hand. He imagines again, throwing it in the river. Choosing the quick way out, the way Winona had, rather than lingering on for months and months longer and waiting for the end to come. He was supposed to be gone already anyway, has stolen eleven years and change from a pup without a name. It's almost tempting.

But he can't. He is scared to die. He is scared to lose his sisters – and for his sisters to lose him.

He puts the moonstone on, the world rushing back into definition around him, and goes home.

ooo

It is the noise of it that wakes them, the great crash and squeal and growl of an engine as it careens through their usually peaceful woods.

Wyatt, ever the careful one, ever looking out for the angers of the world, is the first to rouse. He bolts upright, eyes wide and ears sharp, listening to what sounds like a raging beast crashing through the forest. It's east of them, not far – there is a road in that direction, very old and overgrown, and a set of gates in the human's fence they had thought the humans had forgotten existed.

The others wake slowly, yawning and rubbing sleep from their eyes as they frown in confusion at the noise that has awoken them. There are seven of them in all, strewn about a patch of sunlight on the forest floor as they wait for the daylight to wear away. They're supposed to be hunting, but they've had a fruitless night – Wyatt supposes the next night will be lean too, now that whatever this is has chased off any game there was.

Willa is the first on her feet. "What was that?" asks Willem from the far side of their resting place, rubbing at a crick in his neck.

"Is it a monster?" Walsh asks, to Wyatt's left. He is the youngest of the group, still a pup learning his craft, really – in different days, he would be taking trials and earning marks, but it has been a long time since there was any kind of trials, so long that Walsh would barely remember the last ones to be held.

"On your feet," Willa snaps and then turns to Wyatt, a question in her eyes. He rises slowly, listening, testing the air; even from here, he can smell the exhaust of a car, the burnt rubber of distressed tyres and the sharp loam of freshly-turned earth. He can hear it still too, the screech and while of an engine under pressure. The loud, final crash as it finally hits something and pauses in its movement.

"Humans," he tells Willa in an undertone, and ignores the way Walsh's eyes go wide. "In trouble."

"Trouble?" she questions, and he inclines his head, confident in his own assumption. "Dangerous?"

He gestures helplessly. "You'll have to find them to find out," he tells her.

Willa considers it. "Wolves!" she calls, and their pack of five snaps to attention. "Lets go!"

Wyatt's not sure this is a good idea but Willa is gone before he can put a voice to his concerns. He springs after them, and tries to convince himself the noise couldn't possibly be hunters or trappers or any other sinister group looking for a werewolf legend.

They are swift and silent, splitting up and covering the distance like shadows between the trees. Wyatt keeps up easily, not like the last time he had chased Willa through the forest, a week ago now. That had been a dark day, panic-filled and fear-driven. Today is not like that – today the sun shines down from a cloudless sky, and they are out living as wolves should, and for a minute it's almost easy to remember that they have decided to stay here and die, to wait around for their moonstones to run out rather than take any drastic actions against the humans.

They stop when they find the tracks the vehicle has left through the woods, the churning of tyres and broken branches from overarching trees. Some of the wolves duck behind the bushes and stare in awe, or in fear; the younger ones don't go near the fence, have never seen the humans or their inventions. Willa stays back in the shadows, but lets them creep forwards, watching over them. Wyatt is the closest of all, trying to tell how much further the tracks might go.

There's a noise, a scuffling of feet in the dirt, someone running. He stops and listens, eyes turned in the direction of the human's crash site. A girl comes into view, following the tracks the vehicle had left back towards the road.

His heart stops when he sees her. Every muscle freezes in place. And then a strong arm drags him backwards, into the trees and out of sight.

"Did you see her?" he turns to ask his sister, ignoring the look on her face.

"What, the human? Yeah, I saw her. She almost saw you."

"No," he says, and he's being rude and incendiary right in front of the other wolves, but there's only one thing on his mind right now. "Her hair. White hair, Willa. It's the girl I saw last winter. The Great Alpha."

Silence follows him, the others staring at him in confusion and disbelief, until Willa sends them away with a single glare. "She's just a human," she tells him, like she's trying to explain something simple to a little pup. "She's not the Great Alpha."

"She looks exactly like her!" he insists, and rips his arm out of her grip. His feet are already moving, swift and steady against the forest floor.

"Where are you going?" she calls after him.

"We have to follow her!" he replies. "If there's even a chance – if she can find the moonstone-"

His voice trails off because he is already running, too far away to argue anymore. He thinks for a few seconds he will be alone in the chase – but then the others catch up, shadows splitting between the trees, stalking the girl from every side. Willa is to his left, brow furrowed in frustration as she follows the pack, follows him. She doesn't like to follow. That's why she's the leader, why Wyatt is not.

He doesn't care about that right now. He only cares about the girl, the hope that's rising slowly in his chest, threatening to strangle him.

Down in the old, dry riverbed, amongst the rocks and the oaks with shallow roots, the trees most likely to fall in bad weather, she slows down, looking around her like she's lost. It's harder to follow her down here, and the pups are loud and obnoxious as they move through the trees, not so stealthy as they think they are. Wyatt gets the closest, crouched low to the ground amongst the scratchy leaves of a thick bush that grows between the trees; it's the first time he sees her face properly, and the way the sun glints off of her hair as she moves, shining silver in the light.

There's a second where he's mesmerised, frozen in place and unable to look away, and not just because she is beautiful. His whole life he has watched and dreamed of her shadow, the vague prophecy of the Great Alpha that dances across the den walls…and now here she is, standing right in front of him. And it must be her, it must be – what are the odds that any other girl with white hair would wander into their forest and across their path, when they are the most desperate for the prophecy to be fulfilled? When it is the final hour for their saviour to arrive?

There is a howl, and he turns to find Willa standing tall and proud upon a rock in the centre of the clearing. Her eyes flash yellow, looking right at the girl, and then she disappears back into the trees and the shadows of the rocks, the pups scampering after her.

Wyatt waits until a boy with green hair appears from the other side of the riverbed, the fence side, another intruder in their forest – and then he leaves too, slipping quietly between two rocks and crawling up a short embankment to get above them, to watch them through the trees with sharp eyes and a keen sense of hearing.

Willa finds him easily, and together, they watch the humans gather and leave, heading back to their town.

Wyatt stands up too.

"Where are you going?" she demands, when the humans are out of sight, following the tracks of their vehicle back to their road.

"To find her!" he says and shifts anxiously where he stands – he doesn't want to stand here any longer, doesn't want to linger in the forest when the Great Alpha has been in that town just over the rise this whole time. "If she's the Great Alpha, if she can find the moonstone-"

"How are you going to find her?" Willa asks. "Walk into their town? Say 'howl's it going' and 'fangs for the memories'? They know what werewolves are, Wyatt. They'll catch you."

"Only because you howled right in front of her," he scoffs, and then reaches for his moonstone, removing it from around his neck. "Take this, then. They won't know I'm a wolf like this."

"Wyatt-"

He glares at her, with the sort of fierce, unyielding gaze that she usually throws at him. "I'm going, Willa," he tells her, in a way that says he will not be convinced otherwise. "If there's even a chance that she can help us, that we can find the moonstone, we should take it. And I'm the only one that's been into their town before. I know how to blend in. I won't get caught."

That's a lie. He'd learnt close to nothing about humans, that one morning he had taken a walk through their streets. He'd barely even seen any humans – they'd all been in their houses, hiding from the snow and the wind. But he is determined to go, to follow the girl, and if this is what will convince his sister…

Willa considers it, her eyes turning in the direction the humans had gone. Finally, her hand wraps around his moonstone, taking it from him with great care to see that she doesn't drop it.

"Come here," she says and steps forward, using her sleeve to rub the Beta mark off his cheek. "You don't look human at all, but fine. Go." She pauses, and then adds, "Be back by sundown."

"Sundown," he repeats, already backing away, already planning how he will get into the town and where he will go first. Behind the wall, he thinks, even if the thought of being surrounded by walls and locked in by gates terrifies him. He'd seen her there before, that winter's day when he'd thought she was a dream. Maybe he will find her there again, if he just goes a little further.

He runs, away from the wolves and towards their destiny, towards their future, and the hope that maybe they were born to live after all.

ooo

A/N: thankyou for reading! please leave a review to let me know what you thought, any news is good news :) For more of my work, or if you just want to come chat about zombies, visit my tumblr zombiedadjokes :)