FATED TO THE BEAST'S RIVAL

I never believed in destiny until it tried to kill me.

My name is Luna Pierce, and I work as a wildlife ranger in the Cascade Mountains. That's what it says on my uniform, anyway. Most days I feel more like a tour guide than a guardian of nature. I spend most of my days pointing lost tourists in the direction of the nearest bathroom facilities and explaining to them why it's a bad idea to feed the wildlife-even if deer do look awfully cute. It wasn't exactly the career I had in mind when I graduated with a degree in wildlife biology.

Today had been particularly exhausting. To begin with, my supervisor, Warden Blackwood, spent the whole morning reaming me about my reports on the wolf population in Sector Seven. I'd documented declining numbers, unusual migration patterns, and what I believed were signs of stress in the pack hierarchy. Instead of concern, I got bureaucratic pushback.

"You're not seeing the bigger picture, Pierce!" he'd barked, his weathered face twisted in frustration. "The ranchers are complaining. We need solutions, not excuses!"

Those words stung because I knew he expected better. Three years ago, I'd tracked and rescued a lost group of hikers through a blizzard that had meteorologists predicting catastrophic conditions. I'd found them hypothermic and disoriented, huddled in a cave, and guided them back to safety through whiteout conditions that would have made most people turn back.

The local news called me a hero. My photo appeared in outdoor magazines alongside articles about wilderness survival.

My inbox is flooded with speaking requests. But that was ancient history now, a fading memory that people occasionally mentioned at town hall meetings. Now I spend my days filling out incident reports in triplicate, breaking up arguments between tourists and locals over parking spaces and trail access, and attending budget meetings where every request for new equipment gets denied.

The afternoon had only gotten worse: a family from California had let their children chase a black bear cub for a photograph. By the time I arrived, the mother bear was circling back, and I'd spent twenty frantic minutes evacuating the area and explaining why their Instagram moment could have resulted in tragedy. The father threatened to report me for "ruining their vacation." I smiled politely and handed him the citation anyway.

At six, when my shift finally ended, I grabbed my jacket and was virtually running to my truck, desperate to escape before someone found another crisis that needed my attention. My coworker, Marcus Webb, yelled out from the ranger station as I passed.

"Want to go get pizza? Jenny's making her famous pepperoni tonight at Angelo's!

"Maybe next time!" I yelled back, already unlocking my truck door. Marcus was great-reliable, humorous, and one of the few true friends I had within the department. He'd covered for me more times than I could count, and his easygoing nature made even the worst days bearable. But tonight I needed to be alone.

Except I didn't want to be alone. Well, not completely. What I wanted was to be away from people—there's a difference.

I found myself driving to the Timber Ridge Trail, a remote hiking path I'd found a couple of years ago while tracking a wounded elk. Most people avoided it after sunset, deterred by the rough terrain and zero cell phone reception, which made it all the more perfect in my opinion.

I parked at the trailhead and hit the trail, inhaling deeply of the pine-scented air that always reminded me of childhood camping trips with my father. The forest was my sanctuary—the one place where expectations and disappointments could not touch me. Here, I wasn't Luna Pierce, the ranger who'd lost her edge. I was just another creature moving through the wilderness.

The trail wound through thick stands of Douglas fir and over rocky ground studded with moss-covered boulders. I knew every root and stone by heart, every turn and switchback. As the sun dipped below the horizon, painting streaks of orange and purple across the sky between the tree canopy, my stress melted away like snow in spring. My breathing slowed. My shoulders relaxed. This was why I'd become a ranger in the first place—not for the paperwork or the politics, but for moments like this.

I'm twenty-nine years old. I live in a small cabin about fifteen miles outside of town with my German Shepherd, Ranger. Yes, I named my dog after my job. My older brother Jason says I lack imagination and should have called him something more creative, like Thor or Kodiak. Mom worries I'm too isolated, living alone in the woods without a partner or even a roommate. She calls every Sunday to ask if I've met anyone interesting, her voice carefully neutral but her disappointment evident. My dad, also a former forest service officer who'd spent thirty years in these same mountains, just wants me to be happy. He understands the pull of the wilderness in a way my mother and brother never could.

Was I content? I really could no longer answer that question honestly. There were days when the silence of my cabin felt peaceful, and days when it felt suffocating.

A howl rent through the evening's stillness, yanking me from my musing.

I stopped walking immediately, my ranger instincts kicking in before conscious thought could catch up. That wasn't a coyote's yipping call or a domestic dog's plaintive cry. That was a wolf—deep, resonant, primal—and wolves didn't usually come this close to the trails, especially the marked ones where human scent was strong. My hand moved instinctively to the radio clipped to my belt, fingers touching the call button but not pressing it yet.

Another howl-closer this time, perhaps forty yards away. Then I saw him.

A huge wolf emerged from the treeline about fifty yards in front of me, materializing from the shadows like something out of a dream. His coat was midnight black with silver highlights catching the fading light, creating an almost ethereal shimmer around his massive frame. His eyes-impossible, brilliant amber eyes that seemed to glow with their own inner fire-locked onto mine. He was easily twice as big as any wolf I'd studied in my years with the service, his shoulders reaching heights that defied natural biology and everything I'd learned in university. This wasn't just an unusually large wolf. This was something else entirely.

I should have been terrified. All ranger training protocol screamed for me to back away slowly, make myself large by raising my arms, and avoid direct eye contact that predators interpret as challenge. But I couldn't move. Those amber eyes held me frozen in place, and something deep in my chest pulled tight, an invisible string connecting us that I'd never known existed until this precise moment.

The wolf took a step closer, his large paw silent on the forest floor. Then another. His movements were fluid, almost human in their deliberation and purpose. He wasn't stalking—he was approaching. Deliberately. Purposefully. Like he'd been searching for something and had finally found it.

"Easy," I whispered, not quite sure if I was talking to him or myself. My voice sounded strange in the quiet forest, too loud and too small all at once.

He stopped ten feet away, close enough that I could make out the individual guard hairs in his coat, the slight rise and fall of his breathing. We stared at each other, predator and human, locked in a moment that stretched into eternity. In that moment, the rational part of my brain—the ranger part, the scientist part—told me this was impossible. Wolves didn't act like this. They avoided humans. They ran. They certainly didn't approach with what I could only describe as recognition in their eyes.

But the other half of me, the part I had ignored and pushed down-the half that believed in instinct over evidence-recognized something in those amber eyes. Something ancient and knowing. It was a call to a piece of myself that I had forgotten existed.

"Who are you?" I breathed, the question escaping before I could stop it.

The wolf cocked his head slightly, seeming to understand my question-actually understand it, not just react to my tone-before turning and vanishing into the forest in the span of a heartbeat, dissolving into the shadows much like smoke dispersing in the wind. I stood there for several minutes, my heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape my chest as I tried to process what had just happened.

Finally, I pulled out my radio to call in the sighting, my fingers hovering over the button, then stopped. What would I say? I saw an abnormally large wolf who stared at me like he knew me, like he recognized me, like we'd met before in some life I couldn't remember.

They'd send me for a psychiatric evaluation.

They'd pull me from field duty. Blackwood would use it as another reason to keep me chained to a desk. I turned the radio down and walked back to my truck on unsteady legs, my mind racing with questions without any rational answers.

Driving home through the mountains, in that day's darkening aftermath, with only my headlights cutting through the gathering night, I had this bone-deep sense that something had just changed forever in my world. That invisible line had been crossed, and there was no going back to the person I'd been just an hour ago.

I had no idea how right I was.

I had no idea my whole view on reality would shatter into pieces so small that I would never be able to put them together the same again.