Luna of Rogues - Chapter 1: Chapter 1

My pack always hated me. They had their reasons, although I didn't know it at the time, but there's no reason on earth which could excuse the systematic isolation and bullying of a seven-year-old by grown adults. If I wanted to eat, I stole, and if I was caught in the packhouse, I was dragged outside and cussed out. They stopped short of beating me. Just.
The hunger and the cold, I could handle. The loneliness was harder to bear. I had lived in a house until I was about five, but my memories of it were hazy to say the least and whoever had taken care of me there was gone now. My parents, if they were alive, never made an appearance. The other children steered clear if I was lucky and taunted me if I wasn't. I didn't belong in the pack, and they all knew it. Born to be wild, maybe.
I would have run away if I'd had anywhere to run to. Sometimes, when I was near the border, staring at the bone fence, I would get tempted. But somehow the hell I knew was preferable than the one I didn't. And so I stayed, learned to dodge the blows and run when I couldn't, and spent the first years of my life miserable and scared.
It was only when I left my birth pack that I could be a normal child. Well, I wouldn't say normal, but I was happy. Let's start at the beginning, though. How I met Fion.
***
I wriggled forwards on my stomach under the bench, trying so desperately to keep quiet. All around were pack chefs preparing the Alpha's dinner. No one had time to deal with me ... or so I hoped. I had spotted my target from outside -- a tray of freshly baked loaves resting on a countertop. That would feed me for a few days, if I was careful.
To be honest, I was a dreadful thief, but I never let that stop me. When I thought everyone's backs were turned, I darted out from my hiding place to snatch at the food. Even as my fingers closed around the bread, a hand grasped my wrist, forcing me to drop it.
"Are you trying to get yourself killed?" a voice hissed into my ear.
Maia -- possibly my only friend. She didn't share the others' opinion that I was to be avoided at all costs. But even the kind kitchen-helper didn't dare interact with me openly. It was like I was tainted, and anyone who spent too much time around me would catch it. The rogue taint.
On this occasion, she marched me out of the back door without anyone else catching sight of me, then turned on me angrily.
"Stealing, again?" she scolded. "You're lucky it wasn't one of the others who caught you."
"Sorry, Maia," I said, hanging my head and easily pulling off the just-an-innocent-child look. Young as I was, even I knew it was bullshit, so I wasn't quite sure how Maia didn't. I could have snuck into the kitchen at night with half the risk, but the food wouldn't be hot or fresh.
"Just don't do it again," Maia said. She pushed the loaf into my hand with a final tut.
"Thank you," I replied quietly, then dashed towards the woods before any other pack wolves spotted me. But I wasn't fast enough, apparently, because I found myself surrounded by the gang of youngsters who took pleasure from bullying the little kid. I couldn't blame them, really: they were only following their parents' example.
"Hand it over," their leader told me. He was a tall teenager with a cruel smile, maybe twice my height. "You know what we do to thieves."
It was an odd world, where children fought over a loaf of bread rather than sweets.
I would've happily flown at them, if it hadn't been four against one. With an exaggerated sigh, I offered the bread to the boy. Just as he reached out to take it, I slammed my knee into the easy target between his legs. Then it was just a matter of dashing through the gap which emerged. I wasn't exactly a brilliant fighter at the age of seven (especially compared to some people, mentioning no names), but I was pretty damn fast for a kid.
I reached the cover of the trees in three seconds flat. None of them bothered chasing me: they weren't allowed into the woods on their own, and so that was my domain and the only place I really felt safe. I loved the tangle of ferns and the green canopy high above, and I would spend hours roaming the undergrowth, learning every twisting path and clearing for miles.
That particular day, I walked in a new direction, heading north from the lake. I was following a set of footprints. They were child-sized, and I was hoping to find someone my age. If another kid was this far out in the woods alone, surely they were just as alone as I was.
But the tracks disappeared in a patch of dry ground. With absolutely no control over my wolf sense to follow a scent trail, I gave up and spent the rest of the evening picking blackberries. When it got dark, with no other options in sight, I climbed a tree for the night. It was second nature to me, to find a suitable spruce and scurry into the branches like a squirrel.
It was summer, when the nights were often warm enough that I didn't have to sneak into a corner of the pack house. From my perch, I could see the faintest glimmer of light coming from the ground below. It looked almost like the entrance to a cave directly below me. On the ground, it was hidden by a holly bush, but from up here...
Leaning over, I tried to examine it further. But my foot slipped on a patch of moss, and I fell. After tumbling head over heels for several metres, I landed straight in the cave opening. My arm took the worst of the fall. When the pain from that faded into a dull ache, I lifted my head from the stone.
I was lying unharmed but very shaken-up in a dusty cavern, and in front of me was a wide-eyed girl. She couldn't have been older than ten, but she held a knife in a way that made me think she knew how to use it. In her other hand was a wind-up torch, the beam directed at me and bright enough to hurt my eyes.
Alarm swept through me. I stumbled backwards and closed my hand around a pebble. She narrowed her eyes at me, then spoke up. "You can put that down. I don't kill little kids."
"I'm not little," I protested indignantly. "I'm big for my age."
"Whatever you say." The girl gave me a wild grin and ran a hand through her cropped, dark ginger hair. If it hadn't been for the shape of her face and the pitch of her voice, I would have assumed she was a boy.
She tossed the knife into a corner and sat down, not looking like she remotely cared that I was still threatening her with a rock. My hand dropped a little, my grip on the rough stone loosening.
"Are you from this pack?" I asked. I'd never met a kid who didn't hate me on principle. Was she the one whose footprints I had been following?
"Unfortunately," she said. "I'm called Fion."
I would have given her my name, except to the best of my knowledge, I didn't have one. I had a rough age, but nobody had ever called me anything except 'kid', 'thief' and 'runt'. I didn't mind the names nearly as much as I should have, especially thief. Some small part of me enjoyed breaking the rules, even then.
"Why aren't you in the pack house with your parents?" I asked.
"I think my parents hate me," Fion said. "And they're always drunk. So I ran away. I'd much prefer to be out here than anywhere near them."
"I don't have any parents," I said, finally dropping my makeshift weapon.
Fion considered me for a moment. "What's your name?"
"I don't have a name."
I sat down next to her. It wasn't the most comfortable of places to sit, but it was far less lonely than my usual perches.
"Everyone has a name," she said matter-of-factly. Fion sighed when I just shook my head. "Well, you fell into my cave from the sky, so I'll call you Skye."
"Skye," I murmured to myself. I liked the sound of it. My eyes were sky coloured too, the colour of storm clouds.
"You have any place to stay tonight?" Fion asked me. Being a young and undereducated kid, I wondered long and hard why she wanted to know, and only answered after considering many abstract motives, the worst of which was she cared, because I didn't have the faintest clue how to react to that.
"I usually sleep in trees," I replied, with the last of my initial shyness vanishing.
"Not anymore you don't," Fion told me, throwing over a threadbare blanket. My suspicions confirmed, I settled quickly into the role of the naïve younger sibling in our strange and coincidental relationship. It didn't take long to realise it wasn't nearly as bad as I had thought.
Fion became like my big sister. In fact, beyond that. She was my big sister, in all the ways that mattered. Over the next two years she taught me how to do many things: steal food properly, pick locks, and my particular favourite -- fight. My young mind never questioned how she knew how to do any of it. Or why she had to return to her family every so often. When those lonely days came, I would venture out to the river or sulk in the cave.
It wasn't long before I figured out why Fion hated going home so much. She had faded bruises all over her body, and she told me that her parents would beat her when they had too much to drink. Most nights were too dangerous to be at home, and during the day they were too hungover to realise she was missing.
But in all that time, I hadn't shifted. At every full moon from birth, our wolves took control, and we would shift involuntarily. It's only at age eight or nine that we learned how to transform at will.
So I was a bit of a late bloomer. Not that Fion minded —she just shrugged it off. "You'll shift when you're ready," she kept telling me.
All the same, she made me try every evening, just before we told scary stories in an attempt to scare each other. Our particular favourites were about the rogues, and how they'd travel from pack to pack, destroying everything in their path. It was just after my tenth birthday that those nightmares became a reality.
When it began, I was foraging alone in the woods, digging up roots and picking berries. One hand caught my waist from behind, and another clamped my mouth shut. My attacker dragged me, kicking and squirming, behind a tree. I was about to pull off an emergency manoeuvre and start biting, when I heard Fion's voice hiss in my ear, "It's me, you halfwit."
Instantly, I stopped struggling and lay still. Fion's word was law. She was much older, and that meant she was smarter. At least...that was what she had told me.
"What is it?" I asked in a hushed whisper.
"Shut up," Fion replied in a murmur. She was crouched low and watching the path intently. She'd grown a lot in the last three years, and now towered half a foot over me. I, on the other hand, had remained frustratingly small. "Rogues."
That single word made me flatten myself completely to the ground.
"What do we do?"
"Get to the river," Fion instructed. "If we hide our scents we might be able to get away, but you're going to need to shift."
"I can't," I whispered desperately, suddenly convinced we would die here.
"I'll help you," she promised, and although I've never been able to work out how she did it, an image of my wolf at the last full moon appeared in my mind.
"Just concentrate on that picture. Imagine yourself as your wolf."
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then focused on my midnight-black wolf with all of my limited mind power. Over the course of a few seconds, I could feel my body morphing into its new shape. There was some pain, but it was bearable. I found myself on all fours with paws instead of fingers. Fion was beside me, as her own pale wolf.
I didn't have much time to revel in my victory before Fion began nudging me down the path. Although I wasn't very proficient with my nose, she could already smell the rogues flooding down the path ahead.
"Run," a voice echoed in my head, which I instantly recognised as Fion's. The mind-link was our way of talking mentally, because a pack functions best when they can communicate. "Run and don't look back."
I did what she told me, stumbling my way down to the riverside. It was hard using four legs instead of two, and my wolf didn't seem to be making an appearance to help out. Even as I submerged myself in the frozen water, I could hear Fion's yips and a rogue growling.
Run. That was what Fion had told me, but she had never specified which direction. I couldn't leave her behind; she was the only friend I had. Goddess only knew how long it would take me to find another one. I span round to go back for her and found myself face-to-face with a rogue pup.
He was probably only my age, but so much bigger, stronger and surer on his feet. The pup was a light-timber colour with startling hazel eyes, and he towered nearly a foot over me, courtesy of a richer diet and better genes. I growled at him, which probably wasn't the smartest move.
The wolf growled back with enough force to make me want to run or hide in a corner, or both. But my own wolf had other ideas, so I didn't do either of those things. Instead, I made the far less logical choice -- I attacked him.
It wasn't a very impressive effort. The young rogue just grabbed my scruff the second I got close enough, and then he half-dragged, half-carried me off into the trees. For the first time, I felt truly afraid. Fion was nowhere to be seen and I was at the mercy of a rogue.
I struggled to keep my paws on the ground as we got further and further into the forest, heading towards the packhouse. I had spent most of my life avoiding that place, and now I was going back whether I liked it or not. I snarled, bit and scratched, but nothing I could do would make the rogue release me. Despite being a pup himself, my weight didn't seem to bother him at all.
Eventually we reached our destination: the open space behind our pack house where the rogues seemed to have rounded up every shifter in the pack. The majority of them were in human form and lined up along the wall. I recognised the Alpha at one end, restrained by no less than four rogues. He was glaring at me like it was my fault. In hindsight, it really was.
With a pang of regret, I identified Fion bleeding from several places among the prisoners. She stared at me like she could help me escape just by willpower alone. But from her injuries, I knew she hadn't come quietly, so I wasn't going to stay quietly.
The young rogue dropped me in a heap at one end of the line, then trotted off to stand at the heels of the only rogue in human form -- a tall, tan, well-built man in his thirties with an eerily calculating gaze. His eyes were the same shade of hazel as my captor's. Were they related, perhaps? Those eyes swept over the line, evaluating his catch.
"Don't want to tell me, Paul? That's fine. We'll do this the hard way," he told the Alpha. "Line up all the children separately."
Why? What was he looking for? I was torn between baring my teeth and making myself very small and hoping I'd go unnoticed. I chose the former, but they never got as far as me...
Fion was next to a ginger-haired couple who could only be her parents. As the rogues who were pulling out the younger prisoners got close to them, Fion's father gave her a kick forwards as if he was giving her to the rogues. After all the years of beatings at the hands of her parents, Fion chose a very unfortunate moment to snap. She launched herself at her father, biting and clawing for all she was worth.
To my surprise, a hearty chuckle rang out. The leader of the rogues was laughing. He watched Fion for almost a minute, before walking over and hauling my friend away by the scruff of her neck. She didn't bite him, I noticed. I was suddenly very, very afraid for Fion, but the man seemed to find it all very funny.
He dragged a still-angry Fion out from the line of prisoners and looked at her with an expression empty of the casual cruelty I had come to expect from adults.
"I admire your guts, kid," the man told Fion. "They'll get you killed one day."
At that point, I was completely convinced that the rogue was going to hurt my friend. I saw red, and, with all the wisdom of my ten-year-old self, charged at the man who would turn out to be the most powerful shifter in the country.
He just started chuckling again, and he intercepted my tiny wolf with one hand. I found myself handed over to the same rogue pup who had brought me here. Then the man scrutinised me and grinned widely.
"Here, Rhys. You can keep an eye on this one. Watch out, mind — she's damned feisty."
The pup, whom I guessed was called Rhys, caught my scruff in his teeth to stop me going for the man again. The rogue leader, meanwhile, handed Fion to another rogue.
"Move out, lads. I'll be along shortly," the man said, and I found myself being herded away beside Fion. When I realised she was coming too, I stopped fighting. Rhys didn't take long to notice, and he released the scruff of my neck and let me walk on my own.
A little part of me wanted to run or fight back or at least kick up a fuss of some kind. The bigger, more sensible part of me recognised that there were a lot of rogues around me, and they were all big and rough-looking and a little scary, if I was being honest. Even the women were corded with muscle. I wasn't going to pick a fight with them.
I couldn't say how long we travelled for, but by the time we reached a camp in the hills, I was exhausted. Being kidnapped by rogues was more than enough excitement for a ten-year-old to cope with.