Read Chapter 2: The First Full Moon

The clinic smelled of disinfectant and wet dog before Iona even reached the examination room. Moira Grant stood in the doorway, wringing her hands, her face the colour of old porridge.

“He won’t stop bleeding,” Moira said. “Andy, he… he got out last night. I found him at dawn by the burn.”

Iona pushed past her. On the steel table lay a border collie, a young male, barely two years old by the look of his teeth. His flank was a mess of torn flesh—ragged, deep, as if something had gripped him and shaken him like a rat. Blood matted his black-and-white coat into a single dark slick.

“Andy, easy, easy.” Iona moved slowly, letting the dog smell her hand before she touched him. His tail gave a weak thump. Good sign. He was conscious, which meant the bleeding was external, not internal. “What did this to him?”

“I don’t know.” Moira’s voice cracked. “I thought maybe a deer, but… deer don’t do that. And there were tracks. Big ones. Bigger than any dog I’ve ever seen.”

Iona’s hands worked automatically—clipping fur, swabbing the wound. The lacerations were deep and clean-edged. A bite. She’d treated dog bites before, farm injuries, foxes cornered by terriers. This wasn’t that. The jaws that had done this had width and power. The punctures were spaced wide apart, almost like a human hand’s spread, but the teeth marks were long and curved.

“This wasn’t a dog,” she said, more to herself than to Moira.

“It’s the curse,” Moira whispered. “The Blackwood curse.”

Iona looked up. “What?”

“The old family. They’re not right. My gran always said—stay inside on the full moon, mind the boundary stones.” Moira crossed herself, a quick, practiced gesture. “I thought it was nonsense. But Andy, he’s a good dog. He doesn’t chase sheep. He wouldn’t go up there unless something called him.”

Iona returned to her stitching. The wound needed forty-odd sutures, and she worked with a steady hand while Moira talked, nervously, filling the silence with local lore. Something about the first Blackwood laird making a deal with the devil in the sixteen-hundreds. About how the family didn’t age right, didn’t die right, didn’t stay in their own skin.

“They come out at the full moon,” Moira finished. “All of them. Even the bairns.”

Iona knotted the final suture and stepped back. “He’s stable. I want to keep him overnight for observation. Bring him back tomorrow and I’ll check the wound.”

“You’re not staying here alone tonight, are you?” Moira asked, her eyes wide.

“I’ll be fine.” Iona smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She’d been in Glasgow for five years. She’d dealt with drunks and addicts and owners who sobbed in her exam room over animals they couldn’t afford to save. A dark hillside was nothing.

Moira left with promises to call in the morning. Iona settled Andy into a kennel with a heated pad and a bowl of water, then locked the clinic door. She walked the short path to her cottage, boots squelching in the wet grass. The sky was threading gold and violet—the tail end of sunset—and above the treeline, the Blackwood estate sat dark against the hills.

She paused, hand on her cottage door, and looked at it. The windows were black. No lights. No movement. But she felt watched, a prickle at the base of her neck that she couldn’t explain.

---

Inside, she made toast and tea and tried to read a battered paperback she’d found in a drawer of the cottage’s previous occupant. The words blurred. Her mind kept returning to the dog’s wounds. The width of the bite. The spacing of the punctures. She’d seen something similar once, at a wildlife park outside Edinburgh—a wolf-dog hybrid that had snapped its chain. But this was different. There was something almost deliberate in the attack, like the animal had toyed with the collie, testing him.

Her phone buzzed. A local number.

“Is this Dr. MacRae?” A man’s voice, clipped, with the soft burr of the Highlands. “This is Callum Blackwood. We have a mare at the estate. She’s not right. Can you come?”

Iona glanced at the window. The moon was rising—a fat, pale disc, nearly full. She’d checked her calendar that morning. Full moon tonight.

“What are her symptoms?” she asked.

“Just come,” Callum said. “Please. She’s in the east paddock. The gate will be open.”

The line went dead.

Iona stood in her small kitchen, weighing it. The warning from Lachlan Blackwood the day before played in her head. *Leave before nightfall.* The superstitious mutterings from Moira. The boundary stones she’d seen at the edge of the property, moss-covered and ancient.

But a horse was suffering. And she was a vet, first and foremost.

She grabbed her bag and her keys.

---

The east paddock was a meadow of silvered grass, bounded by drystone walls. The mare stood apart from the others, head down, flanks heaving. Iona climbed the fence and approached slowly, murmuring low and soft. The mare let her come close enough to run a hand over her neck. Hot. Feverish.

“She’s colicky,” Iona called to the shadows. “I need to walk her. Do you have a halter?”

Callum Blackwood emerged from behind the stable block. He was in his sixties, lean and grey, with sharp features that reminded her uncomfortably of Lachlan. He held out a rope halter without a word.

They walked the mare in slow circles for twenty minutes. Iona listened to the gut sounds, felt the horse’s pulse steady. By the time the colic eased, the moon had climbed clear of the hills—huge and white, turning the paddock to bone.

“She’ll be fine,” Iona said. “But keep her off the rich grass for a day or two. I’ll leave some electrolyte powder.”

“Thank you.” Callum’s gaze kept flicking to the main house, where the drive was lit up. Figures moved in the glow—fast, purposeful.

Iona saw them clearly. The old grandmother, leaning on a cane but moving with alarming speed. Children—a boy and a girl, maybe ten and eight—carrying bags. Lachlan at the head, holding open the back door of a battered Land Rover.

The entire family was loading into the van.

“Is something wrong?” Iona asked, keeping her voice light. “Bit late for a family outing.”

Callum’s jaw tightened. “We have… business.”

“At night?” She smiled, hoping he’d read it as friendly curiosity. “All of you?”

“We keep to ourselves out here, Dr. MacRae.” The emphasis was gentle but final. Callum handed her a folded banknote. “For your trouble. The gate will be open on your way out.”

She took the money. She didn’t argue. She walked back to her Land Rover, and she didn’t look back until she was through the gate and onto the main road.

Only then did she pull over and kill the engine.

She watched in her rearview mirror as the estate gates swung shut, and the Land Rover’s headlights swung onto the farm track that led up into the hills. Up toward the high moors, where the trees thinned and the rock rose grey and bare.

Up toward the mountains.

Her phone lit up with a text from Moira: *Did you see them? Gone again. Every month. Like clockwork.*

Iona typed back: *Where do they go?*

A long pause. Then three dots. Then: *Nobody knows.*

The moon was fully up now, sharp-edged and silver, and she felt the strangest sensation—like the light was pressing down on her skin, asking her a question she didn’t know how to answer.

She put the Land Rover in gear and drove home.

---

The cottage was cold and dark when she returned. She didn’t bother turning on the lamps. She went straight to the window and looked out.

The Blackwood estate was a silhouette against the moon-washed sky. And there, high on the mountain flank, a thin stream of light crept upward—headlights, climbing the old drove road that no one in the village used anymore.

She watched until the lights vanished over the ridge.

Then she unpacked the last box she hadn’t touched since Glasgow. The one her mother’s lawyer had sent after the funeral. She hadn’t been ready to open it. But tonight, with the quiet pressing in and the impossible lights gone beyond the hill, she wanted something familiar.

Her mother’s jewellery was in there. She knew it without looking—the clatter of cheap beads and a few good pieces. And nested at the bottom, wrapped in tissue paper, a silver locket on a thin chain. She hadn’t remembered it. But when she turned it over in her fingers, the engraving caught the moonlight.

A tree, its branches sweeping upward. And at the base of the trunk, a crescent moon.