The Alpha Who Rejected Me

The Ryland pack held its mating ceremonies in the old quarry, because four hundred wolves need somewhere to stand and because Alpha Ryland liked an audience.

I was nineteen. I had a dress my mother had altered twice and a name nobody outside the eastern cabins had reason to know. When the moon found me and pulled my head up and turned my whole body toward Kade Ryland, I remember thinking, absurdly, that I should have practiced walking in the shoes.

He looked at me for four seconds. I counted them later, over and over, the way you count stairs in the dark.

Then he said, "I reject her."

There is no polite word for what a rejection does. The bond is not a rope that gets cut; it is a bone that gets broken while it is still growing. I went down on the stone and I heard my knees hit and I could not make my lungs work, and above me four hundred wolves looked politely at the sky.

Nobody helped me up. It is bad luck to touch what the moon threw away.

My mother found me an hour later, after the dancing started. She did not say anything. She walked me home along the ridge road, and in the morning there was a bag packed by the door, and she said, "Not because I want you to go. Because you will not survive staying."

So I went.

I will spare you the two years in the middle, because they were mostly buses and diners and a rented room over a laundromat in a human town where nobody could smell what I was. I learned to sleep through the full moon. I learned that a rejected wolf does not die of it, which had been an open question.

And then, in a parking lot in the third October, a woman with grey at her temples got out of a truck and said, "You're Maren's girl. From the eastern cabins."

Her name was Ada Fenn. She ran a territory in the high country that did not appear on any pack map, made up almost entirely of wolves other packs had thrown away: rejected mates, exiles, three brothers whose alpha had died without an heir. They had land, water, and no bloodline anybody respected.

"We don't do ceremonies," Ada told me on the drive up. "We do work. You any good at anything?"

I was good at exactly one thing. I had spent two years learning how a pack breaks, from the inside, from underneath. I knew every place the weight sits.

It took eleven months for Ada to make me her second, and another nine for her to die of something the doctors in town called a mass and the wolves called bad luck, and on a Thursday in March I became the Luna of a territory of the discarded, with two hundred and six wolves and a valley nobody had wanted.

We were fine. That is the part of the story that gets skipped.

We were more than fine. We had water rights the neighboring packs had let lapse, and a road, and by the second winter we had grain contracts with four human towns because I was the only alpha in three hundred miles willing to sit in a county office in a blazer and fill out forms.

Which is how I came to be standing on my own border in the fourth winter, watching a delegation from the Ryland pack come up the road on foot, in daylight, with their heads uncovered.

You walk in daylight with your head uncovered when you are asking for something you have no right to.

Their alpha had died. Their grain had failed for the second year, and their creek had gone bad above the fork, and their numbers had dropped from four hundred to something under three hundred. And there is exactly one territory in the high country with water and road access and a Luna known to take in wolves nobody else wants.

Kade Ryland walked at the front, because of course he did.

He had aged. Not badly — wolves do not age badly — but there was something scraped-out about him, the look men get when they have spent three years doing a job they were never trained for and losing at it.

He stopped six feet from me. He did not know me. That is the detail I keep turning over: he had looked at me for four seconds once, in the dark, in a dress that did not fit, and he had never bothered to learn my face.