The Mating Moon

Nobody wants you at the Mating Moon, so you stand where nobody has to look at you: behind the last row of torches, holding a tray of honey cakes you baked because your mother always baked them.

Your mother has been dead for twenty-nine days.

The pack still says her name like it tastes of rust. Liora the healer. Liora the poisoner. Three months ago the old Alpha, Aldric Blackmoor, died in his bed with black veins climbing his throat, and by morning the council had found a vial of wolfsbane in her medicine cabinet. She swore she'd never seen it. She died in a holding cell under the lodge before the trial was finished. Heart failure, the elders said.

You know better. You just can't prove it.

"You shouldn't be here, Ava."

Ansel Marrick steps beside you, freckles gold in the firelight. He's twenty-five and already the Beta. Once, when you were kids, he taught you to whistle through a blade of grass.

"I'm wolfless," you say. "I'm not invisible. The cakes were her recipe."

He takes one, which is more kindness than anyone else has shown you all month. Then his eyes slide to the cliff, and his face goes careful.

Kael has come out onto the Moon Rock.

He's twenty-six, the youngest Alpha in Blackmoor's history, and he wears it like a coat that doesn't fit yet. Black hair pushed back. Gray eyes. A thin scar splitting his left eyebrow from a fight he won at nineteen, the same summer he used to swim the river with you until the stars came out. Before his father died. Before your mother was blamed for it. Before he stopped saying your name.

Half the unmated girls at the fire are watching him and pretending not to. You can't blame them. The torchlight finds the hard line of his jaw and the hollows under his cheekbones, and he's beautiful the way a winter storm is beautiful: something you want to stand closer to than you should.

Beside him stands his uncle Corvin, silver-haired and mild, his hand resting on Kael's shoulder like a blessing.

"Blackmoor," Kael says, and two hundred wolves go quiet. "The moon is full. Let the bonds find us."

The torches gutter. Someone laughs nervously. This is the part everyone waits for: the night the moon decides who belongs to whom. Most years nothing happens. Some years two people gasp, turn, and the whole pack cheers.

You don't expect anything. You've never felt your wolf. Not once in twenty-two years.

Then the moon clears the pines.

It hits you like a fist under the sternum. You drop the tray. Honey cakes roll across the dirt. Heat pours through your chest, down your arms, into your fingertips, and something in your blood that has never spoken in your whole life says one word.

Mine.

You look up.

Kael is already looking at you.

He's gone white. His hand is pressed flat over his heart as if he's been shot. Across forty yards of firelight his eyes find yours and hold, and for one second, one, he looks the way he did at the river: stunned, open, nineteen.

The pack turns. One by one, they follow his stare to you.

"No," someone whispers. "Not her."

Corvin's hand tightens on Kael's shoulder. He bends and says something into his nephew's ear. You can't hear it. You see Kael's jaw lock.

Then he steps down off the Moon Rock and walks toward you.

The crowd parts for him. You can smell him before he reaches you: cedar, rain, the woodsmoke that always lives in his collar. The pull in your chest is so strong you're afraid you'll fall into him. You've wanted this. You've never let yourself say it, even in your head, but you've wanted this since you were nineteen and he pulled you out of the cold river laughing.

He stops an arm's length away.

"Kael," you breathe.

For a heartbeat his eyes go soft.

Then they go black, the Alpha rising to the surface, and his voice comes out loud enough for the back row.

"I, Kael Blackmoor, Alpha of Blackmoor, reject you as my mate."

The words hit the bond like an axe.

You hear someone gasp. Then someone else laughs, a short, ugly bark, and it spreads. Not everyone. But enough. Selene Draven, the visiting daughter of the Ashcrest pack, covers her pretty mouth with her hand, and her eyes are bright.

"The healer's daughter," a woman behind you mutters. "Can you imagine. A poisoner's girl as Luna."

You don't look away from Kael. You make him look at you.

"Say it again," you whisper.

His throat moves. "Accept the rejection, Ava."

"Why?"

"Because I'm your Alpha and I'm telling you to."

The thing in your chest is screaming. You don't know how to stop it, so you do the only thing you have left. You lift your chin.

"I accept your rejection," you say, clear as a bell. "I hope it's worth it."

The bond tears.

It feels like being skinned from the inside. You double over. Somewhere very far away you hear Kael make a sound, low and wrong, like an animal stepping in a trap. When you straighten, he's already turned his back. He's walking toward the Moon Rock. His shoulders are perfectly straight.

He doesn't look back once.

You pack in eleven minutes.

There isn't much. Your mother's bag of herbs. Her rings. The quilt from your bed. A photo of the two of you at the lake, both squinting into the sun. You leave the honey cake recipe on the kitchen table, because you're never baking them again.

Ansel is waiting by your mother's old truck.

"Don't," you say.

"I should have said something." His voice is raw. "Up there. I should have."

"You should have." You toss the bag into the cab. "You didn't. Move."

He moves.

You drive with the windows down so the cold air can scour your face. The pines blur past in the headlights. Your chest hurts so badly you have to pull over twice, gripping the wheel, breathing through your teeth. It isn't heartbreak. Heartbreak is a word. This is a wound with edges.

The border of Blackmoor territory is marked by an old iron sign half-eaten by moss. You've never crossed it alone.

Twenty yards before the sign, the pain changes.

It drops down your spine like molten metal. Your hands go numb on the wheel. The truck swerves onto the shoulder and stalls in the gravel, and you fall out of the door onto your knees in the cold, wet ferns.

Something is moving under your skin.

Your fingers curl into the dirt. Light leaks out between them, pale and shining, silver as the moon. It's coming from you. It's crawling up your wrists and over your arms and into your eyes, and you open your mouth to scream and what comes out is not a human sound.

It's a howl.

Far behind you, deep in Blackmoor, something howls back.

Headlights flare across the road. A car door opens. Boots crunch on gravel and stop beside you, and a woman's voice, dry and unhurried, says your name like she's known it for years.

"There you are, Ava," she says. "I've been waiting for you since midnight."