Chapter Two: The River and the Reckoning

I run until the hall is gone and the pack sounds are gone and there is nothing around me but the forest and the dark, and then I kept running because the forest and the dark are safer than anything that has my name on it right now.

My legs know this path without me. I have walked it since I was small the trail that cuts behind the Ashcroft border and drops down to the river where nobody goes at night because the moonlight is strange here, silver and warm, and pack wolves generally find strange things uncomfortable.

I have always found it the only place I could breathe.

I make it to the bank before my legs gives up. I go down hard on the grass and I sit with my knees against my chest and I wait for the crying to start. It doesn’t. There is nothing in my chest right now. Just the absence of where the bond was enormous and clean and cold.

He rejected me. In front of every wolf in that room. In front of the Elders and the families and the twenty-two other unmated wolves who will go home tonight paired and warm and chosen. He called me an insult. He called me a curse. He said the Moon Goddess made a mistake.

I put my forehead on my knees.

The moon is very bright. The silver water moves. I don’t know how long I sit here. Long enough for the cold to get into my bones. Long enough for the ceremony to end, probably, for the celebration to begin, for everyone to forget the moment except the people who laughed.

I think about my parents. I think about my brother. I think about nine years old and standing in the trees and not understanding what I had done. I think about twelve years of being the thing this pack points to when it needs a reason for its bad days.

I think about my aunt’s face tonight not angry, not even satisfied, just finally, quietly settled, the way a person looks when they have been proven right about something they always believed.

I think: I have survived everything this pack has thrown at me for twelve years. I have survived every morning that started with my aunt’s voice telling me what I cost her. I have survived being last and least and cursed and wrong.

 I have survived meals withheld and wages stolen and a cousin who breaks my things on purpose to watch me not react. I have survived all of it by being very still and very quiet and very careful. I will survive this too.

I press my palms flat to the ground. The earth is cold. The moonlight falls across my hands and something strange happens, the silver light that touches my skin does not feel cold. It feels warm. It feels like recognition. I look at my hands. For a second, just a second, there is a shimmer under my skin, faint and silver, and then it’s gone so fast I think I imagined it.

I’m tired. I’m imagining things. I get up and start walking back.

♦︎

The weeks that follow are the greyest of my life.

The pack talks. They always talk, but now they have material. The Lycan King rejected the curse-born at the Mating Ceremony not even a real rejection, they say, because you can only be properly rejected by a mate who considers you worth rejecting, and clearly, I was not.

My aunt’s satisfaction is quiet and thorough. She doesn’t say anything outright. She doesn’t have to.

I go about my work. I clean. I mend. I avoid mirrors because my own face has started to look unfamiliar to me and I don’t have the energy to examine why. I take the meals I am given and say nothing about the ones I am not. I count things when I am overwhelmed: steps, breaths, the number of stitches in a hem. Counting makes the world smaller and smaller is survivable.

Three weeks after the ceremony, I’m sick in the morning.

I think nothing of it the first day. The second day I sit on the edge of my bed and wait for it to pass and notice, with the detached attention of someone who has been trying not to think too hard, that it passes at exactly the same time it passed yesterday. The third day I count.

I count the weeks. I count them again. My hands are very steady. I am a wolf who has learned to be still when everything inside is not.

I think about the Harvest Night bonfire, six weeks ago. The one night every year when the pack lowers its rules a little and the boundary between caution and want gets thinner.

I had gone to the edge of it, not inside, watching from the dark. A stranger had been there. He smelled of pine and cold water and something underneath that I had not been able to name. We had talked in the dark and I had not seen his face clearly and I had thought, after, that it was the kind of night that belongs only to itself and does not carry forward. It carried forward.

I put my hands in my lap. I look at the wall. I let myself understand what I already know.

I am pregnant. I do not know who the father is. I am an unmated, rejected, curse-born Omega in a pack that already has more reasons than it needs to throw me away. I have approximately four weeks before anyone can see, four weeks to figure out the impossible.

The moonlight comes through my window. I hold my hand in it. For a moment, just a moment, there is that warmth again. That shimmer. That feeling, impossible and specific of being recognized by something that does not care what this pack decided I was.

I close my fingers. I breathe. I think about what the pack would say if they knew. I think about my aunt’s face. I think about the Elders in their carved chairs. I think about the Lycan King stepping back from me in that hall, his expression a closed door, the bond snapping like a thread pulled too hard.

None of them knew what they were rejecting. Neither did I. But there is something here, in the warmth of this light on my hands, in the silver that keeps appearing and disappearing at the edges of my vision, that feels less like a curse and more like something waiting to be understood.

I don’t know what I am. I know what I’m not. I’m not nothing. Whatever this pack has decided, I am not nothing.

I got up and went inside. I start with the next hour, because the next hour is all I have, and I have always been very good at the next hour. One hour. Then another. That is how you survive when you cannot see further than that.

I start with what I know. I am good at starting with what I know.