The Rejected Mate novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Rite
At the Moon Stone Caelen rejects Willa under his father's command, Willa refuses to accept it and the fever hits him instead, and the Alpha bars her from the pack house while the Stormvale Alpha offers her a ride out.
"I'll be there," Willa said to the empty doorway, long after Caelen had gone.
The Moon Stone stood in a clearing a mile above the pack house, a flat grey slab as tall as a man, rubbed smooth by a thousand years of palms.
By ten the next night every wolf in Ironwood stood in a ring around it, holding lanterns.
Willa walked into the ring alone, in the plain green dress she wore to the bakery.
Nobody spoke to her.
Her parents stood at the far edge beside Dinah, and her mother would not lift her eyes.
Alpha Rufus waited beside the Stone with his hands folded.
Caelen stood in front of it, bare-headed in the cold.
He looked hollowed out.
Beyond the lanterns, at the edge of the trees, a lean man with a sandy beard leaned on a fence post with his hands in his jacket pockets.
He was Kirk Hartnell, the Alpha of Stormvale, who had come three days early for the border talks.
Willa had never spoken to him, and he was watching Caelen.
"Pack of Ironwood," Rufus said. "We are gathered to loose a bond the Moon should never have tied."
"It is the heir's duty to put his child first. Caelen."
Caelen stepped up to the Stone.
He laid his palm on it, and the grey rock seemed to drink the lantern light.
"I, Caelen Braithwaite," he said, and stopped.
A muscle jumped in his jaw.
"Say it," said Rufus.
He did not raise his voice.
He did not have to.
The air around the Alpha pressed down, and she heard the wolves nearest him whimper, and a child began to cry.
Caelen's knees buckled and he caught himself against the Stone.
Blood ran from where his teeth had cut his lip.
"I, Caelen Braithwaite, heir of Ironwood," he said, in the same dead voice from the hall, "reject Willa Ashdown as my mate."
"Before the Moon and before this pack, I release her."
The thread under Willa's ribs went tight as a wire.
The pain came up so fast she could not breathe.
She saw Dinah smile, small and quick, behind her hand, and she saw her mother cover her face.
By law she had one thing to say.
Every she-wolf in the ring knew the words, and every one of them braced to hear them.
"Do you accept?" Rufus asked her.
It was said as a formality.
Willa pressed one hand flat over her chest and stood up straight.
"No," she said.
The ring went silent.
"Say the words, girl," said Rufus. "It's finished. Say you accept."
"I do not accept."
Her voice carried to the trees.
"He can say what he likes. I was not asked, I was told, and I won't give anyone the pleasure of my agreement."
An old woman near the front, the pack healer, gasped.
"Nobody has refused in my lifetime," she whispered.
On the Stone, Caelen's whole body arched.
The sound that came out of him was not a word, and it was not quite a howl.
He dropped to his knees with both hands clawed into the grass, and the fever ran visibly across his skin, sweat springing out on his neck and temples.
Willa felt her own pain ease by half.
She understood, in the stillness, exactly what had happened.
The bond was still whole.
The rejection had only hurt him.
"Get him up," Rufus snapped to the nearest wolves.
He turned on Willa with the warm mask gone from his face.
"Then you are a fool and your wolf is a rebel," he said. "No pack house will keep you."
"You are barred from the heir's house and the Alpha's table, and you will stay out of my sight until the child is born."
"Your family will keep the Beta's seat only if it keeps you quiet."
Willa looked at her father.
His mouth worked, and nothing came out of it.
She looked at her mother, who wept into her hands.
She looked at Dinah, and her little sister looked back with her big wet eyes and did not blink.
"I understand," Willa said.
She turned and walked out of the ring.
Nobody stopped her.
The wolves parted for her one by one, and she did not look back to see Caelen carried off the hill.
She was at the bottom of the track, in the dark, when a truck engine started beside the fence.
"Miss Ashdown."
Kirk Hartnell leaned out of the driver's window.
Up close, his eyes were brown and not unkind, and his jaw was tight.
"I'm Kirk. I went to school with that idiot for two years."
"I know who you are."
"Stormvale has a spare room and a healer who's seen a refusal before. Not here. In Stormvale nobody will blame you for it."
"Why?"
"Because he'd have been a good Alpha if his father weren't standing on his neck," Kirk said. "And because you shouldn't be alone tonight."
Rain began to fall, fat and cold.
Willa looked back up the hill, where the lanterns still burned.
Then she opened the passenger door and got in.
The truck pulled away down the road.
Halfway to the river she put her hand on her chest and felt the thread behind her ribs pull toward the hill like a rope with a man on the other end, still hauling.
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