The Alpha's Regret: Rejecting His Fated White Wolf Mate novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Tern Lake

In her late mother's cabin Isla, who has never shifted, wakes at the lake and shifts into a white wolf. A lone wolf knows the coat and names the Council's seventh seat.

My mother's cabin sat on the far shore of Tern Lake, a mile outside the pack line, and it had been shut for seven years.

We got there at first light.

Bettina carried the cases up the porch steps while I stood in the yard and looked at the door.

I had last come through it the week of the funeral.

The key was still under the third flowerpot. It turned stiffly.

Inside, the air was cold and smelled of dust and cedar.

My mother's sewing machine sat under a sheet by the window. Her blue cardigan hung on the hook by the stove, and her reading glasses lay folded on the table.

Nobody had touched anything.

I had paid a pack boy to check the roof every spring, and that was all I had done.

"We'll make it good," Bettina said, and began opening windows. "I'll light the stove. You sit."

I sat on the edge of my mother's bed and held the recipe box on my knees.

I thought about the report.

Three weeks old, Hugh had said. A doctor I had never met had put my body in writing, and Torin had not asked me one question.

He had asked his father.

I told myself that was the answer to everything, and still I could not stop hearing that sound through the window.

The stove caught. The cabin warmed slowly.

By noon, six people from the shore had come to the porch.

They were lone wolves, the ones who belonged to no pack.

They lived in trailers and boathouses around the lake and had never bothered anybody.

An old woman with a grey braid led them. She did not say hello. She put a covered dish of fish stew on the step and said, "Your mother used to feed us."

"I remember," I said.

"Then eat."

I ate, standing on the porch, and cried for the first time since the dinner, into a bowl of someone else's stew.

Nobody said anything about it.

That night Bettina fell asleep on the couch with her boots on.

I could not sleep, and walked down to the lake in my mother's cardigan.

The water was black and flat. The moon was a day past full.

I stood on the stones and felt something move in my chest.

It was low, and slow, and very old.

It pushed against the inside of my ribs, and it wanted out.

I had never shifted, not once.

Every wolf in Cedar Hollow shifted by sixteen.

At twenty-six I could not even feel the edge of it.

Torin's father called me the Luna with no wolf, and he said it kindly.

Everyone laughed.

Now my skin burned.

"No," I said out loud, and put my hand on a rock. "Not now. Not tonight."

It did not listen.

The pain started in my spine and ran into my arms.

I dropped to my knees on the stones.

My bones pulled and cracked. I heard a sound come out of my mouth that was not a word.

For a long moment there was only the cold and the stones and my own breath, huge in my ears.

Then it was over.

I was standing on four feet, in the lake shallows, and the water was lapping at my wrists, and it did not hurt at all.

Everything was sharp.

I could smell the fish stew, and the cedar smoke, and Bettina asleep inside, and the old woman's cottage down the shore.

I looked down at the water.

The wolf looking back at me was white.

Not grey, not pale blonde. White all over, with the moon on her coat and pale grey eyes.

I stood very still.

Behind me a stone clicked.

The old woman was on the shingle in her nightdress with a shawl around her shoulders.

She had walked down from her house without a sound.

She was not afraid of me.

She was staring, and her mouth was open.

I shifted back, shaking, and she put the shawl around me.

"I never shifted before," I said.

"I know," she said. "You were holding it."

"Holding what?"

"Your whole self." She tucked the shawl under my chin. "Girl, look at me. Do you know what you are?"

"I'm a woman the pack threw away."

"You're a white wolf."

The word dropped into the dark.

"There hasn't been one in this pack in thirty years."

Her hands tightened on my shoulders.

"They sit in the Council's seventh chair, and they always have."

"I don't understand."

"Your mother ran from that chair so they could never find you."

She looked up the shore at the dark road to the pack line.

"And tonight, child, you walked straight back into their reach."

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