The Rejected Luna's Revenge novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Silver
Demelza shifts for the first time in Nan's yard, into a silver wolf twice the size anyone expected, while at the Hall Hoyt cannot climb his own stairs.
At two in the morning Demelza could not sit still.
Nan had put her in the small back bedroom with a quilt, and she lasted ten minutes before she was in the kitchen again, pacing.
Her skin felt too small.
There was a heat under her ribs, and it pushed outward with every step.
"Something's coming up in me," she said.
Nan looked at her over the rim of her glasses. "Like a cough?"
"Like a door opening."
Nan went very still, then put her mug down.
"Go out to the yard," she said. "Now. Take the coat off and hang it on the fence."
"Why?"
"Because it's his, and it's good wool, and you're about to be very big."
Demelza stood in the wet grass behind the cottage and hung Rafe's coat on the fence post with hands that shook.
The rain had thinned to a mist.
The heat climbed her spine.
"I've never done this," she whispered.
"I know," Nan said from the back step. "Don't fight it. It knows how."
Demelza dropped to her knees.
Her back bowed and something in her shoulders gave with a wet crack. She bit down on a scream.
It hurt.
Her fingers curled into the earth and the nails darkened and thickened.
Her dress split along the seams and fell away.
Fur ran over her arms and shoulders in a cold wave, silver in the dark, and her face pulled forward.
For one long moment there was only pain.
Then the pain stopped, and she was standing on four feet in Nan's yard.
The night was suddenly loud.
She could hear the fox in the hedgerow and the water in the gutters. She could smell wet stone, onions, woodsmoke and the faint, clean scent of the man who had lent her his coat.
She lifted her head.
She stood higher than the fence.
"Well, there you are," Nan said, very softly.
Demelza turned her head toward the sound.
The old healer was standing on the step with both hands pressed over her mouth.
"A Silver," Nan whispered. "Demelza, honey. You're a Silver. Your mother's line."
Demelza could not answer, because wolves cannot talk.
She took one step forward, then another, and the whole yard seemed to move around her.
A truck door slammed in the lane.
Rafe Kincaid stood at the gate, with a second coat over his arm.
He did not move. He did not speak.
His eyes met hers, and she could see the gold in them rising.
He took one slow breath, and then another.
Then he went down on one knee in the wet grass, the way a man does when he has been given something heavy to carry.
"Demelza," he said, very quietly.
She padded across the yard and stopped an arm's length from him.
He did not reach out.
She could have knocked him flat with a shoulder. They both knew it.
Instead she lowered her great head, and breathed in the smell of rain on black hair and cold coffee.
His wolf was close under his skin.
Hers answered.
It was nothing like the bond she had felt for Hoyt.
This was quieter, and it did not pull at all.
She stepped back before it could say anything more.
The change back came as easily as taking off a glove.
She was kneeling in the mud and the mist, naked and shaking, with Nan already beside her with a blanket.
Rafe was looking at the fence post, and at the sky, and anywhere at all.
"Coat," Demelza said through chattering teeth.
He passed the second one to Nan without turning his head.
She pulled it on over the blanket. It smelled of him, too.
"I've never seen a wolf that size," Rafe said to the fence. "And I've fought two Alphas."
"Hoyt's guards," said Demelza. "Thirty."
"Twelve of my wolves are an hour out. They'll stand witness." He cleared his throat. "They won't touch anyone. The charter doesn't need blood."
"Good. I don't want blood."
She wanted the Ridge, and she wanted to stand on it.
Everything else could wait for daylight.
Rafe's phone buzzed in his pocket.
He pulled it out, read the screen, and read it again.
"My second is still at the Hall," he said slowly. "I asked him to stay and keep an ear open."
"And?"
He turned the phone toward her.
*Brocklehurst went down on the main stairs. His wolf won't answer him. They had to carry him up.*
Nan breathed out through her nose.
"Well," she said. "Isn't that interesting."
Demelza stared at the screen.
Her hands, wrapped in the blanket, were warm and strong.
And somewhere up the hill, in a lantern-lit house, the man who had rejected her could not climb his own stairs.
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