Fatal Attraction: The Hybrid Princess novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Ashes
Lilia returns for her parents' funeral, faces the ex who took her seat, and loses control of her fire when the rival Alpha walks in.
My parents burned on the shore at Marrow Bay, and I got there after the fire was lit.
My grandfather's truck stopped at the top of the beach road.
I could see the pyre from there, two long shapes of pine under a wall of orange.
Eighty wolves stood in a ring around it with their heads bowed.
I had been gone fourteen months.
Not one of them looked up when I got out of the truck.
"Breathe, Lilia," my grandfather said.
"I'm breathing."
"You're smoking."
I looked down.
A thin grey thread was rising off my left palm, off the old burn scar.
I closed my hand and walked.
The ring opened for me one wolf at a time.
I heard my name go down the line in whispers.
The Princess.
The wolfless one.
They had called me that since I was sixteen, and I had never learned to love it.
At the front, beside the fire, stood Nolan Calvert.
He wore a navy peacoat and my father's silver pin on the lapel.
His hair was brushed back, and his face had the sad, brave look he practiced in mirrors.
Fourteen months ago he had stood in this same sand at the Midsummer Run and told eighty people I would never be a Luna.
I had no wolf, he said.
I was a mistake the Alpha's family kept hidden.
Then he had taken Tilda Rooke's hand in front of me and walked away.
Tilda stood at his side now in a grey coat, one palm resting on the curve of her stomach.
Three months along, maybe four.
She would not look at me either.
"Lilia," Nolan said, soft and sorrowful.
"You came."
"That's my father's pin."
His fingers jumped to the lapel.
"The council gave it to me. Someone had to hold the pack together."
"Take it off."
"Lilia, this is not the moment."
"It's my parents' funeral. It's exactly the moment."
A murmur ran around the ring.
Nolan's mouth tightened.
He stepped close and dropped his voice to a pitying hush.
"They're gone, and I'm sorry. But you can't walk in after a year and make a scene at the pyre."
"Watch me."
I put my hand out, palm up.
He looked at it, and then he unpinned my father's badge and laid it there, because eighty wolves were watching him do it.
It was still warm from his coat.
I closed my fingers around it, and my skin did not hurt, and that was when I knew something was wrong.
Because I smelled smoke that was not coming from the pyre.
I smelled pine and cold iron and wet wool.
I smelled something under all of it that made the back of my neck go tight and my pulse slam up into my throat.
The whole ring had turned toward the beach road.
A man was walking down onto the sand alone.
He was tall and broad through the shoulders, in a black coat, with dark hair blown flat by the wind.
A pale scar cut through his right eyebrow.
He carried a single pine bough in one hand.
Nobody stopped him, and nobody spoke, and the only sound was the fire.
"Westpoint," someone whispered.
"That's Wardlaw."
"The one who did it."
I did not hear the rest.
My ears had filled with a rushing sound.
He stopped at the edge of the firelight, and his eyes lifted, and they found me across forty feet of sand.
Amber, and then gold.
Something took hold of my chest and pulled, and every step of the last fourteen months fell out from under me.
Mine, said a voice in my body that was not mine at all.
I hated it.
I hated it more than I had ever hated anything.
Because Ambrose had told me in the truck who had come over the ridge that night with twelve wolves and silver.
Westpoint's Alpha.
The man who had killed my mother and father on their own lawn.
I did not decide to move.
I was just across the sand, and the ring was scattering, and fire was running down both my arms.
I swung at his face with a burning fist.
He caught both my wrists in his bare hands.
Flames licked up between his fingers and over his knuckles and did not burn him.
Not a mark.
He stood there holding me with his scarred brow lowered and his eyes burning gold.
"Not here," he said, so low that only I heard it.
"Not in front of him."
Behind me Nolan was already shouting.
"Seize her!"
"She's a dragon!"
"Seize the dragon!"
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