Mated to the Beast of the Wasteland novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Ditch
Ember dies on the Gate road the night Haven's shield falls, wakes on graduation morning, puts the drugged champagne on the Hawthornes' table, refuses her pairing at the microphone, and reaches the Gate to find the beastman she means to bond chained for the sundown cull.
"What's wrong with that one? Look at his arm. It's black scales from the shoulder down."
"Tainted. Leave him. The shield's gone, and the whole road's going to be hollows in an hour."
The tall collar didn't even slow down.
He swung his boot into my son's ribs.
My boy was two years old. He weighed about as much as a sack of flour.
He flew off my hip and into the roadside ditch.
He didn't cry. He just went quiet in the black water.
I still had his sister on my other arm.
I jumped in after him anyway.
The sky above Haven was the color of a bruise.
For the first time in my life, there was nothing up there.
The shield had been cracked for years.
I was the only one who'd said so.
I found his small hand in the mud and pulled him under me with his sister.
Up on the road, people were screaming.
Then something with too many jaws came over the edge of the ditch.
I put my back to it and held my children.
I remember thinking of their father.
I remember thinking, Brand, I'm sorry, I didn't get them out.
Then I woke up.
There was a white graduation gown hanging on the back of my dorm door.
My Institute badge sat on the desk. EMBER FARADAY, SHIELD ENGINEERING, FIRST IN YEAR.
My hands were clean.
My stomach was flat.
I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both palms against it until they shook.
The calendar on my screen said graduation day.
I was twenty-four.
The twins weren't born yet. Their father was alive.
And tonight my uncle was going to hand me a glass of champagne.
The ceremony was in the Great Hall under the glass roof.
You could see the shield from there, a faint gold skin across the whole sky.
Everyone said it would last a hundred years.
I knew the date it would fall.
The Hawthornes had the front table.
Ottoline Hawthorne, Director of the Registry, sat in her ivory coat.
Her son Perrin was beside her, golden hair, pleasant smile, the ShieldWorks pin on his lapel.
Last time I had thought he was handsome.
Last time I had stabbed his hand with his own fountain pen to get out of his bed.
My uncle found me backstage.
He kissed my cheek. He smelled of cologne and nerves.
"I'm so proud of you, sweetheart." He held out a flute of champagne. "One sip, for luck."
I knew exactly what it tasted like.
Bitter under the sweet.
I took the glass.
He gave a satisfied nod.
Onstage, Ottoline stood at the podium to read the year's Registry pairings.
Her voice filled the hall.
"Our top graduate, Ember Faraday, is paired with Perrin Hawthorne. ShieldWorks is honored."
Applause.
Perrin raised a hand to the crowd.
I walked out onto the stage with the champagne.
I didn't go to the podium.
I went down the steps to the Hawthorne table and set the glass in front of Perrin.
The hall went quiet.
"You drink it, then," I said.
Perrin looked at the glass. He didn't touch it.
Behind me, I heard my uncle make a small sound.
"Go on," I said. "It's for luck. My uncle poured it himself."
Ottoline's mouth went thin.
"Miss Faraday, you're overexcited."
"I'm not, Director. I'm refusing the pairing."
I said it into the stage microphone so the back rows heard it.
Six hundred people turned to look at the Hawthornes.
Perrin recovered first. He always did.
He stood, smiled, and buttoned his jacket.
"A pairing can only be refused by a bonded woman," he said, loud and easy.
"You're not bonded, Ember. You have until midnight. Then you're mine to collect."
A few people laughed, thinking it was a joke.
My uncle wasn't laughing. He was white.
"Midnight," I said. "Fine."
I took off the gown on the steps and left it there.
I caught the last bus out to the Gate with my badge and the clothes I had on.
The Gate was where Haven's wall met the old highway.
Past it was the Wasteland, gray dust under a gray sky.
In my first life I had run here at two in the morning with drugs in my blood.
A wolf-kin man had been sitting in the yard, waiting on a trade permit.
Huge, black-haired, with black scales down his left arm.
I had begged a stranger to bond me.
He had looked at me for a long time and said yes.
I came into the yard at nine at night with my heart pounding.
The bench by the trading window was empty.
"Looking for someone?" said the Gate officer through the glass.
"Brand Tarrant. Wasteland City. He's waiting on a permit."
The officer snorted. "No, he isn't."
He nodded across the yard at a cage of steel bars under a floodlight.
The cull pen.
A man sat inside it on the concrete, chained by both wrists to the bars.
Black hair. Amber eyes. Black scales down his left arm.
His feral clock was posted on the cage. Three minutes.
"The three-minute?" the officer said. "Lady, he's going down at sundown tomorrow."
Brand lifted his head and looked straight at me.
He didn't know me.
"Go home, Haven girl," he said. "You've got the wrong beast."
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