Mateo Santiago novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cast Out
On her 25th birthday the Alpha throws his wolfless daughter out in front of the whole pack, and a rogue Alpha is waiting on the road.
On my twenty-fifth birthday my father made me stand in the middle of the Black Lake clearing.
Two hundred wolves stood in a ring around me with their hands in their pockets.
The Harvest Moon sat fat and orange over the pines.
It was the third year in a row I had been brought out to wake.
The first year they said I was a late bloomer.
The second year they said I was nervous.
Every wolf in that ring had changed at thirteen, and I had not changed at all.
"Sofia," my father said, and the whole clearing went quiet for him.
Aurelio Maldonado had a silver mustache, kind eyes, and a voice that made grown men sit down.
He had been Alpha of Black Lake for twenty-six years.
"Call your wolf, mija," he said.
I shut my eyes and reached inside for the thing that every one of them could feel in their own chests.
There was nothing there.
There was never anything there.
It was trying to lift a hand that wasn't attached.
A minute went by, and then another.
Somebody coughed, and a child asked its mother something in a whisper.
When I opened my eyes, my father was looking at the ground.
"Three Wakings," he said, sorrow thick in his voice.
"By the law of this pack, a wolf who cannot wake by twenty-five is not a wolf."
My stomach dropped.
I had known the law since I was a kid, but I had never thought he would say it about me.
"Dad," I said.
"I am Alpha before I am your father tonight," he said, and he lifted his chin so everyone could see how much it cost him.
"Sofia Maldonado is wolfless, and I cast her out of Black Lake."
A sound ran around the ring, half gasp and half relief.
Nobody argued with him.
I looked for one friendly face and found none.
Emilio Archuleta stood at my father's shoulder in his good black jacket with the silver Beta cuff on his wrist.
Two years ago he had put a ring on my finger in front of this same crowd.
Last year, after my second failure, he had taken it back in front of them too.
He was smiling a little now.
"Her mother would have been ashamed," Emilio said, loud enough to carry.
I felt that one in my teeth.
"My mother was killed by rogues," I said, "and she would never have been ashamed of me."
"Rogues are what you are now," my father said gently.
"Take off the cuff."
The pack cuff on my left wrist was the plain silver band every Black Lake child got at birth.
I looked at it for a second.
Then I unhooked it myself and walked straight across the grass to Emilio.
I put it in his palm and folded his fingers over it, one by one.
"Hold that for the next girl you drop," I said.
Somebody in the crowd laughed, and then stopped.
Emilio's smile went tight.
"The ring too," my father said quietly.
My right hand closed.
It was my mother's moonstone, a small pale one in an old silver setting.
Inés Maldonado had worn it every day of her life.
I had worn it since the night she died, when I was twelve.
"This was hers," I said.
"It belongs to the pack," said Emilio, and reached for my hand.
I stepped back and put my fist behind my hip.
"Touch me and you'll lose that hand at the wrist," I said.
I had no wolf and no claws.
But two hundred people heard it, and for one breath nobody moved.
My father nodded once at Emilio.
"Let her keep it," he said, too easily, as if it were a gift.
"It will do her no good where she's going."
They walked me out in a line, six of Emilio's hunters with their eyes on the road.
I did not cry in front of them.
I did not look back at the lodge, or at the lake, or at the light in my mother's old window.
The county road was a mile and a half of cold dark, and they walked it with me to the pack's boundary stones.
Then they stopped, and they did not turn around.
"The Alpha said to make sure," the biggest one said, and he cracked his knuckles.
I understood then that a wolfless girl cast out onto rogue land was not meant to get very far.
I backed up one step, and then another.
Something huge moved on the ridge above the road.
A black wolf the size of a horse came hurtling down the slope, silver across its face.
The hunters didn't even have time to shift.
It hit the first man and threw him into the culvert, and the rest scattered.
Then the wolf stopped in front of me, and its body ran into a man.
He was tall enough that I had to look up a long way, naked and unbothered, with his hair tied back and one ear notched.
He didn't look at my wrist, or my ring, or my face.
He looked at the hunters running down the road, and then he looked at me.
"You're on my land," Mateo Santiago said.
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