My Pack Erased Me. The Lycan King Didn't. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Hundred Wolves
Thora's mate rejects her at the Claiming in front of three hundred wolves, her father doesn't growl and her brothers stand down, and when her pack strikes her name the Lycan King refuses to seal it.
The stone in the middle of the lawn was still warm from the sun when Brant MacInnes took his hand off it.
Three hundred wolves stood in a ring of torches and waited for him to say my name.
I stood in my white dress with my palms open, the way the law says a Claimed woman stands.
That morning my mother had tied the grey cord on my wrist, the same one she tied every full moon.
She had knotted it twice and pulled it tight.
"Keep it on, whatever they say tonight," she'd told me.
My oldest brother had hugged me at the door and said, "Five brothers, Bri. Nobody touches you."
My father had patted my shoulder and said nothing was going to go wrong.
Brant had texted at noon: "Tonight we start. I'm yours, whatever anyone says."
I had waited six years for this night, because my wolf never came and the law says a wolf must be present to be claimed.
My father had gotten the elders to bend the law for me.
Brant stepped in front of me, and his smile was the one I'd known since I was eighteen.
"Thora Haldane," he said, loud enough for the back rows. "I reject you as my mate."
Somebody gasped.
I couldn't tell who. My ears had gone flat and far away.
"Stonefall needs a Luna with a wolf," Brant said. "A woman who can't shift can't hold a pack. I won't pretend otherwise to be polite."
The bond in my chest pulled once, hard.
Then it went slack.
I looked at my father.
Alpha Corwin Haldane was fifty-five years old and the strongest wolf in the north, and he stood three steps from me with his hands at his sides.
He did not growl.
He did not even step forward.
I looked at my mother.
Edda Haldane was staring at the grass, and her hands were twisted together in front of her green cardigan.
She did not look up.
Behind me I heard my brothers move, five of them, boots on the grass, a ring closing around me.
Joss, my oldest brother, was breathing raggedly against my ear. "Say the word, Dad. Just say it."
"Stand down," my father said. "All of you."
"Dad."
"Stand down, Joss."
They stood down.
Brant walked straight through the gap they'd made for him, close enough that his sleeve brushed my brother's arm, and not one of them laid a hand on him.
He crossed the lawn to his own father's side and kept breathing the whole way.
On his arm, a Stonefall woman in a green dress was already waiting.
The Stonefall Alpha stepped out of the torchlight.
"The treaty holds, Corwin," he said, "if your daughter's name comes out of your book tonight. We will not sit at one table with a wolfless rejected girl."
My father looked at him.
He looked at me.
"Strike it," he said.
The old elder came forward with the blood-book under one arm and a pair of iron shears in his hand.
"Erased wolves wear nothing of the pack," he told me, almost gently.
He took my left wrist and cut the grey cord.
It fell on the grass.
My mother made a small broken sound, and still she didn't look up.
My wrist went hot all the way to the elbow.
I thought it was shame.
The elder wrote a line, and he read it aloud: "Thora Haldane is no wolf of Greywater."
Then he turned, because a writ against an Alpha's daughter doesn't stand without the Crown's seal.
At the head table, a man in a plain black suit had sat through the whole Gathering with one hand around a glass of water.
Caspian Lorne, the Lycan King, came to Greywater every third summer and was never asked to do anything but eat.
The elder set the book in front of him and held out the seal.
The king looked at the book.
Then he looked at me, standing alone in the torchlight with my palms still open.
He picked up the seal, and I waited for the sound of it.
He set it down on the table, very quietly.
"No," he said.
The elder blinked. "Majesty, it's the Alpha's right."
"Greywater can strike her from its own book," the king said. "It can't strike her from mine. As far as the Crown is concerned, Thora Haldane is still a named wolf."
My father's face went the color of ash.
I looked at my wrist, bare and red where the cord had been, and I let my hands drop.
Nobody was going to say it for me, so I did.
"I'm leaving now," I said.
I took off my white shoes and walked out through the ring of torches in my bare feet.
Nobody stopped me.
Behind me the king stood and spoke to the whole lawn.
"Count your wolves in the morning, Alpha Haldane."
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