The Alpha Rejected Her at Midnight, Then the Land Chose Her novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Midnight at the Fire
At her eighteenth birthday bonfire the Alpha rejects Rowena before the whole pack. She refuses to say the word that would close it, drops her pack token at his boots and walks out, and on the road her wolf finally comes with a taste of blood that is not hers.
Midnight had come and gone, and Rowena Hartnell still had no wolf.
She sat on the flat stone beside the bonfire with one hand pressed to its cold side, waiting for her spine to pull.
Purple monkshood grew in a ring around that stone.
The pack cut it back every spring, and every spring it came up thicker.
A hundred and fifty wolves had come to watch her turn eighteen.
Her best friend had shifted at the stroke of twelve. Her brown wolf was still tearing around the fire, howling at anyone who looked up.
Rowena laughed when she passed. It came out thin.
"Give it time," Vivian Crowe said.
Vivian knelt in the dirt beside her, auburn hair tucked behind one ear, and pushed a thermos of hot cider into her hands.
She had braided Rowena's hair that afternoon and hemmed the birthday dress herself.
"Late wolves are the strong ones," Vivian said. "Everybody knows that."
"Everybody tells the late ones that."
"Then everybody is right for once." Vivian squeezed her fingers. "Whatever happens tonight, don't be afraid of it. Promise me."
Rowena promised, though she had no idea what could happen.
She drank. The cider was too sweet, with a bitter edge she put down to nerves.
Then the crowd went quiet from the outside in.
Lachlan Kerr was walking toward her.
He was the Alpha, twenty-seven, and he had not looked at her once all night.
Last night he had stopped her at the clinic door and said, "Tomorrow I want to ask you something."
She had thought of nothing else all day.
He came through the firelight with his jaw set and his eyes on her, and Rowena stood up so fast the thermos fell.
He stopped an arm's length away.
She smelled pine smoke and him, and something in her chest turned over and lit.
Mine, it said, a word she had never thought before in her life.
She saw his hands close at his sides. He felt it too.
"Lachlan?" she whispered.
He raised his chin so that every wolf at the fire could hear.
"I, Lachlan Kerr, Alpha of the Ironwood Pack, reject you, Rowena Hartnell, as my mate and my luna."
The pain came through her chest all at once.
It tore from the inside out. Her knees hit the dirt before she knew she was falling.
She could not breathe in. She could not breathe out.
Her nails dug through the fabric of the dress she had worn for him.
"Why?" she got out.
"Because I choose my own luna," Lachlan said. "The Moon doesn't choose her for me."
He did not touch her. He did not look away, either, and that was the worst of it.
Nobody came to help. Somebody at the back whispered, "Wolfless," and somebody else laughed.
The Beta, Vivian's heavy-chested father, folded his arms.
"A girl who can't shift was never going to carry this pack," he said. "You've done right, Alpha."
Across the fire Hester Quill, the old healer who had raised Rowena, was shoving through the crowd with her mouth open.
Vivian was beside Rowena again, her arm around her shoulders.
"Breathe," Vivian said into her ear. "Breathe. There's a way to make it stop. You only have to say the word."
"What word?"
"Accepted," Orson said from above them. "Say it, girl. Let the Alpha be."
Rowena looked up through her tears at the man she had waited all day to talk to.
His face was grey in the firelight. A muscle jumped in his cheek.
He wanted her to say it. She could see that he wanted it badly.
Everyone at that fire wanted it said and finished, so that they could go back to the party.
Hester had stopped pushing. She stood very still with her hand over her mouth, and Rowena could not read her face.
Rowena got to her feet.
It took three tries. Nobody helped.
"I heard you," she said to Lachlan.
Her voice shook, but it carried.
"You said it in front of everyone I know. You waited until I was standing here in my good dress."
"Say it," Orson said.
"No."
The fire cracked. A log fell in.
Rowena reached up and pulled the iron-wood disc over her head, the token every Ironwood wolf wore on a cord from the day they were born.
She let it drop onto the toe of Lachlan's boot.
"You want me gone, Alpha? Then hold it open like I have to. I'm not making it easy for you."
Something moved behind his eyes, fast, and was gone.
"Rowena," he said.
It was the first time he had said her name all night.
She turned her back on him and walked out between the wolves.
They parted for her. Nobody spoke. Junie whined once, high and cracked, and a hundred and fifty pairs of eyes watched her go.
She walked down the mountain road in the cold, in the dress, with her chest on fire.
She did not look back.
At twelve minutes past one, a mile below the gate, her spine finally pulled.
It threw her off her feet. Her bones cracked and slid.
She went down on the asphalt on her palms, and then they were not palms.
When it was over she stood on four legs in the middle of the road, and the shadow she threw across the trees was bigger than any wolf's she had ever seen.
Her mouth was full of blood.
She had bitten nothing.
It tasted of pine smoke, and she knew exactly whose it was.
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