The Alpha's Birthday Wish Came True No More Noise and No More Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wish
At her father's birthday supper Hedda hears him whisper his wish into the candle: no more noise, no more daughter. She says one word out loud and walks out.
My father's birthday supper began with two hundred wolves clapping with the tips of their fingers.
Nobody in the cold store had made a real sound in ten years.
The old den on Saltclaw Shore used to smell of salt, smoke and pack, and it was loud enough to hear from the water.
Then the pack healer marked my senses cursed, and my family never raised its voice again.
They moved us into the cannery's cold store, a stone cavern cut into the cliff, where the walls swallowed everything.
My parents whispered.
The pack whispered.
I had stopped asking why.
I sat at the head table in my grey coat, because the cavern was always cold, with my mother on my left and Sunniva Hagstrom on my right.
Sunniva poured me a cup from her thermos before I could ask.
"Drink, sweet girl," she whispered. "You're pale, and you'll want your head quiet for the toast."
The tea tasted of salt and burnt sugar.
I had drunk a cup every night since I was seventeen.
I drank it, and the room did not get any quieter.
I could hear the candles hissing on the cake.
I could hear my father's pulse from six feet away, and my mother's, and the baker's at the back, which was going fast because the cake was lopsided.
Two sentries stood by the door with their hands behind them.
One of them had taught me to swim when I was six.
My father stood up in his dark suit with fifty-eight candles burning in front of him.
He was Arne Bostrom, Alpha of the Saltclaw Shore, thin and upright, with grey in his beard.
He did not clap his hands or raise a glass.
He bent over the flame, as the Alpha does on his birthday, and whispered his wish into it so only the fire would hear.
I heard it anyway.
"I want a quiet house," my father said, "and no daughter in it."
I did not move.
Beside me, my mother's breath caught, and I knew she had heard it too.
Her hand came up from her lap and settled over my mouth.
She had done it for ten years, every time I drew a breath that was too deep.
She did it gently, and she did it fast.
"Quietly, Hedda," she whispered against my ear. "Please."
I took her hand and lifted it off my face, and I set it back in her lap.
Then I stood up.
My chair scraped on the stone, and the sound ran the whole length of the cavern.
Two hundred heads turned.
My father straightened, his face blank in the candlelight.
"Hedda," he whispered. "Sit."
I had never been loud in that room.
I took a full breath, all the way down, and I said it at the top of my voice.
"Granted."
The word hit the back wall and came back to us.
Every wolf in the hall dropped their eyes.
The sentries by the door looked at their boots, and the baker looked at the floor, and my father looked at the candles.
I thought, they are ashamed of me, and I thought, good.
I unhooked the iron den key from the cord around my neck, the one I had worn since I was a child.
I set it down on the table beside the cake, and the cord slid after it.
"You wished for a quiet house," I said, still at full voice, because I could finally hear myself.
"It's yours."
Nobody answered me.
My mother's mouth was open, and nothing came out of it.
My grandfather lived at the Elder Den on Greyhowl Ridge, forty miles inland, and he was the only person who had ever shouted at me for fun.
So I stepped out from the table.
Sunniva caught my sleeve before I reached the door and pressed the thermos into my hands.
Her fingers were warm.
"For the road, sweet girl," she whispered. "It's a long climb, and you shouldn't go up there alone and unsettled."
"Thank you," I said, because she had always been kind to me.
The sentry by the door held it open and did not meet my eyes.
I walked out through the tunnel and into the wind.
The sea was loud, and so was the gravel under my boots.
It was the first time in ten years that I had heard how much noise there was in the world.
A mile up the road, where the track bent inland, I stopped and unscrewed the thermos.
I wanted nothing from that table.
I poured the tea into the ditch, and it smelled of salt and burnt sugar all the way down.
Then I heard something I could not place.
It was far up the dark ridge, past the tree line, a man's laugh.
It was big, and it was warm, and it did not care who heard it.
I put the empty thermos on a fence post and started to climb toward it.
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