The Silver Wolf novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Wolfless
At the Moon Altar the bond lights, Alder rejects Calla before the whole pack, and the Alpha calls her wolfless. In the dark her wolf speaks.
Two hundred wolves stood in a ring around the stone altar, and every one of them was watching me wait to change.
It was the night of the first full moon after my twentieth birthday.
In our pack, that is the night your wolf wakes.
Everyone else's had come at eighteen.
Mine hadn't, and the pack had been polite about it for two years.
I stood on the flat grey stone in a white rite dress, barefoot on the cold.
My friend had pinned my hair up an hour before.
She was the Alpha's niece, and she'd kissed my cheek and put her own green shawl around my shoulders.
"You'll freeze up there," she said. "Keep it. I'll get it back after."
I was grateful.
I remember being grateful.
The old healer who had raised me stood at the front of the ring with her arms crossed and her grey braid over one shoulder.
She gave me one short nod.
The Alpha raised both hands, and the clearing went quiet.
"Calla Braemar," he said. "Daughter of this pack. The moon is yours tonight."
His voice was warm.
He had a hand on his son's shoulder.
Alder stood beside him in a pressed white shirt, tall and sandy-haired, smiling at the crowd.
At the edge of the clearing, past the last row of wolves, a man I didn't know stood alone under the pines.
He was tall and dark-bearded, in a canvas coat, with a long knife in a sheath across his back.
Nobody had said a word to him.
His lips were moving, and he pressed his fingers down one at a time, counting something.
I looked away.
The moon cleared the trees.
Heat went through me from the crown of my head to my feet, and my breath caught in my chest.
It wasn't a wolf.
It was a pull, a hard sideways drag toward the front of the ring.
I knew what it was.
Everyone in that clearing knew what it was.
The little crescent birthmark under my collarbone burned, and a gasp ran through the pack.
Alder had gone white.
Then he looked at me, and I saw that he felt it too.
A bond.
My mate was the boy I had grown up three houses from.
I laughed, half a sob, and took a step toward him.
"Alder."
He didn't step toward me.
He glanced at his father.
Edric nodded, very gently.
Alder turned back to the ring and lifted his chin.
"I'm Alder Hartwell, heir of Cedar Fork," he said, loud enough for the back rows. "And I'm not doing this."
I stopped.
"Alder, it's the bond. You feel it. Whatever's wrong, we can..."
"I reject you, Calla Braemar, as my mate."
The words hit me hard and flat.
The pull tore.
Pain opened in my chest, and my knees went, and I caught myself on the edge of the Altar.
Somewhere in the ring, a woman said, "Oh, no."
Lorelei had moved to Alder's side.
She slid her fingers through his, and he let her.
Hattie took one step out of the ring, and the man beside her caught her arm.
He wouldn't look at me.
"It's nothing personal," he said to the stone. "I just can't be tied to someone without a wolf. The pack deserves a real Luna."
"I'm twenty," I said. My voice shook. "It isn't late. Nobody said it was late."
Edric stepped forward and put his hand over his heart.
"Sadly, the moon has spoken," he said, and the whole clearing leaned in to hear it. "Twenty years old, a bond answered, and not so much as a whisker. Calla Braemar is wolfless. Under pack law she has no place in Cedar Fork after tonight."
A few wolves looked at their shoes.
A few of them looked relieved.
Nobody spoke for me.
I understood then that it had all been decided before I walked into the clearing.
I could have begged.
I could have sat on the stone and cried while two hundred people watched.
Instead I stood up straight.
I reached up and unfastened the pack token from my wrist, the little wooden wolf on a leather band that my mother had made for me.
Edric's eyes followed it.
I set it down on the Altar, next to Alder's feet.
"Accepted," I said.
Alder flinched.
I took off Lorelei's shawl and folded it, and held it out to her until she had to take it.
Then I walked down off the stone, and the ring split to let me through.
At the edge of the pines, the man with the knife was gone.
I kept walking until the lights of the clearing were a faint orange behind the trunks.
I stopped when my legs gave out.
The pain in my chest had turned slow and heavy, and I sat on a root and pressed my hands to it.
The wind moved in the high branches.
Then something that was not me drew a long, deep breath inside my ribs.
A voice said, dry and unhurried and very old:
"Finally."
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