The Wolf Who Can't Shift Just Dropped One novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Is That Girl Even a Wolf?
At the Muster check-in line no wolf can smell Larissa, her uncle strikes her from the roll before seven packs, she drops a wolf with one punch, and the host Alpha says he has watched the door for her for fifteen years.
"Is she even a wolf?"
The voice was thin and nasal, and it carried down the whole crowded hallway.
Every head in the check-in line turned toward me.
I kept my wrist out on the table and my chin up.
The girl behind the table wore a lodge fleece with a badge that said WYNNE.
She had put her nose an inch from my wrist three times now.
She breathed in again, frowned, and sat back.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm getting nothing. Everybody smells like something, even if it's only soap."
"I know," I said. "Nobody can smell me. Doctors, teachers, bartenders, they all say the same thing."
"Is she even a wolf?" the voice said again, louder.
It belonged to a friend of my cousin's, three places back in line with two other men from my own pack.
He was grinning at them, not at me.
I didn't turn around.
I was twenty-four, and I had never shifted once, not at a full moon, not in a field, not alone in my bedroom with the door locked.
I had driven four hours to the Autumn Muster for one reason, which was a badge with my name on it.
Wynne touched the back of my hand and pulled her fingers away fast.
"You're burning up. Are you sick?"
"My hands are always hot," I said. "I haven't worn gloves since I was a kid."
Outside it was nineteen degrees and snowing, and I had walked in from the parking lot with my hands bare.
A big hand settled on my shoulder, warm through my blue jacket.
"There she is," said Uncle Bernard.
He smelled like woodsmoke and the peppermints he kept in his coat.
He was the Alpha of Ashgrove and he had raised me since I was nine, and last night he had texted me: Come early, wear the blue jacket, I'll handle the table.
My shoulders came down.
He was here, so it was handled.
An old woman rose from a chair behind the table and leaned on her cane.
She was the senior scent-keeper, and she took my wrist in a dry hand and breathed against it for a long time.
"Nothing, Bernard," she said at last. "The roll won't take a wolf the keepers can't read. It never has."
Bernard sighed and looked down the line.
"Then I'll say it plainly, so nobody hears it secondhand," he said.
His voice was soft and it reached the back wall anyway.
"I love this girl. I raised her. But I won't swear a scent to seven packs that nobody in this building can find. Ashgrove strikes Larissa Aldren from its roll."
A sound went down the hallway, and somebody laughed.
Wynne's pen stopped over the page.
"Uncle," I said.
"It's kinder this way, sweetheart."
He took a folded paper out of his inside pocket.
"Sign this release, and you keep your room in my house. Your father's cabin and his share of the land go back to the pack, where somebody can look after them."
The paper was already typed.
The date at the top was last Tuesday, and I thought that meant he had wanted to be ready for me.
My father built that cabin with his own hands, and I had grown up on its porch until I was nine.
"I'm not signing," I said.
I put the paper in my jacket pocket instead of on the table.
"That's an outcast's paper, Aldren," said the nasal voice behind me. "Outcasts don't stand in the line."
A hand closed on my braid.
"Out," he said. "Now."
So I turned around and hit him.
It was one punch, under the ear, with everything I had.
He dropped at my feet and stayed there.
Nobody in the hallway made a sound.
Then behind me, bone cracked.
I heard it twice, wet and loud, and I heard clothes tear.
The other two Ashgrove men had gone down on their hands in the middle of the hallway, and their spines were bending, and fur was pushing out along their necks.
Their claws dug grooves in the floorboards.
I stood over the man I'd dropped with my fists up and nothing else, because that was all I had.
I had never been able to do what they were doing.
The first wolf, still half a man, jumped.
A man came down the lodge stairs two at a time and did not slow.
He was tall and dark-haired, with a black glove on his left hand, and he walked straight between us.
He caught the jumping wolf by the jaw in that gloved hand and held it off the floor.
The wolf's back legs kicked once and went still.
The hallway went still with it.
The man's eyes were green when he looked at the second wolf, and the second wolf lay down.
Then he looked at me.
He looked at my face and my bare hands, and his own hand, the one holding a full-grown wolf in the air, was steady.
"Larissa Aldren," he said.
I had never seen him before in my life, and he knew my name.
"I have watched that door for fifteen years," said Corbin Hayes.
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