They All Forgot Me, So the Lycan King Marched for Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cherry Soda
Wynn wakes the morning after her Sweet Sixteen to a family that doesn't know her and a stranger's voice in her head; horns sound at the north fence.
At my sixteenth birthday party, our Beta stood on a chair and raised the pack cup in front of all one hundred and forty of us.
"To Wynn," Lester called. "Sixteen today, and the best thing this pack ever found."
The hall cheered, and the cup went hand to hand around the room.
Every wolf in the pack drank from it.
I don't like wine, so I lifted my can of cherry soda instead.
Lester grinned down at me. "More for the rest of us, then," he said.
He climbed off the chair and held my coat out for me, because the hall got cold after dark.
Mom had decorated everything in indigo and maroon, since I'm not a pink person and she knows it.
Dad hummed in the kitchen while he cut the cake.
My six brothers carried me around the room on their shoulders until I begged to be put down.
It was the best night of my life.
I fell asleep with my window open and my blue baby blanket pulled up to my chin.
Then I woke up, and my head wasn't quiet anymore.
There was a new space at the back of it, wide and open.
I knew what it was.
It was the pack link, the thing every wolf in Ironwood got at sixteen, the thing my brothers had bragged about for years.
I grinned at the ceiling and reached out with it.
"Mom?" I tried. "Dad? Ellis?"
Nobody answered.
I tried my brothers one by one, then Lester, then Mom again.
The link was open, and it stayed silent.
Then a voice came back, deep and rough and very far away.
"Who is that?"
It was not anyone I knew.
I held my breath.
"Say it again," the voice said. "Please."
"Wynn," I whispered. "Who are you?"
The voice went still, and then it said, "Stay where you are, little wolf. Don't tell anyone you heard me."
After that there was nothing.
I got dressed in a hurry and went downstairs, and the kitchen smelled like coffee and bacon.
Mom stood at the stove in her green cardigan.
Dad sat at the table behind a newspaper, and four of my brothers were eating over their phones.
"Morning," I said.
Mom turned around with the spatula in her hand.
She smiled at me politely, as she did with the pack's visitors.
"Hello, sweetheart," she said. "Are you one of Lester's cousins? You're up early."
I laughed, because I thought it was a joke.
Nobody else laughed.
"Mom, it's me," I said. "It's Wynn."
Mom looked at Dad. "Glenn, do we know a Wynn?"
Dad lowered the newspaper and looked at me for a long moment.
His eyes went to my gray eyes, the only gray eyes in a family of brown ones.
"No," he said slowly. "I don't think we do."
The twins looked up from their phones.
"Dad, who let a random girl in?" one of them asked.
The banner I'd helped Mom hang was still strung across the kitchen window.
HAPPY SIXTEENTH, WYNN, it said, in indigo and maroon letters.
I pointed at it.
"You made that," I said to Mom. "You stayed up until two doing the letters."
Mom looked at the banner and her smile slipped a little.
"I don't remember ordering that," she said. "Isn't that odd?"
Ellis, my oldest brother, stood up from the table and frowned at the banner too.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
Then the back door opened, and Lester came in with a box of doughnuts.
"Morning, all," he said.
He saw me and his face went kind.
"Well, hello there, miss," he said. "You look lost. Trudy, get her a cocoa, she's shaking."
He put his hand on my shoulder, warm and gentle, the same hand that had held my coat last night.
Every person in that kitchen had drunk from the pack cup last night.
I was the only one who hadn't.
I didn't cry, and I didn't scream.
I looked at the six brothers I loved, and the mother who had stayed up until two, and the father who was looking at my eyes and could not say why.
So I sat down at the table and took the cocoa.
If they had forgotten me, I would just have to make them remember.
I was still holding the cocoa mug when the horns started.
They came from the north fence, long and deep, one after another.
Every wolf in the kitchen went to the window.
And in my head, quiet and close, the deep voice said, "Little wolf. I am at your fence."
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