They Made Me Hunt For My Own Wedding novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Link I Wasn't In
Three nights before her mating ceremony, Sabine's half-sealed mate bond lets her hear the secret pack link her mate, brothers and sister run without her, and she learns they moved the moon site across an enemy line so she will hunt for it and be shamed; she slips out to find the border wardens herself.
Three nights before my mating ceremony, I heard voices inside my own head that were not mine.
Beau had fallen asleep on our couch with his head in my lap.
His hand lay open against my wrist, with the half-sealed mark on his palm touching my pulse.
He had bitten me two years ago and never finished the seal.
The second bite was saved for the ceremony, the way it always is in our pack.
Since then his mark had never done anything but itch.
Tonight it burned, and the burn opened a door.
[She's still in the kitchen. Opal says Sabine thinks the hunt is Saturday at moonrise.]
That was my oldest brother.
I knew his voice better than my own, and I had never heard it like this, flat and pleased.
[She does think so,] said my other brother. [Dad told her himself.]
[Then we're agreed,] a third voice said, easy and warm. [The site moved. She'll hunt for the old one.]
My adopted sister, Opal.
She had been in our house since she was eight, and she was the one who ran this.
I could tell by how the others waited for her to finish.
I sat very still, with my wrist under Beau's hand and my breath going in and out as quietly as I could make it.
There was a fourth voice, and it was soft and close, the one that said my name each morning.
[Don't tell Sabine the moon site changed,] Beau said, in his sleep, to them. [Let her hunt for it.]
His lips did not move.
His head stayed heavy in my lap.
He was talking to them with a part of himself I had never been allowed to touch.
All of them were in this link.
My brothers, my sister and the man I was about to marry.
I was the only Corwin who had never been in it.
[And if she finds the old site empty?] asked Emmett, my other brother.
[Then she stands there at moonrise with nobody to claim her,] Opal said. [Beau waits at the new one with the pack, and Sabine is unclaimed in front of every Alpha who came.]
[She'll cry,] said Gray, my oldest brother.
[She'll go home with Dad,] said Opal, kindly. [We take care of her. We always do.]
I thought about the tea Opal had left on the counter an hour ago.
She had stood there in her cardigan and smiled and said, "Drink it, you've been up all week. Everything's handled. Beau says all you have to do is show up."
I had poured it down the sink without drinking any.
I did not know why I had.
[Where is the new site?] Emmett asked. [Say it so nobody gets it wrong.]
[Weeping Ridge,] Beau said. [The standing stones past the Kettle River.]
My stomach dropped.
The Kettle River is the line.
On one side of it is Corwin land, and on the other side is Garrow Ridge.
Our packs have kept a truce there for thirty years, under the Moon Council, and a Corwin who crosses it without leave is in breach of the whole peace.
[She won't cross,] Gray said. [Sabine follows rules.]
[That's the point,] Opal said. [Either she stops at the line and misses her ceremony, or she crosses, and the Garrow wardens drag her in. Either way she's a coward or a criminal by Saturday.]
[Nobody says we hid it,] Beau agreed. [We say we were waiting at the site and she never came.]
My mate laughed in his sleep.
It was a small, warm sound, and it was the same one he made at my jokes.
I looked down at his face.
It was a good face.
I had loved it for three years, and I had picked out the ceremony candles for it.
I thought of the mirror in my bathroom, which showed me one thing every full moon.
My grey eyes turn to silver for one night.
My father told me when I was twelve that it was my mother's side, and that it frightened the other children, and he gave me tinted contacts to wear.
I had worn them every full moon since, and I had never asked him why.
[Fine,] Opal said in the link. [Go to bed. I'll get the trail laid tomorrow.]
The voices thinned out.
The mark under Beau's hand went cold, and the door closed.
The room was just my living room again, with the lamp on and the clock showing eleven.
Beau slept on.
I lifted his head with both hands, slowly, and slid a pillow under it.
His hand fell off my wrist.
I stood up, put on my boots and my father's old green coat, and took my tracking knife from the hook by the door.
I did not cry.
They had planned for me to cry.
Nobody in that link had planned for the one thing I was good at.
I am the best tracker the Corwin pack has ever had.
If they wanted me to hunt for my own wedding, I would hunt.
But I would not follow their trail.
So I walked out the back door and turned toward the Kettle River, to go and find the Garrow wardens myself.
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