Thirty Days Before My Alpha Lost Me Forever novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Naming Moon
Tilda names Alpha Garrick her First Guardian before the whole pack and he refuses her; she walks out and Dorian Ketch offers to swear her in, asking whether she saw the old woman's cane.
Three hundred wolves stood in the yard of the Blood Moon Pack hall, and every one of them watched me carry my paper to the stone.
It was the Naming Moon, thirty days before my twenty-first birthday.
Pack law said a ward had to write a First Guardian's name on the page in front of everyone.
The guardian signed it or the guardian didn't.
Nobody in living memory had ever not.
My parents died when I was thirteen.
Alpha Garrick Lindholm took me in that same week, and the whole pack had called me his daughter ever since.
So I had written his name in my best handwriting, after practicing it on the kitchen table all week.
Delphine Sayre walked me up the path.
She was twenty-four, the Council elder's daughter, and she'd spent the morning letting out the hem of my green dress by hand.
I'm a size twenty, and nothing in the pack store ever fit me.
"He'll sign," Delphine said, pressing a warm thermos of tea into my hands. "He talks about you like you hung the moon."
"He hasn't said ten words to me since March."
"He's an Alpha. They go quiet when they're proud."
She squeezed my arm.
"I took your form to my mother's office this morning for the Council seal, so you wouldn't have to. It's all in order."
I thanked her and meant it.
In March, on my twentieth birthday, Garrick had moved his bed out of our house and into the gatehouse.
He said the house was too loud.
It had been the two of us.
Now he stood beside the stone with his hands in his pockets, broad and bearded, his eyes on the ground.
Council elder Enid Sayre sat in the front row in her carved chair, her cane planted on the grass.
She read the law aloud, and her voice carried to the back of the yard.
Then she nodded at me.
I held the page out to him with both hands.
"Alpha Lindholm," I said. "I name you my First Guardian."
Garrick took the paper.
His eyes went across my name, then my handwriting, then the line at the bottom where his name would go.
He reached for the pen.
Enid Sayre lifted her cane an inch and tapped it once on the grass.
Garrick set the pen down.
"I decline," he said.
The yard went so quiet I heard my thermos tick as it cooled.
"Garrick?" I said.
He didn't look at me.
"I decline," he said again.
Somebody at the back laughed, one short breath, and a few others shushed it.
Enid Sayre stood and leaned on her cane.
"The Alpha declines," she said. "Tilda Swinburne, you have thirty days to find a guardian who will sign."
She waited a moment.
"At dawn on the first of November, an unsworn wolf is struck from the roll. Her name, her house and her place in this pack are gone, and she may never set foot on this land again."
Delphine's hand closed on my shoulder.
"Oh, honey," she whispered.
I had lived in his house for eight years.
I had learned to drive in his truck and cried on his porch the week my father's ashes came home.
And he stood there rereading a page he had already read, so he wouldn't have to look at me.
"Why?" I asked him.
"I decline," Garrick said, to the paper.
I took the form out of his hand.
He let it go at once, and his hand stayed open in the air a second after.
I set the thermos on the stone, right where he'd have signed.
So I stepped out of the circle.
Nobody stopped me, and the crowd parted in front of me and closed up behind.
I walked through the yard and under the gate arch and out onto the gravel road, still holding the page.
A black truck sat idling there with six large men leaning on it.
They had tattoos up their arms and Iron Hollow patches on their jackets, the neighboring pack, here as treaty guests.
The one in front had his arms crossed and a pen already in his hand.
"Dorian Ketch," he said. "Alpha, Iron Hollow. I'll sign it."
I stared at him.
"Not here," he said. "My law says a guardian has to house his ward through the moon before he swears. Come up the ridge with me. You'll have your oath at the Blood Moon, the night before your birthday."
"Why would you do that for a stranger?"
"Because I was watching your Alpha's hand."
He tipped his head back toward the yard.
"He wanted to sign. Did you see the old woman's cane?"
I hadn't.
I turned and looked back through the gate, at the stone and the chair and the cane planted in the grass.
Then I got in the truck.
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