Unwanted Shewolf novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Today Is My Birthday
On her eighteenth birthday Hazel offers herself to the Moon Goddess before the Beta, signs the rite book in blood and walks out, and at the border stones Elias shouts that if she crosses she throws it all away.
My brothers announced my wedding at breakfast, in front of half the pack, and neither of them remembered it was my birthday.
Elias stood at the head of the long table in Marrick House with a glass of orange juice in his hand.
"Good news, everyone," he said. "My sister will marry the Brannock Alpha at the winter solstice. The treaty is signed, and there will be no more border trouble."
He smiled at me and tipped his glass, like a man handing over a gift.
His thumb kept turning the ring on his other hand, round and round.
Nobody had asked me anything.
My other brother studied his plate and rubbed his jaw.
Someone clapped, and then the whole room did.
From the far end of the table a man said, loud enough for me to hear, "Better than she'd ever do on her own. The girl never even got a wolf."
I was eighteen years old today, and I was still a blank.
That is what the pack calls a she-wolf whose wolf never comes.
Nobody at that table said happy birthday.
I put down my fork and walked out through the kitchen door.
Sydney caught me on the back steps.
She is Elias's mate and our Luna, and she is the only person in that house who has ever been kind to me on purpose.
She pressed a folded grey shawl and a basket into my hands.
"I remembered," she said. "Happy birthday, Hazel. There's a chicken sandwich in there and a slice of the lemon cake."
My throat went tight, and I said thank you.
"Don't do anything hasty," she said. "Let me talk to Elias tonight. These things sort themselves out, I promise."
She asked me twice what time I'd be back.
I told her I didn't know, and I went down the steps with the shawl around my shoulders.
The Beta keeps the pack's rite book in a drawer in his office.
It is the only piece of pack law I have ever been allowed to read.
Elias keeps the real Law Book in a glass case in his study, and he has always said it was too old and too boring for me.
In eighteen years I had never been let through the door of the Moon Hall, not for a naming and not for a funeral.
At eleven fifty-eight I sat down in the chair across from the Beta's desk.
The wall clock ticked.
My mother died giving birth to me, and my wolf had never come to stand in the empty place she left.
I had waited eighteen years for someone in this pack to want me.
I was done waiting.
"Miss Hazel," the Beta said, "you asked to see the offering page. May I ask why?"
The clock hand touched the twelve.
"Because today is my eighteenth birthday," I said.
He looked at the clock.
Then he looked at me for a long time, and the doubt stayed on his face.
"Pack law says no wolf under eighteen may offer herself to the Moon Goddess," he said.
"I'm not under eighteen."
"Are you certain you want this?" he said. "Do your brothers know?"
"They'd tell you it was a bad idea," I said. "They wouldn't care what happened to me."
My voice came out quiet and steady, and I let it.
"I offer myself to the Moon Goddess of my own free will."
The Beta took a silver needle from the drawer and set it on the desk between us.
"Once the book has your blood in it, it can't be taken back," he said.
"Good."
I pricked my thumb and pressed it to the page.
The blood spread into the paper and the ink under it went pale silver.
The Beta closed the book very slowly.
"The Moon Path begins at the border stones," he said. "I am bound to tell your Alphas by sundown."
"Then tell them."
I picked up my basket and walked out of the pack's office, and nobody stopped me.
It took me forty minutes to walk to the stones.
They stand in a ring at the edge of Marrick land, white and waist high, and past them the forest goes up into the mountains.
I stepped up to the line.
Behind me boots pounded on the gravel, and a voice I knew bellowed my name.
I turned around.
Elias was running in his good coat, and my other brother, Dustin, was right behind him.
Sydney's twice-asked question came back to me then, and I understood who had told them where I was.
Elias stopped a few strides short of the stones, and he did not step over the line.
His face was gray.
I had never once seen him afraid of anything to do with me.
"Hazel," he said. "Cross that line and you throw it all away!"
He did not say my life.
He said all of it.
"Do you care what happens to me?" I asked.
Elias opened his mouth, and he did not answer.
So I stepped over the line.
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