Unwanted Shewolf novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Altar

The Goddess asks what she wants, her silver wolf wakes, the Warden drops to a knee, and horns sound at the gate.

I did not walk home.

The altar stood in the middle of the stone ring, one slab of gray rock as long as a bed, with the moon coming up behind it.

Rafe stopped at the edge of the ring and did not step past it.

"From here you go alone," he said. "She asks one question. A true answer or a refusal is allowed. A lie is not."

"What happens to the ones who answer true?"

His jaw worked.

"I'm not allowed to say that before the altar," he said. "I'm sorry. It's the oath."

I thought about Dustin's wet boots and the things he couldn't tell me.

Then I took off the grey shawl, folded it, and left it on the grass for later.

I walked to the slab and lay down on my back on the cold stone.

The moon cleared the last tree.

Light spilled over me, silver and heavy, and the whole ring went quiet.

A voice spoke inside my head.

It did not sound like a woman or a man.

It sounded like every voice I had ever wished would say my name kindly.

What do you want, Hazel Marrick?

My brother had told me to say nothing.

I had spent eighteen years saying nothing, and where had it got me?

My hands were shaking, so I pressed them flat on the stone.

"I want somebody to choose me," I said. "Not take me because I was the one left over. I want to be someone's first choice, just once."

The ring was silent for a long moment.

Then the stone under my back began to burn.

It was not heat.

It was white light, and it poured into my bones.

My spine arched off the slab and a sound tore out of me, and it was not a scream.

My hands curled and the bones in them shifted.

Fur ran over my arms, silver white, and my jaw lengthened, and my whole body folded and stretched into a shape it had never known.

I had waited all my life for my wolf.

She came up out of the dark in me all at once, and she was enormous.

I stood on four legs on the altar with the moon on my back and the whole forest suddenly loud.

I could hear water running a mile away.

I could smell pine, and smoke, and Rafe, who smelled like cedar and cold stone.

I turned my head and looked at him.

He was not looking at my fur.

He was looking at my left front paw, where a mark in the shape of a crescent glowed silver on the skin.

I looked down at it.

I waited for the Goddess to say something else, and nothing came.

My wolf sat down on the slab, lifted her nose, and let out one long howl at the moon.

Then I wanted my body back, and it came.

I was on my knees on the stone, shaking and naked and alive.

The mark was on my left wrist now, a thin silver crescent that burned a little.

Rafe was there before I could cover myself, with his gray shirt held out at arm's length and his eyes on the sky.

I took it and pulled it over my head.

It came down to my knees and smelled of cedar.

"Thank you," I said.

He did not answer.

When I looked up he was on one knee on the grass at the foot of the altar, with his head bowed.

"Rafe?"

"The Goddess has named you Moon's Daughter," he said, and his voice was rough. "I am the Warden of the Hollow, and the Warden is bound to the Moon's Daughter as her mate."

I stared at him.

"Her what?"

"Her mate."

"Then you knew," I said. "You knew when I walked up to the gate this afternoon."

"No."

He raised his head.

His eyes were amber in the moonlight, and they were not hiding anything.

"I swear it on the stones. I didn't feel it until the stone lit under you. Not at the gate, not at the stew. Before that you were a girl with a basket of cake."

"And now?"

He didn't answer, and the muscles in his arm shook.

I had asked the Goddess to let someone choose me.

She had handed me a mate by the rule of an oath and told me nothing at all about whether he wanted me.

I was not going to be grateful for that.

"I'm not going to be anyone's duty," I said.

"I know."

"I want that on the record."

"It's on the record," Rafe said, and there was something almost like relief in it. "You said it to a Warden on his own altar."

Out beyond the ring a horn sounded, long and flat.

It was not a Hollow horn.

It was the horn Marrick House blows when the Alpha calls the warriors out.

Another one answered it, closer.

Rafe was on his feet with his head turned toward the gate.

"Twenty," he said. "Maybe more. They've crossed the stones."

"Elias."

"He's at the Hollow's gate right now." Rafe's voice went flat and dangerous. "Hazel, he's got his whole pack up here, and he is going to ask for you."

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