Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I’m about to do it again when there’s a disturbance across camp. Males are howling. Voices are raised. There’s a mass movement toward the entrance to the clearing.
Danger. Run. Run!
I stand, lifting Efa into my arms so I can bolt with her. She promptly grabs my face, accidentally sticking a finger in my ear.
Elspeth arrives at my side, laying a hand on my forearm. “They’re back,” she says. She squeezes my arm. “Nothing to worry about. If there’s something wrong, the howls will let you know. You can’t mistake it.”
Is there often something wrong?
What goes wrong?
Efa wriggles, wanting down, so I set her on her feet. She grabs my hand and immediately begins to toddle off toward the action. Everyone seems to be going to greet their returning packmates. The sycamore is free of pups for the first time today.
I let Efa lead me at her top speed, which is a very slow stroll for me. Elspeth keeps pace with us, and I’m grateful again for her company. I’d gotten comfortable at the females’ camp-within-a-camp, but as I pass by the areas where the males gather, their mixed scents rattle my nerves.
You’re outnumbered.
It doesn’t help that it’s that time before night falls when you realize that you can’t quite see as far in front of you as you could a minute before, and your brain switches from relying on sight to relying on smell. Everything is swathed in shadows—the work tables, canopies, and stacked boxes marking the various males’ territories.
A stiff breeze blows down from Salt Mountain. I’m still warm from lounging in the sun all day, so my skin is clammy where the wind cools the dampness on my chest and the back of my neck.
Wrong direction.
The pecking voice wants me to turn around. My wolf urges me to walk toward the commotion faster. She wants me to press through the crowd in front of us, find Justus, and let her out to tell him exactly what she thinks about him leaving us alone all day. She flashes her plans into my head. It’s a picture of him on his knees, his palms raised in surrender, as she sinks her fangs into his neck.
Well. We’re not going to do that. Mostly because in her imagination, she’s about five times her actual size.
When we get to the back of the gathering, my feet slow and then stick in place. Efa strains against my hand, but I can’t go farther. I’d have to weave through the males, and I can ignore the voice’s incessant shrieks, but I can’t do that.
Turn around now!
All of a sudden, Efa makes herself dead weight, trying to move me another step forward. She ends up dangling from my hand, parallel to the ground like an ice dancer. She whines. I get it. I want to see what’s happening, too.
Danger. Better run now. Before it’s too late.
The pack is excited, almost raucous.
“They must’ve got something good,” Elspeth observes, rising on her tiptoes to try to see between the males’ shoulders.
Efa wriggles her hand free from mine—my palms are weirdly slick, probably from leftover mashed potato slime—and bolts for a roughhewn picnic table a few feet away. She’s folded over it, throwing a leg up, when I get to her. She’s going to get splinters. I pluck her up. She wails. I freeze.
“Oh, no, little one. Don’t fuss.”
“Up!” she demands with a husky little bark. “Up, Annie!”
Oh. She knows my name. My eyes prickle. Oh, crap. I look over my shoulder at Elspeth. She shrugs. “If you don’t help her up, you’re going to be playing ‘pull the howling baby wolf down off the table’ until her dam comes for her.”
“Where is Nessa?”
“I told her to leave Efa with us and take a break,” Elspeth says. “Thank Fate I wasn’t blessed with triplets.” We share a silent moment of respect.
“Up, Annie, up!” Efa starts to climb me like a tree.
Even if I held her steady while she stood on the table, she wouldn’t be able to see anything over the crowd of tall males.
I sigh. A draped sheet is not ideal for climbing. I tuck it tighter around my chest and step onto the bench, careful not to tread on the hem. Once I’m steady, I lift Efa next to me. I repeat the maneuver to stand on top of the table. It’s sturdy with thick X-legs. Oddly enough, height isn’t one of my fears.
Everyone can see you. Get down. Get down!
I’m surprised when Elspeth climbs up after us.
“Up!” Efa demands, and I set her on my shoulders. She digs her fingers into my hair to hold on, and I wrap my hands around her chubby thighs to anchor her in place. We both still as we catch sight of the hunting party.
The scene looks like something out of the first chapter of our shifter history textbook at Moon Lake. The sunset hasn’t quite faded, but the burnt oranges and reds don’t give off any light. The clearing is illuminated by dozens of small fires and the torches that some of the males carry.
They’ve cleared a path through the gathering for the returning males. The wolves have pushed forward, forming a kind of aisle.
Justus and Khalil come first, an elk hanging by its bound hooves from a thick branch that rests on their shoulders. The elk’s antlers scrape the ground as they walk. It’s a huge bull, big enough to feed a pack this size for weeks.
Justus’s tan skin shines in the flickering torchlight. His hair is pulled back in a messy knot. His hands wrap around the branch, elongating his torso, throwing every single muscle into relief and exposing the whole tapestry of his tattoos.
I don’t know where to stare. His obliques? The ridge of V-shaped muscle that disappears into his waistband? The black swirls and shapes that I can’t make out from back here, but that my eyes can’t help trying to decipher? My mouth waters. I swallow it down.
There isn’t an ounce of arrogance or even pride in his walk. He walks no taller than usual; his back is no straighter. He carries his kill through his excited packmates like you’d haul a bucket or push a wheelbarrow. It’s not fake nonchalance, either. This is a male who isn’t trying to nurse a moment at all—he just really wants to put that elk carcass down.
I still can’t believe he’s my fated mate. I’ve never once been so unbothered in my entire life.
Maybe that’s what Fate does when she pairs people—she matches you with your opposite. Una is nothing like Killian, and I still can’t believe Mari and Darragh are mates. Whenever I see them together, I think of a video Kennedy showed me on her phone where a Doberman puts a kitten’s head in his mouth and wouldn’t let her go until his owner traded him for a hunk of cheese.
Max and the redhead, Alroy, follow the elk. They’re both strutting, although Max is clearly low on gas. His swagger is a little creaky. I glance over at Elspeth. She’s tracking her mate, the corners of her mouth curling in a fond smile.
The return of the hunters seems to be the cue for a celebration. A few scattered drums beat a rhythm for the males to stride along with, and a fiddle joins from somewhere over by the big bonfire. The volume of the chatter rises. Song breaks out.
The pack sways, swirling together in Justus and Khalil’s wake, forming new patterns. Some folks dance. Some shift into their wolves to wrestle and race around the clearing. Others gather around the fires, laughing, drinking, and talking at the top of their lungs. A flute joins the fiddle. The moon comes out, big and round, balanced just above the horizon.
Efa bends over so her chin is resting on the top of my head and grabs my flushed cheeks. I gently turn from left to right so she can take it all in, gasping as a pattern appears before my eye. The tattoo is a map of the camp. I needed to watch the pack disperse from a higher vantage point to recognize it, but I can’t unsee it now. The fires match the starburst shapes. The dens are the jagged triangles. The swoops and spirals are the worn paths the pack takes as they settled themselves in their accustomed places.
Above us, the stars are coming out. Everything seems to line up somehow. To connect. Maybe it’s the music or the sweet weight of Efa, the pinch of her grabby fingers. I’ve never felt like this before, like a bird perched on top of a tree, not a mouse cowering in a hole.
“Oh!” Efa squeals, patting my cheek and pointing. Her attention has been caught by a group dancing by the bonfire.
The fiddler is bending his bow double speed, and the drums beat faster. The females hold their gowns high so their legs show, their bare feet moving almost too quick to track while they hold their bodies perfectly still from the waist up. The males dance around them, stomping, tossing their heads back, their wolves howling to the hills. This is a pattern, too. The females are the stationary shapes, and the males are the swirls weaving between them.
The singed, crackling scent of magic tickles my nose like at Abertha’s cottage, but there aren’t any pots bubbling with potions or herbs hanging well out of the reach of pups. I couldn’t say where the scent is coming from. The ground? The people?
Efa giggles, her rump shifting back and forth on my shoulders. Elspeth shuffles beside us, her feet padding a dull rhythm on the table top. She’s dancing. I glance down at my feet. Am I swaying to the music, too? There must be magic in the air.
Get down now. You’re a target.
No one’s looking at us. They’re all absorbed in their own bodies, their own rhythm and partners.
Get down!
I sigh, reaching up to lift Efa off my shoulders and when I inhale, my lungs fill with the scent of freshly turned earth. My body reacts the way it always does in the spring when we till the garden—my chest rises and something deep in my bones takes note that we’ve made it around the sun and into warm days and blue skies again. Anticipation thrums low in my belly.
Justus emerges from the shadows to stand a few feet from my table.
Efa screeches, reaching for him, her weight forcing my head to fold forward, chin to chest.
“Affa!” she shrieks. “Affa!”
“Justus,” he says, holding his arms up to receive her. I lift her up and pass her down. She snuggles right up to him, her face morphing into her wolf’s so she can rub her forehead all over his face. She grabs a handful of beard, and to his credit, though she gives it a good yank, he doesn’t even rumble.
“Are you keeping Annie company?” he asks her, looking up at me. Have I ever seen him from this angle before?
He’s a few feet below me, so the whites of his eyes show under his dark pupils. They glow in the moonlight. The breeze whips his long hair, and with his height and honed muscle and inked skin, he looks like a wild male, like the ones in the fresco above the stage at Moon Lake’s outdoor amphitheater that shows their Great Alpha, Broderick Moore, single-handedly fighting off the ferals who attacked his people on their way down from the dens.
Except Justus has a pup propped on his hip, she’s half-shifted, and her wolf is licking the side of his face. And although the expression in his eyes is fierce, his lips curve, bemused.
“I’ll take that little pupkin,” Elspeth says, stepping down from the table so nimbly that neither Justus nor I have time to help her. “We need to go find her dam. I don’t want her on my hands when she decides it’s too far past her bedtime.”
“I saw her over by the elm with Redmond,” Justus says, tickling Efa’s nose with his beard as she screeches with delight.
“Snuck off for some alone time, have they?” Elspeth smirks. “Well, let’s go ruin your ma and da’s fun, shall we, little one?” She takes Efa, and after a small fuss, she convinces the pup to wave goodbye to us and go find her dam.