Filed to story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
My heart twinges a little. Did Darragh really have to bail like that? I get that it came out of nowhere, and I needed to process, too, but aren’t males supposed to take charge in these situations, especially older males?
Kennedy’s wolf rumbles in her chest with anticipation, cutting off my train of thought. “Is she ready to come out?”
“I don’t know. I think she’s interested, but she’s not making any moves.” I prod at my breastbone as if that’ll nudge her forward.
Kennedy’s been shifting since she was thirteen. She was actually born in Salt Mountain. When she shifted one random full moon, no mate in sight, and her wolf turned out to be a big-ass male, her parents freaked and traded her to Quarry Pack. We’re not sure for what. She jokes that her parents gave Quarry Pack a carton of cigarettes and a slab of venison to take her off their hands.
That’s why Kennedy and I are so tight. Annie and Una know what losing your parents feels like, too, but at the end of the day, they were loved. Kennedy and I—not so much. We were both lucky to make it away from our fathers alive.
“The moon is almost full.” Kennedy bends over the back of the couch and peeks out the curtains. “Let’s go outside.”
We’re not supposed to, not alone after curfew. “What if we get caught?”
“We won’t. I can smell them coming a mile away.”
“I don’t know—” Isn’t shifting something I’m supposed to do with my mate for the first time?
“Come on. YOLO.” Kennedy grins at me. I taught her YOLO.
Well, isn’t my mate supposed to be around? You snooze, you lose, right? I hop to my feet. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
Kennedy whoops. I dash back to my bedroom for slippers, and by the time I’m back in the living room, the front door is open, and she’s gone. I bound after her.
She didn’t go far. She’s standing in the middle of the path leading to our cabin, nose quivering as she sniffs the wind. Her sense of smell is the best of all of us since she’s shifted.
“This way,” she says, and we head away from the commons, up the rolling hills that lead toward the western boundary of pack territory. A few yards up the path, she cuts away into the woods, winding around mossy trees and thorn patches, down a shallow gulch, and into a small glade by an oxbow creek so narrow no one bothered to give it a name.
The gibbous moon casts everything in a ghostly blue. A cool night breeze rustles the leaves newly budded on the high branches above us. Although it’s an hour past sunset, there’s a strange daylight scent lingering in the air, and it stirs the excitement in my belly.
We stand, facing each other, grinning. These are not the first shenanigans Kennedy and I have embarked upon. I shove away the strange, new, reaching feeling anchored near my heart, and Kennedy and I grin at each other, partners in crime.
“Can you feel her?” she asks.
I close my eyes and focus inward. My wolf is on her feet, alert, listening, watching. “Yeah. What do I do?”
Kennedy blushes. “Uh, so, I usually take my clothes off.” She clears her throat. “You don’t have to, but if you don’t, you’ll ruin them.” She thinks a second. “Well, I guess it depends on the size of your wolf, and like, if your pants have elastic.”
My pajama shorts have a stretchy waistband, but the silk cami doesn’t have much give. I peel off my top and bottoms and set them on the cleanest exposed root I can find before I toe off my marabou slippers. The feathers are wet and matted with dew. Probably not the best choice of footwear.
When I hustle back to the middle of the clearing, Kennedy has shucked her clothes, too. She’s still smiling, and it’s so wild to see her happy and excited. She’s definitely the sarcastic, emo one in our little family. She’s kind of made crabby and bitter her life philosophy.
“You are so stoked.” I grin back at her.
“We’re going for a run, baby,” she says, clapping her hands together.
Not for the first time, it occurs to me how freaking awful it must be for her when she shifts. She can’t run with the pack. Not with how narrow-minded and backwards our males, and females, can be. Una sets her up with a rental out past Chapel Bell for the full moon so she can run in peace, but it has to be lonely as hell. Wolves run in packs. That’s our whole thing.
Nothing pisses Kennedy off more than pity, though, so I keep my feelings off my face.
“Okay, what do I do?” I shake out my arms.
“Uh.” Kennedy grimaces. “You, uh,shift.”
“Like,how
?”
She opens her mouth to explain. I take a deep breath. I’m so ready for this.
She blows out a breath and screws up her face. “You just kind of do.”
“I just do?”
She shrugs. “Here. I’ll show you.”
She cracks her neck, does a quick quad stretch with both legs, and then that weird, shifter-life thing happens when your eyes and your brain lose sync, and one moment, your best friend has arms and legs and a face, and then there’s a glitch in the matrix, and he’s a big-ass wolf with a silky black pelt, his head cocked like okay, your turn.
“You know that didn’t help at all, right?” I say.
Kennedy’s pointy ear flicks. I sigh and shake my arms out again. I want this. The rest of it—Darragh and mates and nests and all of that—I don’t know if I’m ready for that quite yet. But this, I want. I want to run free for the first time in my life.
I squeeze my eyes shut and reach deep inside. My wolf is there, so close.
“Come on,” I mutter, and I don’t know what to do next, so I just want as hard as I can, focusing with all my effort on her royal highness, the dainty wolf standing expectantly at the border between us, waiting on tenterhooks—waiting for what?
I draw in a deep breath, expanding my lungs to capacity with night air, filling myself to the brim with the mustiness of changing leaves and the tang of a distant woodstove, and then the wind shifts, and suddenly, I’m surrounded by the scent of broad daylight. Rolling lawns, bursting bulbs, mellow sunlight streaming through antique wavy glass.
My wolf comes alive. She leaps for the source of that scent. My bones crack. I scream.
The pain is bright. My muscles rip, joints pop, arteries sever, and in the same instant, I’m knitted into another shape, lower, horizontal instead of vertical, tuned into an entirely new and different frequency.
Vaguely, I hear a strange baying from an indistinguishable distance and direction, and I raise my voice to call to the wolf making the sound, but there aren’t words in my mouth, there’s only a wild and joyful howl.
Kennedy trots to where I’ve collapsed in the wet grass and noses my flank, urging me to my feet, adding her howl to the one in the distance, inviting me to run. Oh, yes. I want to run.
I stagger to my feet. No, my paws. My white paws. I’m white. Silvery white. I look up—and up—at Kennedy looming above me. And I’m small.
That’s fine. Small is okay. Small is quick.
I yip and nip Kennedy low on the flank, and zip off into the trees, dart at the shadowy insects spooked airborne at our approach, snap my sharp teeth at crickets and katydids, swipe my fangs with my long tongue, all pain forgotten in the wall of sensation that is the world at night.
The moon is high, conjuring shadows between every tree, in every knoll, under every bush. In every shadow, there’s a mysterious rustling or enticing scent or quick, slight movement, all of which my wolf wants to chase or attack or sink her teeth into, she’s not sure which, how about all three, simultaneously—she would if she could. She’s unleashed. She’s a hyperactive ball of fur and boundless enthusiasm.
She darts and races, slides down moss-slick banks, loses her footing and rolls, yips and bays, while Kennedy’s wolf trots at her side, tongue lolling in companionable happiness.
My wolf seriously lacks coordination, but she’s so low to the ground, she doesn’t skid far when she loses her footing. She’s also tireless. For hours, she zooms along on prancing paws, following Kennedy’s periodic nudges in a different direction when he senses something he doesn’t like.
The whole time, the scent of warm afternoon teases my wolf’s nose, and even though the world at night is scary, and even though she’s small, she’s not the least bit hesitant or afraid.
My wolf investigates every critter and nook and cranny, and she’d probably keep going, except when the horizon begins to lighten in the east, Kennedy’s wolf becomes insistent that we return home, herding her back toward our cabin.
She complies, unhappily, but fully aware that Kennedy’s wolf could sit on her and squash her into a little wolf patty. When we get home, Kennedy shifts back to her human skin as she bounds up the stairs. My wolf lingers outside on the path.
“Don’t be long, Mari’s wolf,” Kennedy says over her shoulder before slipping through the door. “You don’t want to run into anyone. You’re kind of a pipsqueak.”
My wolf doesn’t take offense. She doesn’t really register the words, more the idea that Kennedy wants her to come in for her own safety. She’s not quite ready, though, and she’s not at all worried about the threat of being alone. It’s strange. I’m always uneasy alone.
My wolf stretches in the middle of the path, lowering her chest to the ground and lifting her rump in the air, enjoying the lengthening of her spine and reveling in all the wolf scents compacted into the dirt. She closes her eyes and inhales.
Her nose twitches. Out of nowhere, she catches the scent of mid-day sunlight, and she sneezes. She lifts her head, scanning the trees dotting the hillside, still cast in shadows.
My wolf and I notice him at the same time. Darragh Ryan. He’s close, only a few feet away, standing on the edge of the path. Somehow, he snuck up on us unawares.
He looks the same as he did at Abertha’s cottage. Those are definitely the same jeans. Still no shirt and no shoes. The only difference is that sometime between then and now, he combed and cut his hair. He definitely didn’t have Cheryl do it. It looks like he did it himself.
His brown eyes blaze with gold in the gray pre-dawn as he stands, stiff and broad, frozen in place. A shiver of warning zips down my spine.
My wolf doesn’t seem to feel the danger in the air. She yips a greeting, and without hesitation, she trots right on over to him. His jaw clenches. She plops onto her butt at his feet, right on top of his bare toes, and gazes up, tongue lolling, luxuriating in his scent and the heat from his human skin, a low whine emanating from the back of her throat.
For a moment, he doesn’t move, his muscles somehow tensing even tighter. My wolf noses his calf and nips at the denim. And then, on an exhale, he lets himself go “at ease” and sinks into a crouch, awkwardly offering her a loose fist to sniff. She yips with delight, snuffling his hand, licking his knuckles, and then she straight up rolls onto her back.
Legs splayed.
Tongue hanging out the side of her mouth.