Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
A quarter mile is a head start.
A long skirt with thick tights can get in a male’s way long enough to give you a chance to escape.
Run and hide. Run and hide. Run and hide. My wolf chants her mantra as she dashes along the border between us. She’s really amped up, even for her. She’s noticed the scent, too, and she’s on alert, but she’s not terrified and pissing herself in some corner of my subconscious, which is usually her M.O.
I don’t hate my wolf—not like I hate the voice—but she’s kind of a bummer. On the one hand, I want to meet her, but on the other, I’m so scared that she’s going to be scrawny and weak. One of my worst nightmares is being stuck inside a runt of a wolf who is incapable of protecting herself.
Just the thought of it makes my panic rise.
I take a deep breath, and that earthy scent hits me again. I scan the wildflowers and trees on either side of the path, but I don’t see anyone or anything out of place.
Because it’s behind you. Somewhere you can’t see. Better run while you still can.
I check over my shoulder, but there’s nothing but the empty, winding path. Down the hill, everything appears peaceful—the cabins clustered around the commons and pups playing in the grassy park in the center of it all. The young males wrestle and chase each other around the females sitting in a circle, their heads bent together, intent on some game.
What if it goes after them?
The voice rises to a scream.
Go! Now! Warn them! They need to run!
I force myself to calmly turn away. The pups are safe. Their dams are on their porches, watching them. There are males close by. There are always at least a few training in the gym for the shifter fights, and besides, the patrols would have raised an alarm if something had encroached on our territory.
The danger isn’t real. It’s in my head.
Always in my head.
I trudge the final few feet to the steps to our cabin and peel my damp shirt from my back to let air reach my skin. Maybe the weird smell is me. I give my pits a quick sniff. Mari wasn’t lying. I am rank.
Per usual, Mari leads the way inside, hollering, “Kennedy!”
“In the kitchen,” Kennedy calls back.
She’s a year older than Mari and me, so she doesn’t have to go to the Academy anymore. She works in the kitchens with us at breakfast and dinner. During the day, she goes up to Abertha’s with Una to work on our super-secret mushrooms, jams, herbs, and honey business that we run under the alpha’s nose.
Instead of weird smells, I should be worried about how we’re inevitably going to get busted selling our wares at the human farmers’ market in Chapel Bell. But that’s a real fear. I don’t worry about those.
Mari and I drop our bookbags on the floor and traipse down the hall. Kennedy is bellied up to the kitchen counter, eating cheese. She’s using its plastic wrapper as a plate and a butter knife to cut slices and ferry them to her mouth. With her free hand, she’s scrolling on her phone.
Mari goes directly to the refrigerator and throws the door open. I grab the tea kettle from the stove and fill it at the sink. My crampy stomach eases a little more. It’s tea time. The best time.
“Is that all the cheese we’ve got?” Mari asks Kennedy.
Kennedy hums a cheerful affirmative around a mouthful of cheddar.
“Can I have some?” Mari sounds tetchy, but we all know that she rips through the cheese the quickest. Kennedy’s lucky there was any left.
Kennedy slides the cheese closer to her own chest, and her wolf rumbles a warning. My wolf yelps and drops to her belly inside me, baring her neck and burying her head in her forelegs.
“My bad,” Kennedy says, wincing.
I smile ruefully. Everyone in the house is used to my skittish wolf. We’ve lived together for a long time now. I know that Kennedy’s wolf would never hurt mine, but there is nothing in the world that will convince my wolf of that fact. Kennedy’s wolf is male. Males are killers. End of story.
Frowning, Mari sticks her nose deeper into the fridge. “Who ate the summer sausage?”
Kennedy and I grimace at each other behind her back. I left half. Kennedy must’ve finished it.
“There are Slim Jims left,” I suggest.
Mari turns up her nose, but she still snakes past me to fetch them from the cabinet over my head. Her big blue eyes shine with anticipation as she upends the box, expecting a windfall.
A single Jim drops onto the counter.
“Really?” She scowls at me. “You left one Jim?”
I shrug. “There was at least half a box left last night.”
Mari glares at Kennedy. Kennedy stares back with wide-eyed innocence as she pops another piece of cheddar into her mouth.
Mari huffs, drops into a chair at the kitchen table, and snaps into her meat stick. “Is Una still up at the cottage?” she asks Kennedy.
Kennedy takes her snack to sit in the chair across from her. “Yeah.”
“What did y’all do today?” Mari asks.
“Brought in the last of the squash, and then we canned apples. Una thinks they’ll move at the market.”
“Everyone sells canned apples.” Mari scarfs down the last of her snack, licks her fingers, and looks longingly at Kennedy’s cheese.
“Yeah, but ours were grown, picked, and canned by real, live shifters.” Kennedy waggles her eyebrows. “That puts a premium on them.”
I will never understand humans. They’re afraid of us, but they’re also fascinated. The humans with booths at the Chapel Bell farmers’ market resent us for stealing “their” business. They tell stories behind our backs about how we go on killing rampages during the full moon, but darn if they don’t make sure to come by our stall before we sell out and get themselves a few of whatever we’ve got on offer. They probably resell our stuff online with a three-digit markup.
I hate going into town. Sometimes my nerves and my wolf won’t let me, but if I can take my turn, I do. The money we make buys my tea and yarn and Wi-Fi and our streaming services. Without my little coping mechanisms, I’d be even worse off than I am. I’d have nothing to drown out the voice.
I dab my sweaty forehead with a dish towel and flip open my wooden tea chest. I need something to cool me off. Mint? Lemon? I draw in a breath to let my nose choose, but there’s that strange scent again, wafting in from the cracked window above the sink. Maybe because I have tea on the brain, I feel like I can make out notes of oolong or yerba mate.
My stomach unfurls, somehow making more room for my lungs so I can take another, deeper breath.
The kettle screams.
My heart explodes.
I fling my arms into the air. My legs skitter on the floor tiles, and then I drop, crouch, and tuck to protect my soft parts, huddling against the oven door.
The knife! In the block! Grab it!
Run and hide, run and hide, run and hide.
The voice and the wolf shout louder and louder, trying to top each other.
Oh, hell. I forgot to flip the whistle up on the teapot.
I curl my fingers around the handle on the oven, squeezing until my knuckles blanch so I don’t snatch a knife and bolt out the back door.
I don’t need to run.
There’s no one to fight.
It was only the teapot.
I try to talk myself down, and it’s like talking in the middle of a hurricane. Nothing in my body—not my nerves, my muscles, my adrenaline, my cortisol—nothing is listening. I’m not fleeing the cabin like my heels are on fire, though, so it’s a win.
I used to run all the time when I was a pup. Once, the door was locked when I had a freak out. I hit it at full speed, and it didn’t give, so I bounced backward, landed flat on my butt, and bruised my tailbone. My brain broke, and I crawled under the kitchen table and wouldn’t come out for hours.
Eventually, Una crawled under the table after me, despite her bad leg. She dragged me out and held me on her lap, rocking me until I fell asleep. She couldn’t walk the next day, her leg was so stiff. That was the last time I made a run for it because of a sudden loud noise. Sometimes, shame is more powerful than fear.
Sometimes.
In the here and now, Mari and Kennedy politely ignore me while I force my fingers to release the oven door and take a few deep breaths. The weird smell is stronger. When I finally rise on my shaking legs, I peer out the window. There’s nothing but the deck, the flower bed, our tiny yard, and then beyond it, the steep bank to the ridge that runs behind our cabin. I don’t see anything.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t smell like danger. That’s a change of pace. Usually, everything unfamiliar smells like a threat.
I unwrap a bag of orange pekoe, pour the water, and carry my tea to the table. My hand is still unsteady, so the cup rattles in the saucer. Kennedy pushes my chair out for me with her foot, and I sink into it with as much grace as I can muster.