Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“If you mix egg and flour and leave it on the counter, is it a cake?”
“No.”
“To make a cake, you’ve got to mix the egg and flour and put it in the oven, and if you don’t take the egg out of the fridge, or if you don’t put the batter in the oven, all you’ve got are ingredients. No cake.”
“Okay.”
“The cake is a pup.” Abertha is looking at me like I’m slow as molasses.
“I get that.”
“The oven is your uterus.
Not your vagina. And there’s a difference.”
My face heats. I didn’t say that out loud. She can’t know I was thinking it.
“We can shut the refrigerator door so no egg gets out. Get it? No cakes will be hurt. No cakes will ever exist.”
“I get it.” I kind of do. She can give me something that will make it like today never happened. Nothing and no one will be hurt. I can erase everything. That’s what I want. My heart doesn’t hurt at the thought. Those are just aches from a hard day. “Okay, yes, I want that. Is it sure to work?”
“It’s very likely to work. Of course, if the cake’s already in the oven, it won’t.”
“Will it hurt the cake if the cake is already in there baking?” I don’t want to hurt anything. I just want it never to have happened.
“No, it won’t. If you shut the refrigerator door after the egg gets out, it has no bearing whatsoever on the cake.”
I stare at the dark green brew, and the thin tendrils of steam rising into the air. My mate is gone. I’ve already muffled the bond to a cold, fading shadow in my chest. Soon, I’ll be able to consign it to the deep well where I consign all the bad things that have happened to me in my life. If I do this, that’s it. It’ll be me, alone, forever.
Safe, the voice whispers.
Safe forever.
“All right. I’ll drink it,” I say.
Abertha blinks. “Oh, no, not the tea. That’s for me. For my nerves.”
She stands again to go rummage in her cupboard and comes back with a waxed paper box with green and blue swirls sealed in plastic. It’s human. They love to seal paper boxes in plastic.
She passes it to me. “I’ll let you open this. Humans do these things up like bear traps.”
Out of habit, I reach for the knife in my ankle holster, but it’s not there. I must have lost it during my shift.
A memory flashes in my mind. The knife clattering to the linoleum floor in the lodge basement. A wave of sick horror rises in me, clogging my throat, until I swallow it back down. That’s the distant past. I’m not there, in that moment, anymore. I know how the story ends.
The male died. Somehow, in the confusion that followed, Abertha got the knife back and brought it to me. She said, “Life lesson—sometimes the magic needs time.”
I take a deep breath and force my brain back into the moment. The text on the box comes into focus.
Plan B.
What was plan A supposed to be?
I try to pry the plastic apart, but my nails are torn from what happened by the river. Eventually, I use my teeth to rip the package open. In the end, after I unbox and unwrap everything, it’s only a tiny white pill.
“This is it?” I ask. “It’s so small.”
Abertha hums in agreement and sips her tea. She’s letting me make the decision, but really, it’s no choice at all. If I can make it like this never happened, erase it without hurting anyone, of course I will. Keep the egg in the fridge.
I pop the pill and chase it with a sip of lukewarm tea.
“It never happened,” I say to myself.
“Didn’t it?” Abertha raises an eyebrow.
“No.” And in the rush of deciding for myself, a molten flood of frustration fills me. I don’t want this.
I don’t want to have a failed mating. I don’t want to go back and tell Una and the others that I mated a strange wolf from the Last Pack, and I rejected him, and he walked away, disgusted. I don’t want them to look at me with even more pity.
I can’t bear for them to whisper about me behind my back and shake their heads yet again. It took years for the females to stop looking at me like I’m a ghost, a walking reminder of Orla’s dead body and that basement and the horrors of Declan Kelly’s time.
I don’t think the pity would have ever stopped if Killian hadn’t sent the worst-off females away to live in other packs. He sent my Aunt Nola to Salt Mountain. Before she left, she got so bad, she wouldn’t leave the house. Once the ones who couldn’t get over it were gone, the others let themselves forget, and they let me blend into the scenery like I wanted.
My failed mating is going to turn back the clock. They’ll stare and whisper, and in their eyes, once again, I’ll see nothing but regret that they couldn’t save me from what that night did to my head—and that they couldn’t save themselves at all.
It’s too heavy to bear.
“Can you make it so no one knows?” It’s a child’s request, but I want it like a child wants magic to fix the unbearable, and I’m sure that she can.
“What do you mean?” Abertha narrows her eyes.
“Cast a spell. Make it so that no one notices that I’m different now.”
She shifts back in her chair. “That’s a big ask, little girl.”
“I can pay.” But actually, no, I can’t. I have some money stashed from our farmers’ market sales, but most of it slips through my fingers. There’s a human at the market who weaves yarn from alpaca, and it’s so soft, I can’t resist, and I spend most of what I make before we leave town. “I can work off the cost.”
A speculative gleam lights in her eyes. “You know, no one can dodge their fate forever.”
That’s what everyone says. You can’t fight Fate. But Fate feels very far away, and honestly, part of me feels like I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since the basement. Who knows if I’ll even be around when Fate decides to make me pay up. I need to get through tonight and tomorrow. I need to make this go away, and I can’t if everyone is staring and wondering where my mate has gone.
“Please help me.” I make myself hold her gaze, make her see—in me—the pup under the couch who she rescued, if rescued is the word.
I can tell the exact moment that she remembers she was too late that night, and like the rest of us, not nearly as powerful as we needed to be.
She sighs. “You’ll owe me. One day, I’ll come to collect.”
“Whatever I have will be yours.”
Her lip quirks. “Clearly, your instructors at that academy are not the only ones failing you educationally. Never promise a witch ‘whatever you have’ while drinking her brew in her cottage in the woods. Have you never read a fairy tale in your life?”
“Make it like it didn’t happen, and I’ll be in your debt forever.” It’s an easy vow. What do I have that’s worth anything?
She sighs. “All right. It’s not a simple spell, though. I’m going to need to fetch some ingredients. And you’re going to have to watch Appollonia while I’m gone. Don’t let her outside no matter how much she yowls. She’s been digging up the yams again.”
“You can really make it so no one asks any questions about why I can shift now?”
“Eh.” Abertha piles the tray with our tea things and rises from the table. “I can make folks uninterested in the fact. I am becoming an uncommonly powerful witch, but still, it’s hard to make people not see what they see, or not smell what they smell. It’s very easy to make it so they don’t care, though. That’s just encouraging folks’ natural selfish inclinations.”
For the first time since I lost control of my will by the river, I feel a glimmer of hope. I walk on wobbling legs to the kitchen and run the dish water, holding my fingers in the stream to feel for when the heat is right. Abertha sets the tray on the counter. For a long moment, we stand side by side, our shoulders brushing, and we stare together out the small window above the sink.
Dusk is almost done, but the garden and the woods beyond are still cast in a rich, royal blue. The color belongs to early summer—it’s out of season—but the sky overhead is true to November, crisp and clear and smattered with stars. The moon is round and low. Inside my chest, my wolf stirs, shaken to her bones and exhausted, but still drawn to its glow. The moon seems wise, somehow, as if it knows things we can’t.
Is the Last Pack male looking up at it, right now? Does he feel his loneliness, like I do? Is he still angry? I’m too scared to search inside me for that fragile bond. I don’t want to feel his hate inside me.
He’s probably back in his fur and miles away, happy to be done with me.
Which is good.
I’m grateful.
He doesn’t want a female like me, and I don’t want him.
Abertha will fix things. No one will wonder why I can shift if I have no mate. And in a few months, if I shove this away like I did the night in the basement, he’ll never even come to mind.