Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
Oh. I’m the tree.
Gross.
My cheeks heat. Justus’s gaze shifts awkwardly to the side, and he clears his throat.
“It would take more than Calvus’ big mouth to piss me off,” he kind of mumbles.
I overreacted. My brain leapt to the worst-case scenario. Like always. My cheeks burn hotter. “I’m sorry,” I say.
He opens his mouth, and I know he’s going to tell me not to apologize—which is what Kennedy and Ivo and Tye and everyone always says when I act like they’re monsters because they had the audacity to come upon me around a corner without warning or ask me for something from across the lodge in a loud voice.
For some reason, I don’t want Justus to sweep it under the rug like everyone else.
I tighten my grip on his hands. “I get jumpy,” I tell him. Yeah. And the surface of the sun is a little hot. I exhale. “I worry a lot. I get anxious.”
To his credit, he doesn’t say no shit. Instead, he bends forward and presses his forehead to mine. “Maybe one day you’ll tell me why.”
I would shake my head, but I’m held in place with the pressure of his noggin.
“I would die before I let anything hurt you,” he says, so softly that the warmth of his breath hardly reaches my lips.
“I don’t want you to die.”
He squeezes my fingers, drawing my arms to his side, and runs his temple down my cheek and along my chin. Scent marking me. I’m so hot and trembly. I feel like my knees are going to give out.
“Then how about I worry with you?” His nose brushes my jawline, right in front of my ear, and every nerve in my body jolts awake.
“I worry enough for ten people,” I say. “I have it handled.”
“I worry,” he says.
I’ve heard this a hundred times before, too. People love to tell you about their anxieties and how they conquered them, and the only time it hasn’t both irritated and depressed me was when Kennedy told me how weed gummies helped her get over her fear of accidentally shifting into her he-wolf in public, and she followed the confession up by sharing one with me, and we spent the night watching videos of cats being weird on her phone.
“Yeah?” On the one hand, it’s past time I changed the subject, but on the other, his beard is brushing along my cheek, and it’s scratchy and comforting and strange and lovely, and I don’t want him to stop.
“I worry that something will happen to me, and I won’t be here to protect my people. Or we’ll be attacked, and I won’t be strong enough, or the sickness will come back, and like last time, there won’t be anything I can do.”
Oh. Wow. His voice is even, but it’s deadly serious. I worry about bad things happening to the people I love and not being strong enough all the time, but no one expects me to protect them. I’m not an alpha.
“Is that why you don’t want your pack to call you alpha?” I ask before I can stop myself. I don’t mean to suggest he’s scared. I brace myself. Males don’t like you to insinuate they’re less than, even if you don’t mean it.
“I guess,” he answers, completely unfazed. “I don’t believe that one of us is somehow superior than the others or destined to lead, but I’d let them call me alpha all day, if it made them happy, if it didn’t make us weaker as a pack.”
“What do you mean, weaker?”
“My decisions aren’t any better than anyone else’s. Well, they’re better than Alroy’s, but other than that—I’m just as shortsighted, just as prone to careless mistakes as the others. Ilose my temper. I miscalculate. My pride makes me stupid.” He pauses there and flashes me a look I can’t quite understand.
He goes on. “And the second Ilet them call me alpha, half of them are going to stop disagreeing with me, and there won’t be anyone to point out when my ideas are bad. Or dangerous. A lot of them will rely on my judgment, and theirs will get rusty. If you know our history, you know what can happen.”
“Whose history?” I know more about Moon Lake’s than Quarry Pack, and that’s very little. I know nothing at all about Last Pack.
Justus takes my hand, and we continue our walk. “Ours. Shifters in this part of the world.”
“We didn’t really learn about that at the Academy. Except for Broderick Moore and how he led Moon Lake Pack out of the dens.”
Justus snorts. “Nothing about First Pack?”
“Who is First Pack?”
He smiles ruefully. “You call us the Last Pack. We call us First Pack.”
“Oh. No. Not much. Just how you wouldn’t leave the dens.”
He laughs, and there’s a bitter edge to it. “That’s more or less the story.”
We’ve gotten to the pups’ sycamore playground. It’s abandoned. There are still quite a few dancers by the big bonfire, but I don’t see any little ones running around. They must’ve been herded to bed.
Justus pulls himself up on a swing made from a wood plank and rope and bends over with his hand out to give me a boost. I ignore it. I can do it more gracefully under my own steam.
I brace a palm on the plank, grab the rope, and jump with both feet, throwing my upper body forward. My chest slams the wooden edge so hard, I knock the wind out of myself. This was so much easier when I was six.
Justus chuckles and tries to roll me over and help get my butt on the seat, but he ends up just getting in my way. My wolf snaps at him. He laughs and backs off, scrunching himself into the rope on his side to give me as much space as possible.
By the time I finally get myself in position, I’m a mess. My gown is twisted and winching my waist. I’m breathless and sweating. My hair is all over the place.
Justus is grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat. He reaches over, tucks a loose tendril behind my ear, and quickly pulls his hand away. My heart thumps harder.
“Hold the rope and kick when I say,” he orders.
“Yes, Alpha.” My eyes bug wide at my own audacity.
He laughs from his belly. “One, two, three,kick.”
We manage to lift our heels and lean back in sync, and in no time, we’re swinging with hardly any effort. I haven’t done this since I was little, and never two abreast. Back on the playground at the Quarry Pack commons, I’d sit on a black rubber swing, and Mari would sit in my lap since she was smaller, and then she’d make me do all the work.
My chest aches with homesickness. I miss that place, that time, and I can never go back. Homesickness doesn’t feel like enough of a word. What do you call it when your heart longs to rewind time?
To distract myself, I ask, “Why didn’t your pack leave the dens when the other packs did?”
He frowns, confused. “Well, we weren’t a pack before the others left the dens.”
Now I’m confused.
“They don’t tell you who we are?” he asks.
I shake my head.
Justus doesn’t seem that surprised. “We’re you. Well, some of us are you. Lelia would’ve been one of yours. Ashleen. Alroy.” Justus smirks. “He definitely comes from Quarry Pack blood.”
“I don’t understand.”
He blows out air like he’s thinking about how to put it. “You know how some of us came over on boats, right? Because the humans were blaming us for the famine where we came from, and they were eating everything down to the squirrels and rats, so we were starving, too?”
I vaguely remember a brief mention, an instructor describing how our shifter ancestors had to pass as human on ships, which is how we first began to learn civilized ways. I think it might have been during the field trip we took to Moon Lake’s old den.
“That’s how my people got here, and yours, but of course, there were shifters already here, and some in the area who had escaped from the south during slavery. Max’s people came all the way from Louisiana. Twelve in their group—males, females, and pups—all the way from Bayou Lafourche. Max’s great-grandsire didn’t lose a single soul on the trip.”
I’ve never been taught any of this, and I would know if I had—I paid attention in class like my life depended on it.
“All the shifters who settled here established a territory and lived in dens. We ran together on the full moon, and sometimes we fought, but mostly we lived in peace. We were too busy trying to survive and steer clear of the humans to mess with each other much. And then the Great Alpha, Broderick Moore, came along.”
Of course, I’ve heard all about him. He was a footnote to every lesson at Moon Lake. I swear, even in math class, there would be questions like “The Great Alpha, Broderick Moore, had three apples. He ate one. How many apples did he have left?”
“Broderick Moore looked around and saw the humans with their horseless carriages and electric lights and indoor plumbing, and he wanted it. And if he was good at nothing else, he could paint people a pretty picture, so his people followed him out of the dens to Moon Lake, built themselves a human town, and convinced their wolves they only needed out once a month because wolves are shit at carpentry and laying brick.”
I like electricity and plumbing, too, but we were taught that leaving the dens was more noble than that—like shifters had been living in squalor, uneducated and lawless, and when we moved into houses we became better somehow. And there was this unspoken insinuation that Moon Lake was the best, the rightest, and the other packs were good only inasmuch as we were like Moon Lake.
“So the other packs wanted to be like Moon Lake?”
“Well, an alpha can’t let another alpha outdo him, can he? The first Alpha Fireside set his pack to building North Border. Malcolm Shaw had his build the compounds on Salt Mountain. Lorcan Bell settled by your quarry.”
“But the alpha of Last Pack didn’t want things to change?”
“There was no alpha. There was no Last Pack. Just a bunch of folks who didn’t want to jail their wolves and break their backs to live like humans.”