The Wild Wolf’s Rejected Mate (The Five Packs Book 5)
The Wild Wolf’s Rejected Mate: Chapter 11

Justus still isn’t back when the sun begins to sink behind the hills to the north. Most of the females ventured to the tables by the bonfire for dinner, but Griff brought a tray for Elspeth and me at the female camp. Nessa’s youngest, the sleepy curly-headed toddler, kicked a fuss when the cowbell rang that summons the pack to eat, so she’s here with us, too, picking off my plate.

Her name is Efa, and for some reason, she’s as interested in me as her wolf. She’s the cutest pup I’ve ever seen with her big round eyes and delicate tan whiskers contrasting with her warm brown skin.

She’s been talking to me nonstop since she fully woke up from her afternoon nap, but she’s still sporting baby fangs, so I can’t understand a word. She doesn’t seem to notice or mind. She babbles a few words in her raspy little growly voice, and I’ll say, “Is that right?” Or “Oh. Is that so?” And she’s happy. I wish all people were this easy.

She grabs a handful of mashed potatoes from the plate balanced on my knees. I glance around. Elspeth is messing around with the kettle. No one else is around to see my terrible babysitting. I wait until Efa licks her hands clean and then I gently wipe them on the skirt of my gown.

“How about we use the spoon?” I say, offering her another bite. She scoops the potato off the spoon with two fingers and sticks them in her mouth.

Elspeth chuckles over by the fire. “Usually, that one will only eat as her wolf. Count yourself lucky she’s not licking the plate.”

“Is that true?” I ask Efa. She’s balancing herself with a chubby hand on each of my knees. She bares her tiny fangs in a shameless grin and yips.

I spear a hunk of beef with my fork and hold it up. She plucks the bite off, pops it into her mouth, and then before I can stop her, she licks the tines with her long wolfish tongue.

I’m not used to spending time with pups her age. At Quarry Pack, they stay close to their dams, and despite the changes Killian has made, the mated females still stick together and steer clear of lone females like me. The only little one I have experience with is Una’s babe, Raff, but he isn’t walking or talking yet.

Efa is the most nonsensical person I’ve ever met. She’ll go running straight toward the fire on her thin wobbly legs to give Elspeth a piece of beef, but when an owl hoots overhead, she yelps and huddles close to me, hiding her face in my side. I don’t get the fearlessness, but I understand about the owl. I startled, too.

Despite the good company, as the shadows grow longer, I’m getting anxious again.

Where is he? He left you here. He’s dead. They’ll blame you.

He’s dead.

And he’s your mate, and you don’t even know him.

I distract myself from my dread—and Efa from her infatuation with the fire—by playing peek-a-boo with the rectangular tablecloth-wrap-runner that I made today. When I started this morning, I was too nervous to make a conscious plan, so I started a second row both too late and too soon for a scarf, and then, hours later, when I was calm enough to take stock of what I was doing, I realized I’d already stitched too many rows for a placemat or doll’s blanket. It’s not my best work, obviously, just rows upon rows of garter stitches.

It makes for a good prop for peek-a-boo, though. Efa stands in front of my knees, and I raise it between us so she can’t see my face. Her wolf growls. It’s adorable, about as loud as a tummy grumble. I say, “Peek-a-boo!” and drop the knitting in my lap. She squeals, and her whiskers quiver.

No matter how many times I do it, she doesn’t get bored. When I try a variation, covering my head with the knitting and then raising it to peek out at her, she dissolves in giggles and yips. I’m a comedic genius.

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.

I’m still on the table. Justus has me stuck up here, treed like a raccoon. To get down, I’d either have to jump—and risk losing my makeshift gown and my dignity—or I’d have to turn my back on him to step down to the bench. Something inside me won’t let me do that.

“She’s taken with you,” Justus says, his voice low even though there’s no one nearby.

My cheeks heat. I don’t know how to answer him. There’s too much weight to his words. I’m probably his only chance of having a pup of his own, and there could have been one between us, but not in this timeline, not the one that made me the way I am. That’s a lot of baggage between two people who are virtually strangers.

But is he really a stranger now? He doesn’t quite feel like one anymore. He just kind of feels new.

“She’s taken with you, too,” I finally reply.

He shrugs and grins. “She saw that elk we brought home, and she knows what side her bread is buttered on.”

“You think she was being sweet to you for food?”

He nods very seriously. “Absolutely. She knows what I’m good for.”

“I don’t know. She seemed pretty taken with your beard.”

His grin widens. “I do have a great beard.”

My lips rise at the corners of their own accord. “Very yankable, it seems.”

He takes a step closer. I clutch the sides of my gown with my sweaty palms. “Yes, I’ve been told that many times. Great for yanking and catching crumbs.”

“Seems like a good thing to have, then.” I don’t know what I’m saying, or what we’re doing, or what I’m still doing up on this table. Is this flirting?

“It serves me well.” He closes the rest of the distance between us. “Want to give it a tug? See what everyone is talking about?”

My face catches fire. My lower belly squirms. I’m on my own. My wolf is hanging back, watching, and the pecking voice is missing in action.

I can’t think of even a quasi-smart reply. I’ve run out, so I do what I have to do—I reach out, take a chunk of beard between my forefinger and thumb, and pull, very gently. The smile that breaks across his face steals all my air. Blood whooshes to my head. I’m a balloon about to pop. I’m a complete dork, and at the very same time, I’m utterly, totally, transcendentally entranced.

I drop my hand. Justus catches it and brings it back to his face, pressing my palm to his cheek. My skin is so clammy. My thighs clench, trying to tamp the squirmy sensation that’s doing strange things to my pulse and breath and ability to think.

“I shouldn’t have left you.” I’m not sure whether he means today or back when we mated, and regardless, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that. My wolf snorts. She agrees with him, and she’s unimpressed that it took him so long to realize it.

“I was fine.” I’m going to assume he’s talking about today.

“I was afraid you’d ask me to take you home, so I made myself scarce.”

My jaw drops, not much, but enough that I have to close my mouth. Males don’t just admit things. They brood or stomp around or refuse to eat the dinner put in front of them, and then you have to go back to the kitchen and play ‘guess why’ with the other females.

Hold on. Back up. Focus. He bailed because he didn’t want to take me home today?

“But you will take me back to Quarry Pack?” I ask, my anxiety spiking. I don’t actually want to be anywhere else right now. I like his rough hand cradling mine while I stand on top of a table like I’m a bold female who’s never obsessively worried about exposure, bolt holes, and escape routes. But in order to breathe, I need to know I could go.

“Yes, when you say it’s time,” he says, his eyes shuttering. He lets go of my hand, and I let it fall to my side. There’s a fraught moment while he braces himself, waiting for me to ask, and I try to think of something, anything else to say instead.

I do want to go home. But not right now. I’m afraid to tell him that I want to stay. That he’ll read too much into it.

He’s afraid, too, though he’s doing a good job not showing it. The bond is giving him away.

I stare down at him. He stares up at me.

He blinks first. “Will you come for a walk?” he asks, his voice gruff and tentative.

I nod, my throat too tight to say yes out loud.

He reaches for me, but he doesn’t grab my waist. His hands stop and hover a hairsbreadth over my hips. I have to step forward into them.

He cocks his head and lets me see into his eyes again. He’s nervous. Relieved. Excited.

I am, too. I step into his hands. His fingers curve around my sides, and he lifts me like I’m made of cotton fluff. I instinctively grab his shoulders for balance. His wolf rumbles. I draw down a deep breath, my nose quivering. Oh, lord. His scent.

When I was a girl, we’d till the garden behind Abertha’s cottage as soon as the ground was soft and dry enough, usually in March when the weather still felt like winter on most days. The sky would be stark gray, there would be a bite in the wind and only the barest hint of buds on the trees, but with every spade-full of turned dirt, a delicious springtime scent would rise in the air. That’s Justus.

When I breathe him in, I can hear the crunch of my boots on the cold dirt, the scrape of the hoe hitting rocks, the thunk of steel hacking through clumps of earth. I can feel my palms burn from the rough wooden handle.

His scent confuses the past and the present in my head. He wasn’t there. It’s a trick of the senses that he smells exactly like my memories.

Or is it something else? Out of all the males in the world, Fate picked him for me. Why?

He takes my hand and leads me in the direction of the bonfire, his pace so slow it’s almost bride-like. His grip is strong and certain. I hope he doesn’t notice the clamminess.

We take one of the worn paths that winds between the various areas of activity. We pass by a workbench with the tools left out and some sort of wooden contraption left in the vise. A little further on, someone has left a bowl on a pottery wheel, the rudimentary kind made from wood discs that you kick with your foot. Farther still, there is a circle of empty chairs, whittling left in one, a pipe left in another.

We pass through scents—sawdust, clay, tobacco—but Justus’s rich earthiness travels with me. My steps feel light, and my head swims. I’ve never felt like this before. So not alone.

When we walk by the dancers, they holler and howl and call to Justus. He smiles and waves them off, but two females—Ashleen and Brigid, two young mothers who spent most of the afternoon chasing after their pups—make their way over and block our path, their feet flying, sweat streaming down their smiling, ecstatic, moonlit faces. Several males follow in their wake, stomping out their part of the dance, winding between and around them.

“Come on, Alpha, Annie!” Ashleen calls.

“Alpha! Annie!” the others echo.

I freeze. There is no way my feet can do what theirs are doing. They’d twist off at the ankles.

“Not tonight,” Justus says kindly.

“Come on, Alpha!” a male shouts, and then his wolf bays, calling Justus to join the pack.

Justus shoots me a rueful grin, and then as smooth as butter, he breaks into the steps. His shoulders dip, his feet stomp, his rhythm perfect. Effortless. The dancers erupt in shouts and howls of approval. Justus throws his head back, tossing his hair. It’s the first time I’ve seen him cocky.

My lower belly winches and something flutters in my chest.

I’ve never seen a male dance up close before. I’ve spied from the kitchen at Quarry Pack when our mated females put music on the radio after dinner. If they’d had enough to drink, some of their mates would dance after they got the sparring out of their system. There weren’t really steps to their dancing. They’d kind of grind on the females and grab whatever part of them was closer at hand—boob or butt.

This is different. These males had to learn this. The females, too. And it doesn’t look like foreplay at all. It’s more like a model you make in science class—the females are the sun, the males are orbiting planets. The females are the nucleus. The males are electrons.

Justus winds in a figure eight, looping the other females, and then looping me. The males fall in line behind him, their wolves’ sharp yips punctuating the drumbeat.

My heart thumps. The males are big and loud and close.

Don’t move. Don’t breathe.

Or run? Maybe run?

I’m an island in a stream, and I’m scared, but also, I’m outside of it all. This is so far beyond my experience that I can’t do anything but watch and listen and try to orient myself in this strange, strange moment.

Life is work, right?

Bed, bath, kitchen, garden, greenhouse, beehive, kitchen, bath, bed.

Work, punctuated with episodes of sheer, unfounded terror.

Life is swimming, and if you stop, you drown, and if you think about what might be underneath you, you’ll sink.

You don’t leave your work out on the table or your pipe on the seat of your chair. In order to dance.

I don’t know how it’s dangerous, but it has to be. My soul says so.

Justus passes behind me and then in front of me again. He stops, the males fanning out behind him, furling into a new configuration. He steps forward and back, one foot, then the other, his lips curled up in invitation.

I suddenly feel disproportioned. My feet are cafeteria trays. My arms are fence posts.

He does the sequence of steps again, a shuffle closer, a quick hop back. Isn’t this what male birds do to attract their mates? What do the female birds do back? Stand there awkwardly and wish they’d stop?

Close by, a female yips.

Behind you!

Ashleen appears at my side and bumps me with her hip. “Like this, Annie. Look at my feet.”

She slows her steps, so gracefully, until it seems she’s dancing in slow motion. “There are eight bars.” She begins to clap. “One-two-three and two-two-three and three-two-three and four-two-three.”

She bounces in time to her counting, and since she’s watching my feet, and I’ve always been the most well-behaved student in any class, I bounce, too.

“Okay, now, start with your left. Heel. Toe. Heel. Toe. Tap, tap, tap, tap.”

I heel. I toe. I tap. My feet are clunky wooden marionettes at the end of strings.

“You’ve got it,” Ashleen says. “Now dip with your knees between the heel and toe.”

That’s when it falls apart. My feet stutter to a halt. I’m already flushed and breathless, and now my cheeks are on fire.

“Oh, no, don’t give up. Here, let’s do it how we do with the pups,” Ashleen says and slides in front of me, so she’s facing Justus. She swipes behind her back to find my hands and plants them on her hips. “Okay, now do what I do with my feet, and when you feel me dip, you dip.”

My wolf rumbles. She doesn’t like Ashleen between Justus and me.

Ashleen lets out a gusty peal of laughter. “Settle down, lady. Tell that wolf of yours I don’t want your male. I’ve got my own, and he’s trouble enough. Now, on three. Ready? One, two, three.”

It is easier to follow the steps with her in front of me, and after a few minutes, I can let her hips go, and a little after that, she calls, “Double time!” and I don’t completely fall apart.

Then she dances off, and the males who’d been weaving around us trail after her like the tail of a comet, and I’m left alone with my mate. His eyes fall to my lips, then slip helplessly to my breasts, and finally plummet to the calves and ankles I’m showing by holding up my gown.

I watch him take me in like I’m extraordinary. A statue come to life or a Pegasus. Something that defies the laws of nature. Scary like that. Jaw-dropping like that.

His feet come to a rest. He’s breathing hard, his bare chest rising and falling, his tanned skin flushed ruddy in the white space between his tattoos.

He’s tall and strong and hewn like rock, but staring up into his gentle, smiling face, with the sparkle in his eye, I can see the pup who brought his dam a skunk. My lips curve. I can’t help it. He’s happy.

He’s happy to be here with me.

He grabs my hand and lifts it, pressing my knuckles to his lips, only for a second, but I feel it deep, deep down, like I’m a whole other Annie who’d been raised in a place where it was safe to want to be beautiful, to want a sweet, wild male to kiss her in the moonlight.

I want him to kiss me again. On the mouth this time. I want a restart. What’s it called in golf? In human sport? A mulligan. I want us to start here, instead of where we did.

Justus squeezes my hand. “Let’s keep going,” he says and leads me on.

We pass a group of rambunctious pups who’ve been left to their fathers’ care, and it’s pretty much a scrum of enormous male wolves being climbed and ridden like horses by punch drunk little ones up way past their bedtime.

When the pups see Justus, they race to him, and he drops my hand to toss them in the air or carry them like a package under his arm for a few steps while they squeal and howl. Then he puts them safely back on their feet, shoos them to their fathers, and takes my hand again. Each time his fingers twine with mine, it feels less strange, and more—safe.

Nothing is ever safe. It’s a trap.

Lest I forget, the voice flashes pictures in my mind—the basement’s low ceiling, the old leather sofa, the green and white checkered tile floor, the pool table, Aunt Nola, Iona Ryan, Orla Sullivan and the other females, everyone, everything, familiar and safe. And then boots sound on the stairs. Then the door slams shut.

Pool of blood. Sightless eyes. Twisted mouth.

My clammy skin goes cold, my fear scent erupting from my pores.

Justus holds my hand tighter and swings our joined arms. “Whatever you’re afraid of, I am strong enough to kill,” he says, soft and sure. “And if I can’t, I have a pack behind me.”

For a minute, I don’t think I’ll say anything, but then, surprising myself, I do. “It’s just in my head,” I whisper.

“Good,” he whispers back. “If I had to ask Alroy to back me up, I’d never hear the end of it.”

He smiles again. I can’t smile back, but the small muscles in the corner of my mouth twitch, and I get the sense he can tell, even if he can’t see.

We keep walking. The moon rises, and the temperature drops. I’m not tired at all.

Toward the edge of the clearing, by the stream, we come across a group of males sitting on overturned crates, playing a game with cards and what looks like piles of buttons and human coins.

“Alpha,” they all say as we pass. Justus’s wolf grumbles in his chest.

“Nice kill.”

“That’s one big bull.”

“Can I get the tenderloin, Alpha?”

Justus chuckles. “Get your own, Calvus.”

“Aw, come on,” Calvus whines good-naturedly. “Play me for it.”

“You think I’d trade my mate’s company for yours? For what? What’s he wagering?” Justus asks the others.

“He’s laid down a chit,” another male answers.

“For what?” Justus asks.

“The next squirrel he catches.”

“You want to bet me a squirrel you don’t have for a tenderloin that I do?” Justus snorts.

“It’ll be the best squirrel you’ve ever had. I guarantee it,” Calvus says, laughing.

“You’ve got a lot of confidence for a male with the smallest pile at the table.”

“Hey, Alpha,” Calvus protests. “Don’t talk about the size of my pile in front of our new female.”

Justus’s wolf straight-up growls, vibrating his voice as he says, “My female.”

Trouble. Show your neck. Show neck!

I stop myself from bowing, but all four males at the table dip their heads. They’re still smirking, though.

“Yes, Alpha,” Calvus says, his grin the biggest of them all. “As you say.”

Justus clears his throat. “All right then. We’ll let you get on with your game. Calvus, I’ll make sure to tell Tarquin to give you the shank.”

“Oh, come on, Alpha,” Calvus whines. The males are still laughing as we walk away.

Despite the growl, Justus doesn’t smell angry at all. I take a deep breath through my mouth. I can pick out scents better that way. Maybe his earthy smell is covering the anger.

If you can’t smell his anger, you won’t have any warning.

“What’s wrong, Annie? Do you scent something?” Justus asks.

I glance over. He stops in place, frowning, scanning the area for a threat.

“No, I—I just—” I shake my head, flustered. I’m not used to people noticing my little freakouts. My roommates are used to it, and everyone else at Quarry Pack are too busy impressing each other to pay attention to me.

I wish he’d just let it go, but he’s waiting, not moving, so I blurt out, “You were angry, but you don’t smell angry.”

His brow wrinkles. “I’m not angry.”

“Your wolf growled. You made them show neck.”

He glances up at the sky, blows out a breath, and then looks me in the eye, grabbing my other hand so he’s holding both. “I’m not angry, and neither is my wolf. We were just—” He pauses like he’s searching for words. “That was just my wolf pissing on a tree.”

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. I lose 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 I let 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.”

So that’s why Last Pack looks so different from each other, like they could be from all the packs. They are.

“So these dens—they used to belong to one of the packs?”

Justus nods. “This was Salt Mountain’s. Our winter camp belonged to North Border. Moon Lake and Quarry Pack kept their dens.”

Little pieces are clicking together. “And this is the way we used to live?”

“Mostly. When we joined together, our ways kind of mixed.”

“Is that why you steal females? Because they’re descended from the same pack?”

“Sometimes.” He grins. “Sometimes a male sees a female with a piece of shit for a mate and figures he can do better.”

“And the females don’t waste away, separated from their mates?”

He shakes his head. “Why would they? We feed and care for them well. They aren’t left alone.”

Everyone knows that the loss of a mate is devastating. I’ve seen elders who’ve lost their mates refuse to eat, bathe, leave the house. On occasion, Old Noreen has sent Mari or me to their cabins to coax them out, and sometimes, they come, and they sit in the lodge, staring blankly into the fire or nodding off. Alone.

Because we were busy in the kitchen, and everyone else was occupied with keeping or improving their rank. No one was keeping them company. There were no rocking chair circles gathered around small fires, no pups running wild among them, no dance parties breaking out and weaving among them.

“Why don’t we know all this?” It takes a second for me to realize that I spoke the thought out loud.

Justus shrugs. “If I had to guess, a male who thinks he knows best isn’t keen on people learning there are other ways. A male with a plan doesn’t want to hear about how it was done before. If he thinks his way is better, he doesn’t appreciate evidence that it’s not.”

I think about this and swing, letting the breeze cool my face. The sycamore leaves are a dark umbrella above us, rustling while the camp quiets. High overhead, pinprick stars dot the sky.

Is that why this place feels strange, but also like a long-lost memory? Females didn’t sit together and chat while they worked when I was little—they wouldn’t have dared look idle or like they were telling tales about the males. But sitting with Elspeth and the others did feel familiar, didn’t it?

When I was young, weren’t there stolen minutes—in the laundry or on the porch behind the lodge—when my mother and her friends would gather to fold linens or shuck corn or shell peas, and they’d murmur to each other and giggle behind their hands?

What would it have been like if I’d grown up here? What would I be like?

My thoughts float back to stealing females. “Were your people Quarry Pack, then?”

“My dam was. My sire was a wanderer from parts unknown.”

“He didn’t steal her?”

He chuckles. “The way Max tells it, he hung around like a stray, bringing her geese and rabbit and frogs and piling them up in front of her den until my dam took pity on him and let him sleep inside.”

A smile tugs at my mouth. “Like your wolf. He brought me a goose.”

I glance over. In the shadows, it’s hard to read his eyes, but his voice is low and raspy when he says, “He did. And he only took a bite or two before he left it for you, and that was revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“For the bites the goose took from him.”

I giggle, and a grin breaks across Justus’s face, bright in the dark. “I like that sound, pretty Annie. Sounds like bells.”

My face heats. Out of some kind of synchrony, we both swing our legs slower and ease to a gentle back and forth.

The clearing is calm now, and silent, except for a few males sitting way over by the bonfire, keeping it stoked.

A question bursts to the front of my mind, like a wolf pup busting free from a thicket, all forward momentum, no caution, slipping my good sense and leaping out of my mouth without looking.

“Why did you steal me?” I whisper.

The swing stops. I force myself to look over. Justus meets my gaze, calm but confused.

“You don’t feel it?” he asks. “You’re going into heat again.”