MATED TO NOTHING

The first time Ciara Dale understood she was different, she was four years old and watching the other children playfully bite each other. The pups of Shadowfang pack tumbled across the clearing behind the elder's hut, their small bodies shifting in fits and starts,fur rippling over baby fat arms, snouts pushing out of round faces, claws splitting the tips of fingers. They yelped and growled and chased each other in circles until they collapsed in a heap of panting, happy exhaustion. Ciara sat on the steps of the hut and watched. She could not shift. Had never shifted. Did not even feel the urge to shift, that strange and wonderful itch that the other children described as a second heartbeat, a twin living just beneath their skin. When they asked her what it felt like to be human all the time, she didn't know how to answer. She didn't know what it felt like to be anything else. "Come play," said a boy named Finn, toddling over on unsteady legs. He was three. He'd shifted twice already into a spotted gray pup, once back into a drooling human infant who'd promptly bitten his own mother's finger hard enough to draw blood. Everyone had laughed. Everyone had called him strong. Ciara looked at his hands,small dirty nails thickening into claws even now, even at rest, because his wolf was always there, always ready. "I can't play," she said. "Why?" "Because I can't bite." Finn frowned, processing this. Then he shrugged a three year old's shrug, full body and unbothered and toddled back to the others. That night, Ciara asked her mother why she didn't have a wolf like everyone else. Lena Dale was a healer, not a philosopher. She sat by the fire with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap, watching her daughter with an expression that Ciara would only later learn to recognize as calculation. As in: How much do I tell? How much can she handle? "Some wolves come late," Lena said finally. "Later than others." "How late?" "Very late. Sometimes not until adulthood." "But Finn is three. And he has his wolf." "Finn is lucky." Lena's voice was careful. Polished. A stone smoothed by years of holding the same conversation. "You are simply... not lucky yet." Ciara was four. She accepted this answer the way children accept all answers with the vague sense that something was being kept from her, but without the language to ask for it. She would not accept it forever. By the time Ciara was seven, she had stopped asking. Not because she understood but because she had learned that the question itself made people uncomfortable. The other children stopped inviting her to play. Their parents stopped meeting her eyes. Even the elders possessing ancient wolves who remembered wars and treaties and the old stories looked through her like she was made of fog. She was not wolf less. That was the cruel joke of it. She was wolf empty. A vessel with nothing inside. A body that went through the motions of eating and sleeping and breathing, but lacked the essential spark that made a person a person in the eyes of the pack. And then, on her seventh birthday, her body tried to fix it. It happened in the clearing. Of course it did. The same clearing where she'd watched Finn shift, where she'd sat on the steps and felt the sun on her face and pretended she didn't care that no one looked at her anymore. She was alone. She was always alone now. The shift came without warning. One moment she was sitting in the grass, tracing patterns in the dirt with a stick. The next, her bones were screaming. She didn't know what was happening,she had never been told what a shift felt like because why would anyone tell her? She wasn't supposed to shift. She couldn't shift. The adults had decided this years ago, and the world had obligingly rearranged itself around their decision. But her body had not gotten the message. Her spine arched. Her fingers curled. Something hot and wrong flooded through her veins not the clean heat of a normal shift, the kind the other children described as stretching or waking up. This was different. This was breaking. She tried to scream,her throat closed. She tried to run,her legs folded. She fell sideways into the grass, and the world went white, and somewhere far away she heard someone shouting her name. Lena found her an hour later. The sun had moved across the sky. The shadows had lengthened. Ciara lay curled in a ball at the edge of the clearing, her dress torn, her skin slick with sweat and something darker, a viscous black tinged fluid that smelled of rust and rot and old, old things. She was not a wolf. She was not anything. The shift had failed. Not partially,not the way some pups struggled and needed their mothers to talk them through it.Hers failed completely and absolutely. Her body had reached for something that wasn't there, and in the reaching, had nearly torn itself apart. Lena gathered her daughter into her arms. Carried her back to the hut. Laid her on the pallet by the fire. And then, for the first and only time in Ciara's memory, her mother cried. Not loudly or dramatically. Just tears sliding down her cheeks as she pressed cold compresses to Ciara's forehead and whispered words in a language Ciara had never heard before. Words that sounded like sorry. Words that sounded like not yet. Words that sounded like please, please, please. Ciara didn't shift again. Her body never tried. Whatever door had cracked open on her seventh birthday slammed shut and stayed shut. The other children grew into teenagers, their wolves settling into their bones like old friends. The teenagers grew into adults, taking mates, having pups, living the lives of wolves. Ciara stayed frozen. She was eighteen now. Still living in her mother's hut. Still sleeping on the same pallet by the same fire. Still waking every morning to the same truth: She was nothing. The pack had stopped being cruel about it years ago. Cruelty required effort, and Ciara had stopped being worth the effort. Now she was just there,a piece of furniture that moved sometimes, that ate food that could have gone to someone useful, that breathed air that could have filled a wolf's lungs. The butcher gave her work because Lena asked him to. She scraped hides,cleaned bones,hauled water. Did the tasks too menial for the wolves who had better things to do with their time and their claws. She did them quietly,efficiently and Invisibly. And every night, she lay awake and wondered what it would feel like to matter. The morning the gathering was announced, Ciara was elbow deep in a deer carcass. The butcher's shed reeked of iron and offal. Flies buzzed in the corners. Her fingers were stained red to the second knuckle, and her back ached from hunching over the same ribcage for three hours. She didn't mind. The work was honest. The silence was peaceful. And the butcher,a grizzled old wolf named Garrick who'd lost his mate to a rogue attack fifteen years ago never asked her to be anything other than what she was. "You hear the news?" Garrick said, not looking up from the haunch he was sawing. "No." "There's a gathering next full moon. Biggest one in a decade." Ciara's hands slowed. "All the packs?" "All the packs worth mentioning." Garrick set down his saw. Wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow. "Shadowfang's going. The Alpha announced it this morning." Shadowfang's Alpha was a man named Corin. Middle aged,competent and unremarkable. He'd led the pack for twelve years without doing anything particularly memorable which, in werewolf politics, was either a sign of wisdom or a sign of cowardice. No one had figured out which yet. "Why?" Ciara asked. "Why go?" Garrick shrugged. "Political alliances. The usual." He paused. "Rumor is Kael Draven's going to be there." The name landed like a stone in still water. Ciara had heard it before. Everyone had. Kael Draven, Alpha of Blackmoor pack. Youngest pack leader in a century. He'd killed his own uncle for the title at twenty two.Not in secret, not in shadow, but in the middle of the pack's great hall, with a hundred wolves watching. His uncle's blood had still been wet on his hands when he'd turned to the crowd and said, Anyone else? No one had stepped forward. In the six years since, Kael Draven had turned Blackmoor from a middling pack into a regional power. His borders were iron. His enemies were dead. His name was spoken in whispers, even by Alphas who'd held their thrones for decades. "What does he want?" Ciara asked. "No one knows." Garrick picked up his saw again. "That's what's got everyone nervous." Ciara nodded and went back to her carcass. She didn't think about Kael Draven again. Not then. That night, her mother told her she was going to the gathering. "No." "You are." Lena was stirring something over the fire,a pot of something that smelled of yarrow and rust. Her back was to Ciara. Her shoulders were tight. "The Alpha requested it." "The Alpha doesn't know I exist." "He knows you exist. He knows about you." Lena turned. Her face was drawn in the firelight. Older than Ciara remembered. "Everyone knows about you, Ciara. The girl with no wolf. The healer's cursed daughter. You're a curiosity. A cautionary tale. And when all the packs gather in one place, curiosities get noticed." "Then why would you send me?" "Because I can't protect you here forever." The words hung in the air. Heavy yet Final. Ciara set down her bowl of stew. "What does that mean?" Lena didn't answer immediately. She walked to the door of the hut and stood there, looking out at the dark forest, at the distant lights of the pack's homes, at the moon just beginning to rise above the treeline. "It means," Lena said quietly, "that I've been hiding you for eighteen years. And I'm running out of places to hide." "Hide me from what?" Lena turned. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady. "From yourself." Ciara dreamed of fire that night. Not the clean fire of hearths and torches. Something older and hungry. Flames that burned without wood, without fuel, without anything except intent. They moved like living things,crawling across the walls of a room she didn't recognize, reaching for her with fingers made of heat and light. And in the center of the fire, a pair of cold silver eyes was watching her.She woke with her hand pressed to her chest and her heart pounding against her ribs. The dream faded, as dreams do, leaving behind only fragments. Fire,eyes and the sensation of falling. But one thing stayed with her. The eyes had not been cruel. They had been curious like they were seeing her for the first time. Like they had been looking for her for a very long time.