Rejected By Seven Alphas, Claimed By The Ghost Lycan King

My name is Aria and I have no wolf. In the Northern Alliance, that sentence is a death curse. Every girl in every pack waits for her eighteenth birthday. On that day, her first shift comes. Her eyes turn molten gold. Her bones crack and reshape. Her wolf finally speaks inside her mind after eighteen years of silence. It is the happiest day of a girl's life. Today is my eighteenth birthday. I feel nothing. No gold in my eyes. No howl in my head. Just silence. Just human skin that is too soft, too weak. My mother tried to hide me. She braided my hair with wolfsbane flowers and told the pack I was sick. It did not work. The law of the Temple of Seven is clear. Every unmated eighteen-year-old girl must be presented at the Temple to be chosen as a Shared Luna for the seven Alpha brothers who rule the North. If you have no wolf, you are still presented. You are just presented to be shamed. The Temple of Seven is built from black stone and ice. Hundreds of wolves stand inside wearing white ceremonial robes. The air smells of snow and blood and incense. On the highest platform, there are seven thrones carved from obsidian. On those thrones sit the seven brothers. I have heard stories about them since I was a child. Kaden, the eldest, with black hair and eyes like winter storms. He is thirty and has never smiled. Jax, the second, with a scar across his lip and a cruel laugh. Rhys, the third, with silver hair and hands that have killed a hundred rogues. Cole, the fourth, quiet and cold. Finn and Leon, the twins, beautiful and deadly. And Eli, the youngest, only twenty, but already taller than all his brothers, with eyes that see everything. They are the most powerful Alphas in the North. Every girl dreams of being their Luna, even if she has to share. Every girl except me. The High Priestess calls my name. "Aria of the Low Pack, step forward." My legs shake. My thin white dress is too big. My feet are bare on the cold stone. Hundreds of eyes stare at me. Some pity me. Most despise me. I stop in front of the seven thrones. I keep my head down. I cannot look at them. Kaden speaks first. His voice is deep and it echoes off the ice walls. "Look at me, girl." I force myself to look up. Kaden's eyes are grey and terrible. He looks at my face, my hands, my neck where a wolf mark should be but there is only pale skin. "You are human," he says. It is not a question. It is an accusation. "Yes, Alpha," I whisper. My voice breaks. A murmur goes through the crowd. Human. The word spreads like poison. Human. Human. Wolfless. Jax leans forward on his throne. He smirks. "A human in our Temple? Who brought a human here? This is an insult to our bloodline." Rhys does not even look at me. He looks at the High Priestess. "You waste our time. We asked for strong Luna candidates. You bring us a defective human with no wolf, no scent, no power. She cannot shift. She cannot carry our pups. She cannot even survive a mating bite." My mother makes a small sound behind me, like a wounded animal. She wants to run to me. She cannot. To defend a wolfless girl is to challenge the Alphas. Kaden stands. He is so tall. His black cloak falls around him like night. He raises his hand and I see his claws. Long, black, sharp. "We, the Seven Alphas of the Northern Alliance, reject you, Aria of the Low Pack, as our Luna," he says, and his voice is law. "A human can never be our Luna. A wolfless girl can never be Queen of the North. We cast you out." Then he does it. He slices his own palm and presses his bloodied hand to my forehead. His rejection mark burns like fire and ice at the same time. I scream. It is more painful than any wound. One by one, the brothers come down. Jax grabs my wrist and presses his mark into my skin. "Slave," he whispers in my ear. Rhys marks my other wrist. "Weak." Cole marks my shoulder. "Useless." Finn marks my collarbone. "Human." Leon marks my neck. "Trash." Eli, the youngest, hesitates for a second. His eyes are different, softer, but he still marks my cheek. "Sorry," he breathes, so low only I hear. Seven marks. Seven burning seals of rejection. My knees give out. I fall to the cold stone. Blood drips from my forehead onto the ice. No one helps me. The High Priestess turns away. The crowd watches me bleed. Kaden looks down at me one last time. "Take her to the Forbidden Forest. Let the rogues and the ghosts take her. She is not one of us." Two large guards in black armor grab my arms and drag me. My bare feet scrape against stone. Past the white robes. Past my mother who is crying silently now. Past the huge doors of the Temple. Outside, the snow is falling hard. The wind cuts through my thin dress. They drag me to the edge of the cliff where the world ends and the Forbidden Forest begins. No wolf has entered that forest in a hundred years. That is where they buried the Ghost Lycan King, Caelum. The story says he was so powerful he could kill seven Alphas with one hand. The seven packs had to unite to poison him in his sleep and bury him with silver chains. His ghost still haunts the trees. Wolves say if you hear him howl, you die. "Die here, human," one guard spits and throws me down the slope. I tumble through snow and sharp branches. My dress tears. My skin tears. I land at the bottom, at the tree line. My forehead is bleeding from Kaden's mark. My whole body is shaking from cold and pain. I cannot feel my legs anymore. My eighteenth birthday. I thought maybe, even without a wolf, someone would be kind. I was wrong. Snow falls on my face. I stare up at the black trees. They are twisted, with no leaves, covered in frost. The wind whispers through them and it sounds like voices. Like a man crying far away. I try to crawl. One hand forward, then another. My blood makes a red trail in the white snow. My breath is small white clouds. Then my blood touches something hard under the snow. Not a rock. A stone, flat and carved, covered in old runes I cannot read. It looks like a grave marker. It is warm, even through the snow. The moment my blood touches it, the stone cracks. A thin line of silver light shoots out from the crack, straight into the dark sky. The ground shakes. The trees scream. A cold wind like a thousand ghosts howling bursts out from the grave and throws me backward. And a hand grabs my wrist. It is not a human hand. It is transparent, like smoke and moonlight, but it is solid and strong as iron. The fingers are long, with black claws. Cold, so cold it burns. I look up, too scared to scream. A man kneels over me. No, not a man. A King. He is impossibly tall, even kneeling. His hair is long, black as the forest, falling over his bare shoulders. A crown made of bone and black antlers sits on his head. His skin is pale blue, like he is made of winter itself. You can see through his chest, through his muscular arms, like he is mist, but his eyes... his eyes are solid, glowing white-silver, like two moons. His chest is bare and covered in old silver scars and glowing runes. A huge hole is in his heart area, where a silver spear once went through. The Ghost Lycan King. Caelum. He looks at my face, at the seven burning rejection marks all over my skin. His glowing eyes narrow and the forest shakes with his rage. "Who did this to you?" he whispers. His voice is like ice cracking on a frozen lake, like a winter storm, beautiful and terrifying. He touches my bleeding neck, right where Leon marked me. Where my mating mark should be. His cold finger burns hotter than all seven marks combined. "After a hundred years... you finally came," he says, and his ghostly face is suddenly so close I can feel his cold breath. "I waited in darkness for a hundred years for my Luna. My little human Luna. You are mine now." Pain explodes in my neck, but it is not painful. It is cold fire. A silver crescent moon, brighter than the snow, brighter than his eyes, appears on my neck, glowing and pulsing. His mark. Covering all seven of theirs. The last thing I see before darkness takes me is his transparent, beautiful, terrifying smile. "Welcome home, my Queen."