Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter One: The Girl Who Never Shifted

There were four hundred and eleven wolves in the Iron moon pack and I was the only one who had never been one.

I want to be precise about that, because the pack was never precise about it. They said shiftless. They said broken. Elder Marrick's daughter had a prettier word for it, hollow, which she said with her hand on my cheek like she was doing me a kindness, and by the time I was nineteen it had stopped landing anywhere new.

So I did what hollow girls do at a Mating Ceremony. I carried trays.

The great hall of Iron moon was carved into the mountain itself, three hundred feet of black rock and firelight, and on the night of the Blood Moon they opened the roof. That was the whole ritual, really. They rolled back the iron shutters and let the moon in, and the moon looked at everyone who had come of age that year, and the moon decided.

The moon had skipped me for three ceremonies running. I had made peace with a fourth.

"Ivy. Ivy." Bram elbowed me. He was seventy and his knees were gravel and he had been kitchen staff since before my parents died, which made him the closest thing I had to family. "You're pouring on the Elder."

I was. Wine, over Elder Marrick Vale's sleeve, a dark spreading blot on white ceremonial linen, and the hall went quiet in that particular way. That means everyone has decided to enjoy something.

Marrick looked at the stain. Then at me. He had a long grey face and the flat, patient eyes of a man who had spent forty years being the second most powerful person in a room and had done the arithmetic on it.

"Clumsy," he said, mild as milk.

"I'm sorry, Elder."

"You're always sorry." He took the cloth from my hands and dried his own sleeve, which was worse than being struck. "Go stand at the wall, girl. Try not to be part of the evening."

I went and stood at the wall.

From there I could see the whole floor, and the whole floor could see him.

Alpha Kael Draven was twenty-six years old and had held Iron moon for four of them, since his father went out to meet the rogues at Greywall and came back on a shield. He was tall in a way that made rooms rearrange themselves. Black hair, a jaw you could sharpen a knife on, and a stillness that everyone in the North mistook for calm. It wasn't calm. I'd seen him at the sparring pit before dawn, four hours a day, every day, since the funeral. It was pressure with a lid on.

He had never once spoken to me. In nineteen years he had looked at me twice, and both times it had been past me, at the door I was standing next to.

Beside him, in silver, stood Seraphine Vale.

Everyone knew how tonight was supposed to end. Seraphine was Marrick's daughter, the pack's Seer, twenty-three and beautiful in a way that felt like a policy decision. Two years ago she had stood in this hall with her eyes gone white and prophesied that the Blood Moon would give Kael Draven a Luna who would hold Iron moon through the coming dark. She had been holding his arm at every public event since. The betting in the kitchens wasn't on who. It was on whether she'd cry prettily or pretend not to be surprised.

The shutters rolled back.

Moonlight came down through three hundred feet of open mountain and hit the floor like something poured. It was red that night, thick red, and it moved. That's the part nobody tells you. Moonlight in a Mating Ceremony moves, sliding across the flagstones, hunting.

It found Cass Ardern and her mate and the hall roared.

It found the twins from the eastern holdings, one each, and the hall roared again.

It found six more pairs and I stopped watching, because there is a limit to how many times you can watch other people be chosen, and mine was about six.

Then the light came to the dais, and it went up Kael Draven like water going up a wall, and every wolf in the room stood.

Seraphine lifted her chin. She had practiced that.

And the light left the dais. It came down the three steps. It crossed the floor. It passed the twins, and Cass, and the whole shining front rank of Iron moon's warriors, and it kept coming, and I watched it come and thought, with total serenity, someone behind me is about to have the best night of her life.

There was nobody behind me. There was a wall.

The moonlight climbed my legs.

My skin went to fire. Not pain — recognition, an enormous hand closing around my ribs, and a heat opened across my left shoulder like a brand being laid on from the inside, and a scent hit me that I had smelled a thousand times across a courtyard and never once been allowed to notice. Cedar. Snow. Iron moon's Alpha.

Mine, said something in my chest that had never spoken before. Mine, mine, ours, finally.

I looked up.

Four hundred and eleven wolves had turned around.

And Kael Draven was staring at me from the far end of the hall with his hand pressed flat over his own left shoulder, exactly where mine burned, and on his face was the single most terrible expression I have ever seen on a living creature.

It wasn't disgust.

It was grief. Instant, total, and already deciding something.

"No," he said.

The moon disagreed.