The Alpha Rejected Me

First Shift

The shift wasn't like anything they taught us in training.

Normal wolves shifted by focusing, by pulling the animal inside them to the surface. It took practice. Control. You started at thirteen, fourteen, learned the feel of your wolf form, eased into it like breaking in a new pair of boots.

This wasn't that.

This was detonation.

One second I was on my hands and knees in the dirt with three things that weren't wolves closing in. The next, every bone in my body broke at once.

I didn't scream. I think I tried. But my jaw was already reshaping—elongating, the teeth pushing out, longer, sharper, wrong—and the sound that came out was a roar that shook the leaves off the closest tree.

My skin split. Not painfully—there was no pain anymore. The thing inside me had eaten it, consumed it, burned it for fuel. Muscles rewove themselves. My spine curved and lengthened. Hands became paws the size of dinner plates. And fur—silver, not gray, not white, but metallic, moon-colored silver—erupted along my arms, my back, my neck.

I hit the ground on four legs. And I was enormous.

The three figures stopped. I could see them clearly now—the wolf in me saw everything, every detail, every threat. They wore cloaks of dark leather, and their skin underneath was gray, waxy, stretched too tight over bones that looked wrong. And their scent—dead. They smelled like nothing alive. Like dust in a crypt.

"Impossible," the one in front hissed. "She's already shifted. She shouldn't be able to—"

I lunged.

My jaws closed around the first one's arm and the bone snapped like a dry stick. The creature shrieked—a sound that wasn't a howl, wasn't a scream, but something between, a frequency that made the trees creak. I threw it sideways and it hit a pine trunk hard enough to c***k the bark.

The second one came at me from the left. I caught its movement in my peripheral vision—my senses were everywhere now, the whole forest mapped in my skull like I owned it—and I swung my head. My teeth caught cloth and flesh and I tore, and the thing staggered back with its side opened up, and what came out wasn't blood. It was black. Like oil.

The third one didn't fight. It ran.

I let it go. Every instinct in this new body screamed to chase, to hunt, to end the threat, but somewhere under the animal fury was a girl who knew what mattered. I turned back toward the cabin.

My father.

I ran. The forest parted around me—literally parted, branches whipping out of my path as if the trees themselves wanted to get out of the way. I covered the two hundred yards in seconds. The cabin door was hanging off its hinges. Inside, the furniture was overturned, the lamp broken, oil pooling on the floor.

My father was against the far wall. Bleeding from a gash across his forehead, one arm hanging wrong, but breathing. Alive.

"Serena?" He blinked. Then his eyes went wide. "Serena?"

He was looking at the wolf. At me. At seven feet of silver-furred muscle standing in the doorway of his cabin. I could see myself reflected in his eyes—enormous, silver, glowing violet. Not a normal wolf. Not even close.

I tried to say something. What came out was a low, rumbling sound that wasn't language. I needed to shift back. I didn't know how. The animal didn't want to go. It was furious and protective and it wanted to find whatever had done this and finish the job.

"You need to change back." My father was struggling to his feet. "Listen to me. You have to pull it back. Think about being human. Think about your hands, your face, standing on two legs."

I thought about hands. My hands. Bitten nails, scar on the left thumb.

The shift back was almost as violent. Bones cracking, muscles tearing and reforming, fur receding. I hit the floor naked and gasping, the cold wood against my skin, and for a moment I just lay there, shaking.

"Here." My father draped a blanket over me. His good arm. The other hung at a sickening angle. "We don't have much time. The one that ran—it'll tell the others."

"What were those things?"

"Bloodsworn. The Covenant." He said it like a curse. "They found your mother. Now they've found you."

The pendant. I looked at my hand—I was still holding it. The silver crescent moon, warm against my palm. My mother had said it would call him.

"Dad. Who is 'him'?"

A sound outside. Not the creatures—a different presence. Something that made the night go quiet. The insects stopped. The wind stopped. Even the trees seemed to hold their breath.

My father looked at the door. And then, for the first time all night, he looked relieved.

"He's here," he said.