Rejected by the Alpha, Claimed by the Lycan King

Chapter 7: The Northern Gate

We walked for two days.

Or what I thought was two days. The Blackwood plays tricks with time. The mist never fully cleared, the sun was always behind clouds, and after the first night we slept curled up under Kael's coat in a hollow at the base of a great tree. He did not touch me while I slept. He did not even sleep himself. When I woke, he was sitting upright against the trunk, his silver eyes scanning the trees, as alert as if no time had passed at all.

"You don't sleep?" I asked him on the second morning.

"I sleep," he said. "Just not when I am protecting something."

I felt my face warm. I did not know what to do with a sentence like that.

By the third day, the forest began to change.

The black oaks gave way to silver birches. The mist thinned. The ground sloped upward, and the air grew sharper, colder, cleaner. I could smell snow somewhere in the distance, though it was still spring.

"We are crossing the border," Kael said.

"Whose border?"

"Mine."

I looked at him sideways. "I didn't see a marker."

"You wouldn't." He stopped walking. He turned to face the path ahead and lifted one hand, palm out, as if greeting an old friend. "The border is not made of stone, Aria. It is made of magic. Old magic, the kind that does not announce itself. We have been on Lycan territory for the last hour."

I felt it then.

A faint pressure on my skin, like the feeling of standing too close to a fire. The air itself felt heavier. Older. As if something in the land was watching us, recognising Kael, considering me.

Then, between one breath and the next, the pressure eased.

The land had decided to let me in.

"It accepted you," Kael said. There was something in his voice not surprise, exactly, but quiet satisfaction. As if a question he had been carrying for a long time had finally been answered. "The Lycan blood in you is real. The land would not have let a true werewolf walk this path."

I did not know what to say to that.

We walked for another hour. The trees thinned. The path widened. And then, around the curve of a hill, I saw it.

The kingdom.

Or what was left of it.

A great stone gate stood at the top of a rise, two carved wolves crowning its archway, their teeth bared at the sky. Beyond the gate, I could see the remains of a city a wide valley filled with old stone buildings, half of them crumbling, half of them still standing. Towers reached up toward the cloudy sky like broken teeth. Roads cut through the ruins, paved with black stone. Smoke rose from a few of the buildings, thin and lonely. There was life here, but only a little of it.

This had been a great city, once.

Five hundred years ago, before the war.

Now it was a graveyard with a few stubborn flowers still growing in it.

"How many of you are left?" I whispered.

Kael's jaw tightened.

"Forty-two," he said.

I turned to look at him.

"Forty-two?"

"Forty-two Lycans," he said quietly. "Across the entire world. We are the last of our kind, Aria. There were thousands once. Cities like this one, scattered from the eastern sea to the western mountains. Then the wolf packs rose. They feared us. They hunted us. They allied with the human kings and the witches and the silver-makers. By the time the war ended, there were a few hundred of us left." He paused. "Then time finished what the war had started. We do not breed easily. Lycan blood needs Lycan blood, and there has been very little of either left for a very long time."

I stared at the broken city below.

"The Goddess promised you a mate," I said slowly. "Five hundred years ago."

"Yes."

"Why did she make you wait so long?"

"Because the bloodline she needed had to thin and travel. It had to hide inside werewolf packs for generations until it surfaced again in someone she had chosen. Someone strong enough to carry what comes next." His silver eyes settled on me. "You."

I felt something cold settle in my stomach.

"What comes next, Kael?"

He did not answer at first.

He turned and looked at the kingdom below us. At the smoke rising thinly from the few inhabited buildings. At the towers that had been broken five centuries ago and never rebuilt.

"What comes next," he said quietly, "is the war that finishes what the last one started. The wolf packs are stronger now than they have ever been. They will not allow a Lycan kingdom to rise again. When they learn what you are, they will send everything they have to destroy us before we can grow strong." He turned back to me. "And when that happens, Aria, I am going to need a queen who can stand beside me. Not behind me. Beside me."

I could not breathe.

This was not what I had expected. None of this was what I had expected. Three days ago I had been a Beta's daughter waiting for her mating ceremony. Now I was standing on a hill above a ruined Lycan city, being told I was a queen, being told there was going to be a war, being told that I was the bloodline that had been hidden for five hundred years and was now expected to surface.

"I don't know how to be a queen," I whispered.

"I know."

"I don't know how to fight a war."

"I know that too."

"Then why"

"Because you are mine." His voice was simple. Final. "And because the Moon Goddess does not promise mates to men like me unless the woman is capable of more than she yet knows."

The wind shifted.

From the gate at the top of the rise, a low horn sounded three long notes, like the pack horn at the Mating Ceremony, but deeper, older, with a thread of silver in it.

Kael's head turned.

"They've seen us," he said.

The gate began to open.

Three figures stepped out.

The first was a tall man, broad-shouldered, his hair white though his face looked young. His eyes were silver, like Kael's. The second was a woman small, sharp-featured, with the kind of beauty that came with a knife behind it. Her eyes were silver too. The third was younger, maybe twenty, dark-haired, watching us with an expression that was somewhere between curiosity and contempt.

Kael's expression hardened.

"Stay close to me," he murmured. "And do not speak unless I speak first."

"Why?"

"Because the woman is my sister," he said. "And she did not approve of the Goddess's choice."

I had no time to ask what he meant.

The three Lycans were already walking down the slope toward us.

The sister the small woman with the knife-blade smile reached us first. She stopped two feet from Kael, looked him up and down with a kind of cold amusement, and then her silver eyes slid past him to me.

She studied me for a long moment.

Her lip curled.

"This?" she said softly. "You waited five hundred years for *this*?"