The Alpha's Forbidden Wolf Witch Mate

I was eleven, my next birthday still a few months off, when I found out you could have things inside you that nobody could ever explain. It was a sunny day, I was mowing the lawn, raging about Mr. Henderson. He had been dumping God knows what on our side of the compound, causing our crops to die. Grandma's garden had withered, and my poor Buttercup, my horse. Buttercup used to nudge my shoulder every single morning before I even got the gate open, like she knew before I did whether I'd had a bad day or not. I promised her when I was nine that once I turned twelve I'd finally be tall enough to ride her properly, not just sit on her back while Grandma led the reins. She was fourteen, half blind, the sweetest animal I've ever known, and she was fine, and then she wasn't, and the vet just kept saying "runoff" like that explained anything. My grandmother buried her past the tree line because I couldn't watch. All because of Mr. Henderson. Whatever he dumped, Buttercup had ingested it and now she was gone, and I never even got to keep that promise. "He knows what he's doing, he knows and he keeps doing it, what is wrong with people, they don't even care for the planet anymore, heartless man." I mumbled under my breath as I went through the lawn. The mower had jerked and stopped but I hadn't noticed. I was too angry, too busy replaying that promise I never got to keep. I notice when the sky changes. It goes dark fast, wrong-fast, and the wind picks up out of nowhere and slams into me hard enough that I actually stumble. Behind the trees I can hear the pond, our pond, the one that never does anything, and it sounds like it's churning. My chest feels tight. Too tight, like something's pushing against it from the inside. I look down, I couldn't really understand what was happening but my hands felt hot and it felt like whatever was happening was coming out of them, my hands began to glow. White light under the skin pulsing at the same time as the beat of my heart. I don't understand what's happening. I don't have a single thought that explains what is happening. I just stand there, rooted to the ground, staring down at my hands. "Elira!" My grandma is running towards me, she looks just as scared as I feel. I've never seen her like this. She stops in front of me and her arms wrap around my body, my face shoved into her shoulder, her hands pressed flat against the back of my head. The wind dies first, then the pond goes quiet, the glow in my hands fades out and the sky is clear. "Breathe, baby," she says right against my ear. "Just breathe with me." I don't plan to cry, I just do, shaking in her arms as the skies clear out and the mower sits dead in the grass and my hands lie there, looking completely ordinary again, like they didn't just glow in a way that was nothing ordinary. "What was that? Did I do that?" She pulls away to look at me, cupping my face, and for once there's something about her I do not recognize. Then it's gone. "It's nothing," she says. "You were scared, that's all, it was nothing. It won't happen again." I believed her. Why wouldn't I? That night she starts to teach me how to breathe differently. How to pace myself. Slow. Counted. From somewhere low in my stomach, held until my heartbeat matches it instead of the other way round. She tells me some wolves feel things too fast, too deep, too hard, and they have to learn to hold themselves so it doesn't get out of control. She teaches me to plant my feet, open my palms, empty my head. I think she's teaching me to control the wolf in me that runs a little too hot. It'll be eleven years before I find out she was teaching something in me how to disappear. Because that's what those eleven years actually turned into, once I look back on them. Not just breathing exercises. A whole way of living small. If I got too excited, I learned to sit on it. If I got too angry, I learned to leave the room before anyone could see my face. There were other moments over the years, small ones, a bulb that burst when I cried too hard at thirteen, a whole shelf of jars that cracked at once the year I turned sixteen and got my heart broken by a boy who didn't even know my name, and every single time Grandma had the same answer ready before I even asked the question. Old wiring. Bad glass. Coincidence. I stopped asking after a while. It was easier to believe her than to keep collecting evidence that something was wrong with me. Eleven years later, I'm sitting on the kitchen counter, wrapped in a blanket that isn't warm enough, watching her cut herbs like she always does every morning. Today is Initiation. I have spent eleven years being very good at breathing. "You're doing that thing again, Elira," she says without looking up from her herbs. "What thing?" I answer almost too quickly. "The thing where you go quiet and pretend you're okay." "I am okay." She nods at my hand. I look down. My fingers are twisting restlessly together in my lap. I loosen my grip and I hate that she noticed before I did. "I'm not going," I say. Same as every year. She sets the knife down and looks me dead in the eye. That's how I know it's serious, because Grandma never stops chopping for just anything. "Elira." "I'm serious, ma." "You say that every year." "And every year, nothing happens, so." Her jaw tightens, just slightly, enough for me to notice, because I've spent years learning even the slightest shift in her face like it's the only language that matters. "Fine," she says finally. "Fine." "Good," I say, smiling as I lean in to press a kiss to her cheek. "I love you." I slide off the counter and cross to the fridge, catching the faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth as I go. By afternoon, the outskirts have gone quiet, just like every Initiation day, doors closing, cars pulling out of the garage one by one, heading towards the part of the territory I spent my entire life avoiding. I watch through the kitchen window as the Hendersons load their twins into the car, both of them buzzing with excitement about finally getting initiated. I couldn't seem to understand exactly what the excitement was about but to each their own, right. Grandma doesn't say anything else about it. She makes tea. She waters the plants on the porch. She acts like today is any other day, and for a while I let myself believe that too. I'm in my room when I hear it, not footsteps, not a car. A low sound from the ground itself, like our entire yard had changed weight, and every hair on my body lifts before I even reach the window. I look out anyway. There are wolves standing at the edge of our yard. Not shifted, not yet, I can see the shift sitting right under their skin, coiled and waiting, the way a storm brews. Six of them, spread along the tree line, heads slightly bowed, and none of them looking at the house. They're all looking at the man standing a few feet ahead of them. I don't remember deciding to go downstairs, but I was already on my way there. By the time I'd reached the kitchen, Grandma is already at the door. She didn't look afraid, she looked the way she was that one time the neighbor's dog got loose and went after the chickens. Calm in a way that has teeth in it. She opens the door before he can knock. "You can turn around," she says. "Whatever you think is here, it definitely is not." He doesn't answer right away. He's tall, built like someone that's never once had to explain himself, dark hair, a jaw set like it's permanent. He looks at her the way you'd look at someone you've argued with before and lost. "I'm not wrong," he says. "You're on my land." "And you know exactly why I'm on it." I step up behind Grandma without meaning to. Her arm shoots out but it's too late, he's already looking past her, straight at me, and something in his face shifts the second he sees me. Not soft. Focused, like he's been looking for something for a long time and just found it. "There you are," he says. "Get back inside," Grandma says, not turning around. I don't. He comes up the first step. Grandma doesn't move. "She's not going anywhere with you," she says. "That's not up to you." "It is exactly up to me." His jaw tightens but he doesn't push past her, doesn't even try. His eyes stay on me. "You feel it too, don't you." I don't answer, because he's right and I don't know how to say that out loud without it meaning something I'm not ready for it to mean. "What was that," he says suddenly, looking past Grandma toward the porch light, which had flickered without either of us touching it. "Nothing," Grandma says. "That wasn't nothing." His eyes come back to me, narrowed now. "That's not wolf." Grandma doesn't answer that either. "She's a hybrid," he says, quieter. "A what?" It comes out before I can stop it, small, confused. I don't even know what the word means, only that it's aimed at me like it explains something everyone in this yard already understands except me. Nobody answers. "You're not just wolf," he says, to me this time. "Then what am I?" He doesn't answer that either. Neither does Grandma. "Someone want to tell me what's happening?" My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. "Not here," Grandma says fast. "Not like this." "She has a right to know what she is." "She has a right to a lot of things I couldn't give her," Grandma snaps. "That doesn't mean you get to hand it to her in my front yard." "It's already changed," he says. "The second she walked outside." Grandma's mouth presses into a thin line. "I'm not here to force anything," he says, quieter, to me. "I felt something tonight I've never felt before, and it led me here. I don't fully understand it either. But I'm not leaving without knowing you're safe." I look at Grandma. Jaw set, still refusing to explain anything. Eleven years of calm answers and it's still not different tonight, and for the first time I can remember, I'm angrier at her than I am at him. I step around her before she can stop me. "I'll go," I say. "Not because you told me to. Because I want to know what I am, and she's had eleven years to tell me and didn't." Something moves through his face. Surprise, maybe. Gone fast. "Elira," Grandma says, and for the first time all night her voice cracks. "I'll be fine," I tell her, even though I have no idea if that's true. He doesn't say much on the walk to the car. Neither do I. His men fall in behind us without a word, like they've done this before, like they know exactly how much space to give him and exactly how much not to. The car is black, plain, nothing about it says Alpha except the way the driver doesn't ask where we're going. I sit in the back, as far into my corner as I can get, watching the outskirts disappear out the window, my house getting smaller, Grandma still standing on the porch with her arms crossed, not moving, not waving, just watching until the trees swallow her from view. "You okay?" he asks. First thing he's said since we left. "No." He doesn't push. That surprises me more than anything else tonight has. The drive takes almost an hour. The roads get wider the further we go, the houses get bigger, further apart, until eventually there aren't houses at all, just trees and open land and the occasional set of eyes catching the headlights before disappearing back into the dark. "Are those—" "Yes." I don't ask anything else after that. By the time we slow down, the sky has gone fully black, no moon, just the headlights cutting a path through it. Up ahead, iron gates rise out of the dark taller than anything I've ever seen, flanked on either side by wolves who don't shift, don't move, just watch the car roll toward them like they already know exactly who's inside it. The gates start to open before we even stop. "Whatever you're about to see in there," Kane says, not looking at me, "don't react to it. Not tonight. Not until I tell you it's safe to." "React to what?" He doesn't answer. The car rolls forward, through the gates, and I sit there gripping my own knees, thinking, whatever Grandma spent eleven years hiding me from, it's on the other side of this. Better