THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Firstblood

Odette was waiting on the porch at dusk with two cups of tea nobody was going to drink.

"Sit," she said.

Maya didn't want tea. Maya wanted to be in a truck. She'd been on her feet since a logging road at dawn and her hands still had somebody else's blood in the creases and every second standing on this porch was a second Wilder spent on concrete.

"They're leaving in an hour."

"They're leaving in two. Sloane's still on the phone with that peacock, and she'll be another forty minutes because he'll make her ask twice." The old woman pushed a cup across the boards. "Sit, girl. I'm going to tell you what you are, and you'd rather be sitting."

Maya sat.

The yard below them was all noise. Wolves loading trucks in the dark, somebody arguing about vests, Boone barking at two young ones. It sounded like a family. It sounded like people who'd known each other their whole lives about to go and do something stupid together.

Four days ago they'd voted on whether to kill her. Now they were loading vests for a man she'd gotten taken. Maya didn't know what to do with that. So she didn't do anything with it.

"You told them Firstblood," Odette said. "Downstairs. You left it out. Why."

Maya's head came around. "You knew."

"I knew in the stone room, the second you turned those eyes on me. I've been alive ninety-one years." Odette blew on her tea. "I asked why you left it out."

And Maya, who had lied to everyone for four days straight, heard herself tell the truth.

"Because they'd have used it," she said. "They'd have sat there and worked out what I'm worth and then somebody would've said we could trade her, and everybody would've hated themselves for thinking it, and then they'd have done it anyway."

Odette nodded slowly, like a teacher hearing the right answer from the wrong student.

"Yes," she said. "They would."

And she said it without heat, like she was agreeing about the weather, and that was somehow worse than if she'd denied it.

"Firstblood isn't a bloodline. It's what was here first."

The old woman said it looking out at the trees, not at Maya, and something in how she said it made the hair go up on Maya's arms.

"Every wolf in that yard is a copy of a copy. Generations of it, thinned out, bred careful, dressed in coats and driving trucks. But there was a first, and the first were something else, and their blood does what ours doesn't. Ours breaks under silver. Theirs doesn't. Ours needs a moon. Theirs doesn't. Ours dies." She turned her head. "You had claws in a stone room two days after a bite, girl. Nobody does that. Nobody has done that in my lifetime, and I'd have told you it was a story, right up until I put my hand on your wrist and felt what's in you."

"And what is that," Maya said. Her mouth had gone dry.

Because part of her already knew. It had been sitting under her ribs since a boundary stone in the dark. It had put claws through her hands in a stone room. It had torn silver wire off a chair like wet paper and it had not hurt, not once, not anywhere.

"Older than the pack. Older than the law. Older than whatever your Alpha thought he was doing when he put his mouth on you." Odette set the cup down. "The packs didn't lose Firstblood. Understand that part. The packs hunted it out of themselves. Four hundred years ago. Because a thing that doesn't break under silver and doesn't need a moon and doesn't die easy isn't a wolf, and every Alpha with a table and a law was frightened of what it might decide to be."

Maya sat very still on a porch step in the dark.

Four hundred years. Every wolf in that yard came from people who'd gone hunting for something like her, and found it, and finished it.

And Boone wanted her dead because a human mate meant graves. Boone didn't know the half of it.

"So my mother—"

"Ran. Yes. Of course she ran." Odette's voice went, briefly, almost gentle. "Whether that man told you the truth or told you a thing shaped like the truth to open you up, I don't know, and neither do you, and I'd not trust one word out of him. But the running part is true. That's what your line does. There's forty of you left in the world and every one of them is somebody's daughter with a bag by the door."

And there it was. Nineteen years, cracked all the way open.

Maya put her hands over her face and didn't cry, and it was close.

Nineteen years she'd carried one sentence around. She didn't want me. She'd built everything on it. The two jobs. The one room. Not asking anybody for anything, ever, in case they said no the way the first one had.

And this old woman was sitting on a porch step telling her the sentence might have been wrong the whole time.

"She taught me to count exits," she said, into her palms. "I was nine. I thought everybody's mother did that."

"Now you know."

"I don't know anything." Her voice came out wrecked. "That's the point. I'll never know. She's not here to ask, and the only man who'd tell me is the one who wants me in a cooler."

"So tell me the rest," Maya said, when she could talk. "You didn't come out here at dusk to give me a history lesson. What's the part I'm not going to like?"

Odette smiled. It was thin and cold and there was something in it that might have been approval.

"The moon's up tomorrow night," she said. "Thirty hours. Maybe less."

"I know."

"Do you? Then you know a marked human turns or dies at the moon, and you know you've got the blood to turn, so you've decided you'll live." Odette leaned in. "Wrong. Turning isn't surviving, girl. Turning is the start. What comes through is what you actually are, with nothing on top of it, and for a Firstblood there's no born wolf alive who knows how to hold that. Not me. Not him. Nobody's held one in four hundred years, because we killed them all before they could show us."

The yard noise went on below them. Someone laughed. Somebody dropped a tailgate.

Maya listened to thirty-odd people getting ready to walk into a hunter's box for a man, and felt the moon coming the way you feel weather in a bad knee.

"And there's the bond," Odette said.

Maya's head came up.

"You turn at the moon. He's fifty miles east in a cell with silver in him, holding your bond open by hand because if he lets go you'll drop, and he's been doing it for a day and a night already." The old woman watched her get there. "What do you suppose happens to a man in that condition when the thing on the other end of that rope changes?"

The bottom went out of Maya's stomach.

"It'll kill him," she said.

"It might."

Two words. The old woman said them like she was reading a price off a tin.

"Then I don't turn. I'll—" She was on her feet without knowing she'd stood. "There's a way. There has to be a way to slow it. The ritual, the bonding thing, you said it takes both of us—"

"The ritual finishes it clean and safe and ties you to that man for the rest of your life, and it takes both of you, in a circle, willing." Odette stood too, slow, on old knees. "He's in a box. You've got thirty hours. You do the arithmetic."

Maya stood in the dark with the yard below her and the sky going purple over the trees.

Get him out before the moon, and she'd be bound to him forever. Not marked. Not claimed. Chosen, and permanent, and never her own again.

Don't get him out, and she'd turn anyway, out here, with the rope still in his fist.

And it would tear him apart from fifty miles away.

"That's not a choice," Maya said.

"No," Odette agreed. "It's a law. Choices are what you get before the law arrives." She started down the steps and stopped at the bottom. "For what it's worth, and I've been wrong twice in ninety years, so it's worth a little. I don't think that man will let go. I think you could stand out here on the grass at moonrise and turn into the oldest thing on this coast, and he'd hold that rope with his teeth until it took his head off."

She walked away toward the trucks.

Maya stayed on the porch a long time.

Then she went inside, and found Sloane, and said, "Change the plan. We go now."