THE ALPHA'S FORGOTTEN WHITE WOLF

CHAPTER 2 - The White Wolf

The light didn't fade.

It got brighter.

I was standing on the frozen lake and the ice beneath my thin shoes was cracking - not breaking - glowing. Thin veins of silver light spread out from my feet like lightning trapped under glass, racing to the far edge of Ghost Lake.

My dress was soaked with blood and snow and it was falling off me in tatters, but I wasn't cold anymore. I was burning.

Seraphine? My voice came out wrong. It echoed. Two voices layered over each other - mine and hers.

I told you to wait, she said inside me, but now she wasn't inside. She was everywhere. In my bones, in my blood, in the air around me. For five years I told you to wait because they were not ready to see what we are. He was not ready. But now -

Another wave of power slammed into me and I arched off the ground. My back bowed. My mouth opened but it wasn't a scream this time.

It was a howl.

It ripped out of my throat and shattered the silence of the Forbidden Forest. Birds that had been sleeping for hours exploded from the trees. Snow fell off branches in avalanches. The ice on the lake groaned.

And far, far behind me, on the other side of the trees, I swear I heard wolves answer. A chorus of confused, terrified howls from Black Moon territory.

My body broke and remade itself.

I had imagined shifting my whole life. I thought it would hurt like the rejection did - like being torn apart.

This was the opposite. This was being put together for the first time.

My spine lengthened. My nails turned to claws, pure white. White fur, thick as winter, burst across my skin, but not the thin brown fur of ordinary wolves. This was fur that shone like moonlight. My ears sharpened. My tail - Goddess, my tail was huge, silver-tipped.

I fell forward onto four paws.

I was not a small wolf.

I was enormous. Even for a female, I was bigger than most male Betas. My paws left prints the size of dinner plates in the snow, and each print glowed for a second before fading.

I looked down at my reflection in the glowing ice.

A White Wolf stared back at me.

Pure white. Eyes like molten silver. The crescent mark on my chest - my scar - now glowed on my fur like a real moon. Like a crown.

The last time a White Wolf had been seen was three hundred years ago. The legends said the White Wolves were the first children of the Moon Goddess. Queens. Healers who could raise the dead, warriors who could kill a Lycan with a bite. We were supposed to be extinct, hunted to death by Lycans because we were too powerful to control.

My mother told me those stories when I was little to help me sleep.

She never told me I was one of them.

Because she did not know, Seraphine whispered, and her voice was finally gentle again. She was curled around me, her mind pressed to mine, finally, fully awake. Lyra thought your father was a simple border warrior. He was not. He was the last guardian of the White line. He hid our scent with herbs. He hid my voice with a spell. To keep you alive until you were strong enough. Your silver streak, Elara. That was me trying to get out.

My father. The man who died when I was ten, who they said died as a lowly Omega warrior. He was holding me back to protect me?

Tears froze on my white fur.

Then I felt it.

The bond.

It was still there.

He rejected me. He said the words. I felt it snap, felt it bleed. But the thread between Kian and me - it hadn't been cut. It had been buried under snow and ice, pulsing, black and silver, furious and alive. It was pulling.

He could feel me. Right now, wherever he was in that hall, drinking his wine, he could feel me shift.

I lifted my massive head and snarled at the southern sky, towards Black Moon.

You said I was nothing.

Let him feel this nothing now.

As if answering my rage, the wind changed.

It brought a scent that didn't belong in the Forbidden Forest.

Blood. Old blood, sick blood. The kind of blood my mother coughed into rags when she thought I was asleep.

And herbs. Valerian root and ghost mint. My mother's healing satchel.

She had followed me.

Mother? I tried to speak and it came out as a whine. I forced myself to shift back. It was easier this time, like breathing out. White light wrapped me and I was on my knees again, human, naked in the snow, my new white hair falling down to my waist, covering me.

My mother was at the treeline.

She wasn't standing.

Lyra had collapsed in the snow, her thin healer's cloak tangled around her. Her face was gray. Blood was on her lips, bright red against the white. She had coughed so hard she fainted.

No! I ran to her, my new strength making me fast - too fast. One second I was on the lake, the next I was holding her. Mama, what did you do? You were supposed to stay!

Her ice-blue eyes - eyes just like my old ones - fluttered open. She stared at my white hair, my glowing skin, my shining scar.

And she smiled.

White, she whispered, touching my hair with shaking fingers. You shifted. You... oh, Elara. Your father said... he said you would be white like moonlight...

Mama don't talk, please.

He's coming, she gasped, grabbing my arm with sudden, desperate strength. Kian. He felt it. All of them felt it. The whole pack felt a White Wolf howl. Alpha Magnus... Alpha King Magnus is in the pack tonight. For the ball. He came to see his son choose a mate. If he finds you... if he knows what you are...

My blood ran cold, even though I was still burning.

Alpha King Magnus. Kian's father. The most ruthless Alpha in the region. The man who led the hunts that killed the White Wolves three hundred years ago.

They will kill you, Elara. They will kill you like they killed all the others.

Behind us, deeper in the Forbidden Forest, something else howled.

It wasn't a pack wolf. It was low, and guttural, and it answered my howl.

The rogues had heard me too.

Lyra started to sob. Run.

I picked my mother up in my arms. She weighed nothing. The power humming under my skin made me feel like I could carry the whole forest.

I didn't run back to Black Moon. I would rather die in the snow.

I ran forward.

Straight into the heart of the Forbidden Forest, where no Black Moon wolf dares to go, where the map ends and the old magic begins, carrying my dying mother, my white hair streaming behind me like a flag.

And behind me, the last thing I heard before the trees swallowed us, was the distant, furious, heartbroken roar of an Alpha who had just realized what he had thrown away.

Kian felt his knees hit the floor of the Great Hall.