Silverblood Mate

Chapter Two: What the River Doesn't Judge

I run until the hall is gone, until the torches and the whispers and the sound of my own name being laughed about are all behind me, and then I keep running because the dark is safer than anything that has my name attached to it right now.

My feet know this path without asking me. I've walked it since I was small, the trail behind the pack border that drops down to Hollow Creek, where nobody comes at night because the water runs strange and silver under a full moon and this pack finds strange things uncomfortable.

I've always found it the only place I can breathe.

I go down hard on the bank, knees against my chest, and I wait for the crying to start. It doesn't come. There's nothing in my chest right now except the absence of where the bond used to be… clean, cold, enormous.

He rejected me. In front of every wolf in that hall. In front of the Elders, in front of families, in front of eighteen other unmated wolves who are going home tonight paired and warm and chosen. He called my blood a warning. He said the Goddess made a mistake.

I put my forehead against my knees and let the moon do whatever it wants to the water.

I think about the fever. I think about a mother and father and brother I never got to know outside a healer's frightened retelling. I think about nineteen years of being the answer this pack reaches for whenever it needs one.

I think about Aunt Odessa's face tonight - not angry, not even satisfied exactly, just quietly settled, the way someone looks when they've finally been proven right about something they always believed.

I have survived every morning this pack has handed me since I was old enough to understand what they were handing me. I have survived meals withheld and chores doubled and a cousin who breaks my things just to watch whether I'll react. I will survive this too. I press my palms flat against the cold ground and the moonlight falls across my hands, and something strange happens, the silver light doesn't feel cold where it touches my skin. It feels warm. It feels, for one impossible second, like recognition.

I look down. My skin shimmers, faint and silver, gone before I can be sure I saw it.

I'm exhausted. I'm imagining things. I get up and walk home in the dark.

The weeks after are the greyest of my life.

The pack talks. They always talk, but now they have new material, the Wolf King rejected the curse-born girl, and even that wasn't a real rejection, some say, because you can only be properly rejected by someone who thought you were worth the trouble of rejecting in the first place.

Aunt Odessa's satisfaction doesn't need to be spoken. I go about my work. I clean, I mend, I stop looking too long in mirrors because my own face has started to feel unfamiliar and I don't have the strength to ask why. I count things when the day gets to be too much — steps, stitches, breaths. Counting makes the world small enough to survive.

Three weeks after the ceremony, I'm sick in the morning.

I think nothing of it the first day. The second day I notice, with the same detached attention I use on everything now, that it happens at exactly the hour it happened yesterday. The third day, I count.

I count weeks. I count them twice. My hands stay very steady while everything else in me does not.

I think about the Longnight bonfire, six weeks before the ceremony, the one night a year Hollow Pine loosens its grip a little and the line between caution and want gets thin enough to step over. I'd stood at the edge of it, not inside, and a stranger had found me there, smelled like woodsmoke and rain, hadn't given me his name, hadn't asked for mine. I'd thought, after, that it was the kind of night that belongs only to itself.

It didn't stay there.

I sit with my hands folded in my lap and let myself understand what I already know. I'm pregnant. I don't know the father's name. I'm an unmated, rejected, curse-blamed Omega in a pack that has been looking for a reason to finish with me since before I could talk. I have maybe four weeks before it shows.

The moonlight comes through my window. I hold my hand up into it, and there it is again, that warmth, that shimmer, that feeling of being recognized by something that never once asked this pack's permission first.

I close my fingers around it. I think about what Aunt Odessa's face will do when she finds out. I think about the Elders in their carved chairs. I think about a king stepping back from me like I was something he didn't order.

None of them knew what they were throwing away. Neither did I, not fully. But there's something in this light, in the silver that keeps flickering at the edges of my skin, that feels less like a curse than something waiting for me to finally understand it.

I don't know what I am yet. I know what I'm not. I'm not nothing.

I get up. I start with the next hour, because the next hour is all I have, and I have always been good at surviving exactly that much.