The White Wolf's Hex

Chapter One: Mia's POV The Marrow cottage smelled like dried up rue, damp earth and a predictably boring day. I kept both palms flat against the workbench and watched as a wild violent died.. it was one of my favourites. I was not squeezing it, neither was I crushing the stem or bruising the petals. I was only touching it, the way anyone touches a flower, and still the sickening heat crept up from somewhere beneath my ribs and poured out through my skin. The green drained from the leaves in a slow, greedy rush. The petals curled, browned, and crumbled into a fine ash grey powder that sifted between my fingers. “Another one.” I muttered, frustrated by my very existence. I swept the dust into a paper pouch and reached for my ledger. “Viola sororia. Time of contact, three seconds. Result, complete cellular collapse.” My handwriting stayed perfectly neat. It always did. That was the part that frightened me most, how calm I had become about being a catastrophe. "A morbid habit," Odessa called it whenever she caught me logging my dead garden beds. But the ledger was the only proof I had that I existed at all. My name was not on the pack roster. I was a smudge in the margins of Frost Moon territory, a rumor with a pulse, and everything I had ever touched had left a ghost behind except me. Three graves, my mind whispered, the way it did on nights like this. My mother, who died holding me three days after I was born. My father, Eamon, who went cold on a routine border patrol a year later. And Caleb. Caleb, who had knelt in front of me on the night of my fifteenth birthday, with his crooked, patient smile, and tucked a strand of my silver hair behind my ear. "You aren't broken, Mia," he had said. "Don't let them tell you that you're a curse. You're my little sister, and I'm not going anywhere." His smile had stiffened a second later, as if someone had pulled a string. His eyes rolled white. He was dead before his body reached the floorboards. I could still hear the sound it made. "Everyone who loves you dies, Mia." Odessa had stopped saying it like a warning years ago. Now it was just the weather. The law of my life, as fixed as gravity. I looked up at the brass clock above the hearth. 11:42 PM. In eighteen minutes I would be eighteen years old, eighteen years of living like a secret tucked behind a warded door, eighteen years of Odessa's voice reminding me that my blood ran too strange for the moon. "You're more witch than wolf, child. More hex than human. Be grateful the change never came for you." Tonight, for the first time in my life, I was going to break the one rule that had kept me alive. I pulled a dark hoodie over my long silver grey hair, the color the pack enforcers spat at whenever they caught sight of me through the trees. A sick color, they whispered. A cursed color. I tucked every strand out of sight, listened at Odessa's door and then Thane's until their breathing deepened into sleep, and slipped out into the biting autumn wind. Frost Moon High looked like a fortress at midnight, all black stone and dead windows. It took me about thirty minutes to get there. Alpha Magnus, the late Alpha, whose reign had ended in a strange and sudden death three years ago, had granted me one merciful exception before he died. I could finish my coursework alone, after hours, passing papers through drop boxes and sitting exams in empty rooms. For three years running I had topped the school's rankings without a single teacher seeing my face. To some I was a legend. To everyone else I was a ghost who happened to be very good at calculus. My heart slammed against my ribs as I swiped my master keycard through the side basement door. The lock clicked. I held my breath until I was sure the sound had not carried. I was not here for a cure. I had stopped hoping for cures at twelve. I was here for a name. Eamon Ashford. My father. Old pack rumors said my father had once stood at Alpha Magnus's right hand through the territory wars, yet every public record I had ever found scrubbed him clean, as though someone had gone through the archive with a razor. If anything of him remained, it would be in the restricted historical archive at the back of the library. I moved through the corridors like something poured, hugging the walls, turning right at the trophy cases, slipping through the library doors without letting them swing. The archive stood against the back wall behind a pane of glass and a cheap brass latch. I had spent three nights imagining the lock, the ward, the stubborn mechanism I would have to coax open. The third shelf popped open at my touch. I stood there, stunned. A restricted record, two decades old, and the door simply opened, on a random Tuesday night, like it had been expecting me. Resting on faded velvet was a heavy ledger bound in dark calfskin, furred with dust. I lifted it out with both hands. The cover was cold and strangely heavy. The first page was brittle as a dead leaf, and the first line made my knees go weak. Eamon Ashford. Special Operations and Beta Command. My father had been Beta. Not a nobody. Not a guardsman who died on a dull border patrol. A man with a rank, and a title, and a place at the side of the Alpha. So why had it all been erased? Too easy, whispered a small cold voice at the back of my mind. Why would a restricted archive be unlocked? Who would leave it open? I did not have time to answer it. A sound drifted through the dark, and every thought in my head went quiet. Crrack. Swish. Crrack. It was coming from the glass atrium that overlooked the school's private indoor rink. I should have gone. I knew I should have gone. Instead, as if something had hooked a finger around my heart, I crept toward the observation glass and looked down. The rink glowed blue in the moonlight spilling through the high windows. A single figure cut across the ice below, fast and furious, throwing up sprays of white with every sharp turn. A dark jersey, sleeves shoved to the elbows. Auburn hair damp with sweat. Shoulders built for collision. “What the hell?” It was Silas Throne The golden boy of Frost Moon. The hockey captain. The heir everyone was waiting to crown. He moved over the ice with a savage, effortless grace that made my mouth go dry, like an animal that had never once been told no. He was everything I was not. “Leave Mia… right now.” I heard myself say subconsciously…even though for some reason this felt like where I needed to be. I took a deep breath and stepped backward into the shadows and my heel struck a metal trash bin. It toppled and hit the railing with a CLANG that rang through the whole arena like a gunshot. “f**k!” Down on the ice, the scraping stopped. Silas went rigid in the center of the rink. His head snapped up. Even from that distance, those amber eyes found the dark gallery where I stood and fixed on it, bright and merciless. "Who's there?" His voice rolled up through the quiet, low and commanding, the voice of someone who expected the dark to answer. I clutched the ledger to my chest and pulled my hood down over my face. I turned to run. And the world split open. A pain hit the center of my chest, but it was not a blow. It was heat, searing, immense, a white fire pouring through my ribs and down my arms. It was the same burn that tore through me whenever a flower died in my hands, whenever a bird went still against my fingers, whenever Caleb's skin went cold under my palm. Only this was a hundred times worse. This was the curse breaking its chain. No. No, no, no. I had barely looked at him. I had not touched him. I had not spoken a single word. And the thing inside me had still reached out and sunk its teeth into him. Below, the sharp clack of skates on the wooden exit ramp. He was coming up the stairs. “Wait.” His voice rang out desperately and I couldn't tell if he was terrified that someone was watching him or curious to know who it was. I ran. I ran until the school disappeared behind me and my lungs felt scraped raw. I ran with the ledger crushed to my ribs and tears freezing on my face. I let myself in through the back of the cottage, crept past Odessa's door, and collapsed into bed with my boots still on, shaking under the blankets as I begged a moon that had never once answered me. Please let him be okay. Please don't let me have killed the Alpha's son. I did not sleep. I lay there and watched the ceiling go from black to grey, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw him freeze in the middle of the ice and look straight at me. At seven in the morning, the answer came. I sat at the kitchen table, pushing a spoon through a bowl of cold oats I had no intention of eating, while Odessa brewed her morning herbs at the stove with her back to me. Steam curled up around her shoulders. Everything felt too quiet, too normal, a held breath. Then the pack alert horn split the air. Three sharp blasts from the speakers in the village center. The signal for a royal emergency. Odessa's hand stopped on her spoon. Mine froze halfway to my mouth. Outside, the horn faded, and the automated broadcast took its place, crisp and cold and horribly calm. "Attention all pack members. Regent Isolde requests immediate community prayer at the central cathedral. Alpha Heir Silas Thorne has suffered a sudden and inexplicable collapse during off hours training. He remains unresponsive in critical care." The spoon slid from my fingers and rang against the bowl. The sound seemed to fill the whole cottage. Across the kitchen, Odessa turned, slowly, and her sharp black eyes found my face and stayed there. Behind her, the door to the warded back room, the one I had never once been allowed through, gave a soft tick in its frame, like something cooling. "Mia," she said, her voice dangerously quiet. "Why are your hands shaking?”