The Alpha left me for dead

Odelia pov My basket smelled like winter. That was the first thing I noticed that day, the scent even before the cold.The basket smelled of pine sap, yarrow, smoked rosemary, and bitter feverfew I'd cut earlier this morning while there was still frost. It was winter in a basket, and as I hauled it up the hill, my chest unlocked. I was finally using my hands for something honest. "Slow those legs, girl," Martha, the head healer, muttered behind me. "A girl who walks fast at a gathering is only looking for eyes on her." "You tell me that every autumn, Miss Martha." "Because you never learn." She snagged my sleeve to steady herself, breathing heavily. Sixty years of bending over sickbeds had stiffened her waist. "Tonight of all nights, Odelia… blend in. Be scenery," she advised. Being scenery was the one thing I was good at, so I eased my pace. There's one thing you should know about the gathering of kin if you're not born into it. It is a mating ceremony. Once a year, every unmated wolf over eighteen treads on stones in front of the whole pack; over three hundred wolves watch. These stones are properly dressed by elders for unmated members to perform the rite of crossing. The night the moon goddess chooses a mate for you without apology. It is the center of our year. The event the entire pack spends months preparing for. I turned twenty-one this autumn, and had been performing this ritual since I came of age, but the moon goddess has always ignored me every year. The strongest reaction I had ever provoked crossing the stone was last year: a sneeze erupted from the old town miller, which the crowd agreed was ragweed, not a mate bond. I was the pack null, good for nothing except for grinding herbs and holding basins for the pack healer. The red orphan the pack kept around out of collective guilt. I wasn't nervous, and I want you to understand that after all the years of the moon goddess ignoring me, I still carry my basket of winter up the hill, feeling absolutely nothing because I was just furniture, and furniture doesn't get nervous. Martha and I sat at the healer's table near the edge of the terrace. Close enough to rush if someone fainted, but far enough in the shadow to avoid being watched. I set the ceramic cups on the wooden table filled with red wine. Below us were over three hundred Greyfall pack members, all dressed in their best. The mountains smelled of smoke. That was where Ellis found me. There's something you should know about Alpha Ellis Clarence, and it's the thing that ruined me, so pay attention. For nine years Ellis has been kind to me, not the grand kindness but little kindness. The kind people wouldn't pay much attention to. When I was thirteen, local bullies put a dead snake inside my herb basket. He noticed it and stopped me, looked at me and pointed at the snake, and before I could react, he plucked the dead snake out of the basket with his bare hand. "Just an adder; it doesn't really strike that hard, so shameful they couldn't even find a proper snake," he said before tossing the dead snake into the bush. He knew how scared I was of snakes. Also, when a rare fever broke out in our pack, I worked for three days without sleeping. A sack of oranges appeared in the hut corridor without a note to keep the gesture quiet, but I never missed a thing. He was twenty-one that year and three years into becoming an Alpha. He had his father's looks and also inherited his father's frown, but that evening, when he stood at the front of the healer table for the first time, he wasn't frowning. "You cut the feverfew already," he said. "It's early." "Frost came early." "Hmm." He brushed his thumb against the rough stem of the bitter feverfew, eyes fixed on the leaves on the table in the way a person does when they are trying to buy time to say something. "Odelia." My body tensed against my seat because Ellis rarely calls me by my name. "Alpha," I responded. "I was--" he stopped as a sweet scent of pineapple perfume filled the air. It was Miren Wallace, the daughter of the Thornwood Alpha. She has been visiting for over six months now. Her father owns nine hundred warriors along the hollow waste border. And everyone in Greyfall, including me, did the math almost every day. Ellis glanced towards her, then back to me. But this time his eyes were shallow; he had just transformed into a different person. "Forget it," he said. "Clear sky tonight. Not that you need it anyway…" he winced. "I only meant--" "I know what you mean, Alpha… Ellis," I said and gave him that crooked smile I had been giving him since I was ten. He laughed before he walked away. We both didn't know what the moon goddess had planned for us that night. The rite started when the full moon appeared. It followed the order of age, so the Ashford boys started, followed by the Smith daughter and dozens of others. Ellis's cousin Cross was also allowed to walk the stone despite being only sixteen. Rules bend when it involves the Alpha's blood, but the pack laughed over it. The cup went round, and it was all laughter, noise, and fireworks. And then it was my turn. I stepped on the cold stone as I had done every year, my eyes fixed on the spaces between the rocks, counting my steps. As my foot reached the fourth stone, everything shattered. I didn't feel anything. Not even a spark while I was on the stone, and that's the joke of my life. Then the word "mate" breaks the air. It came from the terrace just beside the healer's table, followed by a drop; a cup of wine shattered against the table. I raised my gaze, and Ellis stood there in front of the healer's table. His eyelid dropped, eyebrow pulling together slightly. He wasn't angry; it was an expression I couldn't tell. I've seen him angry; I've seen him grieving. I sat next to his father dying, and I watched him grieve as he held his hand, so this was different; he looked like someone waiting for the ground to swallow him. "Odelia," he said, not "Odelia?" There was no question to it, so it sounded like horror. The elders stood up. Old Marri covered her mouth with her hand. Everywhere became silent. A woman whispered loudly in the crowd, "The null," and immediately someone shushed her. "The moon goddess has misread the stone this time," Alpha Ellis said; he didn't stutter his voice flat. The crowd began murmuring and he stepped down from the terrace glancing from my head to toe. "Greyfall cannot take a wolfless null to sit the Luna seat," he added, circling me slowly with his hands behind his back. "I, Ellis, son of Clarence, Alpha of Greyfall Pack, reject you, Odelia, as my fated mate," his voice echoed through the silence as over three hundred pack members watched. Although I was wolfless, the sharp rejecting pain pierced me like a hot knife through my chest. I dug my finger into my palm, hiding the pain because, to the members, it was impossible for someone who is wolfless to feel any pain. They would label me dramatic if I had reacted to the pain I was feeling, so I was silent, fighting an internal battle while the pack members mocked me. I finished crossing the stone, and my eyes locked with the man the moon goddess has chosen as my mate. "It's understandable, Alpha; maybe the moon goddess actually did make a mistake," I replied, and the small flinch in his eyes gave me a little satisfaction. "I, Odelia, the daughter of the late Parker Patrick, accept your rejection," I said. Miren walked to him and held his hand, and despite it making the situation worse, I tried not to react. His mother didn't say a word, but my eyes met Old Marri's, who was praying for me. I walked back to the healer's table, took the heavy clay tray, and poured wine into the remaining mating cups while the two remaining couples walked the stone, because the pack still needed its healer and the broken girl, too. When I reached the last cup, my hand started shaking profusely. I had to put the tray down and breathe for a few seconds, just as Martha taught me: four counts in and six counts out, all against the sound of three hundred people ignoring me, acting as if I didn't exist. That night, Martha walked me home. She didn't say anything, and that's her way of saying everything. When we got to the hut door, she poured me a cup of tea. "For sleep," she said, "drink it all. It's actually nice. It won't even let dreams in." I didn't drink it; I sat on the step with the cup in my hand and the tea going cold because that's what my body chose to do on the worst day of my life--hold a cup. That was when the second detail landed, and it cut deeper than the first. What a person notices first matters, but what a person notices last matters even more. The wind blew from the north, the forest side, and it carried along a strong smell that was just so wrong. And the dogs--you can set a watch on Greyfall dogs; they bark at owls, snakes, and even their own shadow. But all of a sudden, all the dogs in Greyfall were silent, and that's not normal in this pack. I bolted upright, and my cup shattered on the stairs. That was the night the Hollow Men came to Greyfall. But I want it on record that before the running, the blood, and the river, before the Alpha left me for dead and before the King--the first cut was from a man that I had known since I was a kid, and everything after that was just the world agreeing with his plans.