My Rejected Sister Stole My Crown

Cyrene's scream cut the night in half. "I call my wolf!" Nothing answered her. Wren froze at the edge of the courtyard, a tray of wine glasses trembling in her hands, as the princess of Draukmoor stood alone on the dais under a full moon and nothing happened. No fur. No claws. No shift. Just a girl in a blood red gown, arms thrown wide to the sky, shaking. Thousands of pack members packed the courtyard shoulder to shoulder. A second ago, they'd been roaring her name. Now every single one of them had gone dead silent, watching their future Luna fail in front of the whole kingdom. "Again," Alpha Thoren's voice cracked across the stone like a whip. "Call it again." "I'm trying!" Cyrene's composure shattered. Her silver hair combs slipped loose, dark strands falling wild around her face. "Father, I don't understand, I've always.…" "Again." She screamed it a third time, her whole body straining toward the moon like she could rip her wolf out through sheer will. The moonlight touched her skin and slid right off, like it didn't recognize what it was looking at. Someone in the crowd whispered, "A princess with no wolf isn't possible." "Unless she's cursed," another voice hissed back. The word cursed moved through the courtyard like fire through dry grass. Wren watched from the shadows near the kitchen doors, close enough to see Cyrene's knees buckle, close enough to see the moment the princess stopped looking untouchable and started looking terrified. She should have felt satisfied. Cyrene had spent eighteen years making Wren's life small and miserable. Every insult, every slap, every order barked without a glance. Some small, ugly part of Wren wanted to enjoy this. Instead, something cold crawled up the back of her neck. Not fear for Cyrene. Fear for herself. Her stomach twisted, hard and sudden, like a fist closing around her insides. The tray slipped from her fingers. It never hit the ground. Pain exploded through her spine, first white-hot, splitting her in half from the inside. Wren didn't hear the glasses shatter. She didn't hear anything except the roar of her own pulse and a sound tearing out of her throat that was not human. Her vision blurred. Her hands she looked down at her own hands and watched, in horror, as her nails darkened and lengthened into something that was not a hand at all. "No." A voice, close, gripping her shoulder hard enough to bruise. "No, no, not tonight, please not tonight" Maren. Wren knew that voice, knew those hands, had known them her whole life. But she had never heard Maren sound like this. Not angry. Not worried. Terrified. "Maren," Wren gasped, the word barely making it out before another wave of pain doubled her over. "Something's wrong with me. Something's…." "I know." Maren's face had gone bone white, eyes darting toward the dais, toward the Alpha, toward anywhere but Wren's face. "I know, sweetheart, I know, this isn't supposed to …you weren't supposed to. " "What is happening to me?" Maren didn't answer. Because at that exact moment, Wren's spine arched backward with a sound like snapping wood, and the scream that tore out of her was loud enough to reach every corner of the courtyard, loud enough to reach the dais, where Cyrene stood frozen with her arms still raised to an empty moon. Every head turned. Every single person in Draukmoor's Ember Moon Rite turned away from their broken princess and toward the shadows by the kitchen doors, where a servant girl nobody ever looked at twice was on her knees, shaking, as fur ripped through her skin in front of the entire pack. Alpha Thoren's voice rang out across the sudden chaos. "What in the moon's name?" Wren didn't hear the rest. Her body wasn't hers anymore. Bones cracked and reshaped themselves in seconds instead of the slow hours she'd heard other wolves describe. Claws tore through her fingertips. A howl ripped out of her chest that didn't sound like anything a human throat should make. The last clear thing Wren saw, before the pain swallowed her whole, was Maren's face streaked with tears, lips moving around words Wren couldn't hear over her own screaming. Then the world went black, and Wren of the kitchens, the girl nobody ever called, hit the ground as something the courtyard had no name for.