My Rejected Sister Stole My Crown

Chapter Three

Bone cracked before anyone understood what they were hearing.

Wren's spine bent at an angle no spine should bend, and the sound tearing out of her throat wasn't a scream anymore. It wasn't anything human.

"Wren!" Maren's hands gripped her shoulders, shaking, trying to hold onto a body that was no longer holding still. "Wren, look at me, stay with me"

She couldn't. Fur was already breaking through her skin in patches along her arms, dark and fast, faster than anything Maren had ever seen a wolf take shape. Wren's fingers curled inward, nails darkening, lengthening, until they weren't fingers at all.

They were claws.

"Something's wrong with her!" the woman in blue silk screamed, stumbling back from the shadows near the kitchen doors. "Someone help, something's wrong with the servant girl"

Heads turned. All of them. Every single person who had been staring at Cyrene's failed Rite a moment ago now spun toward the sound of bones breaking near the kitchens, and what they saw stopped the courtyard cold.

A servant girl on her knees, spine arched wrong, fur ripping through her skin in front of the entire pack.

"Guards!" Alpha Thoren's voice cracked across the stone, sharper now than it had been for his own daughter's failure. "Guards, to the kitchens, NOW!"

Wren didn't hear him. Couldn't hear him. Her ears had already reshaped themselves into something that sat higher on her skull, catching sound in ways human ears never could, and every noise in the courtyard came at her twisted and too loud, a wall of screaming and shouting and running feet that made no sense anymore.

"Get back!" A guard's voice cracked through the chaos as Wren's claws raked across the stone, gouging deep lines into the ground beneath her. "Everybody back, NOW!"

She couldn't stop it. Her body wasn't hers anymore. Fur spread fast across her arms, her back, her face, until the girl who had carried wine trays an hour ago was gone completely, replaced by something snarling and huge and terrified of its own claws.

"Wren, please" Maren's voice broke apart into sobs, still gripping at fur where skin used to be, refusing to let go even as guards moved in around them with spears lowered. "Don't hurt her, please, don't you dare hurt her"

"Get away from it!" a guard shouted at Maren.

"She's not an it"

Wren's snarl ripped louder, deeper, a sound too wide for any human throat to have made. She didn't know what she was doing anymore. Didn't know where her own thoughts ended and the animal's fear began. All she felt was pain, and noise, and the terrifying pull of claws that wanted to lash out at anything that came close.

On the dais, Cyrene had gone completely still.

She stood frozen where the guards had been about to lead her away, staring across the courtyard at the creature tearing itself out of a servant girl's body, and for the first time all night, her face wasn't afraid for herself.

It was afraid of her.

"That's not possible," Cyrene whispered. "She's a servant. She doesn't even have"

"Everyone, stand back!" Alpha Thoren descended from the platform himself now, cutting through the crowd, and Wren somewhere still trapped behind the animal's eyes felt his presence land on her like a physical weight. Even half shifted, even out of her mind with pain, some ancient instinct in her recognized an Alpha's command and flinched from it.

He stopped a few feet away, staring down at what was left of the girl who used to pour his wine.

His face, always carved from stone, cracked for just a second into something Wren had never seen on him before.

Shock.

"That wolf," he said slowly, "is not average."

"Father, it's just a servant," Cyrene called from the dais, voice climbing, desperate. "She's nobody, she's always been nobody"

"Quiet." Alpha Thoren didn't even look at her.

His eyes stayed locked on Wren, on fur the color of dark earth spreading fast across a body still not fully changed, on claws gouging fresh lines into stone with every twitch of pain. Wren's vision blurred, human thought slipping further away with every second, until all that remained was Maren's voice, screaming her name over and over like saying it enough times could drag her back.

"Wren! Wren, please, stay with me"

It didn't work.

Somewhere in the chaos, Wren's back leg gave out beneath her, half-formed and unsteady, and she collapsed hard against the stone. Guards closed in tighter, spears raised, unsure whether to strike or retreat from a creature none of them had a name for.

"Don't touch her!" Maren threw herself directly in front of Wren's shaking, half shifted body, arms spread wide. "I said don't you dare touch her"

"Stand down," Alpha Thoren said, and though his voice was quiet, every guard obeyed instantly, spears lowering an inch.

He crouched slowly, close enough now that Wren dimly, distantly, through eyes that barely felt like her own could see his face clearly for the first time. Not angry. Not disgusted.

Studying her. Like he was trying to solve something that made no sense.

"Who is this girl," he asked, without looking away from Wren, "and why does her wolf feel like royal blood?"

Nobody answered him.

Maren's whole body had gone rigid, tears streaking silently down her face, lips pressed shut so hard they'd gone white.

"I asked a question," Alpha Thoren said, low and dangerous now.

Still, silence.

Wren's vision tunneled at the edges, pain and noise blurring together into one overwhelming roar that drowned out every voice around her, even the Alpha's. Somewhere far away, she thought she heard Maren finally speak a broken whisper, words that didn't make sense yet, words she wouldn't understand until much later.

"She's the true one."

Wren's body seized one final time, spine snapping fully into a shape that finally held, fur and claws and everything else settling into place all at once, and the last thing she felt before the darkness swallowed her whole was her own heartbeat, hammering so hard it hurt, and one single, useless thought echoing through whatever was left of her mind.

I don't know what I am anymore.

Then her legs buckled completely, and Wren collapsed unconscious at the Alpha's feet, in front of the entire pack of Draukmoor, as something none of them had a name for.

Nobody moved for a long, long moment.

Then Alpha Thoren rose to his full height, turned to the guards still frozen around him, and said the words that would change everything.

"Take her to the palace. Now. And someone find out exactly whose daughter this really is."