THE ALPHA'S FORBIDDEN FATED MATE AT DRAVEN WOLF ACADEMY

Elara's POV The lunch hall was loud the way it always was on Fridays, conversations layered on top of each other, trays clattering, someone laughing too hard at something that probably was not that funny. I was staring at my food and not eating it when Professor Aldric walked to the front of the hall and clapped twice. The noise dropped. "The annual forest camping trip begins today," he said. "Buses leave at four. Attendance is mandatory." The hall immediately erupted, half the room excited, the other half pretending not to be. I was somewhere in neither category. "Say something," Freya said, watching me from across the table. "I didn't say anything." "That's the problem." She leaned forward. "You have the face." "I don't have a face." "Elara." Leo set his fork down. "It's been two months. Two months since your birthday and you still haven't shifted. We know that. You know that. But sitting here looking like someone just told you Christmas is cancelled is not going to make your wolf show up any faster." I looked up at him. "That is the least helpful thing anyone has ever said to me." "It came from a place of love." Nyx had not looked up from her notebook through any of this. "Go on the trip," she said simply. "Staying behind alone in the dormitory while everyone else is gone is worse than whatever you're trying to avoid out there." She was right and I hated that she was right. Two months. Two months since my eighteenth birthday came and went without a shift, without even the faintest sign that my wolf existed anywhere inside me. For a girl from any other family that would have been humiliating enough. For a Moonfall it was something else entirely. My parents carried one of the rarest bloodlines in Velthorn, wolves whose strength was spoken about with something close to reverence, and I had spent the last two months being the living proof that bloodlines did not guarantee anything. The whispers had not stopped since. "Fine," I said. "I'm going." Freya smiled. "Obviously you are." *** The forest was deep and the buses were loud and by the time we set up camp the sun had already started its descent behind the trees. I stayed close to Leo, Freya and Nyx the way I always did, near enough to the main group to avoid drawing attention but far enough that nobody felt the need to come over and remind me of things I already knew. We found a spot beyond the main cluster of tents where the trees were older and the noise of our classmates softened into background. Leo built a fire with the focused energy of someone who had been waiting all week for an excuse to build a fire, and Freya immediately began rating his technique loudly and unhelpfully. "You're going to suffocate it," she said. "I know how to build a fire, Freya." "The wood needs to breathe." "The wood is fine I said." "The wood is stressed she said" I almost smiled. Almost. Nyx settled beside me and for a while none of us said anything that mattered and it was the most comfortable I had felt all day. The forest at night had a particular quality to it, a fullness, like it was paying attention to something the rest of us could not quite hear. I noticed it but said nothing, filing it away under the category of things my newly oversensitive nerves were probably manufacturing. Then Freya looked up. "Why is the moon red?" We all looked. Above the treeline the moon hung full and heavy, not its usual silver but a deep bleeding crimson that bled into the clouds around it and washed the sky in the kind of colour that made you feel like something had shifted in the world without asking permission. "Blood moon," Leo said confidently. "Rare lunar event. Completely natural." "You failed Earth Science," Nyx said. "I deferred my grade." "That's still not a thing." Around the main campfire I could hear other students reacting, jokes about the apocalypse, someone dramatically declaring the end of Velthorn, the usual noise of people who had no real reason to be worried. I stared at the moon and stayed quiet and tried to name the feeling settling over me that had nothing to do with the cold or the dark or two months of accumulated exhaustion. I could not name it. "Elara." Freya's voice had changed, softer now, the version she used when she was actually paying attention. "You okay?" "I don't know," I said honestly. And then my spine cracked. Not metaphorically. Not like a figure of speech. A sound that came from inside my own body, deep and splitting, and the pain that followed it knocked the air completely out of my lungs. I grabbed the nearest thing, which was Leo's arm, and my fingers closed around it so hard he made a sound. "Elara what" "Something is wrong." My voice came out strange. Too thin. "Something is really wrong." "What does it feel like?" Freya was already on her feet. "Like my bones are" I could not finish the sentence because another wave hit, moving from my spine outward through every nerve I had, and my knees hit the ground before I made any decision to kneel. The dirt was cold under my palms. My fingers were changing, nails darkening and lengthening in a way that I watched with a kind of detached disbelief because it was happening to my own hands and I still could not fully process it. "She's shifting." Nyx's voice was quiet and certain. "She's actually shifting." "Go," Leo said. "Get someone, get any of the staff, go now." Two sets of footsteps ran. I heard Freya calling out somewhere behind me, her voice rising above the general camp noise, and then Leo's hands were on my shoulders trying to hold me steady while everything inside me moved like it had been waiting a very long time and was done being patient. The pain was enormous. Bigger than anything I had a reference point for, coming from inside my bones, radiating outward in waves that I could only survive by staying completely focused on one thing at a time. Breathe. Stay on your hands. Do not let go of the ground. My mother's voice came through the noise of it without warning, a single sentence from a conversation years ago when I was young enough to ask questions like what does it feel like and she had smoothed my hair back and said, "It only hurts the first time, my love. After that it is the most natural thing in the world." My back arched hard, another wave tearing through me, and I pressed my claws into the earth and held on. It only hurts the first time. It only hurts the first time.