The Unwanted Luna's Rise

"Happy birthday to no one," I told the mirror. The sun had not even thought about rising. I was already awake, already standing in the small bathroom at the end of the hallway, already staring at a face that did not belong to anyone who mattered. That was the truth of my life. I was Nova Ashfield. I was eighteen years old today. Nobody in this pack house cared. I studied my reflection the way I always did, quickly and with no feeling. My hair was brown, the kind of brown that refused to be interesting, falling past my shoulders in straight, dull lines. My eyes were gray, or greenish, depending on the light. My face was thin. My arms were thin. Everything about me was thin in a way that had nothing to do with choosing to be that way. The scar above my left eyebrow had mostly healed. Three weeks since my father threw the ceramic mug. I had gotten faster at moving but not fast enough that time. I looked at the bruise fading on my collarbone and stopped looking. This was my morning habit. A quick check of the damage. Then I put it away and got on with the day. My name in this house was not Nova. My name was girl. My name was wretch. My name was whatever sharp thing my mother needed to throw at me before her first cup of coffee. I had been here in this pack house for all eighteen years of my life and I had not been spoken to with kindness in as long as I could remember. My sister Lyra had been kind. She was the one who braided my hair when I was small, the one who pressed her hand against my back when I was crying in the dark. But Lyra left six years ago when she found her mate, and I had stopped expecting softness from anyone after that. I did not spend more than two minutes feeling sorry for myself. Feeling sorry was dangerous. It made your eyes wet. Wet eyes made my father angry. Anger meant pain. So I pressed everything flat inside me and got ready for the one thing in my day that belonged to me alone. My morning run. I pulled on a worn gray shirt and dark sweatpants and crept down the back staircase in my bare feet. The pack house at this hour was quiet and I loved it. I loved the way the floorboards did not creak if you knew exactly where to step. I had memorized every safe spot over eighteen years of moving silently through rooms that were not mine. The cold hit me the moment I pushed open the back door. Northern Montana in late September had real teeth in the early morning. I could smell frost on the grass, pine sap from the tree line, and the faint mineral smell of the river running somewhere ahead. The Rocky Mountain foothills rose up in the distance, dark shapes against a sky going from black to purple. I ran. I ran until the pack house disappeared behind me and the trees swallowed me whole. The moment I hit the forest floor everything inside me loosened. My shoulders came down. My chest opened. This was the only place I was not afraid. At the edge of the trees I stripped off my clothes and shifted. My wolf moved through me the way water fills a glass. Fast and complete. I had first shifted at twelve, which was young by any standard. Most wolves did not shift until sixteen. Mine came early because she needed out, because I had needed her, because on a particular night when my father's hands found my hair and I pressed my face against the floor and thought this is the time he actually kills me, she exploded out of me and saved us both. After enough shifts, it does not hurt. It becomes like breathing. Your bones know what they are doing. I ran deeper into the trees, low and fast. My wolf, Smoke, was all gray with a white chest and she ran like she had been waiting her whole life for open space. We both had. The river came into view through the pines. I shifted back at the bank and sat on the flat rock I always used, the one with a shallow dip in the middle that fit the curve of my back perfectly. I dipped my feet into the water. Cold enough to make my toes ache immediately. I sat and listened. A woodpecker starting somewhere above me. The river pushing over the stones below. The first birds calling to each other in the dark. Across the water a doe stepped out from the brush. She stood with her ears turning like small satellite dishes, testing the air. Her coat was the color of warm wood. She was completely still for three long seconds. Then she turned and vanished into the trees and I felt the particular ache I always felt watching something free move away from me. I thought about running. I thought about it the way you think about a locked door. You know the lock is there. You test it anyway. The Stonecrest Pack's territory ran fifteen miles in every direction. Past its borders I would be rogue. Rogues lived outside pack law, outside pack protection. Most packs treated rogues as threats and killed them without much discussion. The world had no space for a wolf without a home. I had no home either, not really. But the woods came close enough. The sky was turning pink at the edges. I had to go back. If I was not in the kitchen by the time the pack started waking, I would pay for it in ways I did not want to think about before I had even eaten anything. I shifted back, dressed, and started the return trip. Smoke's mood dropped the moment we turned around. She knew what was waiting. I reached out to her with the quiet thing I did, the mental press of my palm against her side, and she steadied. One more day. As I came out of the tree line and started across the grass toward the back of the pack house, I heard something that stopped me still. Voices. Low, unfamiliar. Then the growl of an engine from the front of the house. It was not yet six in the morning. Our pack had no visitors scheduled until tomorrow. Those voices did not belong to anyone I knew. I moved along the side of the house instead of going straight to the back door. I kept my body flat against the cold stone wall and edged toward the corner where I could see the front drive without being seen. Three black vehicles sat in the gravel. The kind that looked like they cost more than everything inside the pack house combined. Men in dark jackets stepped out and every single one of them moved with the ease that comes from knowing you are dangerous. Warriors. Not scouts or messengers. A full arrival. A pack had come. A large one. My wolf pressed forward inside me, nose working the cold air. Something in the smell of these people made the hair on my arms stand straight up. These were not allies of equal size. These were something bigger than anything I had ever been close to. I did not know why that should matter to me. I had nothing to do with pack politics. I had nothing to do with anything here. I was the girl in the kitchen. Invisible. The one everyone wished had never been born. I pulled back from the corner and took the long way around to the back door. I had a pack to feed. And today of all days, I could not afford to be noticed.