The beta’s silence

Thirty-six moons. You would think I would stop counting. “You almost missed it,” Nora said, grabbing my arm the second I reached the tree line. “Almost doesn’t count.” “It does when the shift starts without you.” She pulled me into the crowd, already buzzing with that restless, pre-shift energy that I had spent three years studying from the inside out. People shedding jackets, kicking off shoes, kids chasing each other through adult legs. That bright, open look on every face, like the moon had already done something to them just by rising. I smiled at the right people. Laughed at the right moments. Twelve minutes. “Go find Patrick,” I told Nora. “I’ll be right here.” She gave me a look, the kind she had been giving me for two years, somewhere between I believe you and I don’t quite believe you. Then someone called her name and she let go of my arm and I was free. I worked the edge of the crowd slowly. A word here, a hand squeeze there, stop to laugh at something Marcus said near the oak. Three years of this had taught me that disappearing was not about moving fast. It was about making sure the last thing people remembered was you being present, so the absence came later, quietly, without a shape. By the time I reached the trees, no one was watching. I counted my steps to the hollow out of old habit. One hundred and seventy-nine. Three pines in a loose triangle, the ground between them soft from years of rain, low enough that the sound of the pack disappeared completely once I sat down. I had found this place the first month, when I was nineteen and terrified and had approximately four minutes to figure out where to go. Three years later I could find it blind. I sat. I pulled the leather strap from my jacket. I found the knot on the middle pine, eye level, ugly and specific, the thing I had chosen to stare at because it was impossible to mistake for anything else when my vision started going at the edges. I looked at the knot. I breathed. The moon hit me the way it always hit me. Not gently. A pressure low in my chest first, like something reaching in with both hands. Then my spine, locking from the bottom up, one vertebra at a time. My palms hit the ground and I pressed hard into the dirt and bit down on the leather and the sound that rose in my throat stayed there because that was the one rule I never broke. Not one sound. My bones moved wrong. They had been moving wrong for three years. Reaching for the shift, almost touching it, never getting there. Seventeen minutes average. Some months fifteen. One terrible month it was twenty-four and I sat in the dark afterward for a long time before I could stand. I counted. One, two, three. The knot on the pine. The taste of leather. The cold ground under my palms. At twelve minutes my left shoulder locked so hard my breath cut off for a second. I breathed through it. At fifteen the white came in at the edges of my vision and I kept my eyes on the knot and breathed through that too. At sixteen and a half the wave started pulling back. Seventeen minutes. On the nose. I sat still until the shaking stopped. Then I moved my fingers one at a time, checking, the way you check a structure after a storm. Both hands. Both wrists. Head side to side. The damage was the same as always. Bone-deep and dull and something I would feel for two days and tell no one about. I pulled the vial from inside my bra. Bitter going down, herbal and sharp, the taste I associated with survival more than anything else. Petra’s formula. Three years of refinement in a small house at the edge of pack territory by a woman who never asked for my gratitude and never got anything close to what she deserved. I gave myself twenty minutes. Every single one. Then I stood, checked my posture, checked my face in the small mirror in my jacket. Loose in the shoulders. Soft around the eyes. The specific quiet look of someone who had just shifted, all the restless energy spent, body at ease. I had studied it long enough to wear it like a second skin. I walked back. The clearing was full of people coming down from the shift, loud and warm and completely open in the way that only happened after. I stepped into the edge of it and let it fold around me and Nora found me in under two minutes, grabbing my arm, mid-story about something Bryce did near the creek. I laughed where it was funny. Asked what she wanted me to ask. Let her voice fill the space while I ran my usual quiet check. Faces. Positions. Anything out of place. Nothing. Same as every month. We walked back toward the compound with the others and I thought about the bone pain coming tomorrow morning, the herb order I needed to put in, the shift report due Friday. Full shift. No complications. All clear. Thirty-six times I had written those words. I could write them in my sleep. I was thinking about the wording when the feeling hit. That specific, skin-level awareness of weight coming from a direction I wasn’t expecting. I had learned over three years to take that feeling seriously. I looked up. Damon Reeves was standing at the far edge of the clearing by himself, a cup in one hand, not moving back toward the compound with the rest of the pack. He was still in the way he was always still, like it was something he decided rather than something that just happened. His gaze was on the trees. The specific section of trees I had walked out of four minutes ago. My feet kept moving. Same pace, same direction. I said something to Nora, she laughed, I laughed. I did not look back at him. I told myself it was nothing for most of the night. By morning I had almost believed it. I opened my cabin door at six and it was there on the ground. A single sprig of mordveil. Fresh cut, still green, the smell of it reaching me before I had fully processed what I was looking at. I crouched and picked it up. Mordveil had one entry in the pack medical guide. Two lines. Bone pain of a structural origin. The kind that came from a failed shift, from a body that spent seventeen minutes trying to become something it couldn’t. Three people in this pack knew what it was used for. I stood slowly. Across the compound road, in the early grey morning, the lights in the Beta’s house were on. My fingers closed around the sprig until the stem snapped clean in half.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​