The Mooncaller's Rejected Mate

The moon came up fat and white, and found me elbow-deep in pork fat. Claiming night turned the packhouse kitchen into a war camp — spits turning, pots boiling over, the matron screaming for bread that didn't exist — because two hundred wolves would straggle back from the Moongrove starving, whether the goddess had given them a mate or not. My job was the trays. Back and forth to the yard tables. Don't stop. Don't look up too long. Don't be the girl anyone remembered. Invisibility was the only thing I owned that nobody could take. Nineteen. Wolfless. Omega. At sixteen, when every other pup felt the first shift tear through their bones, I had felt nothing but kitchen heat and Poppy's hand crushing mine in the dark. No wolf ever woke inside me. The pack had a word for girls like me, and it wasn't kind. So the Claiming was a rite for real wolves, and the moon could keep her gifts. "You're mooning at the sky again." Poppy elbowed past me with a basket of rolls, flour to the eyebrows. "That's my job. I'm the romantic." "I'm checking the weather." "It's the Claiming Moon. It's always clear. Selene likes an audience." She dumped the rolls and leaned in, eyes bright. "What if it's you?" "What if what's me?" "The Alpha's mate. Wouldn't that be a story? The defective kitchen girl—" "Don't." I hefted my tray. "Even the goddess has standards, Pops." She laughed, but her eyes slid past me to the yard fence, where the Moongrove glowed beyond the pines. The unmated had lined up at moonrise — sixteen and up, washed and braided, shaking with hope or terror — and Alpha Ronan walked the line the way his father had, and his father's father, scenting for the one the goddess had marked as his. Selene gives. Nobody refuses what Selene gives. That was the whole of our religion, and it had never once been about me. The matron chose that moment to lose her war with the ovens. "Bread! I said bread, you useless—" A tray of rolls went in blackened on one side; she hurled a ladle at the scullion and missed on purpose, the way she always did when she liked you. "Mira! Stop gawking and move those trays!" The kitchen roared. Somewhere a spit-boy was singing a bawdy song about the moon, and three girls joined in, and for a minute the heat and the noise were almost enough to drown out the howling from the grove. Almost. I had worked Claiming nights for three years. I knew the shape of it the way I knew the shape of my own hands: the lining up, the walking, the choosing, and then the feast where some girl cried happy tears into her pork and some other girl cried the other kind where nobody could see. My part never changed. Trays. Back and forth. The girl nobody remembered. It was, I told myself, a good life for a defective. Safe. Before dusk, the Bloodmoon carriage had rolled into the yard — red-painted wheels, four black horses, Alpha Kane climbing down like he owned the dirt he stood on. His daughter came after him: Isolde, twenty, all dark hair and poise, surveying Nightfang's yard the way you'd survey a house you were thinking of buying. "That's the new Luna," the scullion whispered to me over a scrubbed pot. "Alliance against the rogues. Kane's price." I filed it away with all the other things that weren't my business. The rogues were gathering in the Hollows, beyond the border. Everybody knew. Everybody was afraid to say it past a whisper. Isolde had watched the Alpha walk his line with the patience of a woman reading a contract she'd already signed. I wondered, carrying my tray, what it felt like to be that sure of a man. My rounds took me up to the fence where the servers handed cups through to the watchers, and from there I could see the line proper — torchlit, trembling, every unmated wolf of Nightfang standing straight with their chins up. A girl my age near the front had her hands clasped so tight the knuckles shone white. The boy behind her kept shifting his weight, boot to boot, like the ground was too hot. Ronan paused before a tall she-wolf with copper hair, and the whole grove inhaled. He breathed in. Held it. Moved on. The copper-haired girl's face didn't change. That was the worst part. She'd practiced not-changing her face, the way we'd all practiced, and she stood there perfect and unchosen while the Alpha's footsteps went past her into the dark. Selene gives. The rest of us waited to see who she'd give to. The howling started at full dark — the pack raising its voice to the moon — and I carried my tray to the yard edge and watched from behind the fence, because omegas served, and serving meant the edge of things. The line stretched between the first pines, torchlit, every unmated wolf of Nightfang standing straight while the Alpha walked. He moved the way he did everything: like the ground had agreed with him in advance. Dark hair, dark coat, the Blackwood shoulders. He paused at each wolf, breathed in, moved on. Moved on. The line thinned behind him, hope curdling into the particular silence of not-being-chosen. Then he reached the end of the line. He stood still for three heartbeats. Lifted his head. And turned toward the yard. The howling stopped — all of it, mid-chorus, two hundred throats cut off like a door slamming — and every head turned. The matron's ladle froze over the pot. Somewhere a dog barked once and thought better of it. The crowd at the fence parted. He came down the path alone, moonlight pouring off his shoulders, and the yard went so quiet I could hear the fat spitting on the spits. He wasn't walking the way a man walks through his own yard. His head was up, nostrils flared, and he moved past the servers and the tables and the Bloodmoon carriage with its red wheels — past all of it — the way a wolf moves when the scent has him and nothing else exists. Wolves veered out of his way. Someone's tray hit the dirt. Nobody understood what was happening. I saw it on every face — the servers looking at each other, the matron with her ladle raised high, old Harl the gatekeeper actually stepping backward. The Alpha had walked his line. The rite was done. Alphas didn't leave the grove after the walking. It wasn't done. Isolde rose from her seat by the Bloodmoon carriage. Slowly, like the bench had burned her. Her father didn't move — Kane stood with his arms folded, watching his daughter's face go pale under the torchlight, and memorizing it. The scent had him. You could see it in the set of his shoulders, the flare of his nostrils — past the servers, past the tables, past the red wheels of the Bloodmoon carriage, past all of it, nose up and gone somewhere the rest of us couldn't follow. He stopped in front of me. The roast pork steamed between us. His eyes were the color of river stones, and they didn't blink, and the whole yard held its breath while he looked at me — at the grease on my apron, the flour on my cheek, the tray I was holding like a shield. "Mine." The word landed in the silence, and the silence closed over it. My fingers went numb on the tray handles. Behind me, Poppy made a small strangled sound. The matron's ladle hit the pot with a clang nobody reacted to, because Alpha Ronan Blackwood had just claimed a kitchen girl, and the moon had just rewritten every rule the pack thought it knew. The whispers started at the edges — omega, defective, her? — and died where they started. He stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell him under the pork fat and the woodsmoke — pine and cold iron, cut clean. Close enough to see the pulse beating in his throat, fast as a cornered animal's, and I understood with a lurch that the Alpha of Nightfang was afraid. Of me. Of this. Of what the moon had done to both of us. And very low, for me alone, he said it. "Forgive me." Across the yard, Mother Agda stood white as bone, her healer's basket slipping from her fingers. The pack's oldest healer, who had steadied a hundred births and closed a hundred wounds without flinching — terrified. The goddess had given. And the whole yard was holding its breath, waiting to see what it would cost.