The Ashes of The Rejected Queen

Chapter 3 — What Followed Us Into The Dark

We had been walking for twenty minutes when I realized we were being followed.

My wolf felt it first that prickling awareness along the back of my neck, the way the night sounds shifted slightly, the specific silence that falls when something predatory decides to stop pretending it isn't there.

I touched Mara's arm. She stopped walking immediately.

"Three of them," I said quietly. "Behind us. Moving parallel through the trees."

Mara didn't look surprised. "Rogues. They patrol this border at night. A rejected wolf leaving pack territory alone is" she paused delicately"an easy opportunity."

Something cold moved through me. Not fear. Something older and sharper than fear.

I had just been rejected. I had nothing. No rank. No pack protection. No wolf as far as anyone knew. In the werewolf world, a rejected wolf walking alone at night was basically an announcement. I am vulnerable. I am unclaimed. Come and take what you want.

"How many times has this happened to rejected wolves?" I asked.

"Too many," Mara said simply.

The anger that moved through me then was so clean and so cold it almost felt like relief. After the messy devastation of the ceremony, after the crying on the road, this was something I knew what to do with. Or at least something I wanted to know what to do with.

"Keep walking," I told Mara.

"Sera"

"Keep walking and stay behind me."

She went quiet. Which surprised me. I had known this woman for less than an hour and she already struck me as someone who did not go quiet for anyone.

But she stepped behind me without argument.

The rogues stopped pretending after that. Three of them stepped out of the trees ahead of us cutting off the path. Large. Male. The particular kind of confident that comes from doing something many times and never facing consequences for it.

The one in the center grinned. "Lost little wolf. All alone."

"I'm not alone," I said. "And I'm not little."

He looked me over slowly. The grin didn't move. "No pack scent on you. Rejection fresh I can smell it. That means no one's coming to look for you." He took a step forward. "That means tonight's our night."

My wolf slammed against my skin so hard I actually stumbled.

Not in fear. In fury.

She wanted out. For the first time in my entire life she wasn't pressing gently or staying carefully hidden she was slamming against me like a door in a storm, furious and enormous and absolutely done with being contained.

I had no training. I had never fought anyone. I had never shifted, never let her out, never even known for certain she was real.

But something happened in that moment that I cannot fully explain something that started in my chest and moved outward, through my blood, into my hands, into my feet. Like a door inside me swung open just a crack.

Not all the way. She didn't come all the way out. But enough.

Enough that my eyes changed I could feel it, that heat behind my irises.

Enough that the rogue in the center stopped walking.

Enough that all three of them suddenly looked less sure of themselves.

"What" the center one started.

I moved.

I don't know how to describe what happened except to say that my body did things my brain hadn't planned. I crossed the distance between us faster than made sense, caught the center rogue's arm before he could shift, and used his own momentum to put him on the ground. Hard. The impact shook the trees.

The other two launched at me simultaneously.

It was messy. It was nothing like how I imagine properly trained wolves fight there was no elegance to it, no strategy. Just instinct and desperation and my wolf pouring just enough of herself through that cracked-open door to keep me standing when I should have gone down.

I took a hit across my shoulder that would leave a bruise the size of a hand. I took another across my jaw that made my vision spark white for a second.

But I gave back worse.

When it was over when all three rogues were on the ground and I was standing over them breathing hard and bleeding from my lip — the forest was very quiet.

I looked at my hands. They were shaking. Not from fear. From the effort of holding my wolf back from finishing what we'd started.

I turned around.

Mara was standing exactly where I had left her. She was watching me with those silver eyes and her expression was something I couldn't read not surprise, not pride exactly. Something bigger than both.

"You've never fought before," she said. It wasn't a question.

"No."

"You've never shifted."

"No."

"And yet."

I looked back at the three rogues. One of them was conscious and staring at me like I was something he had never seen before and desperately hoped to never see again.

"What am I?" I asked. For the second time that night. But this time it didn't come out quiet. It came out like something that had been locked behind my teeth for eighteen years and had finally gotten tired of waiting.

Mara walked toward me. She reached up and touched my face my jaw, where the bruise was forming with a gentleness that was so unexpected it almost cracked me open all over again.

"You are the thing they should have been afraid of all along," she said softly. "They just didn't know to be scared yet."

She turned and walked forward on the path like nothing had happened. Like three rogues weren't on the ground behind us.

"Come," she said. "We have two more days of walking. And I have a great deal to tell you."

I followed her. And behind me, without looking back, I heard one of the rogues whisper something to the others in a shaking voice. Three words. I didn't know their significance then. I would later.

"Black wolf. Run."