Rejected by the Pack (PAPERBACK)

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ONE

“COME ON, EMBER. Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Darby said.
An unimpressed snort escaped my control as I strolled along the well-worn dirt path with my best friend at my side. We were discussing my upcoming wolfbirth ceremony, and despite her comforting tone, Darby still seemed almost as nervous about it as I was.

I breathed in the scent of trees and decaying leaf litter. A weak late afternoon sun cast pale, heatless rays down on the Greystalker lands, a region of dense forests and majestic mountains tucked far away from any of the human cities near the coast. It was usually rainy at this time of year, although today the blue sky was only marred by a few fluffy, white clouds that held no obvious threat of even a light drizzle.

“Why? Do you think the elders have been lying to us all these years about how painful this is going to be?” I shot back.

Darby grimaced and shrugged. “I mean… maybe? You know how these wolf tales get spun out of control. It could just be one of those rite-of-passage things, couldn’t it? They get you so freaked out that when it’s over, you end up torturing the next generation of wolves with the same bullshit stories just to get a bit of revenge.”

I glanced at her skeptically, not sure if I found her optimism refreshing or infuriating.

“I somehow doubt that,” I answered.

My twenty-first birthday was looming, which meant that my days of puphood were well and truly coming to an end. Not that I’d been able to enjoy my adolescence like most of my peers had done.

Oh, no.

The carefree camping trips in the mountains… the long nights of swimming in crystal clear river waters… the cozy, sheltered dens filled with affectionate parents and siblings… those were for the legitimate, accepted pups in the pack. Not for me. Not for an orphaned outcast.

I was, not to put too fine a point on it, as low in the pack hierarchy as it was possible to be. I’d never been adopted by another family once I lost my parents, as was customary for orphaned pups. Instead, the pack had forced me to live on the fringes of their society from the time I was ten years old. They kept me alive, but barely. Mostly, I’d been expected to survive on my own.

I set the bitter memories aside as Darby and I wound around the corner of the low dens on the eastern side of the path. The rough-hewn wood that made up the walls and pillars blended so naturally into the landscape that the buildings pressed deep into the side of the mountain weren’t immediately noticeable to a casual observer. They were there, though—an entire town hidden among the forests and hills.

The Greystalker packlands might have been the only home that I’d ever known, but I felt little attachment to the place. If it hadn’t been for Geneva Padfoot, the eccentric woman who kept a curio shop on the outskirts of the town, I probably would have ended up sleeping under trees or bare, rocky overhangs for most of my young life. Even years later, the thought made me angry.

But there was no use obsessing over it. Not now. For years, I’d agonized over why I was so hated within my own pack. When I’d been little, I’d worried that maybe I’d done something to incur the wrath of everyone around me. My sensitive, childish heart had broken every time a pack member turned their back on me in disgust. It wasn’t until I’d grown older that I’d managed to shake off the grief that came with perpetual rejection.

In the end, the ‘why’ of it really didn’t matter—and besides, the eve of my first shift wasn’t exactly an ideal time to rehash all of this in my mind.

“You’re obsessing over the past, aren’t you?” Darby asked, breaking into my dark thoughts.

I shot her a sidelong glance, aware that my musings must have been showing on my face. With practiced ease, I smoothed away the tightness around my mouth and eyes, firmly pressing down the emotions that had, for a moment, bubbled too near the surface.

“Of course not,” I said. “Anyway, the wolfbirth ceremony can’t be any worse than the rest of this, can it?”

My best friend stared hard at me, clearly not buying into my attempt at bravado.

Darby only shook her head at my sarcasm. “You know, in a way, I’m jealous of you.”

Taken by surprise, I let out a bark of laughter. “Jealous? Of me? Have you lost your mind?”

“No!” Darby insisted, shooting me a quelling look as we passed a dense clump of evergreen trees. “It’s just—your ceremony is in two days, and then it will be out of the way.”

I frowned. “Out of the way? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Darby let out a frustrated sigh. “I have to wait another eleven months until my wolfbirth. And right now, that feels like forever. I want to get out of here, Ember.”

My pace slowed, pine needles crunching softly beneath my feet.

“What?” Darby asked, looking back at me.

“You’re still stuck on that, huh?” I asked, coming fully to a halt.

Darby turned to face me, a faint flush coloring her pale cheeks. “You sound like you disapprove.”

I shook my head at her and resumed the trek toward Geneva’s shop, where I had an informal job tracking inventory and keeping the books in exchange for room and board. She huffed and fell into step with me once more.
“It’s not that I disapprove,” I explained, for possibly the hundredth time. “It’s just that I don’t think the plan will work.”

Darby sighed wistfully. “It could work. Just picture it! We’ll both have our wolfbirths and transform into gorgeous, tawny wolves—beautiful, and with undeniable grace. We’ll leave this pack and join another one, where we can find mates that are somewhere in the middle of the pecking order. Mates that are honest, and not cruel. It will be a fresh start and a way to climb up from the bottom rung of this pack.”

I met her eyes with regret. “I wish it were that easy. And, I dunno… maybe you should try it. But there’s ‘low in the pecking order,’ and then there’s whatever I am. I don’t think that kind of fresh start is in the cards for me.”

News traveled, even between packs. With my background, I was pretty sure my only shot at salvation would be to get away from wolves completely. And that, unfortunately, was something far easier said than done.

Darby grimaced and offered, “Well, on the positive side, at least there’s nowhere for you to go but up, right? That gives you some freedom, in a way.”

“You think so?” I asked tartly.

Darby snorted in dark amusement and gestured at me. “Well, look at you! Who else could pull off hair dyed half black and half platinum blonde? Who else in the pack is covered in tattoos?”

“I’m not covered,” I pointed out. “They’re just on my arms.”

With a laugh, Darby shook her head at me. “Still. You disappear and come back with tattoos, and no one bats an eye. If I tried that…”

“Your family would kill you,” I finished for her.

While Darby was quite low in the pack, she still had a place. Her family might be poorly regarded, but her parents wouldn’t tolerate a sin like sneaking off to get tattoos or a human dye-job.

And she had a point. I could do those things. I could steal away in the night, hitchhike to the nearest city, panhandle for human money, and do the kind of stuff that would drag another shifter’s reputation through the mud. After all, what else was the pack going to do to me at this point? I was already paying the price for my mother’s unforgivable crime. Adding a few minor ‘crimes’ of my own was no big deal by comparison.

Raucous laughter drifted down the trail from the direction we’d just come, cutting into my thoughts. Darby and I both froze, turning to look with a sinking sense of inevitability.

“Oh, no.” Darby let out a low groan.

I set my jaw and said nothing. We both knew those voices. They’d haunted nearly every step of our lives for years now. The gang approaching us was a bunch of pack bullies with hardly any brains to share between them. Unfortunately, being well fed and cared for within the pack meant that despite their disgusting lack of intelligence, they were all well muscled and fast.

God knew, I’d personally tried time and time again to outrun them without any luck.