The Wild Wolf’s Rejected Mate (The Five Packs Book 5)

Male! Approaching from your left!

I’m sure there is a male approaching. There are folks everywhere. I’m sitting among a dozen females, some gathered around the fire, others working under the canopy or resting in the tent. Pups swarm the ladders and ropes hanging from the branches of the sycamore tree in front of us.

Males meander the invisible paths around the camp, going about their business, none of which seems to be urgent. Wolves of all ages lounge and wrestle and groom themselves, and then set off at random on urgent missions that end with them lounging, wrestling, and grooming themselves in a different location.

Male! From your left!

The pecking voice is back, and she’s been promoted to Captain Obvious.

LOOK! MALE!

I grind my teeth and glance up from my knitting to shut her up. Griff, the pup who brought the hatbox to me, strolls up to the fire. I wouldn’t call him a male, but the voice has always gone by size, not age.

“All right, Ma?” he asks Elspeth, poking at the charcoal with a stick although it doesn’t need stoking. “You need anything?”

“I don’t. What about you, Annie?” Elspeth asks me.

“I’m good.” I muster up a smile for Griff. This is the fourth or fifth time he’s dropped by to see if we need anything. Justus must’ve asked him to, although it’s possible that it’s Griff’s habit to check on his dam. The males do seem drawn to the females’ camp like moths to a flame.

Already, a male has come by because he found a particularly smooth rock and wondered if any of the females had lost it, and if not, if any wanted it. Diantha took it. It was threaded with a neat green color, almost like jade. It was lovely. Another male came by to offer us fresh bread he’d made. It was delicious—nutty and warm.

Griff is still messing with the fire, waiting in case we change our mind, I guess, when a pair of males come by rolling a huge, wooden spool they’d found in the woods. I can’t imagine how they got it up the narrow, rocky trail to the clearing.

I’ve seen something like it before. There’s a bigger one at Quarry Pack in the field behind the nursery. We were told it was human-made, a device to hold the wire they use to run electric lines. Pups pretend it’s a giant’s dining room table or a stage.

As soon as they see it, the Last Pack pups shift to two legs and join forces to roll the spool as fast as they can with no regard for life or limb. They narrowly miss the canopy stakes. The broad side of the tent. The huge trunk of the sycamore. A babe in basket.

The babe is the end of the game. Before my brain even computes the danger, Diantha leaps from her loom, shifts to her wolf, and leaps onto the spool to shove it off course with her paws. Her wolf then chases the culprits into their tree playground, baying as ferociously as any male wolf I’ve ever heard. The pups scramble to the highest branches they can reach.

It isn’t until she sashays back to the fire on two legs, her tail swishing, that I realize I’m standing, my knitting dumped on the ground, a needle clutched in my fist like a knife.

Elspeth gently takes my wrist and lowers my arm. “Listen to your wolf,” she murmurs. “Diantha is not a threat to them.”

I never listen to my wolf. I don’t have to—she’s not shy about letting her thoughts be known. Run and hide. Twenty-four seven, in any given situation. Run and hide.

Elspeth is still holding my wrist, though, and she’s gazing into my eyes like she’s waiting for me to do what she asked.

My face flushes. I can’t tug my wrist free—that would be rude—so I do what she says and listen to my wolf.

She’s on her feet, but she’s not alarmed. She’s excited. There was an enormous wooden spool rolling around, wreaking havoc. She wishes she could’ve rolled it around. She would’ve pushed it up the switchback trail to the dens and watched it roll back down.

My wolf has zero concerns about Diantha. In fact, she thinks Diantha’s wolf went easy on the pups. She didn’t even nip a behind, and the pups were being much too wild around babes and elders.

My wolf wouldn’t have been so wild. She would’ve howled to clear a path before she sent the spool sailing.

I blink, meeting Elspeth’s kind gaze. I don’t understand. I was afraid for the pups. Why wasn’t my wolf?

Elspeth pats my wrist as she lets it go and resettles herself in her chair. She picks up her own needles, smiles gently, and says, “I was the same at first. Always prepared for the worst. It helped to listen to my wolf. She was quicker than I was to realize that things are different here.”

Different how?

I have so many questions, but I’ve never been good with strangers, and I’m too shy to ask in front of everyone. Now that the spool is settled in place under the sycamore, the females return to their conversation. It’s been going pretty much nonstop all day. Back at Quarry Pack, we chat while we work in the kitchen or the garden, but nothing like this.

For one thing, not everyone is making themselves busy. Several females are lounging in chairs or blankets, doing nothing more than soaking up the sun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen females idle in the middle of the day, especially if they have pups.

It’s almost lunch, and the sun is high in the sky. Despite the shade, I’m sweating like a pig from nerves. Although the chatter and clack of the needles and the loom are calming, this is still a strange place, these are strangers, and my mate has left me here alone.

I’m not too mad about it. Or hurt. I just can’t settle. The breeze is sweet, and the yipping and shouting of the pups as they swarm the sycamore are soothing in their own way, but as the hours wear on, it’s getting to be too much. I’m homesick. I want to lie on my bed with my fan blowing straight on me from my night table and take a few months to work through everything that’s happened in the past two days.

The Last Pack females keep trying to be polite and include me, but my calm is wearing thin, and every time they preface a comment with, “Annie,” I jolt and drop a stitch. Being with them is nothing like being with Una, Kennedy, and Mari. They know how I am, and I don’t ever have to worry about offending them with my startles or my silence.

My stomach aches with missing them, and it’s not a new feeling. I’ve been missing them a while now. If I were home, they wouldn’t be there. Una and Mari would be with their mates, and Kennedy would be out, training or scouting or hunting. She’s grabbed freedom with both hands.

At home, I felt so left behind, so forgotten. And that’s what feels like safety to me?

On a whim, I listen to my wolf again. She’s drowsing with her head on her paws, perfectly content. What does she know that I don’t? What’s different now for her?

It’s a wild thought—that things could possibly be different.

“Annie, you wouldn’t believe what Max would have to do to keep Justus out of trouble when he was little,” Elspeth says, and I startle, but I don’t drop a stitch. I make myself focus on the conversation.

Diantha, Nessa, and the others chuckle like family who’ve heard a story a hundred times and knows what’s coming. Most of the females’ hands are occupied in our small circle. Nessa braids one of her pup’s thick black hair in neat rows, the female named Lelia files her nails, and Diantha works her loom. It’s an interesting cherry wood piece, foldable, with a built-in bobbin winder and shelf. If it’s homemade, the craftsman was very skilled.

Elspeth waits for me to reply, but I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to say quickly enough, so she takes pity on me and continues, “Max would take the pups out to teach them how to hunt, but of course, if you left Justus to his own devices, he’d tear off and kill everything in a five-mile radius before the others had a chance to sniff out a track.”

Everyone chuckles fondly. Elspeth pauses for me to respond. I should chuckle, too, or make some approving sound. She’s so obviously proud. Yet again, though, I don’t manage to reply before Elspeth feels compelled to go on. My face burns. The embarrassment doesn’t help the sweat situation. It’s trickling down my neck.

“Well, it was so bad that Max would have to hunt down an animal the day before—say a badger—and then go out in the middle of the night and create a whole trail of badger sign—up, down, and all around, over hill and dale. Like a maze. Then, the next day, he’d take the pups out and tell Justus to have at it. Justus would tear off after the badger, and Max would tell the others, ‘Today, pups, we’re hunting fox.’”

She laughs. I can’t imagine a male creating such an elaborate ruse when he could just bark the pup into submission. That’s what a Quarry Pack male would do.

“Oh, remember the time Justus caught that skunk?” an older female named Mabli cackles. “Skinned it and everything and brought it to Alys proud as a peacock, the pelt reeking to high heaven.”

“Who’s Alys?” I ask. Several females glance up in surprise, but they recover quickly.

“Justus’s dam,” Elspeth answers.

I focus on my knitting so I don’t see their expressions. They know Justus and I aren’t really mates. It isn’t so strange that I wouldn’t know his mother’s name. I’m not in the wrong, but you couldn’t convince my stomach. It aches like it got kicked by a mule.

“Well, she soaked that pelt in tomato juice for days, scrubbed it with lemon rinds,” Mabli recalls. “She tried everything to get the stink out, and she never quite could, so in the end, she made a pair of slippers out of it. She said her feet were the furthest she could get that foul fur from her nose.” Everyone laughs, and again, it’s the warm, easy laughter of people who’ve heard the story a hundred times.

I remember, one time when I was very young, when my father was still alive, Ma let me help her make a mincemeat pie. I was so careful with spooning the pre-measured spices and dumping the raisins and stirring, but rolling out the dough was beyond my coordination and strength. I kicked a fuss, though, so Ma let me do it.

In the end, she made the crust on top look pretty, but the dough on bottom was uneven, so some parts burned, and others didn’t cook all the way through. I still remember how her face lit up when she ate her slice, how she hummed happily and sunk back in her chair, saying to Pa, “Our Annie’s a natural cook, just like her mother, isn’t she?” And he smiled and agreed.

My chest tightens. It’s hard to imagine young Justus, skinning a skunk, while little Annie baked pies. He’s been the bugbear of my life for so long, I’ve never considered that we were both young at the same time. We both had mothers who loved us.

Mabli talks about Alys like she’s not here anymore. “Did she pass away?” I ask softly.

“Yes, during the great sickness.” Mabli’s voice roughens, and the females grow quiet.

“I lost my dam then, too,” I say quietly.

We learned at Moon Lake Academy that the sickness tore through all the shifter packs, and that the wasting sickness was a virus, not a curse, but regardless, we should leave it in the past—don’t dwell or ask too many questions—lest we somehow wake it up by talking about it. We’ve memory-holed the people we lost and the things we did when we were scared.

My heartbeat speeds. It feels dangerous to talk about it here, now. Like I should be crossing my fingers or knocking on wood.

The females shift in their seats. They’re not tensing, although some straighten their spines. It’s more like when Una, Mari, Kennedy, and I are sitting in our living room late at night, and we’ve all had a few tokes or nips of whiskey in our tea, and one of us says something real, and we all let our masks slip for a moment so we can speak and hear each other the most clearly.

“I did, too,” Lelia says, scratching the back of a wolf lounging beside her with her freshly sharpened nails. “Her name was Ryanne. She was a great weaver.”

“And so beautiful.” Mabli’s thin, feathered lips curve, her gaze growing distant. “Her hair was so long and red. Just like yours,” she says to Lelia.

“It was down past her bottom,” Diantha says. “She could sit on it.”

“When she was little, the back would knot up like a beaver’s tail, and she’d holler like you were killing her when you brushed it. Drove your granddam to distraction.” Mabli reaches over and strokes Lelia’s hair. “So soft. So lovely.”

Lelia smiles sadly, her shining eyes rising to meet mine. “What was your dam’s name?”

“Aileen Murphy,” I say. I haven’t said her name out loud in years. No one has.

A strange feeling untangles in my chest. Guilt that it’s been so long. Gratitude that I had reason to speak her name on such a beautiful day with the sky so blue. Grief. Love. Regret.

“She was the best cook,” I say.

The females hum and murmur, a kind of affirmation. Or maybe an amen. I blink, and maybe for the first time, I really see the people around me.

The tremor in Mabli’s hand. Her swollen knuckles, her red chafed skin.

The steel in Elspeth’s spine, how she won’t let herself relax against the back of her chair, and how her eyes are always darting when she hears a shriek from the sycamore, a clang from across the clearing, or the caw of a crow flying overhead.

The dirt under Griff’s fingernails as he crouches by the fire, pokes it with his stick, and pretends he isn’t listening to our conversation.

This is all so strange, but is it that different, really, from home? Mabli’s hands could easily belong to Old Noreen. Griff lingers just like Fallon used to do when he’d drop by for the video games we’d buy for him in Chapel Bell, like he craved the warmth of our company but some grown male voice in his head wouldn’t let him show it.

And isn’t my gaze darting, too, like Elspeth’s, at each shriek, clang, and caw?

“Remember when Justus and Khalil went after that bog worm up by Salt Mountain?” Lelia changes the subject back to Justus’s exploits. This time, everyone chuckles a little more gustily. I guess this one’s even better than the skunk story.

“They really thought they could catch him with a net.” Diantha snorts.

“They did catch his head,” Elspeth says.

“More like they harnessed him.” Diantha’s furry, pointed ears twitch with humor.

“It was a lucky throw, though. I’m sure I couldn’t tell a bog worm’s head from its ass.”

“That beast dragged the both of them around the whole lake at least a dozen times.”

“You couldn’t tell them apart afterward; they were both so covered in muck.”

“And the smell!”

“Oh, Fate, the smell!”

“It was like they’d rolled in something dead.”

“Like they’d rolled in shit and then in something that died.”

“They had to scrape themselves clean with a putty knife.”

“If I close my eyes, I can still smell it.”

“I smell it in my nightmares.”

“And that bog worm got away clean in the end, didn’t he?”

“He’s up there laughing still, mark my words, telling his little bog worm babies about the time he took two idiot shifters for a tour of the bottom of the lake.”

They’re all nearly falling out of their seats, cackling, their noses scrunched, tears gathering in their eyes. Griff has given up acting like he’s not listening. He’s cracking up, too.

Is this bog worm the same one that Darragh killed a little while back? I heard it was a monster. Should I mention it?

Join in?

Reach out?

I listen for the voice to tell me why I shouldn’t, but she’s silent.

I listen for my wolf.

She’s grinning, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, giddy to be in the middle of chatty, happy females and fresh air and sunshine.

I open my mouth.

Before I can speak, Diantha’s strong voice rings out. “I have a story.”

The laughter immediately fades. Elspeth’s eyes narrow, the lines at the corners disappearing. Mabli’s mouth tightens. My wolf gets very quiet, her ears perking.

“Remember when Justus was—what—eighteen or nineteen? And he was out past the red clay camp for some reason, and he came across the scent of humans and some North Border males?”

Everyone’s gaze shifts to Nessa where she’s sitting by the tent flap, keeping an eye on her sleeping pups. A sourness taints the air.

“Diantha,” Elspeth warns.

Diantha ignores her, looking past her to Nessa.

“Go on,” Nessa says, her voice very deliberately even, her eyes cold as ice. I can recognize a mask when I see one. Hers is good. Much better than mine.

“He was alone and outnumbered, but he smelled a female in distress, and he didn’t want to lose the trail, so he stalked them. It turned out to be a hunting party. The North Border males were guides. The humans were the paying customers. Nessa’s brother was the prey. And Nessa was the bait.”

Diantha holds Nessa’s gaze as she speaks, and there’s a challenge in the look, but no cruelty, at least not that I can recognize. Nessa doesn’t flinch, although her face has gone gray. I think this hurts her, but at the same time, I think she wants Diantha to keep going. What is that like? For someone to know your story and tell it for you?

“There were a dozen of them. They tied Nessa to a tree by the top of a hill. They chained her brother, threw him in the back of a truck, and drove away. Justus was left alone with the two North Border males guarding Nessa. How long did it take him to kill them once the truck was gone?” Diantha asks.

“Seconds,” Nessa says. “He cut their throats with his claws like that.” She snaps. Her small, cold voice sends chills up my spine.

Diantha continues, “He freed Nessa, told her to hide, and went after her brother. He tried his best, but he was on four legs, and the hunters had a huge lead and guns and numbers.”

Nessa takes over. “I found a place I could fit between the roots of an old oak by a dried-up stream. It felt like I was there for hours. Every so often, there would be a gunshot, and I would pray so hard for another one because as long as they were shooting, Bowen might still be alive.”

The wolf on Lelia’s lap jumps down and pads over to Nessa, winding between her calves. Nessa’s fingers float down to trail through the fur on the top of the wolf’s head.

“Eventually, there weren’t any more shots. And then Justus came back, covered in blood. Weeping.” Tears stream down Nessa’s cheeks. “He said he was too late.”

“He killed every single one of those bastards, though.” There’s a fierce light in Diantha’s wolfish eyes.

“I wanted to see Bowen. I made Justus take me to him. There was a North Border wolf in the dirt near his body. The wolf was enormous. As big as a bear. His intestines were trailing from his belly. Justus was so young—not much older than a pup.”

“Oh, he was fully grown,” Diantha says, her gaze hardening as it turns to me. “He was newly mated. That’s why he was out in those woods. He was trekking back to his mate’s pack territory yet again to check on her.”

My stomach knots. Yet again? How many times did he come back, and I didn’t know?

“Diantha,” Elspeth warns quietly.

Diantha ignores her, staring me down. “I have another story, since we’re talking about mothers.”

“Diantha,” Elspeth hisses louder.

“Remember how Alys died during the worst of that winter, when we were losing one or two people a day? Everyone was either sick themselves or too busy nursing their own blood or burying the dead. Remember how no one made their way up to her den for days? How Justus had done his best to bury her by himself. Was he eight? Nine?”

Justus’s words in the den echo in my head. I swear it to you on my dam’s grave.

Diantha pauses, but no one answers her. They don’t interrupt her, either. I’m going to be sick.

“His sire was already gone. How many days was Justus alone up there? No one remembers, do they?” She pins the others with her stare. No one will meet her eyes. “How long did he stay alone in that den before Max finally got well enough to go up and check on him?”

“Max had to drag Justus out,” Elspeth says quietly. “He didn’t want to leave her nest.” Her cheeks are wet with tears.

Nessa is crying, too. And Lelia. Mabli. All the females are tense, weeping, staring at me, blaming me.

They love him, and I rejected him, but they don’t want my blood. They want to tell me who he is. They want me to hear them, to see the pup who refused to come out of his dam’s nest.

Come on, Annie. We’ve got to get out of here.

You’ve got to come now. What if they come back?

Please, Annie. Please.

My chest balloons with guilt and grief and regret and rage. I didn’t ask for this—any of it. They don’t know me. Do they think this is what I wanted?

I want to shout that at them, but the muscles in my throat don’t work—they’ve never worked—and besides, it’s not them that I want to shout at, is it? These weeping mothers and daughters and sisters?

What do I do?

Where is the pecking voice now? Doesn’t my wolf want to bark at me to run and hide?

I grasp for the fear—the familiar, reliable, insistent fear that doesn’t leave room for anything else—and it’s not there. All I have left is me.

And them.

And the blue sky overhead.

The pups yipping and yapping over in the sycamore tree.

The scent of woodsmoke and fur on the breeze.

For the first time in my life, it is crystal clear in my mind that—in this moment, at least—I have a choice. I can shrink down. Wrap my arms around myself. Or I can straighten up. Open my hand.

I did it once before, didn’t I? I let go of the slat. Crawled out from my hiding place. Reached for the knife.

Inside me, close to the boundary between us, my wolf sits, quiet and watchful.

I meet Diantha’s eyes. “We lost so many,” I say. “So much.” And even though it is very, very hard, I don’t look away.

It’s not a defense or excuse or platitude. It’s the truth. No more, no less. It’s all I’ve got.

“We did,” Diantha says, her chin high. Her whiskers quiver. She’s not crying, but her diamond eyes shine.

It isn’t enough, but what else do we have?

Diantha sniffs and settles back down to her loom. She throws the little wooden boat through the threads and pulls the shaft firmly forward with a clunk. Slowly, as if she’s waking up from some spell, Elspeth begins to rock her chair again. Griff, who’d been making himself invisible, stirs the coals with his stick.

Nessa ducks into the tent and reemerges with a yawning toddler with puffy black curls. The pup plasters herself to her dam’s front and promptly falls asleep again, her head nestled in the crook of Nessa’s neck.

A pup rushes over from the sycamore with a scraped knee.

A male drops by with a bucket of water to refill our kettle.

The moment passes.

I’m not sure if I said the right thing. My hands shake as I take up my yarn again. Actually, all of me is shaking.

The voice still doesn’t have anything to say, though.

I didn’t run. I didn’t hide. I didn’t close my eyes and keep my mouth shut. And the world didn’t end.

The sun is still shining as I knit beside a fire, surrounded by this strange pack. They don’t know me. I don’t know them. But the same breeze dries our cheeks.

And when a pup shrieks in the sycamore, all our eyes flick over for a second, to reassure ourselves that everyone is safe. Everyone is well.