Chapter 2 The White Wolf

The first shift was not beautiful. Nobody held my hand. Nobody applauded. I changed in mud and storm water while three rogues argued over me in growls - who got my throat, who got what was left. Garrick won the argument. He always did. My spine snapped first. I heard it before I felt it, a wet crack that ran teeth to tailbone, and then the pain arrived all at once and the world went white. My fingers broke backward. My jaw unhinged and rebuilt itself around teeth that were not mine. The borrowed dress tore off me in strips. Stop fighting me, the voice inside roared. Fight THEM. Garrick hit me before I had four legs under me. He went for the throat, the way a wolf who has killed girls before goes for the throat - no hesitation, no wasted motion. His teeth sank into the side of my neck and shook. Blood filled my mouth. My blood. He was tearing me open and I was still half girl in my head, still thinking this cannot be happening, I was at a ceremony an hour ago, there was a bonfire, there was music- My paw caught him across the face and ripped his bad eye out of its socket. He screamed. Actually screamed, a sound no wolf should make. He let go of my neck to get away from the pain and that mistake saved my life. I got my feet under me. I was bigger than him. I only understood it when I stood all the way up and he had to look up at me - a full head taller, white fur already matted red down one side, rain steaming off me. For the first time in his life, Garrick the rogue Alpha, Garrick who wore a necklace of exile teeth, hesitated. "Direwolf," he snarled, in blood-language, the way wolves speak without mouths. "They're dead. You're dead. You're just late." He did not run. Rogues who run in the Borderlands starve, and Garrick had not survived twenty years out here by being careful. He circled, limping now, one empty socket streaming, and feinted left - and the brown rogue I had forgotten hit me from the right and took me down into the mud. We went over together. His claws opened my ribs. I felt them part, hot and deep, felt the cold rain get inside the cut a second later. My new body made a sound I will hear in my sleep for years. I bit down on the first thing in reach. His ear, half his face. I shook my head the way he had shaken my neck. He did not scream like Garrick. He made a small, surprised noise, and stopped moving, and did not start again. I had killed him. There was no time to be sick about it. There was no time to be anything about it. Garrick was already coming, not at me - At the boy. The third rogue. Seventeen, ribs like a ladder, shaking so hard he could not keep his wolf shape. Garrick had leashed him the crude rogue way, dominance hammered into his spine like a nail, and I could suddenly see the leash, black and rotting, wrapped twice around the boy's throat. Garrick knew what I was looking at. "He hunts for me, or his sister dies coughing," Garrick said, almost conversational, circling the boy. "Don't he, Finn? Tell the dead queen what happens to little sisters who don't get their medicine." Finn made a noise I have only heard once since, in a war hospital. "She died," Finn whispered. "Three days ago. You told me she was getting better. You made me hunt two more nights for a corpse." "And you'd have kept hunting." Garrick shrugged with his whole body. "That's the beauty of a leash. Hope's cheaper than food." He lunged for Finn's throat. Punishment. Example. A message to me about what things cost out here. I broke the leash first. I do not know how I did it. I reached for that black rotting cord with something that lived behind my ribs where the mate bond had been, and I tore it out by the root. In the real world there was no sound. In the other world it was a bell cracking. Finn dropped to the mud gasping like a drowned pup pulled out of a river - free, and feeling it, and terrified of it. Garrick's teeth closed on empty air where a leashed boy's obedience should have kept him still. Finn scrambled backward on his hands and Garrick rounded on me with murder in his one good eye, and all his age, all his cruelty, in one final charge. This time I did not hesitate. This time I was not half a girl. I met him head-on. His weight hit me like a falling tree and drove the air out of my torn ribs. My claws found mud, then purchase, then him. We rolled to the edge of the fallen pine, snapping, ripping, and his teeth found my shoulder and ground down to bone while mine found the underside of his jaw. Finish it, my wolf said. Not cruelly. The way winter says it. He will leash every wolf he ever meets. He will kill every Finn. Finish it, or wear it. I finished it. My jaws closed. I felt his jaw break, felt the fight go out of him in one great shudder, felt him try - at the very end, with an Alpha's pride - to Command me to release him. His will hit mine like a wave hits a cliff. Like it was nothing. Like he was nothing. Then he was dead under me in the rain, and the Borderlands were very quiet, and I was standing over two corpses with blood running out of me in three places. I threw up. Wolves are not built for it. It was horrible and undignified and I did not care. My legs shook. My side was opening and closing with every breath. The white fur down my left foreleg was red to the paw. "Miss-" Finn said. "Miss, you're- that's a lot of blood, that's-" "Don't call me miss." My voice in blood-language came out ragged. "Kings and corpses get titles out here. I'm neither yet." "You killed Garrick." He stared at the body like it might apologize. "Nobody kills Garrick. The packs send hunters and the hunters come back in pieces. You killed Garrick on your first shift." "Then the packs are worse at this than they look," I said, and my legs folded. The shift back was worse than dying would have been, I think. Broken things had to break again to fit in a girl. I came back to myself on my knees in the mud with Finn's jacket around my shoulders - he had looked away, the idiot, even in the Borderlands there are manners - and my own blood making black mud of the white dress rags stuck to my skin. "The horn," Finn said suddenly. Silvercrest. Low, long, and much closer than a horn should be. Then a second answered it. Two hunting parties. Pincer. "They heard you change," Finn said. "White wolf howl travels for miles. They'll bring silver, Miss- Elara. They'll bring silver and they'll tell the council you went rabid in exile and they had to put you down. That's the story already. We're it." A silver-tipped crossbow bolt took the pine trunk beside my head and quivered there, hissing faintly where the rain touched it. Neither of us had heard the shot. "Run," I said. "I can't shift back, I can't- after the leash, I can't-" "Then run as a boy." We ran as a girl who should have been dead and a boy who could not change, through black trees, over roots that took what was left of my feet, my side leaking with every step, the horns getting their bearings behind us. I could hear hounds now. Silvercrest hounds are bred to ignore every scent but the one they're given. They had been given mine before I even left the ceremonial circle. Rowan had planned that far ahead. The rejection had never been the end of it. Then, through the rain, from the old river road below us, a scream wiped every other thought out of my head. A girl. Young. Not a wolf's scream - a human throat, raw with it. Steel trap, Finn mouthed at me, gone white. Silvercrest set them along the river road and lied about it to their own council. "Please-" the voice cracked, thinned out, tried again. "I can't shift- please, somebody, I can't shift-" The hounds bayed behind us, closing. Finn grabbed my arm. "That's a death trap and a dead girl and we are bleeding, we have to go the other way, Elara, we have to-" I looked at him. I looked back once, toward the horns and the silver and the pack that had made my rejection into a hunt before my body was even cold in the ground. Then I turned downhill, toward the screaming, and I ran straight at it with everything I had left. Some of us don't get to be saved. We get to be the ones who arrive.