The Rejection

The marble floor of the Luna hall was cold enough to feel through my shoes, and I'd been standing on it for forty minutes.

"Step forward," Elder Marcus said.

He'd known my mother. He didn't look at me now.

I stepped forward. The hall was full — two hundred wolves at least, the whole pack packed onto the benches, and every one of them had come to watch me take a vow I'd rehearsed in my bathroom mirror until the words lost their shape. My hands were sweating. I wiped them on the dress, then stopped, because the dress cost more than my rent and Lena would kill me.

At the end of the aisle, Alpha Cole stood with his hands clasped behind his back. Black suit. No tie. He had the kind of face that made people lower their voices, and I'd spent six months learning to read the small changes in it — the jaw, the pause before he spoke. I knew what his mouth did when he was pleased. I had never seen it do that for me in front of anyone.

"Let's not drag this out," Elder Marcus said, and the room quieted. "The Luna ceremony is a formality. The bond is what it is. The Moon chose."

Someone in the third row laughed, muffled, like a cough.

I fixed my eyes on the banner above the doors. Silver thread, the pack crest, a wolf's head with its teeth showing. My mother used to say the moon didn't make mistakes. She'd said it the last night I saw her, and she'd been wrong about a lot of things, but I'd kept that one in my pocket anyway.

"Alpha Cole," Marcus said. "You've asked for the oath to be administered. Before the pack, then."

Cole turned. He didn't come toward me. He stayed where he was, and that was the first thing that went wrong, because a ceremony like this, he was supposed to walk to me. The silence got a texture. People shifted on the benches.

"Nora," he said.

"Cole." My voice came out steady. Good. I'd practiced that too.

"I've thought about this." He let the words sit. "I've given it more thought than you're going to want to hear."

"Then say the part you're stalling on."

His jaw moved. That was the tell — I'd learned it in the truck after the border run, when he'd asked me to check the map a second time and I'd found the turn he'd missed. He didn't like being corrected in front of people. He'd never once said so.

"You don't have a wolf," he said.

The benches went still. Not quiet — I could hear someone breathing through their mouth, a chair leg scraping, the pipes ticking in the wall behind the dais. But still, in the way water goes still before it drops.

"I know what I don't have," I said. "I've known that since I was fifteen. You've known it since you were twenty-two. We've been through this, Cole. We sat in your office and we went through it line by line."

"Then you should have known better than to stand up here."

"I stood up here because you asked me to." My ears were hot. I made myself keep my hands at my sides. "You sent the dress. You sent Lena with the dress."

"I sent the dress," he agreed, and something in his voice made me want to sit down. "I'm not going to stand here and pretend I didn't."

Marcus cleared his throat. "Alpha. The pack is waiting."

"The pack can wait," Cole said, and he finally walked to me. Three steps. His shoes made a clean sound on the marble. Up close he smelled like cedar and the coffee he drank black at four in the morning, and I hated that my body knew that, that it leaned in before my brain caught up. "Nora. A Luna has to be able to hold the line. To shift. To run with the pack on the full moon and not be carried home."

"I've held the line," I said. "I did the border rotation for three winters while the rest of them —"

"You held the line with a rifle."

"It worked."

"It worked because nobody on the other side wanted a fight. What happens the first time they do?" He said it quietly, almost kindly, and that was worse than shouting. "You're not fit for this. You were never fit for this. I should have said it in private."

"You did say it in private." My voice cracked on the last word and I let it. "You said it in private and then you sent the dress."

He looked at the dress. His mouth did the thing it did when he was pleased, and my stomach turned over, because it wasn't pleasure. It was a decision he'd already made, wearing the face he wore when things went his way.

"I'm rejecting you," he said. "Before the pack. It's cleaner."

"You're rejecting me," I repeated.

"You'll keep your job. The garage, the office work, it's all on paper —"

"Keep my job." I heard myself laugh. It came out wrong, high and short, and the benches stirred. "You're throwing me out of your bed and offering me the filing cabinet."

"Don't make this ugly."

"You made it ugly when you wrote the speech." I pointed at the folded paper in his hand. He'd been holding it the whole time. I hadn't seen it until now. "You wrote it down. You wrote down *wolfless* and *unfit* and you brought it to a ceremony and you're reading it to two hundred people who watched me carry your dinner up the stairs for two years."

He put the paper in his pocket.

"The rejection stands," he said, loud enough for the room. "Nora is wolfless. She cannot be Luna. She will be removed from pack grounds and from the territory by sundown."

Someone on the benches said *finally*. A woman's voice. I didn't turn around to see who.

Two guards stepped out from the side door. I knew both of them. Toby had a kid and a bad knee and he'd helped me jump-start my truck in October. The other one, Dane, was nineteen and hadn't spoken to me since the night I beat him at cards and he lost his week's pay.

"Don't," Toby said, low, when I pulled my arm back. "Please. Don't make me."

"He can't do this," I said. "Marcus. The elders have to vote. That's the law — the rejection has to be ratified —"

Elder Marcus looked at the floor.

"Marcus." My voice rang off the stone. "You knew my mother."

"I knew your mother," he said, and folded his hands together in front of his belly, and that was all. He didn't say the rest. He didn't have to.

Dane's hand closed around my upper arm. His grip was too tight for a nineteen-year-old; he was enjoying it. Toby took the other side, gentle, apologetic, and somehow that was the worst part, the way he kept murmuring *easy, easy* like I was a horse that had spooked.

"Walk," Dane said.

I walked. What else was I going to do? The doors were open at the end of the aisle and the evening was coming through them, gray and wet, the smell of the parking lot and the pine behind it. I could feel every eye on the back of my neck. I could feel Cole's, too, and I didn't look around, because I'd rehearsed that. In the mirror. *Don't give him your face.*

They took me down the front steps. My heel caught on the second one and I went down on one knee, and Dane yanked me up by the elbow before I'd finished falling, and the dress tore at the shoulder with a sound like paper. Somebody up on the landing laughed.

"Get her to the gate," Dane said. "The Alpha wants her past the line by dark."

The pack grounds ended at a cattle gate and a strip of gravel that turned into county road. Beyond that was neutral land — nobody's, technically. The border patrol didn't go out that far, and neither did anyone else.

They marched me. The gravel bit through the soles of the dress shoes Lena had picked out, and my knee was bleeding into the hem, and I kept my chin up like a fool, because if I was going to be dragged, I was going to be dragged looking at the trees instead of the ground.

We were halfway down the drive when it happened.

It started under my ribs. A pull, like a hook sunk behind the sternum, and then heat, spreading through my chest and down both arms. I stumbled. Toby caught me and swore.

"Hey. Hey. She's burning up —"

"Keep walking."

"She's *hot,* Dane, feel her —"

They stopped. I was on my knees in the gravel and I couldn't get my breath, and the heat rolled through me in a wave that made my fingers curl into the stones. My skin itched. Not itched — *moved,* like something under it had turned over in its sleep.

"Nora." Toby crouched down. His face had gone the color of the gravel. "Nora, what's happening?"

"I don't —" I looked at my hands. The backs of them. Under the skin, thin as a thread, something was glowing. Silver. It ran up the veins from my wrist to my knuckles and faded, and it felt like a door opening somewhere deep in a house I'd never been inside.

Dane took a step back. "What is that."

"Nothing," I said. I closed my hands into fists. The glow pressed between my fingers, dimmed, went out. "It's nothing. It's the light."

"There's no light," Dane said. "It's cloudy. There's no —" He looked at Toby. "She's doing something. She's doing something, we have to tell the Alpha —"

"She's bleeding on the ground, Dane, look at her —"

"Get her out." Dane's voice had gone thin. "Now. Get her past the line."

Toby pulled me up. He was shaking. He kept his hand light now, careful, like I was made of something that might go off. "Come on," he said, very quietly. "Come on, Nora. Just a little further."

I got my feet under me. The heat was receding, leaving me cold and hollow, and my knee hurt, and my shoulder hurt, and the silver was gone. But I could still feel it. A pressure behind the ribs, patient, waiting, like a hand pressed flat against a door on the other side.

They walked me to the gate. Toby lifted the latch. The road stretched away into the gray, wet and empty in both directions.

"Don't come back," Dane said. "I mean it. Alpha's orders."

"Tell him something for me," I said.

"What."

I stepped through the gate. The gravel changed under my shoes to cracked asphalt, and the wind came up off the fields, cold and smelling of rain.

"Tell him I said thank you," I said. "For the dress."

Toby's mouth opened. Dane pulled him back through the gate and dropped the latch, and they walked away fast, not quite running, and the trees closed in behind them.

I stood on the road alone. My bag was still in the hall — my wallet, my keys, my phone, all of it sitting on a bench where I'd left it because Cole had said there was no need to carry anything into a ceremony. He'd been right about that. There was nothing I needed from his hall.

The first drop of rain hit the asphalt and made a dark circle the size of a quarter. Then another.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach, and under it, faint as a pulse, the silver pressed back.