Juniper
The crowd was deathly silent as Anders’s words sank in.
My stomach dropped. I didn’t want to be Anders’ mate, but the thought of being a rejected mate was even more terrifying.
My breath puffed out in icy clouds, each one a gasp of shock.
In some rare cases, people chose not to go through with the pairing, preferring to run off alone rather than bind themselves to someone they wouldn’t or couldn’t love.
But to be outright rejected? By the alpha, no less? That was a hundred times worse.
The elders all stirred uncomfortably at his words. As rumbles of conversation filtered through the onlookers, Douglas raised his hand for silence.
“Uh, Anders, perhaps we can discuss this in private before—”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Anders snarled.
“I am the alpha of this pack. You can’t expect me to mate with a woman who has no wolf.
She’s damaged, broken. Unfit for anyone, especially an alpha.
” Anders lowered his head, his face softening—less anger, more disappointment.
“I just…” He shook his head, then finished in a kinder tone.
“I’m sure she’ll be a good match for someone else, but I can’t take her as my mate. I’m sorry.”
He tossed the card down and stalked off the stage, vanishing into the crowd. I watched in numb confusion as he strode in the direction of his home.
Beatrice pulled at my arm, pressing her lips close to my ear. “Juniper, I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”
I barely heard her. All I could do was stare in horror as Anders walked off into the night.
Around me, the crowd muttered in confusion.
This couldn’t happen. I couldn’t let it happen.
A rejection meant I had to leave. The elders couldn’t assign Anders another mate until I was gone.
Their process told them I was the best match for him, and my presence would only continue throwing off the ceremony.
I’d be a blight on Anders, and his chances at a mate.
Anders would be forced to find a reason to banish me, and the elders would expel me from the pack because they wouldn’t want to anger the new alpha.
My gaze finally landed on my grandmother. She stood in front of her store, hand to her mouth, and tears in her eyes. I couldn’t leave her. Who would take care of her? Who would help her? No. I refused to let this to happen.
“Can we, uh, please have some order?” Douglas said, raising his hands and speaking into the microphone. “Let’s… perhaps pause the proceedings for a bit. We can begin again later.”
The crowd ignored him, getting louder as conversations broke out everywhere.
People looked at me, muttering under their breath.
What were they saying about me? Not everyone in Idlewild was bigoted towards me, but maybe they would be now.
I’d already been afraid that Anders’s dislike of me might bleed over to everyone else, and now that was becoming more possible by the second. I had to find a way to fix this.
“Juniper?” Beatrice hissed. “Are you hearing me? Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. Can we…” It was like I had a vise around my lungs, making it hard to breathe. “Can we get out of here?”
“Yeah. Sure. Come on,” she said, tugging me along.
Moving through the crowd was almost worse than standing in the middle of it.
Every eye pierced me with judgment and confusion, or worse, condemnation.
The chilly air was nothing compared to the heat of shame that burned my cheeks.
As we made our way through, Beatrice shoving people aside with less-than-polite words, my mind spun to find a way to fix this.
I would do whatever was necessary. I’d make Anders see that I could be a good mate.
The fear of expulsion pushed everything aside, even my own hopes and dreams. This was bigger than what I wanted.
My parents died when I was young, so I was all my grandparents had.
I was the one who would be there as they grew older and helped them.
As an outcast lone wolf, I would never be allowed to return, and I’d spend my days imagining them growing older and frailer, until they were unable to man the store and cook their own meals.
They’d taken care of me all these years.
The least I could do was be there for them.
And the only way for me to do that was for Anders to accept me as his mate.
“Let’s go,” Beatrice said once we were free of the crowd.
We practically jogged away from the burgeoning chaos of the arrangement ceremony. The fresh, cold air on my face helped clear my head, and eventually, when we reached the small footbridge that crossed the small creek on the outskirts of town, I’d managed to calm down.
Beatrice helped me sit, treating me as though I was injured rather than simply shocked and distraught. The gurgle of the water beneath us soothed me even more.
“Okay,” she said, patting her thighs once with both hands. “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know,” I said miserably. “I can’t let it stay this way.”
“Uh…yeah, no shit,” Beatrice said. “What do you want me to do? Sneak into Anders’s house and put his balls in a clamp until he agrees to take you as his mate?”
“We can’t force him to accept me,” I said, rolling my eyes at the suggestion. “He has to want me.”
Beatrice looked at me for a long moment before speaking. “Do you even want him to accept you?”
She was my best friend; she knew exactly how I felt about Anders and how he felt about me.
All those years ago, when Anders and the other had left me, lost and alone, in the forest, she’d been livid.
Beatrice had almost beaten Ander’s ass for that.
The only thing that had stopped her was me begging her not to. It would have only made things worse.
“Of course I do.” The words came out sounding hollow and half-hearted.
Beatrice gave me a condescending look. “Are you really trying to lie to me right now?”
Sighing, I turned away, looking over the side of the bridge at the running water and the frosty edges of the creek. “I don’t want to be Anders’s mate, no, but there’s no other option. You and I both know the elders will have a hard time assigning him another mate.”
She snorted. “They’ll have an impossible time. They spend an entire year going over star charts, birth sequences, bloodlines. They track pheromones and do blood tests to find the best match. With you here, no matter what they do, you’ll always come out as the best option.”
“Exactly,” I said, pointing at her, fear trickling up again. “If Anders wants anyone else but me for a mate, he has only one choice.”
Horror dawned on Beatrice’s face. “You think he’ll expel you from the pack? The elders won’t let him do that. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“The elders have, and always will, acquiesce to whatever the alpha wants. It’s been like that with every alpha ever. As long as it doesn’t bring harm to the entire pack, the elders will go along with it. Plus, an alpha needs a mate.”
“I won’t let them kick you out. No way. Not happening,” she said, crossing her arms like a petulant child.
“You can say that all you want, but the truth is the truth,” I said.
Beatrice sat there for a moment before shaking her head. “What do we do?”
“There’s nothing you can do. It’s all on me. The entire reason Anders doesn’t want me is because I don’t have an inner wolf. I’m a shifter who can’t shift. I need to find my wolf. That’s the only option I have. I need to be able to shift, and I need to be the kind of woman he’d want.”
Beatrice scowled at me. “What the fuck does that mean?”
I sighed, my frustration overriding my fear. “You know. You’ve been around Anders as long as I have. The girls he dated in school? Sexy, super feminine, seductive. All the things I’m not.”
I preferred pajamas to sexy clothes. I was a doer and liked helping around the store. I’d helped my grandfather change the oil in the lawnmower every summer since I was nine years old. I wouldn’t have called myself a tomboy, but I was far from the typical arm candy Anders preferred.
Beatrice looked both shocked and disappointed at that. “You’re going to change yourself? Fuck that. You can’t pretend to be something you aren’t.”
“That’s the least of my problems, Bea,” I said. “Acting a little sexier is easy. It won’t change who I am inside. Finding my wolf is the tough part. If it was easy, I’d have done it over ten years ago.”
“Fair enough,” she said, but I picked up on the irritation in her tone. “That being said, how are you going to do that? Like you said, you’ve tried everything you can think of. I love you for who you are, your grandparents do as well. We don’t care that you don’t have a wolf.”
I chewed my bottom lip. A thought occurred to me, but it sounded crazy in my head and would sound even crazier if I said it out loud. It was folklore and superstition, but that was better than the guaranteed expulsion that would come.
I spoke in a low whisper, almost afraid to say it. “Leviathan Cross.”
Beatrice froze, her eyes widening in surprise and horror. “Excuse me?”
“Leviathan Cross. He could help me.”
She gripped my knees and stared directly into my eyes.
“What the hell are you talking about? What do you think the Demon Wolf is going to do for you other than kill you? Holy shit, that may be the least of your worries. He might enchant you and, like, have his way with you, then kill you, then eat you. God only knows what he’s capable of. ”
Leviathan Cross was a whispered name among all the surrounding packs.
The disgraced alpha had been banished into the woods after allegedly murdering his mate.
He’d become a dark legend akin to the boogeyman, something parents told their children about to get them to behave.
The Demon Wolf, who’d crawl through their windows and tear them apart if they didn’t do their chores or eat their vegetables.
But there were other legends about him, ones spoken about in hushed tones around campfires and kitchens late at night.
Those legends said rejected mates, especially women, would be taken by him, never to be seen again.
He was rumored to have been the most powerful alpha ever, not only in the Idlewild pack where he’d been born, but in every pack within a hundred miles.
According to the stories, he’d spent the century after his exile in his wolf form, longer than any shifter in history, and in that way, he remained ageless in his human form.
If that was true, he’d had a hundred years to learn all the ways of a wolf.
If anyone could show me how to access my wolf, it was him.
“Wait!” Beatice said. “Hang on. Not only is this batshit crazy, but how the hell do you even know if he’s real?
No one alive has ever even seen him. For all we know, he’s just a story.
Some poor piece of shit who died alone in the woods, and a legend sprang up around him.
I’m not letting you walk off into the woods to get lost and die of starvation or dehydration.
We both know how directionally challenged you are. ”
“I…uh…I think I’ve seen him,” I said, admitting something I’d been afraid of all these years.
“Say what?” Somehow, her eyes went even wider.
I’d never told her what had happened that in the woods.
It had been so ethereal, like a dream, that I sometimes had a hard time believing it was real.
Late at night, when I was alone in bed, I’d think about the man who’d come from the forest like some kind of ghost and wonder who he really was.
He’d said he was from a neighboring pack, but there had been something ancient about him, some intense power that had radiated from him.
Even now, my lips tingled at the memory of his kiss.
It had been a simple gesture of kindness, though there had been an intensity toward the end that had taken my breath away.
He’d been like a genie summoned to grant a wish, and he’d done so.
He was Leviathan Cross, I was almost certain of it, and if he’d granted me one wish back then, maybe he’d grant me another now.
“I’ve seen him. I’ve met him. I…uh…well…I kissed him once,” I muttered.
Beatrice’s face went slack as if she was a robot and someone had unplugged her. Finally, she managed a couple of croaking words. “Holy shit.”