Prologue
Aurora
5 Years Ago
“Are you sure there’s not a bump?” I run a hand down the braid I’ve put my ash blonde hair in, craning my neck to try to see the back of my head in the mirror. “You’d tell me if there was a bump, right, Gran?”
“You’re beautiful.” Grandma Carrie puts her hands on my shoulders and gazes into the mirror at my reflection. “I’ll never be able to get over it. My beautiful, wonderful blessing, with her stained-glass eyes.”
I wince a little at the reminder that my eyes are mismatched. One blue, one amber. It’s the first thing all the other shifters notice, right before they smell my weakness and sense that I can’t shift. At school they say it’s a sign of the madness, that it’s the reason why my pack died and I can’t shift. A boy at school even told all the other kids that I ate my twin in the womb, and that’s why I have two colored eyes. He only stopped when Kieran, Alpha Cade’s son, told him he was being an idiot and to leave me alone.
“I just want to make sure everything is perfect when the elders see me today,” I tell Gran, who technically isn’t my grandmother at all. “Maybe I should wear something else…”
“Your sundress is perfect,” Gran says, kissing me on the forehead. “And if you don’t leave soon, you’ll be late. Head out, my darling Aurora, and I’ll be thinking of you from here.”
Squeezing her hands, I let her enfold me in her arms in a tight hug. Then I force myself to step away and leave her home, which has been my refuge for most of my life. It was a place where I could come when the “privilege” of growing up safe and fed in Alpha Cade’s orphanage was too much for me.
Now that I’m eighteen, the days where I can live off his generosity are dwindling, and soon… soon, I fear, he may decide that a wolfless shifter doesn’t belong in Pack Jade after all, no matter how generous it makes him seem to take me in.
But today, I’m one of the lucky shifters who gets to go to the meeting about the coming Lunar New Year, wolf or no. Alpha Cade will be giving a speech, and any able-bodied member of the pack under the age of retirement is expected to attend. I’m hoping it’ll be a chance for me to remind the elders who I am and what I represent: the last living member of Pack Onyx.
Maybe they’ll be able to give me answers about where I came from, or even tell me why I can’t shift.
I would give anything to find my wolf. Then give more to find my mate. To be a part of the pack,trulya part of it, instead of just tolerated. I’m constantly being held up as a symbol of Alpha Cade’s generosity and mercy, paraded in front of everyone to be pitied and mocked, then tucked away again.
When I get to the end of Gran’s driveway, I grab my trusty bicycle and climb on, my sundress parting around the shorts I wore underneath. It’s humiliating to bike on pack lands at my age, when everyone else uses their wolf to get places. I use theback ways as much as possible, avoiding the paths I know will be full of wolves running free.
Here on pack land, shifters can shift whenever they want. The pack amphitheater, where Alpha Cade is going to give his speech, even has extra outfits for shifters to put on when they return to human form. They strip naked and shift right out in the open far from prying eyes.
Reminding me over and over again what I don’t have.
“Your wolf will come, Rory,” Gran says, her aged fingers pressing up my chin so she can reach out to wipe my tears away with a clean kerchief. “It takes longer for some shifters than others. Took me until I was nearly fourteen. But she’ll come, and when she does, she’ll be stronger ’cause of the waiting and growing.”
I desperately wanted to believe her. But the years came and went, and now, I’m long past the age where all shifters shift. There’s no wolf inside me waiting to come out—and maybe never will be.
Gran told me that I was special. That being found and taken in meant that I was a survivor. She insisted that the kids who claimed I was cursed would see the error of their ways. But if it weren’t for the pack bond, or the fact that Alpha Cade brought me in himself, I probably would’ve been cast out by now. The only thing I even have, to prove that I’m a shifter, are my shifter senses, and even those are weaker than most, my nose, eyes, and ears barely better than a human’s.
As the amphitheater becomes visible in the distance, I hop off my bike and lean it up against a tree nearby. Then I brush myself off and stride toward the amphitheater’s wide front doors, trying to ignore the whispers around me.
“Do you think they’ll get rid of her this year?” Maya Hawthorne barely lowers her voice as she pulls a shirt over herhead, fresh from shifting. “She hasn’t gone mad yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
The large black wolf besides her shifts into the naked form of Farah Smith, her long black hair cascading down to her hips. She’s staring right at me with open disdain.
I look away, trying to tune them out, but I hear their words anyway. “She’s going to spread it, you know. I heard that she tried to kiss Garrett Grieves and right after he got sick.”
Hetried to kiss me, and his “sickness” was just a hangover courtesy of witch’s brew. It happened weeks later, but that didn’t stop him from spreading the rumor. All to keep anyone else from knowing he’d gone to one of the hedge witches to get drunk faster. Even his shifter metabolism couldn’t keep up, and when he puked during class the next day he claimed it was because of me.
The rumors sting, despite all the years I’ve spent facing them. But I shrug off the hurt and stride into the amphitheater anyway, trying to ignore the whispers that follow me as I walk through the rows of seats, words about madness, murmurs that I’ll never shift. I keep my eyes forward, toward the stage, where the elders sit with Alpha Cade.
And Kieran. His son.
Even from a distance, my eyes are drawn to him. It’s been two years since I’ve been able to see Kieran in person, at his senior graduation. In that time, I’ve never forgotten the moments we shared.
How he stood up for me. Defended me to the other students. Even carried my books once. The way his jaw would clench when he heard someone talking badly about me, as if he was holding himself back from doing something about it.
They were rare, those moments of kindness. I only ever got them from him, Gran, or some of the other outcasts. At least until my fellow outcasts got their wolves and left me.
One of my former friends, Dierdre Reynolds, is sitting near the stage next to her mate. She turns as I walk up to my assigned seat—right in the front, in case the alpha needs to call on me. Her blue eyes seem to dismiss me almost immediately, as if I’m not even there.
