SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA

I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. The house just breathes differently at night—old wood, thin walls, every whisper caught and held. I’d gone for water and stopped when I heard my name.

“…Clara,” my dad said, voice low but urgent. “She turns eighteen tomorrow. We can’t keep hiding it.”

My mom didn’t answer at first. There was the soft clink of a mug and then a quick inhale. “She’s not ready.”

“She needs the staff, Cecilia.” His chair scraped. “If the Rogues catch her before the moon does—”

“Don’t call them that.” My mom’s voice trembled. “They’re not stories.”

Rogues. The word slid under my skin like ice. Dad never called anyone “demons,” not really, but Rogues felt worse. Less distant, more animal. More real.

“Clara’s father wouldn’t—” Mom cut herself off.

My glass touched the counter too hard. A dull tap. I froze.

Dad spoke softer. “Kennedy made his choice. You made yours. And I’ve made mine—she’s our daughter. But she’s also… she’s also his blood.”

My stomach dropped. Kennedy. I knew that name like people know an ache in rainy weather: familiar without a story attached. Mr. Drake had been Dad since I learned the word. I didn’t remember anything before him, and I never asked for it. I guess that made me a coward or loyal. Maybe both.

“We tell her in the morning,” Dad said. “At first light.”

“Tomorrow is her first moon as an adult,” Mom whispered. “If the mark awakens—”

“It will,” Dad said. “It should.”

I stood there a second longer, the kitchen’s hum too loud, the clock suddenly counting in my rib cage. I didn’t hear the rest. I went back to bed, tried to pretend I hadn’t heard anything, and failed. Sleep finally dragged me under like waves, and I dreamed of tall pines and silver light and footsteps keeping pace with my own.

Morning came bright and ordinary, which felt rude. The sky was scrubbed clean, the kind of blue that looks painted. Eighteen. I stared at my face in the mirror and didn’t see anything new—same hair I keep pretending I’m growing out, same eyes with odd flecks people ask about and I never know how to explain. The flecks looked brighter today. Maybe I imagined that.

“Happy birthday!” James yelled from the end of the street, waving both arms like a human flag. He jogged up, grinning, barely out of breath because of course he wasn’t. “Clara! Eighteen! Legal and dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?” I asked.

“Sharp wit. Killer smile.” He winked. “And, you know, you can vote now.”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. The tightness in my chest loosened. Mom was still asleep when I left. Dad had already gone to the precinct. I’d left a note: Out with James. Back for dinner. I didn’t add, Please don’t tell me I’m a wolf until cake time. Hilarious.

School happened in a blur—birthday wishes, the little cupcake someone smuggled into homeroom, the teacher pretending not to notice. After, James and I did what we always do when the day doesn’t know where to put itself. We went to the arcade off Baker. We button-mashed, we trash-talked, we forgot the time. We forgot everything.

Dark came early behind the pines. The air had that autumn bite, apple-sweet and cold.

“Let’s grab a drink,” I said, half-joking.

“At the place-where-we-definitely-shouldn’t-be?” James arched a brow. He was already walking.

The club sat on the edge of town pretending it wasn’t. Neon humming, bass leaking out of brick. If you squinted, the bouncer looked like a statue carved out of a mountain. Older boy handsome. I felt my ears heat up and immediately hated that about myself.

“IDs,” he said, because of course he did.

“It’s my birthday,” I tried. “Eighteen today.”

“Then happy birthday,” he said, not unkindly, “and go home.”

We tried the oldest move in the book anyway—wait for a crowd to distract him, angle right. He didn’t even look, just slid one hand out and we were suddenly outside again, laughing like idiots.

“Okay,” I said, catching my breath, “but he was… wow.”

James put a hand to his chest. “Wounded. You’ve never called me wow.”

“You’re pretty wow,” I said, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “In a golden retriever way.”

“That’s slander,” he said, giggling, and we turned down the side alley that cut back to Main.

I didn’t see him until I ran straight into him. Cold washed over me like I’d stepped through a waterfall.

“Watch—” I started, and stopped. The stranger’s eyes were the kind of dark that reflects starlight. Not black, not brown. Forest-at-midnight dark.

“Can you see me?” he asked softly.

The world went quiet. The distant bass from the club, gone. The buzzing alley light, gone. There was just his voice and the shock of it, like snow at the back of my neck.

“Um,” I said, brilliant. “You’re standing right in front of me.”

Something like relief flashed across his face, there and gone. He stepped back, and in the shiver of air between us I smelled… pine and rain, a metal tang like blood or the inside of a battery. It crawled through me, not bad exactly, just new. Too new.

“Hey! Clara!” James jogged up, breath misting. “Who are you talking to?”

I glanced at him, then back. The stranger was still there. Solid. Real. Watching me watch him.

“You don’t… see him?” I said.

“See who?” James looked around the empty alley, then at me, then narrowed his eyes like he was checking for a joke I’d forgotten to tell. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I lied. When I turned again the stranger had moved. Or vanished. Or I blinked and he used that to leave. My heartbeat was in my throat. “Never mind. I’m good.”

“Let’s go,” James said, and didn’t push, because James is annoyingly decent like that.

We cut through town in the soft, thin dark. Streetlamps threw coins of gold on the pavement. A stray dog padded across the road and stopped, watching me with too-human stillness. The fur along my arms prickled, and then it was just a dog again, tail wagging at nothing.

“I’m gonna swing by Susan’s,” I said at the corner.

“Tarot Susan,” James said, feigning dread. “Tell her I still think the Death card is bad branding.”

“It means transformation,” I said automatically, and he made a face. We split there, and I walked the last two blocks alone, the night pressing in like a secret.

Susan’s apartment was warm with spice tea and candles that had burned too low. She pulled me into a hug the second the door opened, hair wild, smile wilder. “Birthday girl!”

“Hi, witch,” I said, which she tolerated because she loves me.

“I got you something.” She rummaged until she found a soft parcel wrapped in tissue. The dress inside took my breath—moon-silver, cut simply, fabric that caught the light like water. “Tried it on you in my head,” she said. “It fit there.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “You didn’t have to—”

“I did.” She set the deck on the table. “One card. For the road.”

“I thought you hated when people read for themselves.”

“You’re not people,” she said, and that was normal Susan weirdness, so I let it slide.

I shuffled until the cards felt quiet. Drew one. An angel, head circled with a star that looked like it was lit from the inside. Flames spilled at the figure’s feet, not burning, just there, like an old friend come home.

Susan went still. “Temperance,” she said slowly. “Balance, yes, but… see the star? The foot in water, the foot on land—old symbols of crossing, of carrying two worlds. And the fire—” She hesitated. “It’s not a bad card.”

“That’s not the same as good.”

She smiled with her mouth but not her eyes. “You’ll be fine, Clara.”

“You sound like Mom,” I said lightly, and the smile made it to her eyes this time. She kissed my forehead on the way out. “Go. Before I feed you and keep you.”

Outside, the night had shifted. Or maybe I had. Sounds came apart and layered in ways I’d never noticed—frogs steadying the creek’s edge, wind threading a pine bough, something running far off and fast. When I breathed in, the air tasted like stories I didn’t know yet.

Home smelled like lemon cleaner and rosemary and the faint copper of Dad’s keys. I found him in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, chopping something he wasn’t looking at.

“Cupcake,” he said without turning. He will always say it and I will always pretend I hate it.

“Don’t start,” I warned, fighting a smile. “I’m grown.”

“As if that ever stopped me.” He set the knife down and pulled me in, his hug short and tight. When he let go, Mom was there on the other side of the island, hands braced like she was holding herself to the floor.

“My baby,” she said. “Eighteen.”

“Barely,” I said. The joke fell between us and didn’t know what to do.

Mom’s eyes were red like she’d been either crying or biting it back. She wiped her hands and came around, took mine. Her palms were warm, too warm.

“There’s something,” she said. “We should have told you sooner. We told ourselves we were keeping you safe. Maybe we were keeping ourselves safe from the telling.”

“Cecilia,” Dad said softly.

She nodded. Let go of me long enough to cross to the pantry. She reached up to the back of a top shelf and pulled down a long, wrapped object. When she set it on the counter and peeled away the old cloth, the room felt smaller.

A staff lay there, carved from pale wood veined with darker shadow. The head was a crescent shape, simple, elegant, like a moon caught mid-swing. Symbols traveled down the length—some I recognized from Susan’s books, some that made my skin hum.

“This belonged to your father,” Mom said. Not Dad. Father. The word made a dull sound in my chest. “To Kennedy. It belongs to you now.”

“What is it?” I asked, voice thin.

“An heirloom,” Dad said. “A promise.”

“Of what?” It came out sharper than I meant.

Mom looked at me like there was a story pressed behind her teeth and she was choosing which parts to let out. “A long time ago, before you were born, there were packs here. Families that… that weren’t just human. Some of us were chosen to keep the old ways, to keep a balance. The staff passes down the bloodline when the daughter comes of age.” Her hands trembled. “You are of that bloodline.”

“Mom,” I said. “What are you telling me?”

“That the world is wider than you think,” Dad said. “And that you’re not entirely what you think you are.”

I touched the staff. Heat flared under my fingers, not hot enough to hurt, exactly. The symbols seemed to shift, the way words do when you look at them too long and forget what they are. Something in me leaned toward the feeling like a plant seeking light.

“What about the Rogues?” The word scraped out of me before I could stop it. Their word, not mine. I didn’t even know if I understood what it meant.

Mom’s gaze flicked to the window. The pines at the edge of the yard stood too still. “They hunt what they fear. And they fear the bloodline. There are… old rivalries. Old debts. We’ve kept you hidden, kept you off the river path, kept you out of the woods at night—”

“Because of wolves?” I said. Saying it made it both ridiculous and truer.

She flinched. “Because of men who forget they’re men when the moon is high. Because sometimes the forgetting is contagious.”

The kitchen light buzzed. A moth battered itself against the glass. Far away, so far I might have made it up, a howl rose and broke into the night—not a dog’s. Something larger. Lonelier. My bones answered in a way that scared me.

“We should wait till morning,” Dad said. “Tell the rest with the sun up.”

Mom reached into her pocket and pulled out a necklace I’d never seen. A silver disk hung from a dark cord, stamped with the same crescent as the staff. When she slipped it over my head, the cool touched my skin and went warm all at once, like breath.

“Wear this. Don’t take it off,” she said. “If you get turned around, if you feel… if anything feels wrong, find Selene.”

“The Selene?” I asked. “From your book club Selene, or the moon goddess selene, capital S?”

“Yes,” Mom said, and then actually laughed. It sounded like it hurt and helped at the same time. “My friend. She’ll know what to do.”

Dad squeezed my shoulder. “And if a man named Jasper finds you, you go with him.”

“Jasper?” I tried the name in my mouth. It tasted like pine. And rain.

“He’s one of ours,” Dad said. “He knows the paths.”

I didn’t tell them about the stranger in the alley whose eyes held stars. I didn’t know how to say it without sounding like I’d already crossed some line I couldn’t uncross.

We ate cake like we were normal. We sang off-key. Mom cried at the second verse of “happy birthday dear,” which isn’t even a verse, and I pretended not to notice. When I went upstairs the house seemed to hold its breath. I set Susan’s dress across the chair, the silver pooling like water. I set the staff against the wall, careful, half-afraid it would roll away under its own will.

I turned out the light. The necklace warmed at my throat, pulsing slow, like a second heart. From my window I could see the ridge line where the pines bunched together, a darker dark against the sky. A wind came up and the trees answered, all their leaves talking at once.

I was almost asleep when the night split—one long howl, clean and impossible to mistake. It rolled over the roofs and through my bones and left me shaking. Not fear. Not only fear. Something old lifting its face to the sky inside me.

On my eighteenth birthday I learned a new kind of silence, the kind that exists after a truth speaks your name. Morning would come. So would answers, apparently. Also, probably, trouble.

I turned onto my side and faced the window anyway, eyes open to the dark, because it felt rude to blink. Somewhere between waking and whatever comes after, I thought I saw a shape slip the fence line—tall, shadow-quick, head lifted as if scenting the air. He paused like he knew I was there.

And then, nothing. Just night. Just the necklace steady against my skin, counting down to a moon I could already feel.

Tomorrow, the world would ask me what I was. I didn’t know yet. But I knew this: something had begun.