Cast Out at Dawn

I packed my bag in the dark because I could not bring myself to turn the light on.

Turning the light on felt too real, too final, like an acknowledgment that everything had actually happened and there was no taking any of it back. So I moved through the room by memory instead, pulling out only what I needed and leaving everything else exactly where it was.

I took my clothes, my training gear, and the small pouch of herbs sitting on my desk. I left the rest without looking at it too long, because looking at things too long was going to break me again and I could not afford that right now.

The last thing I picked up was my mother's photograph from the nightstand. I held it for just a moment before tucking it carefully into the side pocket of my bag. It was the only thing in that entire room that had ever truly felt like mine.

I heard his footsteps in the hallway before I saw him. I knew the sound of them too well after six years, that particular weight and rhythm that I had spent so long listening for whenever he was near. I straightened up and kept my back to the door and waited, because I already knew who it was and I needed a moment to prepare myself.

He stood in the doorway without speaking at first. I could feel him looking at me and I kept my eyes on the wall in front of me and said nothing. He tried to start speaking twice and stopped both times before the words came out, and I stood there listening to him fail and felt something exhausted and sad move through me.

"Aria," he finally said, his voice quieter and rougher than I expected.

I did not turn around. I kept my eyes on the wall and my hands on the strap of my bag and I waited for whatever he was going to say.

"I'm sorry," he said.

The two words sat in the room between us and I looked at them the way you look at something that arrived too late to do any good. I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder and walked to the door. He stepped aside as I reached him and I walked straight past without looking at his face, because looking at his face was the one thing I genuinely could not trust myself to do.

"No you're not," I said quietly as I passed him, and then I walked down the hallway and down the stairs and out through the back door without looking back once.

Beta Rhys was already waiting in the courtyard when I came outside. He was standing with his hands clasped in front of him and his expression carefully blank, the look of someone trying very hard not to show that they felt uncomfortable about the job they had been given. He nodded once when he saw me and turned toward the southern path without a word.

He walked three steps behind me the entire way to the border. Not beside me.

Behind me, at a careful measured distance that told me everything I needed to know about what I was to Silverstone Pack now. I was not a person being accompanied somewhere. I was a problem being escorted out.

The sky was pale grey and lightless, that strange hour just before sunrise when the world has not decided yet what kind of day it is going to be. Everything was quiet except for our footsteps and the soft sound of birds beginning somewhere in the trees ahead of us. I kept my eyes forward and my breathing steady and I told myself over and over that I was going to be fine.

I am not sure I believed it.

We reached the border stone after about twenty minutes of walking. It was old and worn smooth and I had run past it hundreds of times during morning training without giving it a second thought. Now I stood in front of it and it felt like the edge of a cliff. Rhys stopped a few feet behind me and I heard him take a breath like he was about to say something.

"Don't," I said, without turning around.

He closed his mouth. Some things did not need to be said and would not be made better by saying them.

I shifted my bag on my shoulder, took one slow breath, and stepped across the border.

The pack bond did not break cleanly the way I always imagined it would. I used to think it would feel like a single snap, one sharp pain and then done. It was nothing like that at all. It came apart slowly, thread by thread, each connection dissolving one at a time in a long and terrible sequence that I felt through my entire body. I felt every single one go. The warriors I had trained beside. The elders who remembered my mother. The pups I had helped through their first shifts. Each one pulled free and left behind a cold empty space where something warm had been.

By the time the last thread went I was twenty steps into the Darkwood and I could barely feel my own legs anymore.

They gave out on me without warning.

One moment I was walking and the next I was on my knees in the wet dirt with my bag fallen off my shoulder and both hands pressed flat against the cold earth. I had not decided to stop. My body simply made the decision for me, the way it does when you have pushed past the point where willpower can reach.

The rain was falling steadily by then, coming down through the tree branches and soaking through my jacket and into my hair. I pressed my forehead toward my hands and just let it fall. I did not have anything left to fight it with. Everything that had happened in the last few hours sat on top of me all at once, the ceremony, the fall, the silence of three hundred wolves, Rhys walking three careful steps behind me, the bond unravelling piece by piece, and I stayed on my knees in the dirt under the rain and let it all be as heavy as it actually was.

I do not know how long I stayed like that.

Long enough for the cold to settle deep into my bones. Long enough for the rain to completely soak through everything I was wearing. Long enough for the sounds of Silverstone to disappear so completely behind me that there was nothing left in any direction except the forest and the rain and my own breathing.

I was just beginning to tell myself that I needed to get up, that kneeling in the rain was not a plan and I needed to make an actual plan, when the howl came from somewhere deeper in the trees ahead of me. The same low, long, wild sound from the night before, the one that had stopped me at the tree line. I lifted my head slowly.

It came again, closer this time, and then I heard something else underneath it.

Footsteps moving through the undergrowth ahead of me, slow and deliberate, unhurried, like whatever was coming already knew exactly where I was and was in no particular rush to get there.

I tried to push myself up from my knees.

My arms shook with the effort and my legs felt like they belonged to someone else, but I managed to get one foot under me before the footsteps stopped completely.

Silence.

And then between the trees, two eyes caught the faint grey morning light filtering through the branches and reflected it directly back at me. Bright and completely still and fixed without any hesitation on my face.

Silver. Completely and startlingly silver.

I stopped breathing entirely.