Chapter 3

I was already arranging my things in my suitcase when the door opened.

Priya didn't knock. She just came in and closed the door behind her and stood there for a second like she was deciding something. Then she crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed and turned on the small lamp on the nightstand and looked at me.

"What are you doing? Why are you arranging your things back in your suitcase?" she asked, looking at me like she knew what was going on in my head.

"My manager called last night, and there are some issues that require my attention, and I can't do it from here," I told her, not wanting to tell her I overheard her and her mom.

She already knew I had heard. I could see it on her face.

"How much?" she said, not beating around the bush.

"Enough."

She nodded slowly. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

"Okay," she said. "Okay, I'm going to tell you everything, and I need you to just let me get through it before you say anything."

I didn't respond. I sat on the bed and waited.

"You know how I've always been the one who hears things before everyone else. In school, remember when I heard the fire alarm two seconds before it went off and you thought I was messing with you." She stopped. "That wasn't nothing, Zara. I hear everything. I smell everything. I see in the dark without trying. I have since I was a child, and I've been careful my whole time in the city to make sure you never really noticed."

The room felt very small suddenly.

"Priya."

"Let me finish." She pressed her hands together in her lap. "My family, this town, these people. We're not like you. The world is not as you know it to be, there are many supernatural beings living among humans. I am a werewolf, Zara, and I know how that sounds, and I know you're about to panic, but I need you to stay with me."

I stared at her like she had grown two heads already.

I had known Priya for seven years. I had shared food with her, cried in front of her, and called her from a hallway floor two days ago. Seven years of knowing someone's face, and I was looking at her right now like she was a stranger. I expected something but not this.

"Say something," she said.

"Are you kidding me, werewolves?" I said, laughing, but she wasn't.

"You're serious."

"Yes."

"You're actually...."

"Yes."

I got up. I didn't know where I was planning to go, the room wasn't big enough to go anywhere, I just needed to be on my feet. I stood in the middle of the floor and pressed my hand to my mouth and thought about the woman on the pavement who said I smelled strange. The man on the bicycle. Priya's mother's face. Not a human.

"They were all looking at me because they could smell that I wasn't one of them," I said.

"Yes."

"And the whole town is...."

"Most of it."

I sat back down on the bed because my legs made the decision before I did. "I need to leave Priya. I need to go home."

"I know that's what you're feeling right now. But Zara, you are safe. Nobody here is going to hurt you, I would never have brought you somewhere you weren't safe."

"You brought a human," I said, and my voice came out strange, "into a werewolf town without telling me."

She flinched. "I know."

"Why?"

"Because you needed to get out of the city and you needed me, and this is where I am." She reached over and took my hand. Her grip was firm. "And because I have been your best friend for seven years and I was not going to let you sit in that apartment alone."

I looked at her hand on mine. Same hands I had seen a thousand times.

"You could have taken me somewhere else or just let me be," I said, pacing around the room.

"I know."

"This is actually insane."

"I know Zara."

We sat there. The lamp made a small yellow circle around us and outside the window Wrenfield was completely dark and completely quiet.

"What happens now?" I said finally.

"Tonight there's a ceremony. A festival. The alpha's first son is choosing his mate and the whole town will be there." She hesitated. "I think it would be better if you came than if you stayed here alone. People already know you're here. If they see you at the festival, with me, under my family's protection, it tells them something."

"What does it tell them?"

"That you're not a threat. That you belong to someone here." She stood up and went to her bag and pulled out a folded piece of clothing. A dress, dark green, simple. "Wear this. My scent is on it, it'll cover yours enough that people won't react the way they did in town today."

I took the dress from her. Held it.

A mate-choosing ceremony. In a werewolf town. Wearing my best friend's clothes so I smelled like her instead of like myself.

Two days ago I was sitting on a kitchen floor crying over Marcus and now I am here. All of this still feels like one big bad dream.

"Priya," I said.

"Yeah."

"You owe me an enormous explanation."

"I know," she said. "I'll give you all of it. But put the dress on first."

She talked while I got ready. Sat on the bed and talked and I listened and asked questions and she answered them and by the time I was dressed I had the outline of it, the shape of what Wrenfield actually was. That there were other creatures living in this world, that those vampires and witches they show in movies are real.

The town had been here longer than the official maps showed. Built by a pack that came over before the country was a country, dug in, grew and stayed. The alpha wasn't elected, it was blood. The pack had a hierarchy that everyone understood and nobody questioned publicly and questioning it privately was something you did very carefully. The ceremony tonight was not a suggestion, every unmated she-wolf of age was expected to be present because the first son choosing his mate was a pack event not a personal one.

"What happens if he doesn't choose anyone tonight?" I asked.

"He will. There's pressure. There's always been pressure on Darius." She paused on the name like she had said it more carefully than she meant to.

"You know him?"

"Everyone knows him. He's the alpha's son Zara, not a celebrity. Just someone I grew up around." She stood up. "We need to go."

The festival was on the edge of town where the trees opened into a wide flat clearing and someone had strung lights between the branches so the whole place glowed warm and gold. There was music, low and rhythmic, and fire in a central pit and more people than I had seen anywhere in Wrenfield combined.

And the women.

I don't know what I expected but I was not prepared. They were dressed like they had been preparing for this for months, and maybe they had. Beautiful in a way that felt slightly too much, too deliberate, the kind of beauty that has intent behind it. They stood in groups and moved with a confidence that was physical, not performed, like they were entirely comfortable in their own weight and their own skin.

I was wearing Priya's dress and standing next to Priya and trying not to make eye contact with anyone.

"Stop looking at the ground," Priya said quietly.

"I'm not looking at the ground."

"You're looking at the ground."

I looked up.

There was a raised area at the far end of the clearing, not a stage exactly, more like the ground was naturally higher there and someone had put chairs on it. Important people chairs, the kind of chairs that mean something. An older man sat in the center with the particular stillness of someone who never had to make themselves noticed. The alpha, it had to be.

Beside him a young man stood talking to someone, relaxed and smiling, built like someone who had never once been told no. The first son. Darius. He had that deliberate ease that good-looking people in power always seem to have.

I was scanning the rest of the raised area when I saw him.

He wasn't standing. He was sitting slightly apart from the others, chair pushed back just enough to create a distance that was clearly intentional, one arm resting on the side, not talking to anyone. Dark. Not dark in coloring, though that too, but dark in the way he occupied space. Like light worked slightly differently around him. He had those dark blue eyes. I saw him yesterday from the forest. It couldn't be him, right?

He was looking at me.

Not glancing. Not the quick curious look I had been getting all day from people in town. He was looking at me directly and he didn't look away when I caught him, and that did something immediate and unwelcome to my breathing. I think it's him.

I turned to Priya. "Who is that?"

She followed my eyes and something crossed her face. "That's Caius. Don't look him in the eye he is dangerous."

"And."

"And he is the second son." She lowered her voice even though we were surrounded by noise. "He's different from his brother. Different from everyone here actually. He's a hybrid Zara. Half werewolf, half vampire. Vampires are our enemies so nobody really likes him here and he has this dark energy around him so everyone avoids him."

I looked back at him. He was still watching me. Not the way the town had watched me, not that confused alert smell-based awareness. It was like he knew who I am.

"Why is he still looking at me?" I said.

Priya didn't answer right away.

"Priya."

"I don't know, just ignore him," she said, but she said it in the same voice she had used in the car when she told me to ignore the staring and not to worry and everything was fine. The voice she used when she knew exactly what was happening.

I was still looking at him when Priya grabbed my arm. "Isn't Darius so handsome though, I kinda wish he would pick me," she said, suddenly sounding like a completely different person.

I had already stopped listening. My head was full and getting fuller and I needed air that was not shared with several hundred werewolves and one hybrid who kept looking at me like he was reading something.

"I need to clear my head, I will be back," I said to Priya, not checking if she heard me.

I moved through the crowd without direction, not caring where I was going, just needing distance from all of it, when I walked straight into something solid.

Not a wall. Walls do not have clothes.

I looked up.

Dark blue eyes looked down at me, the same ones from across the clearing, reading something in my face that I could not see myself.

How did he get here.

He straightened and glanced past my shoulder.

"The ceremony is that way, miss."