Tearing-b

The breath went out of me. I actually felt my knees start to soften with relief, and I took a step forward, and then he said the rest of it.

"I reject you as my mate and my Luna."

I stopped mid-step.

It didn't register at first. It sounded like words in a language I'd learned a long time ago and forgotten. Then it hit, and the canvas ripped, and the taste of copper flooded the back of my throat, hot and thick. My hand went to my chest without my permission. Around me, three hundred people made the same small sound. Not a gasp. A kind of soft, embarrassed exhale, the noise people make when someone drops a tray.

I had tripped over a root, and this time I'd dropped everything.

"You'll... you'll want to accept," Garrick said, and his voice cracked on the last word. Just slightly. He cleared his throat and tried again, and I watched him puff himself up, watched him hold his shoulders like a man wearing a coat that doesn't quite fit. "The pack needs a strong Luna, Sloane. Someone the other packs respect. You know that. It's nothing personal."

Nothing personal.

"You told me to trust you," I said. It came out in a whisper. I hadn't planned to say it. "Behind the granary. You said..."

"Sloane." His eyes flicked toward the crowd, panicked, and then back to me, and I saw it. He was scared. Not of hurting me. Of me saying it out loud, in front of everyone, in front of his father. "Don't."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chloe.

She was standing three feet from him with both hands pressed over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking. Tears had already started, right on schedule, silver ribbon catching the torchlight, and I thought, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful: *She's making this about her.* That was Chloe's gift. Whatever happened to anyone, somehow it ended up being about how hard it was for her to watch.

And then Garrick did the thing that finished me. He turned and held out his hand to her.

"Chloe," he said. "Will you stand with me?"

She lowered her hands. She looked at me, and for half a second, before she rearranged her face, I saw something in her eyes that wasn't sorrow. It was satisfaction. It was so clean and so brief that I almost thought I'd made it up.

"Oh, Garrick," she said, and stepped into his hand.

The clearing broke open. Cheering, clapping, the drums starting up somewhere behind me. It took a second to understand that they were happy. They were celebrating. Everyone had known. Everyone had known the silver wolf would get the crown, and the only person in three hundred who'd believed otherwise was standing there in a hemmed-up green dress with a rock around her neck

Deep in my gut, something moved.

I'd been keeping it down since I was twelve. My wolf. Not the bright, quick, silver-tongued thing the other girls got, the ones who shifted at sixteen and ran through the woods laughing. Mine had never come out. It had never shown itself.

It just lay there in the dark at the bottom of me, heavy and patient and enormous, and I'd known from the first night it stirred that it wasn't like theirs. It moved like something with too much weight behind it. It scared the hell out of me. So I shut the door, and I never opened it again, and eventually everyone stopped asking why I never shifted and just decided I couldn't.

It moved now. Not a whine. Not a cry. A low, slow growl, so deep it rattled my back teeth.

 Let me out,  it said. It had never spoken before. It didn't use words, exactly. It was more like meaning arriving all at once, cold and simple.  Let me tear his throat out. 

 No,  I thought, and shoved it back down so hard my vision went white at the edges.  Not here. Not now. 

Across the ring, Garrick was looking at me again. Actually looking this time, his pale watery eyes finally settling on my face. And he looked guilty. He really did. That made me angrier than anything else had.

"Sloane," he said. "You know I care about you. But the pack..."

"The pack needs a silver," I said.

My voice sounded flat. Dead. Like a voice I'd borrowed off someone else's shelf. Garrick flinched. Somewhere behind him Chloe made a small, wet, muffled sound into her fingers, and the people nearest me suddenly found the ground very interesting.

My eyes slid past them. I couldn't help it. I looked for my father.

He was staring at the dirt.

And then, beyond him, I caught Elder Rowan. He hadn't moved. He was leaning on his staff, watching me with those pale, unblinking eyes, and on his face was not pity, and not triumph. It was something more like relief. The look of a man who's been holding his breath for a very long time and has just been told he can let it out.

I didn't understand it. I would think about it a lot, later.

"I accept your rejection," I said.

I didn't wait for whatever came next. I turned around and walked.

Past the elders. Past the enforcers in their blue and silver. Past the girls I'd grown up with, who looked away like I was contagious. Past my father, close enough that I could have touched his sleeve. He didn't lift his head. I kept my spine straight, because if I bent it even a little, I knew I'd fold up on the ground and never get back to my feet. I kept my chin up. I made it all the way to the tree line without a sound.

Then I ran.

I ran until my lungs felt like I'd swallowed glass. I ran until the green dress caught on a bramble and tore to the knee and I didn't stop to fix it. I ran until my boots were soaked through and my shins were scraped raw, and somewhere in there the drums behind me faded out, and there was only the sound of my own breath sawing in and out of my chest.

I couldn't stop. Every time I slowed, I felt it. The place where the bond used to be. A hollow, bleeding cavity right in the center of me, and the second I stopped moving it would swallow me whole.

The sun went down. The woods went dark. The cold came in, thin jacket, thin dress, biting at my arms. I should have stopped. I should have found a hollow log, or climbed a tree, or let my wolf out and used her eyes to see. But I kept the door locked, and I kept moving, a human girl stumbling over roots in the dark, crying without any noise because I was so tired, so unbelievably tired, and the crying seemed to be happening a long way off, to someone else.

Trust me, Sloane. 

I wiped my face on my sleeve and kept going.

I didn't notice the trees changing until the smell hit me. The pines of Moonstone had thinned out without my seeing it, replaced by black, twisted oaks whose bark looked burnt. The air tasted different. Wet ash. Old iron. Something like blood that had soaked into the ground so long ago it had become part of the soil.

I stopped so hard I nearly fell.