Rejected Luna: Claimed by the Lycan King

Four years I was Grayson Mercer's secret, and he ended it in front of four hundred wolves with the Lycan King watching.

It started with a note under the door.

I found it at five in the morning, when I got up to light the stove in Agnes's kitchen. A square of paper folded twice, pushed through the gap where the cottage door never quite met the floor. I knew the handwriting before I unfolded it. I'd been reading that handwriting since I was eighteen, on notes left in the hollow pine by the creek, on the backs of receipts, once on the inside of my wrist in pen.

Tonight. I promise.

That was all. I stood in the cold kitchen in my socks and read it nine times.

"You're grinning at the kettle," Agnes said from the doorway. She was sixty-three and she wore the same green cardigan every spring, the one with the hole in the elbow she'd been meaning to darn since I was a child. "Nobody grins at a kettle, love."

"I'm not grinning."

"You are. Sit down. I'll do your hair."

I sat. She brushed out my hair the way she'd done every morning since I was five years old, and it was brown, because she dyed it brown every month the way my mother had told her to, and I'd stopped asking why a long time ago. She poured my tonic into the little glass and set it by my hand. Grey, bitter, one swallow. My mother's medicine. I drank it without thinking, the way you breathe.

"Big night," Agnes said, and her hands went careful on the braid. "The whole pack on the green. The King's people in the Alpha house. You'll keep to the back, Nova."

"I always keep to the back."

"I know you do." She tied off the braid. "I just want you to keep doing it."

She didn't know about Grayson. Nobody did. That was the whole point of a secret.

Juni came by at noon with a dress over her arm, a blue one, her own good one, the only good thing she owned. Juni Ostrow was nineteen and an omega and the fastest talker in Hollowpine, and she had decided when she was twelve that I was her person, and nothing anyone said to her about the wolfless girl had ever made her undecide it.

"You can't wear the brown thing," she said. "Not tonight. Everybody's going to be there. The King's going to be there."

"The King isn't going to look at me, Juni."

"Nobody's going to look at you in the brown thing. That's my point."

I wore the blue dress. I'm telling you that so you understand I'd hoped.

The Ascension started at moonrise.

Hollowpine is a pack of four hundred wolves in a valley town with one main street, a feed store, a high school, and a green in front of the Alpha house where we've held every ceremony for a hundred and twenty years. That night they'd hung string lights between the pines and set up a stage on hay bales, and every wolf in the pack was there in their good clothes, phones out, filming. The April moon came up full and enormous over the ridge, and the old wolves howled at it the way they always do, and the young ones laughed at the old ones.

The King's people had arrived that afternoon in six black SUVs. The Lycan King was on his spring tour of the southern packs, and Conrad Mercer had spent a year getting Hollowpine onto the list. I'd seen the King once, from the healer's porch, getting out of a car. Tall. Dark coat. A face like a closed door. Every wolf on the street had stopped breathing until he went inside.

Now he sat at the high table at the edge of the stage, under the lights, with a big fair-haired man standing behind his chair, and he didn't look at anyone.

I stood at the back, by the healer's table, where I always stood. Agnes had a basket of bandages and a jar of honey, because somebody always gets hurt at a ceremony. I held the honey.

A boy from the Kettle Creek delegation came over with a split knuckle from some argument by the beer tent, and I cleaned it and pressed my thumb over the cut the way I always did, and felt the skin knit under it, warm. He looked at his hand and then at me.

"Thanks," he said. "You're the one with no wolf, right?"

"That's me."

He went off sucking his knuckle. I wiped my hands on a cloth and didn't watch him go.

Conrad Mercer stepped down first. Twenty years as Alpha, a short speech, a long applause. Then Grayson walked up onto the hay-bale stage and took the pack.

He looked so good. That's the stupid part. He was twenty-five and tall and golden in the string lights, and the whole pack roared for him, and I stood at the back holding a jar of honey and loved him so much it hurt my teeth.

The ritual words. The oath. The pack answering. And then the part everyone had come for.

"A pack needs its Luna," Grayson said, and the green went quiet.

I'd imagined this moment for four years. I'd imagined him looking for me in the crowd. I'd imagined walking up through four hundred wolves who'd spent my whole life looking at me like a stray dog, and every one of them watching me go.

He looked for me in the crowd. He found me.

Then he turned and held his hand out to Tessa Rowe.

The Beta's daughter. Twenty-three, beautiful, born with a wolf that came at thirteen and a laugh that had followed me down every hallway of Hollowpine High. She took his hand like she'd been expecting it for years. Maybe she had.

The green exploded. Cheering, howling, phones up.

I didn't move. I couldn't. The jar of honey was cold against my stomach.

Grayson raised his hand for quiet, and the pack gave it to him, and then he did the thing I still dream about.

He turned back to the crowd. He found me again. And he said, in his Alpha voice, so the whole valley could hear it:

"There's one more thing. Nova Rose. Come here."

Four hundred heads turned. The crowd opened in front of me the way water opens around a stone. Agnes said my name, low, behind me. I gave her the honey. I don't remember deciding to walk, but I walked, up the aisle of my whole life, in Juni's blue dress, to the foot of the stage.

He didn't come down to me. He looked down.

"I, Grayson Mercer," he said, "reject you, Nova Rose, as my mate."

Somebody gasped. Then somebody laughed, and the laugh caught like dry grass.

Because nobody had known. And now everybody knew. The wolfless girl, the healer's charity case, the one who couldn't even shift at the full moon, had been the new Alpha's mate. And he was throwing her away in front of everyone.

"I won't make a wolfless girl my Luna," Grayson said.

The laughter got louder.

Here is what I learned in that moment. When the worst thing happens in public, you get a choice, and it's a very small choice, and it's the only one you get. You can give them the show they came for. Or you can make them watch you not give it to them.

I didn't cry. I'd spent four years practicing not crying in front of Grayson Mercer, and I wasn't about to waste the training.

"Say it again," I said.

The laughter faltered. He blinked at me.

"You're doing this in front of everyone," I said. "So do it properly. Say it again, Grayson. Slower. I want to make sure I heard you."

Something moved in his face. For one second he looked like the boy at the creek. Then his father shifted his weight on the stage behind him, and the boy went away.

"I, Grayson Mercer, reject you, Nova Rose, as my mate."

"I accept," I said.

The bond broke.

I'd heard it described. Everybody has. Like a rib cracking, the old wolves say, like a tooth pulled with no numbing. It was worse. It went through the middle of me and out the back, and for a second I couldn't see the stage. I locked my knees. I did not fall down. I would rather have died on that grass than fall down.

And under the pain, there was something else.

A cold hum, deep in my chest, like a struck bell. Silver. I don't know how else to say it. And the moonstone pendant at my throat, my mother's, the only thing of hers I owned, was burning against my skin like it had been left in a fire.

I put my hand over it. It was so hot it hurt my palm.

I didn't have time to understand it, because Conrad Mercer had stepped forward, smiling, and he was enjoying himself.

"Hollowpine keeps the old ways," he said to the crowd, and the crowd hooted, because they knew what was coming. I knew what was coming. Every girl in every pack knows. "A girl rejected before her pack has her Answer. Before the moon sets, she may name a second mate from the unmated wolves here tonight." He spread his hands at me. "Go on, Nova. Who'll it be?"

The laughter was enormous now. That's what the Answer is for. It's the oldest joke in the valley. Nobody's been accepted in a hundred years. You name a boy, the boy says nothing, and silence is a refusal, and the pack gets to laugh at you twice.

Tessa was laughing, her hand over her mouth. Owen Rowe was laughing. Boys I'd patched up after fights were laughing and shoving each other, not me, not me.

I looked at all of them. Every unmated boy in Hollowpine. And then I looked past them.

At the high table, at the edge of the light, the Lycan King was sitting very still. He had been sitting very still for a while, I realized. Since the bond broke. His hands were flat on the white tablecloth and he was looking at me, only at me, and his eyes were not the color they'd been on the street. They'd gone pale, almost silver, and the big fair-haired man behind his chair had put a hand on his shoulder.

The silver hum in my chest got louder.

I don't know why I did it. I've told myself a hundred reasons since. Because it was the cruelest joke I could make back. Because if they were going to laugh at me twice, I wanted to choose what they laughed at. Because I wanted Grayson, just once, to look at me and be afraid of what I'd do.

"I name," I said, loud enough for the back row, "the Lycan King."

The laugh started. Huge. Delighted. A wolfless nobody in a borrowed dress, naming the sovereign of every pack on the continent. They'd be telling it for years.

Then the Lycan King stood up, and four hundred wolves went to their knees, and he looked at nobody but me.

"Accepted," he said. "Mine."

Nobody stood up for a long time.

That's the thing they don't tell you about kings. When one stands, everyone else goes down, and they stay down until he lets them up, and he didn't let them up. Four hundred wolves knelt on the wet April grass under the string lights, and the only people still on their feet on the whole green were me and him.

The herald was the first to move. Old Barney Kell, who'd read out every notice in Hollowpine since before I was born. He crawled to the edge of the stage on his knees with the pack's book of law in his hands, because Conrad was hissing at him to read it, read it.

"The Answer," Barney read, and his voice shook. "A wolf rejected before the pack may name a second mate from among the unmated present, before the moon sets. If the named wolf accepts, the Answer stands. An Answer accepted cannot be withdrawn." He swallowed. "By anyone."

"It was a joke," I said.

Nobody answered me. I said it again, louder, to the green. "It