Awakening - Rejected Mate and Following Fate

I've been pacing for twenty minutes.

The floorboards creak under my bare feet,a sound that belongs to this place the way mold belongs to the walls, the way the smell of cafeteria grease soaks into everything. Eleven steps to the window. Eleven steps back. The single bulb overhead flickers like it's too tired to commit.

Tonight. It happens tonight.

I stop at the window and press my forehead against the cold glass. Outside, the blood moon hangs low and bloated over the tree line, so red it looks like a wound in the sky. The kind of moon that makes your skin crawl. The kind that means something.

My name is Aurora Vance. I'm eighteen years old. I'm an orphan. And in approximately four hours, I'm going to endure the most agonizing experience of my life,the Awakening Ceremony.

Lucky me.

The room is small enough that I can touch both walls if I stretch my arms out. Two cots, two scratched-up nightstands, one shared dresser that never closes properly. Bianca's side is neat, her few belongings arranged with the obsessive precision of someone who needs to control something,anything,in a life that controls her. My side is less neat. I don't really see the point.

Bianca herself is already gone. She left an hour ago without a word, without a glance in my direction. Story of our lives.

We've been roommates for three years. In that time, she's said maybe forty words to me directly. Not because she's cruel, not exactly,she's just Sterling. And I'm Krueger. Or I was, before I became neither.

Here's how it works: ten years ago, the Vampire War tore through our world like a blade through smoke. Three major packs fought together on the front lines. Sterling was one of them. Krueger was the other. My mother,silver-furred and fierce and twenty-six years old,died in the third month. My father held out until the sixth before a vampire's claws found his throat.

I was eight. Too young to remember their faces clearly, old enough to know I'd never stop trying to.

The war ended. The packs survived. The surviving pack members looked at the orphans left behind,the children of the fallen,and saw not grief, not legacy, not sacrifice. They saw weakness. They saw proof that their parents hadn't been strong enough. That the blood that ran in our veins was compromised. Flawed.

Reject. That's what they started calling us. The ones without a pack, without a family, without a place. Shipped off to facilities like this one,glorified holding pens dressed up as orphanages,and quietly forgotten.

The funny thing is, Bianca and I should have been allies. Two Rejects, same broken world. But old hatreds don't dissolve just because you're both at the bottom of the pile. Sterling and Krueger were rivals long before the war. The resentment passed down like a family heirloom, the only thing either of our packs left us.

So she ignores me. I let her. It's easier.

I push away from the window and drop onto my cot, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. The mattress springs dig into my lower back.

Awakening at eighteen. God, even thinking the words makes my stomach drop.

Most wolves in this world awaken early,twelve, thirteen, some even younger. The powerful ones, the ones with strong bloodlines, the ones who are someone,they shift young. Their wolves are eager to emerge. Their place in the hierarchy gets cemented before high school.

Damien Krueger was eight years old when he first shifted.

Eight. The same age I was when I watched my father die. While I was sitting in a government facility eating stale crackers and trying to remember what my mother smelled like, the future Alpha of the Krueger pack was already running through forest on four legs, already proving what his blood was worth.

I met him once. I was fourteen. He was eighteen and already towering, already carrying himself like the world owed him deference. He'd come to tour the facility,some kind of mandatory pack leader's visit, the kind that makes the administrators scramble and the kids stand up straight.

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,coming around a corner too fast, too preoccupied with my own thoughts. My shoulder caught his arm. He didn't even stumble. I did.

He looked down at me sprawled on the floor with the kind of expression that tells you exactly where you rank. Not anger. Not cruelty.

Indifference. Like I was furniture that had inconvenienced him.

"Watch yourself," he said, and stepped over me.

That was it. That was the entirety of Damien Krueger's impact on my life,a moment of careless dismissal that somehow burrowed under my skin and stayed there, a splinter I couldn't reach.

Watch yourself, Aurora. I've been watching myself ever since.

The thing about the Awakening Ceremony is that it hurts. That's not a secret,every wolf knows it. Your body breaking itself apart and rebuilding into something new, something other, something that runs on instinct and moonlight. I've heard grown wolves describe it in hushed voices: like burning alive from the inside out. Like your skeleton is being replaced one bone at a time with something sharp and wrong.

I've been waiting for this my whole life and I'm terrified of it.

That's the other thing about being a late bloomer,you've had years to hear the horror stories. The early shifters go through it young enough that the pain doesn't leave the same kind of scar. They don't have time to build a mythology around it. They just suffer and emerge and move on.

I've built a mythology. It's not a good one.

But here's the thing. Here's the thing I hold onto when the fear gets loud:

After tonight, I can leave.

The facility releases Rejects the moment they've awakened. It's the rule,the one thing we're entitled to. Once you've shifted, you're technically an adult wolf. You're no longer a ward of the system. You're free. Free to go wherever you want, claim whatever miserable corner of the world is willing to have you.

Free to stop being someone else's burden.

Free to just go.

I've been planning it for two years. A bag packed under my cot with everything that matters,which isn't much. A route mapped in my head. I'm leaving this territory the moment I can walk out of the ceremony grounds. I don't care where I end up. Anywhere is better than here.

Just survive tonight. One night. And then you're done.

The alarm on my phone buzzes,the one I set three weeks ago as a countdown. Two hours.

I drag myself off the cot and into the bathroom. The fluorescent light hums and buzzes and throws everything in pale yellow. I turn on the shower and wait for the lukewarm trickle to stop being cold.

I strip off my clothes mechanically, step under the water, and stand there for a long moment with my eyes closed.

You can do this.

After, I stand in front of the mirror. Just me and the blood moon pouring through the small window and this face I've been looking at for eighteen years.

My mother's face. That's what everyone tells me,or told me, back when anyone still talked about her. Her cheekbones. Her mouth. Her pale silver eyes. She was a white wolf, rare and striking and apparently legendary in her own quiet way. All I have left of her is this face in the mirror and the memory of her hands.

I pull my dark hair back. I put on the simple clothes I'd set aside,things I don't mind ruining, because I've been told the shift isn't kind to fabric.

The moon is higher now. Brighter. I can feel something under my skin that wasn't there this morning,a low, restless vibration, like a second heartbeat. My wolf. Stirring. Finally waking up to claim what's hers.

Okay, I tell her silently. Let's get this over with.

I shoulder my bag, set it beside the door,I won't need it tonight, but I want it ready for tomorrow morning,and I sit down on the edge of my cot.

I wait.