The Alpha Girl and Her Rogue Mate

Secrets

Of course, while I was sitting out in my tree, Aunt Tara had called my mom. I hear her car on the driveway all the way from the pond. Werewolves have really good hearing, even before we shift and even in our human forms. Werewolves are also speed demons, so the screech of her tires as she turns on a dime onto our street was certainly not subtle. She was going even faster than usual, from the sound of it. I don’t stir from the boughs or even sit up any straighter. I stay slouched over staring down at the water. I had always loved to watch the fish dart to and fro. I sometimes bought fish food in town and scattered it as I sat out here. I don’t have any with me today.

A few minutes later, when my mom doesn’t seem to be coming out to find me, I think that maybe, just maybe, I lucked out and she isn’t home to talk to me. At least until I hear the sound of my father’s car pulling up, screeching louder and I assume faster than my mom had.

Now that they are both here, I hear them approaching. They aren’t attempting to be quiet. Maybe they’re worried about startling me. I shift my weight on the branch so I am facing the way they’re coming, and when they burst through the trees I don’t flinch. They knew where I was, of course. I’ve loved this tree since I was two and my mom used to place me on her lap while she sat in the lowest bough, telling me about the fishes and fauna.

“Skylar?” My father speaks first, approaching me cautiously.

“We heard you felt the heat,” my mother says gently. I roll my eyes. My parents are aware of my ambivalence to, and borderline disdain for, the idea of my wolf. I’ve never told them why. I’m not sure they know exactly why. I’ve never told them why.

“No. I just felt a little shaky. Maybe I need to eat.” I reply, as nonchalantly as I can. The heat is what we call the first time you start to sense your wolf, and it happens a little differently for each person. But I know that everyone always feels a burning sort of feeling in their chest. That’s why it’s called the heat. And I know that’s what it was. But I don’t want to talk about it. 

My parents exchange a look.

“Maybe,” my mom says, even though we all know she doesn’t think so.

“No, really.” I say, in a confident tone, hoping it doesn’t sound too confident. “I had a headache at school all morning. There’s a bug going around.”

“That could be it,” says my father, “but do you really think that’s what it is?”

He stares at me for a long time and I try not to break eye contact. Most of the pack could never maintain this kind of eye contact with our Alpha without answering a direct question. Thankfully, as his kid, I’ve always been exempt, both to the rules about obeying the Alpha and to the wolf in me forcing me to look down and answer. I’m sure my mom, as Luna, is glad it doesn’t apply to her either. My father is quick tempered, but my mother is the real force to be reckoned with. I can hold eye contact with my father for much longer than I can with my mother. I asked her about it once, as a kid, but she just laughed and told me that she was the Alpha of motherhood.

Of course, as a kid, I didn’t quite get what she meant. So for several years I thought my mother was a secret Alpha of some kind.

She is the one who breaks the silence of my dad and I staring each other down.

“We should have told you sooner, Sky.” she says, and her voice is unusually measured and quiet. “We wanted to talk to you about how things can be different when you have Alpha blood, but you never wanted to talk about your wolf. We didn’t want to push you.”

I roll my eyes and say, “more like you didn’t want to deal with telling me I might not even be a wolf!”

My mom and dad share a puzzled look, which I have to admit isn’t what I expected. 

“Skylar, why would you think you aren’t a werewolf?” my father asks me.

“Because everyone says it,” I tell him. But a minute passes while they continue to look bewildered and I begin to doubt it. “Don’t they?” 

“I don’t think so?” My mother’s voice is no longer even, it’s filled with an emotion I can’t quite identify. “Do people say that to you?”

“No, not to me. They would never. But they say it about me. I’ve heard it.”

My father furrows his brow a little. “Who?” His voice booms, and this time I can’t avoid the question.

“Pierce,” I say, unable to look him in the eye. I mutter it, staring at a leaf in my hand which I absentmindedly start to shred.

I’m still sitting on that tree bough. And because it is so low to the ground, I am only about a foot or so above them. Yet in this moment right now, I feel as if I am on the ground, a small child not wanting to admit the truth.

My father emits a low growl. As I look up I can see his snout elongating and hair sprouting on his arms, which is what I knew would happen. But my mother suddenly gives a low growl of her own, and somehow it’s much scarier even though she hasn’t shifted. My father’s shift slowly starts to fade.

“Walk it off, Cliff.” my mother says to him. He stares at her for a few moments with fury still lingering in his gaze and on his face, his muscles still tense. Then, suddenly, he nods curtly and turns on his heel toward the pond. “And no mind link! Go calm down,” she calls after him.

My mom turns back to me. “When did you hear Pierce say that?” she asks me.

The truth, though, is that I can’t remember. Not exactly. At some point, he stopped saying it where I could hear. I think at a certain age, he realized I might be paying attention. But I’d heard him say it more than once before that realization came to him.

I sigh, a bit heavier than I meant to. “I don’t know, more than once.”

“More than once?” My mom’s voice is sharp.

“A few times, but I was young. I mean, people never think kids are listening.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“Uh, well,” I pause. I don’t want to tell her. Honestly, Pierce has never been outwardly cruel to me. I’ve always been a little uncomfortable around him, and sometimes he acts like he doesn’t know how to interact with me, but I don’t think he is a bad person. He’s never been mean. He usually brings us kids candy when he comes out to the packhouse. “Basically, I just heard him a few times saying that...you know, that he was glad the Goddess hadn’t made a mistake, that she got it right for him. Or, I guess, that maybe Acer was your real first born, that it was possible I didn’t have a wolf. He said that would explain how I came first, if I was a human child.”

“Did anyone else say things like that?” she asks. I was hoping she wouldn’t.

“Again, not once I got older. Other than some kids, and that was mostly when we were young and maybe they didn’t know better. But…” I pause, gulp, and continue. “I did hear Uncle Blaise say it once.”

My mother’s eyes go wide. “Tara’s husband?” she gasps. I nod, not quite meeting her eye.

My mother closes her eyes and seems to be calming herself down. I hear her muttering something that sounds like “he’s dead, it’s fine,” and she seems to be tense, concentrating on not shifting, I think.

My Uncle Blaise was my father’s Beta until I was 9. But he grew impatient with my father, called him weak for sending half our Warriors to California when a wolf from the Green Pine Pack, here in Oregon, turned rogue and started killing humans unchecked out there. Blaise said it wasn’t our place to interfere. He said it was a ploy by the Green Pine Pack to attack us while our Warriors were away. 

A week after half our Warriors left, Blaise and a few other wolves who had always hated the Oregon Federation attacked my father at the packhouse. They even got a few rogues in the area to help. My father killed Blaise and everyone involved.

We never talk about him. Tara scrubbed him from her house, promised to never mention him, and swore she didn’t know about his plans. My father believed her. Tara grieved not for her husband, but for her daughter.

My cousin Lakeyn had a sister, Mirabelle. They were twins, three years younger than me. Blaise and the others attacked during a pack meeting, and when Mirabelle saw her father fighting, she tried to run to him. A rogue killed her before anyone could blink, in front of all of us.

Everyone always assumed it was over the Oregon Federation. Over sending the Warriors to California. I never told anyone that two weeks or so before the attack, I heard Blaise on the phone with someone, and he said, “an Alpha that has a female human firstborn is no Alpha at all. No Alpha of mine.”

I didn’t really know what it meant at the time. But if I had said something, maybe Mirabelle would still be alive.