“Uh…yeah, no shit,” Beatrice said. “What do you want me to do? Sneak into Anders’s house and put his balls in a clamp until he agrees to take you as his mate?”
“We can’t force him to accept me,” I said, rolling my eyes at the suggestion. “He has towantme.”
Beatrice looked at me for a long moment before speaking. “Do you evenwanthim to accept you?”
She was my best friend; she knew exactly how I felt about Anders and how he felt about me. All those years ago, when Anders and the other had left me, lost and alone, in the forest, she’d been livid. Beatrice had almost beaten Ander’s ass for that. The only thing that had stopped her was me begging her not to. It would have only made things worse.
“Of course I do.” The words came out sounding hollow and half-hearted.
Beatrice gave me a condescending look. “Are youreallytrying to lie to me right now?”
Sighing, I turned away, looking over the side of the bridge at the running water and the frosty edges of the creek. “I don’t want to be Anders’s mate, no, but there’s no other option. You and I both know the elders will have a hard time assigning him another mate.”
She snorted. “They’ll have an impossible time. They spend an entire year going over star charts, birth sequences, bloodlines. They track pheromones and do blood tests to find the best match. With you here, no matter what they do, you’llalwayscome out as the best option.”
“Exactly,” I said, pointing at her, fear trickling up again. “If Anders wants anyone else but me for a mate, he has only one choice.”
Horror dawned on Beatrice’s face. “You think he’ll expel you from the pack? The elders won’t let him do that. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“The elders have, and always will,acquiesce to whatever the alpha wants. It’s been like that with every alpha ever. As long as it doesn’t bring harm to the entire pack, the elders will go along with it. Plus, an alphaneedsa mate.”
“I won’t let them kick you out. No way. Not happening,” she said, crossing her arms like a petulant child.
“You can say that all you want, but the truth is the truth,” I said.
Beatrice sat there for a moment before shaking her head. “What do we do?”
“There’s nothing you can do. It’s all on me. The entire reason Anders doesn’t want me is because I don’t have an inner wolf. I’m a shifter who can’t shift. I need to find my wolf. That’s the only option I have. I need to be able to shift, and I need to be the kind of woman he’d want.”
Beatrice scowled at me. “What thefuckdoesthatmean?”
I sighed, my frustration overriding my fear. “You know. You’ve been around Anders as long as I have. The girls he dated in school? Sexy, super feminine, seductive. All the things I’m not.”
I preferred pajamas to sexy clothes. I was a doer and liked helping around the store. I’d helped my grandfather change the oil in the lawnmower every summer since I was nine years old. I wouldn’t have called myself a tomboy, but I was far from the typical arm candy Anders preferred.
Beatrice looked both shocked and disappointed at that. “You’re going to change yourself? Fuck that. You can’t pretend to be something you aren’t.”
“That’s the least of my problems, Bea,” I said. “Acting a little sexier is easy. It won’t change who I am inside. Finding my wolf is the tough part. If it was easy, I’d have done it over ten years ago.”
“Fair enough,” she said, but I picked up on the irritation in her tone. “That being said, how are you going to do that? Like you said, you’ve tried everything you can think of. I love you for who you are, your grandparents do as well. We don’t care that you don’t have a wolf.”
I chewed my bottom lip. A thought occurred to me, but it sounded crazy in my head and would sound even crazier if I said it out loud. It was folklore and superstition, but that was better than the guaranteed expulsion that would come.
I spoke in a low whisper, almost afraid to say it. “Leviathan Cross.”
Beatrice froze, her eyes widening in surprise and horror. “Excuseme?”
“Leviathan Cross. He could help me.”
She gripped my knees and stared directly into my eyes. “What the hell are you talking about? What do you think the Demon Wolf is going to do for you other than kill you? Holy shit, that may be the least of your worries. He might enchant you and, like, have his way with you, then kill you,theneat you. God only knows what he’s capable of.”
Leviathan Cross was a whispered name among all the surrounding packs. The disgraced alpha had been banished into the woods after allegedly murdering his mate. He’d become a dark legend akin to the boogeyman, something parents told their children about to get them to behave. The Demon Wolf, who’d crawl through their windows and tear them apart if they didn’t do their chores or eat their vegetables. But there were other legends about him, ones spoken about in hushed tones around campfires and kitchens late at night. Those legends said rejected mates, especially women, would be taken by him, never to be seen again.
He was rumored to have been the most powerful alpha ever, not only in the Idlewild pack where he’d been born, but in everypack within a hundred miles. According to the stories, he’d spent the century after his exile in his wolf form, longer than any shifter in history, and in that way, he remained ageless in his human form. If that was true, he’d had a hundred years to learn all the ways of a wolf. Ifanyonecould show me how to access my wolf, it was him.
“Wait!” Beatice said. “Hang on. Not only is this batshit crazy, but how the hell do you even know if he’s real? No one alive has ever even seen him. For all we know, he’s just a story. Some poor piece of shit who died alone in the woods, and a legend sprang up around him. I’m not letting you walk off into the woods to get lost and die of starvation or dehydration. We both know how directionally challenged you are.”
“I…uh…I think I’ve seen him,” I said, admitting something I’d been afraid of all these years.
