1. Spring Grass

1

Spring Grass

REBIN

T he cool evening air that flowed down from the Rocky Mountains, scented with pine and early-blooming columbine, nearly hummed with anticipation and promise. The Mountain pack had gathered to lift up some of its youngest members, who were ready to fill the darkness with howls of delight. To become full members of the pack.

Our Alpha stood in the center of at least a hundred shifters, the light from the full moon making his hair and eyes glitter eerily in the night. A few of our pack had stayed in their human forms, waiting for their friends to complete the ritual, but the rest had already taken to four feet, and were ready to run.

I was in the center of the ring, naked, like the other five undergoing the ritual. This moon, there were three females and three males who were mature enough to shift. Alpha Samuel would command us to change into our wolf forms, and we would obey.

Or at least the others would. This wasn’t my first time standing in the ring with a group of eighteen to twenty-one-year-olds, the age of maturity for our kind. It wasn’t even my twentieth attempt.

The ritual for the first shift was meant to be easy, like stepping through a door, entering into adulthood. But without that step, you were stuck. In our pack, you couldn’t take a mate or strike out on your own until you’d shifted.

I had been in this same spot once every season for four years for my first sixteen attempts to shift. Then once a year for the seven years following that. But I’d never changed, no matter how firmly or how often our Alpha shouted the command. No matter how much power he’d poured into it, it was like my wolf was asleep, or deaf. Maybe just so weak, he couldn’t emerge. But I knew he was there.

I couldn’t go back home to the small shed my father had built for me next to my parents’ cabin, after my fourth year of failed attempts. I couldn’t eat at my mother’s table and face the disappointment in her eyes. Wouldn’t return to these humiliating nights with other shifters who looked younger every year, but who joyfully became wolves while I failed again and again.

Shame and humiliation burned through me like acid as the Alpha stepped close to me and laid a hand on my shoulder, sympathy in his gaze. “This is your year, Reb. I can feel it.”

I could feel something too, deep in my bones. I was going to fail, and then I would do what I’d promised myself, when that happened. I would leave the pack, go out past the border, and either be killed by the rogue shifters who roamed out there… or live in the human world, as a human.

I might as well be one anyway. No one knew why I was twenty-nine years old, and unable to shift. No one understood how my inner wolf could resist obeying the Alpha’s command again and again. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a wolf; I could feel him inside, motionless and silent as usual.

Beside me, Grace muttered to the woman next to her, “I know it’s gonna hurt, Layla. I don’t care about that part. But it’s the sounds of all the bones breaking that gives me the creeps. Maybe when I’m shifting, you can howl or something and cover it up.” Grace was one of the weakest shifters in our pack, sweet-natured but afraid of her own shadow. She’d also been flirting with me since I arrived at the inner compound of the packlands, I think because I was less threatening than the other males. I was harmless, in fact.

I’d turned her down gently, but not for the reason she’d assumed. Many of our males eschewed casual sex with others in the pack while they waited to find their true mate, their soul’s match. But I’d rejected her advances for the same reason I’d stayed alone for years, because my own sex drive was the same as my wolf.

Asleep.

I’d never had a spark of sexual attraction for any other wolf, though I’d woken in the morning more than once, longing for something. Someone. A scent that the wind carried down from the mountains, that smelled of possibility, like new spring grass.

I shifted uneasily. Thinking of it now had my cock slightly hard, and I was as naked as everyone else. I didn’t want Grace getting ideas this late in the game.

Next to Grace, Layla shivered. “Why did you have to remind me about the bones?”

“We begin now,” Alpha Samuel announced, and the pack grew quiet.

“Me last,” I mumbled, meeting his gaze for an instant before I dropped my eyes. He was already shaking his head when I added, “Please, Alpha.”

He sighed. “All right, Reb.”

I watched him move away and put his hand on the shoulders of the others one at a time—Tomas, Layla, Grace, Raymond, and Brianna. As soon as he touched them and spoke the word “Shift,” they fell to the ground, their bodies losing human form and taking on wolf fur, claws, teeth, ears… It was a horrifying thing to watch, but also a beautiful one, like flowers unfurling, or the sun rising.

In a few short minutes, they were howling and running to join the rest of the pack, but Alpha Samuel laid his hand back on my shoulder. “Reb, you can do this.” I took a shaky breath, and he said, in a thunderous voice, “Shift.”

The whole pack was holding its breath, it seemed like. All of them were in wolf form now, besides me and the Alpha.

He repeated himself, louder this time. “ Shift! ” His voice was so powerful that it hurt my ears, like lightning striking too close by.

More than I needed to breathe, I felt the desire to shift—a compulsion that had my blood racing in my veins and my skin burning. But my wolf stayed quiet.

My face flamed, but I held still. I would not show any more weakness in front of my pack than I already had.

“Go. Run,” the Alpha said in a softer voice to the pack, then nodded to the massive wolf who was the next most powerful shifter present. “Dean? Take them toward Spruce Ridge. I’ll join you soon.” Dean obeyed immediately, but his mate—his moonblessed true mate—trotted to me and nosed my bare leg in what was meant to be sympathy, but felt like pity.

I was so humiliated, I almost fell to my knees. But the Alpha lifted my chin with one hand, turning my face to his. He was tall, even for a Mountain pack shifter, but I was as well, only a few inches shorter than his seven feet. In my human form, I looked like I belonged to the strongest and largest pack in the world.

But inside, I was a dud.

“Alpha, we both know there’s no reason for me to stay here without being able to shift. Thank you for sending the pack away so I can leave without an audience.”

“No, Reb. I didn’t send them away so you could leave. I sent them away so I could do this. ” He forced my gaze to his, his dark eyes boring into mine, burning me, piercing me with raw power. A wave of his dominance crested over me, nearly drowning me in it.

Shock coursed through me. This wasn’t what he did to trigger a shift. This was what he did to kill rogues.

I’d witnessed it before, years ago, when a small group had dared to come onto our land, and had attacked his mate. She’d been visiting some of the pack’s more solitary members, bringing them food and news from the Den. At the top of a cliff, a feral rogue had attacked. Somehow, he’d gotten a blow in that had knocked her out. She’d fallen from the cliff into a river far below, and the rogues had run, leaving nothing but their scents.

Her body had been found dozens of miles downstream. If the attack hadn’t been witnessed by a woman who lived deep in the forest, who’d come running to help when she heard the howls, the pack might never have known how our Alpha Mate died.

Our pack had spent a year rounding up every one of them and bringing them to the Alpha to execute. I’d watched him tear them apart without even touching them, using his dominance alone to force their bones to liquify, their blood to burst out of their veins. Then he’d used his claws on their corpses as well.

Was he trying to kill me now? It felt like I might die. Like something deep inside me was breaking loose, breaking… free.

I dropped to my knees, vaguely cognizant of the Alpha doing the same thing alongside me, whispering, “That’s it, that’s it, keep going.”My bones broke slowly and reformed, my face reshaped itself into points at my ears and snout, and my legs folded back under me, my knees reversing. Then, even with the Alpha murmuring, “ Shift, shift, shift ,” like a mantra, it stopped.

I fell to my side, agony coursing through me. I was bleeding from internal wounds, and external ones. My eyes, my nose, my ears, filling up and overflowing as something stopped me from completing the shift.

This was it. The end. I was almost grateful to the Alpha for taking the choice from me. It was better to die here, on the land that had nurtured my family for generations. If I’d been able to speak, I would have thanked him.

But my twisted muzzle was filled with blood, and I was slipping into the darkness. The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the moon, staring down with her soft, kind eye. The last thing I smelled was fresh spring grass.

The last thing I felt was regret.