Page 2 of An Ancient Bond

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.

2

Full Moon Run

ANNALISE

Isnarled at the early summer wind that teased and pulled at the ends of my wildly curling hair and the ragged edges of my tattered clothing, carrying my scent away from me into the night. To my left, the frogs on the shore of the lake trilled like giggling schoolgirls, making me feel every one of my fifty-eight years. Even the moon, the first full one of the season, seemed to be laughing at me as it lit up my face.

My aging, ugly face.

I’d jogged close to the still water, and I kneeled for a drink, setting down my bag. While I rested, I glanced idly into the lake, surprised that my reflection was visible by moonlight. I almost smiled. It was no wonder the moon hadn’t sent me a mate. She’d probably made me and then thrown in the towel.

A memory surfaced from forty years earlier, of a handsome face and a quick smile, the male I’d seen across a crowded field moments before he’d been killed. I’d never even spoken to him, but his profile was burned into my mind. I shook the memory away before I grew morose, and stared more deeply into the water.

I had plain brown eyes, and dark hair that curled how it wanted to around my face and shoulders. My only vanity was my lips, full and almost sensual, with a natural deep brown color, though it wasn’t visible now.

My body wasn’t soft and curved like males seemed to like, so I’d never seen a reason to try and dress it up. I sighed down at my increasingly ragged cotton shirt and drawstring trousers. They’d lost almost all color over the years from washing. I would have liked something brighter, but I’d heard another female in the pack whisper that giving me nice clothes was like putting lipstick on a pig. I would have bitten her for the insult, but I had eyes. She hadn’t been lying.

I had plenty of good qualities. I was strong, capable. I had muscles and a flexible, powerful body I’d earned from decades of living in the wilderness. The Alpha had allowed me to settle a hundred miles from the nearest pack cabin, where I made artwork that I delivered quietly once a year, slipping in and out of the main borders of our pack’s central compound before anyone knew I was there.

I hadn’t spoken to anyone in two decades except Ida, the Alpha’s mother, who always met me at the kitchen door and exchanged the staples I needed for the things I made. The treasures. I smiled as I thought of the shifters who would receive these gifts, and how they might react. Shifters who would never know who’d made the trinkets, or even know my name, though I knew all of theirs.

The bag made a rattling sound as I shifted it over my shoulders again, then set out. Remembering what I was here for muted my sadness, and I half-closed my eyes as I walked. I would be eating Ida’s cornbread in the next half hour. Maybe even some of her pound cake. The prospect was enough to lighten my mood.

As I approached the Alpha’s Den, the air filled with the howls and shouts of the members of our pack who were going on the full moon run. I grimaced, wondering how I’d let that slip my mind. These nights were special ones, when the Alpha would help young shifters find their wolves. Then they would run together, getting to know what it meant to be a wolf, and hoping to find their true mates in our pack.

Or, if not here, they would travel to the other, smaller packs and touch hands or paws to every other wolf they found, hoping to feel the spark. If that didn’t work, the Conclaves that occurred every four years brought all the larger packs in North America together… and if that also failed, our Alpha would allow a shifter to go abroad, visiting other packs that had ties to our own.

Finding your true mate, the other half of your soul that the Mother Moon promised Her children, was one of the things that made a wolf shifter’s long life bearable. If you were lucky, you had a lover who ran beside you on these nights for a hundred years, or even a few more.

I was not lucky. I’d never met another male that even caught my eye, not after that first, disastrous Conclave I’d attended at Southern—the one that had sparked the eventual war, devastating all the packs.

Still, I’d tried to find my mate.I’d touched every wolf in every pack, even ones that made my hackles rise. I’d visited all the smaller packs. I’d even gone abroad, and barely made it home alive.

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