Page 84 of The Wild Wolf's Rejected Mate

The pack sways, swirling together in Justus and Khalil’s wake, forming new patterns. Some folks dance. Some shift into their wolves to wrestle and race around the clearing. Others gather around the fires, laughing, drinking, and talking at the top of their lungs. A flute joins the fiddle. The moon comes out, big and round, balanced just above the horizon.

Efa bends over so her chin is resting on the top of my head and grabs my flushed cheeks. I gently turn from left to right so she can take it all in, gasping as a pattern appears before my eye. The tattoo is a map of the camp. I needed to watch the pack disperse from a higher vantage point to recognize it, but I can’t unsee it now. The fires match the starburst shapes. The dens are the jagged triangles. The swoops and spirals are the worn paths the pack takes as they settled themselves in their accustomed places.

Above us, the stars are coming out. Everything seems to line up somehow. To connect. Maybe it’s the music or the sweet weight of Efa, the pinch of her grabby fingers. I’ve never felt like this before, like a bird perched on top of a tree, not a mouse cowering in a hole.

“Oh!” Efa squeals, patting my cheek and pointing. Her attention has been caught by a group dancing by the bonfire.

The fiddler is bending his bow double speed, and the drums beat faster. The females hold their gowns high so their legs show, their bare feet moving almost too quick to track while they hold their bodies perfectly still from the waist up. The males dance around them, stomping, tossing their heads back, their wolves howling to the hills. This is a pattern, too. The females are the stationary shapes, and the males are the swirls weaving between them.

The singed, crackling scent of magic tickles my nose like at Abertha’s cottage, but there aren’t any pots bubbling with potions or herbs hanging well out of the reach of pups. I couldn’t say where the scent is coming from. The ground? The people?

Efa giggles, her rump shifting back and forth on my shoulders. Elspeth shuffles beside us, her feet padding a dull rhythm on the table top. She’s dancing. I glance down at my feet. Am I swaying to the music, too? There must be magic in the air.

Get down now. You’re a target.

No one’s looking at us. They’re all absorbed in their own bodies, their own rhythm and partners.

Get down!

I sigh, reaching up to lift Efa off my shoulders and when I inhale, my lungs fill with the scent of freshly turned earth. My body reacts the way it always does in the spring when we till the garden—my chest rises and something deep in my bones takes note that we’ve made it around the sun and into warm days and blue skies again. Anticipation thrums low in my belly.

Justus emerges from the shadows to stand a few feet from my table.

Efa screeches, reaching for him, her weight forcing my head to fold forward, chin to chest.

“Affa!” she shrieks. “Affa!”

“Justus,” he says, holding his arms up to receive her. I lift her up and pass her down. She snuggles right up to him, her facemorphing into her wolf’s so she can rub her forehead all over his face. She grabs a handful of beard, and to his credit, though she gives it a good yank, he doesn’t even rumble.

“Are you keeping Annie company?” he asks her, looking up at me. Have I ever seen him from this angle before?

He’s a few feet below me, so the whites of his eyes show under his dark pupils. They glow in the moonlight. The breeze whips his long hair, and with his height and honed muscle and inked skin, he looks like a wild male, like the ones in the fresco above the stage at Moon Lake’s outdoor amphitheater that shows their Great Alpha, Broderick Moore, single-handedly fighting off the ferals who attacked his people on their way down from the dens.

Except Justus has a pup propped on his hip, she’s half-shifted, and her wolf is licking the side of his face. And although the expression in his eyes is fierce, his lips curve, bemused.

“I’ll take that little pupkin,” Elspeth says, stepping down from the table so nimbly that neither Justus nor I have time to help her. “We need to go find her dam. I don’t want her on my hands when she decides it’s too far past her bedtime.”

“I saw her over by the elm with Redmond,” Justus says, tickling Efa’s nose with his beard as she screeches with delight.

“Snuck off for some alone time, have they?” Elspeth smirks. “Well, let’s go ruin your ma and da’s fun, shall we, little one?” She takes Efa, and after a small fuss, she convinces the pup to wave goodbye to us and go find her dam.

I’m still on the table. Justus has me stuck up here, treed like a raccoon. To get down, I’d either have to jump—and risk losing my makeshift gown and my dignity—or I’d have to turn my back on him to step down to the bench. Something inside me won’t let me do that.

“She’s taken with you,” Justus says, his voice low even though there’s no one nearby.

My cheeks heat. I don’t know how to answer him. There’s too much weight to his words. I’m probably his only chance of having a pup of his own, and there could have been one between us, but not in this timeline, not the one that made me the way I am. That’s a lot of baggage between two people who are virtually strangers.

But is he really a stranger now? He doesn’t quite feel like one anymore. He just kind of feelsnew.

“She’s taken with you, too,” I finally reply.

He shrugs and grins. “She saw that elk we brought home, and she knows what side her bread is buttered on.”

“You think she was being sweet to you for food?”

He nods very seriously. “Absolutely. She knows what I’m good for.”

“I don’t know. She seemed pretty taken with your beard.”

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