The Omega They Mocked

Everyone in Redstone knew the new Alpha was my fated mate, which was why they laughed when I carried the cup out to him.

Six hours earlier I was polishing it.

“Harder,” Darla said, without looking round from the stove. “The King drinks from that one. If he sees his own face in it, he’ll know Redstone has manners.”

“He’ll see mine,” I said.

“Then smile, girl, and he’ll think it’s a ghost.”

The Hall kitchen in the afternoon smelled of venison and woodsmoke, and of the bread Darla had been knocking back since four in the morning. Darla was sixty and wore her gray hair in a bun so tight it pulled her eyebrows up, which was the only reason anyone ever thought she looked surprised. She’d been cook in the Hall since before I was carried up its steps at eight years old, crying, with my name pinned to my coat. In fourteen years she’d never once hit me. In Redstone that made her practically my mother.

I rubbed the silver until my left wrist began to ache. It always ached when the weather turned, ever since a boy behind the schoolhouse had taught it to bend the wrong way. October had turned that week. I switched hands.

On the long table behind me lay three hundred pairs of white gloves.

Every year at the Hunter’s Moon, and at every full moon after it, the Hall laid out the Rite gloves, and every wolf in Redstone took a pair at the meadow gate and put them on before the moon came up. Thin white kid, washed and pressed, stacked in rows like folded birds. I’d washed them. I’d pressed them. I had never once been given a pair.

“Darla. Why do we wear them?”

“Wear what?”

“The gloves. At the Rite.”

She looked at me as if I’d asked why water was wet. “Custom, girl. Polish.”

“Whose custom?”

“Redstone’s.” She banged the oven shut. “Thirty years and nobody’s asked me that. Don’t you start tonight of all nights.”

The back door creaked. My brother put his head round it, then the rest of him, which was mostly elbows and freckles. Teddy was ten. He wasn’t supposed to come up to the Hall kitchen, and he came every day.

“Nora. I drew the moon.”

“Where?”

“On the barn. In chalk. Big as a wagon wheel.” He held his hands out to show me, and they were white to the wrist. “Pa says I’ll wash it off by Sunday or he’ll wash me.”

“Then wash it off by Sunday.”

He came and leaned on the table beside me and looked at the King’s cup. Then he looked at me, the way he always did, straight into my left eye, where the silver ring sat around the hazel like a thin bright wire. Most people looked at it and away. Teddy had never once looked away.

“Is he going to pick you tonight?” he whispered.

“He’s going to pick Delaney.”

“He’s your mate.”

“Mates are for Lunas,” I said. “I’m the omega. Go home before Darla feeds you to the King.”

“The King’s really coming?”

“The King himself,” Darla said from the stove, and she sounded almost proud of it. “And his uncle, the Warden. First time the Crown’s come down to Redstone for an ascension since I was a girl.”

Teddy went, by way of the bread crock, with a heel of the new loaf in his fist and Darla pretending not to see.

“He’ll be the death of me, that boy,” she said.

“He’ll be the death of the bread.”

“Same thing, in this kitchen.” She wiped her hands on her apron and looked at me sideways. “You’ll keep your head down tonight, Nora. Whatever he does up there. You hear me?”

“I always keep my head down.”

“I know you do,” Darla said, and turned back to the stove, and didn’t say anything else for a long time.

I polished the cup until I could see my face in it, and Darla was right, it did look like a ghost.

At moonrise I carried it out onto the Moon Meadow.

The meadow lay under the red bluff where the river bent, and when the moon cleared the rim of the rock it poured down over the grass like milk out of a pail. Torches stood in a ring. Three hundred wolves waited inside it in their best coats and their white gloves, and at the top of the meadow, on the flat stone they called the meadow step, stood the King.

I’d never seen a King. I’d thought he’d be older.

He was tall and dark-haired, and he stood very still, the way you stand when everyone is looking at you and you’ve decided not to notice. Beside him a big man with a shaved head watched the crowd instead of the ceremony. Behind them stood the King’s guard in gray, and a little apart, an older man with silver hair and a kind, tired face, in a black coat and thin black gloves. The Warden. Everyone else’s gloves were white. His were the only black ones on the meadow.

And mine were the only bare hands.

I walked up the aisle between them with the tray. Twelve cups for the witnesses, and the King’s cup in the middle, the polished one. The pack watched me come, and the whisper ran ahead of me the way it always did.

“The omega.”

“Look at her. Does she think he’ll pick her?”

“Four years. Four years she’s been mooning after him.”

Delaney Shaw stood at the front of the crowd in a green coat, with her red-brown hair cropped short and her green eyes bright with the evening. She was the best hunter in Redstone, and she’d been Rhett’s shadow since they were children. She smiled at me as I came level with her.

Then she put her foot out.

I’d known she would. I’d known since I picked up the tray. I knew where her foot would be, because I knew where it always was, and I turned my body round the King’s cup as I went down, so that when the tray hit the meadow step, eleven cups went over and spilled across the stone and the King’s cup didn’t.

I landed on my knees with it held up in both hands, full to the brim.

The pack laughed. Three hundred wolves, all at once. It came off the bluff and back again.

I got up. I didn’t look at Delaney. I walked up the last two steps and held the cup out to the King, because it was his, and because I’d polished it for three hours, and because my knees were bleeding and I wasn’t going to give anyone the pleasure of seeing me notice.

The King took it. He looked at the cup, and then at me, and then at the spilled wine running between the stones, and something in his face went very quiet.

“Thank you,” he said.

Nobody in Redstone had said that to me in fourteen years. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I stepped back to my place at the side of the step, where the omega stands, and folded my bare hands.

Down in the front row Delaney said something to the girl beside her, and they both laughed behind their white gloves. The King’s eyes went to them and stayed there, level and patient, until the laughing stopped. Then he turned back to the aisle as if nothing had happened. I had never in my life seen anyone stop Delaney Shaw laughing just by looking at her.

Rhett came up the aisle.

He was twenty-six and he looked like the Alpha he’d been raised to be: tall, broad, dark-blond, with blue eyes and his father’s long Alpha coat on his shoulders, and a white scar along his collarbone where his first challenge had opened him at seventeen. When the bond woke between us, on my eighteenth birthday in the Hall corridor, I’d smelled pine and rain and something I had no name for, and he’d smelled it too. I’d seen it in his face. Then he’d looked over my shoulder at Delaney and two of the others laughing in the doorway, and he’d walked away.

He didn’t look at me now. He knelt to the King.

The oath was short. The King spoke it, and Rhett answered it, and the King put his hand on Rhett’s head and said, “Redstone is yours. Keep it well,” and Rhett rose an Alpha. The pack howled. A few of them shifted for the joy of it and ran a lap of the torches, gold and gray and brown in the moonlight, and came back panting and grinning.

Then the Elder, Josiah Merritt, came forward with the Luna’s ring on a cushion, and three hundred heads turned toward me.

I’d known this was coming too. Everyone in Redstone knew he was my mate. Everyone in Redstone knew he’d never once acknowledged it. So everyone in Redstone had come tonight to watch what he’d do with the omega, the way you’d come to watch a dog get put out in the rain.

Rhett turned. He looked straight at me for the first time in four years.

“I, Rhett Thatcher, Alpha of Redstone, reject you, Nora Doyle, as my mate and my Luna.”

Laughter. Not all of it, but enough.

The bond went. I’d read that it would feel like a rope pulled out through the ribs, and it did. I didn’t make a sound. I’d had fourteen years of practice at not making a sound.

“I accept your rejection,” I said.

And something under the bond opened.

It was like a door I’d been leaning on my whole life without knowing it was there. On the other side was weight. Not one weight: hundreds of them, small and separate, tugging at me from every direction at once. From the front row. From the back. From the Elder. From Delaney. From the boy who’d broken my wrist, standing with his mother by the torches. Every one of them was a thread, and every thread ran from my chest to a white-gloved hand somewhere in the meadow.

I swayed, and nobody noticed, because Rhett was holding out his hand to Delaney.

“I name Delaney Shaw my Luna,” he said, “before Redstone and before the Crown.”

She came up the step with her chin high and her eyes on mine, glad. By the Rite, the Alpha takes his Luna’s hand bare under the moon. Rhett pulled off his left glove.

The moonlight fell on his palm.

It was crossed with silver. Thin bright lines, dozens of them, like scratches drawn in light, one over another from the wrist to the base of the fingers. Old ones, dull. Newer ones, brighter. And one, the newest, deep as a knife cut across the middle of his palm, still opening as we watched, a slow line of silver welling up in it like blood.

Delaney’s hand stopped in the air.

The meadow went silent. Three hundred wolves who had been laughing a breath ago stood with their mouths open and looked at the Alpha’s hand.

At the side of the step, Rhett’s mother, Corinne, made a sound I’d never heard a woman make, as if someone had struck her in the stomach. She put both gloved hands over her mouth.

And at the edge of the torchlight, the Warden closed his own gloved left hand into a fist, turned, and walked out of the light without a word.

Rhett stared at his palm. “What is this?” he said. “What is this?”

Nobody answered him.

The King set down his cup on the meadow step, very carefully, as if he didn’t want to spill a drop. Then he crossed the step to me, took my left hand, and turned my face to the moon to see my eye.

“That’s the ring,” he said. “Every one of those marks on his hand is yours.”

The meadow came apart around us.

Rhett was shouting for the Elder. Delaney was shouting at Rhett. Somebody’s pup was crying, and three hundred wolves were all talking at once and every one of them had a hand jammed into a pocket or held behind a back. I stood there with the King’s fingers around my left wrist, the bad one, and I couldn’t make my mouth work.

“Not here,” the King said quietly. “Beck.”

The big man with the shaved head was already beside us. “Sire.”

“Somewhere with a door.”

They took me up through the side of the crowd, the King’s hand still on my wrist, Beck walking ahead and people moving out of his way without being asked. We went in by the Hall’s kitchen passage because it was nearest, and halfway down it, by the linen press, Rhett’s mother was waiting.

Corinne Thatcher was fifty-two, ash-blond and blue-eyed like her son, and in fourteen years she had spoken to me perhaps a dozen times, every one of them to tell me I’d missed a st