The Alpha's Runaway Omega

The beta cuts the pack cord off my neck in the square at dawn, in front of all sixty-two wolves of Coldwater, and the alpha stands on the steps and lets him.

Braided leather, a river stone on it, tied on me by my mother when I was six. Emmett Stroud holds it up for the back rows, then drops it in the fire basket beside the naming stone.

"Wren Halloran," he says. "Omega of Coldwater. Not any more."

Somebody at the back says louder, Emmett, we can't hear you.

The omega is the lowest wolf in a pack. We eat last, speak last, and sleep by the door. You'd think there was nowhere further down. Turns out there's the gate.

I'm twenty-two. I'm six weeks pregnant. The father is standing on the packhouse steps in his dead father's coat, not looking at me.

That's the first thing Cassian Navarro doesn't know this morning. The second thing his own father told me at sixteen, and it's about to walk out of his valley with me.

"The charge," Emmett says, "is the north gate."

Ilsa Stroud steps forward. The beta's daughter. Cassian's intended since eight days ago, announced round a bonfire I laid.

"I saw her," Ilsa says. "Midnight. At the north gate with the bar lifted. An hour later the Teller pack walked through it and took the winter herd. Forty head. And Pell's leg."

"I keep the door," I say. "Six years. Nobody comes or goes without me knowing. That's what I'm for."

"Then you knew," Emmett says.

"I was at the north gate." The square makes a sound. "I wasn't opening it. I was waiting."

"For who?"

I look at the steps. Everyone looks at the steps.

Cassian Navarro, twenty-eight, alpha of Coldwater, eyes like a struck match, looks over my head.

"Tell them where I was, Cassian," I say.

The fire basket eats my mother's leather.

"Tell them who sent for me."

He opens his mouth. His beta's hand comes down on his shoulder like a lid, and he shuts it.

"No?" I say. "Then I'll keep that too. I'm good at keeping things. Ask anyone."

His sister Nika, nineteen and enjoying it, spits on the flagstones in front of my boots. "Traitor." Somebody's mother says shame on you, Nika. Then, to me, shame on you.

"Out by sunrise," Emmett says. "The pack's hand is off you. The bond is cut."

He has no idea what he's just said.

I pick up my bag. One bag. It's mostly socks.

Oona Fairweather waits at the north gate with a coat over her arm, seventy-six and furious at a steady temperature.

"Does he know?" she says.

"Which part?"

"Either part."

"No."

"Say it," Oona says. "Once. So I know you know what you're carrying out."

So I say it.

"A pack isn't sixty wolves. It's sixty wolves who can feel each other. Who hunt like one animal and hear the alpha from a mile off. Everyone thinks that lives in him. It has to live in somebody. Mateo set it in me at sixteen, the night my mother died. In the lowest wolf. Nobody fights to be lowest. Nobody looks there."

"And Emmett's knife just now?"

"Cut a cord." I do up the coat. "You can't carve this out of a pack. You can only walk it out of the gate."

"Sixty-two wolves up there," Oona says, "about to find out they're sixty-two wolves."

"Mateo made me swear. An alpha who knows where it lives leans on it. A beta who knows cuts it."

"Does one of them know?"

"Somebody moved a herd through my gate the one night I wasn't on the door," I say. "Somebody knew I wouldn't be."

She lifts the bar.

"Go west. Three valleys. Don't look back, it's a cliché and it's bad for your neck."

I walk out of Coldwater at sunrise with a bag of socks, an old woman's coat, a baby nobody knows about and a pack nobody knows I'm carrying. Behind me, sixty-two wolves go in to breakfast thinking they're still a pack.

Five years.

Lindqvist Feed and Hardware, Larkin, three valleys west. Ten to six on a Thursday. I'm doing the till. My son is on the counter, drawing a wolf with too many legs.

Teo is five. His father's hair, his father's jaw, and at dusk, when he's tired or cross, his father's eyes. Gold. Lit from behind. Only the alpha line does that. I tell the school it's a condition.

I feel Coldwater the way you feel weather in a bad knee. Thirty-one wolves now. Their hunts come back light. Their alpha's voice carries about as far as mine. Nobody up there knows why. The only two people who ever knew are an old woman and the lowest wolf, and the lowest wolf is doing the till.

The bell. A man in a dark coat stands in my doorway with the dusk behind him, and every dog in the back kennel goes quiet at once.

He's thinner. His eyes used to look like a struck match. Now they're the colour of a cheap ring.

"Hello, Wren," says the alpha of Coldwater.

"We close at six," I say. "Feed's on the left. Rope's on the right. Traitors are out back by the propane."

"Oona's dead," he says. "She sent for me the night she died." He looks like a man reciting something he doesn't understand. "She said, you threw away the keel, you fool. Find Wren. I've spent three weeks finding Wren."

"What's a keel?" I say, very evenly.

"I was hoping you'd know."

"Try the hardware aisle."

"Wren." He puts both hands flat on my counter, the way he used to put them on the stone. "The pack is..."

He stops. Teo has stopped drawing.

My son looks up at the stranger in the door. He's tired, he's never liked a man that tall, and his eyes do the thing.

Gold. Lit from behind.

Cassian Navarro puts a hand on the door frame like the floor moved.

"Wren," he says. "Whose is he?"

I don't answer him. I'll answer you.

The alpha of Coldwater drove three valleys to beg the lowest wolf to come home and sleep by the door. He thinks he's looking at a traitor and some stranger's kid.

He's standing in front of his heir and his pack.

"Shop's closed," I say. "Come back when you've worked out what you threw away."