Alphas burden

4AVERY

The rest of the walk back to the cottage I share with Beatrix and Lena only takes minutes, except every step feels wrong somehow. Maybe I’m still coming down from the adrenaline of crossing paths with Caden.

When I reach the crooked gate Bea helped me build as a project to distract ourselves the first year we moved up here, I breathe easier. The wood’s seen better days. We did what we could with the pieces we salvaged from the group assigned to manage the carpentry supply for the pack. Even though the scrap wood cost us twice the trade value than it should’ve because we’re Morgans, it makes the place feel slightly homier.

The dilapidated tiny house is one of the original ones built on the mountain, dating back to the shifters that settled here to start Silver Falls Pack once they broke away from the first pack to exist. And it shows its age after being uninhabited for decades. The roof is in disrepair, there are cracks in the pockmarked stone steps, the door is hanging on for dear life to its creaky hinges. One of the narrow arched lattice windows has a chip from a hailstorm that’s splintered outward with a fracture line.

We do everything we can to keep the place standing, though the cobbled stone foundation is deteriorating faster than I know how to patch with mud and whatever stones I’m able to collect. Last year I picked the sloping field behind the cottage clean to repair a corner.

It’s not much, but it’s ours now. Our love for each other fills the small space to make it a home.

I check my garden before heading in. It was hell to get this land to cooperate with me, but I won out as the more stubborn one in the end.

There was some help I received to get my garden to take. She caught me by chance in the woods, desperation driving me to search for food when we didn’t receive enough the first week here.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

My head snapped up, searching my surroundings until I spotted the source of the voice. A woman. I should be alone out here, but there she was walking through the woods. I didn’t hear her at all.

The stranger had braided dark hair threaded through with strands of silver. I couldn’t tell her age, she could be near mine, or maybe older. Her face held an ethereal quality to match the clothes she wore—a colorful mix of shawls lined with tassels and trinkets over a layered skirt that resembled the vines of a willow tree.

No one was with her, and she definitely didn’t belong on packlands. I’d never seen the woman before. Yet the woods seemed to welcome her, straining towards the path she walked as if she were their sun.

She surveyed me with a playful smirk. My hackles rose, already at my breaking point after the week I’ve had. After having everything taken from me, and learning none of the people I thought I could rely on were really my friends.

I sat on my haunches, not caring about the mud caked on my shoes and ankles. I would go to my favorite swimming hole later to wash before I dared bathe in my new prison.

She snorted when I lifted my nose to scent the air. My shoulders hunched. There was no way she could tell I didn’t even feel a hint of my wolf yet, right?

“I mean, if you’re doing it because you like the thrill of danger, by all means.” She waved her hand. “I’m not one for the nausea that will cause if you eat it, no matter how pretty and tasty it appears.”

I narrowed my eyes, refusing to drop the mushroom I found. She was tricking me. She wanted my food for herself.

“Who are you? How are you here?” I asked, though I already had an idea of what she could be after she appeared here out of nowhere.

Her laughter sounded like bells, tinkling and bright. “I go where I please, as do my sisters and brothers.” She strolled closer, perching on a nearby slab of rock. “I’m beholden to no borders. No wards, either.”

“So you are a witch?” I choked out, suspicion confirmed.

She spread her arms wide, showing off the crystals dangling from her colorful shawls. “What of it, little wolf girl? What will you do to me?”

A witch shouldn’t be here. Every shifter knew not to trust witches. They were our allies at one time, then they wanted to control us as their attack dogs, to use our power and numbers to boost their own.

“Get out of here!” I bared my teeth. “These are packlands. You can’t be here. The alpha will—he’ll…”

I slumped back, breathing hard to erase the moment of my father’s death that looped in my head nonstop. Tears flowed freely. I didn’t think I had any left to spill.

A gentle touch to my shoulder startled me. She drew me into her arms for a hug, hushing me when I broke down. I clung to her, letting everything out, and she held me through it.

When I calmed down, she took the mushroom and pointed out how poisonous it was, explaining the signs to look for. Nature had all sorts of signals. Patterns of certain leaf numbers, common lookalikes, and colorings to tip off if it’s safe or not.

I stared in awe as she transfigured the mushroom into a small pile of blackberries on the altar she made on the rock out of a velvet bag of shells she had tied to her hip. She explained something about equal value exchange, but I wasn’t listening, too busy eating the berries.

“Plants are my specialty,” she said. “I’m only passing through, but I found a nice field over this ridge, just past your wards. Come see me. I’ll show you how to avoid death by poison.”

“Why would you help me?” I mumbled.

She smiled. “Give and take. All things work on balance. I help you when you need it, and someday you’ll return it.”

Throughout that summer I couldn’t get her to tell me what she meant by that. She did give me her name, Jade. Her coven is nomadic, following the ley lines, pools of natural magic, around the world. She’s since moved on, but the months she spent beyond the border, I snuck out to meet with her.

She taught me about foraging and what other ways to use what I find or grow. Her guidance, like the advice she gave me to plant sunflowers first to revitalize the soil, was invaluable to our survival up here the first year when the kitchens wouldn’t give us a full ration depending on who had distribution duty.

A smile tugs at my mouth as I stroll past the potatoes and the herbs I’ve cultivated from foraging, and from seeds I traded for to the quarantined plants at the far end, their pots clearly marked with poison labels.

In the seven years since I met the witch, I’ve learned so much, finding a new passion for studying every plant and experimenting to figure out its uses. The pack’s designated head healer doesn’t recognize half of the ailments easily soothed by what the land provides all around us. The lazy old male’s too reliant on our natural recovery abilities as shifters when he could be helping more.

“Stop obsessing over your babies, they’ve been fine and haven’t grown an inch without your supervision while you’ve been gone,” Beatrix calls from one of the open windows.

“How would you know? You never come out to tend to them for me,” I tease.

She rolls her eyes. “I saw what happened when you got that nasty rash. No freaking thank you.”

My heart warms as I make my way inside. At seventeen now, she’s growing to look like the spitting image of our mother, her and Lena both getting Mom’s lighter blonde hair while I have more of Dad’s caramel tones streaking mine. I miss both of them so much, but at least I have my sisters.

Losing Mom is what drove our father to do what he did, I think. I remember overhearing him arguing with the alpha about looking for her when she went missing after a run. Shifters sometimes get lost if they’re pulled too far tracking an interesting scent, or if they spend too much time in their fur the wolf can lose the human side, returning to our original nature.

I don’t know what to believe happened to our mother. There weren’t any signs of her turning feral. She was happily mated to Dad in a True Mate bond and loved to take us out on girls-only exploration trips. Was that a hint that she wanted to leave us? I don’t like to dwell on it, because I can’t change it now. I don’t have the luxury of time to sit around dissecting the past when there’s always so much to be done.

“Did you bring us anything?” Bea asks when I come through the door.

I pause from unloading my satchel on the table, setting aside the wire and some extra secondhand tools the man from the market threw in simply because he was eager to boast to his stall neighbors he’d traded with a shifter.

The main area of the house is one room we divide into our eating area by the sink and ancient wood burning stove, the bed Lena and Beatrix share shoved into the alcove in the corner, and the rest is nearly overtaken by my herb workbench by the windows. I’ve grown from having one bench to a whole corner overflowing with hanging plants and drying cuttings, potted propagations and seeds I’m coaxing to grow on the windowsill, and my tools.

Bea blinks her big brown eyes at me hopefully. “Say yes. For Lena, I mean. You know she loves a sweet treat.”

The corner of my mouth lifts. “I got these in exchange for a vial of dried hyssop and lavender. One for each of you.”

She squeals in delight at the matching pink sticks of rock candy I pull from one of the pockets. I grunt when she barrels into my side for a fierce hug. Her wolf is making her stronger every day. I have no doubt when she comes of age in another year, she’ll be celebrating her first shift during a full moon run like tonight.

Lena’s the one that worries me. I fear she’ll be Wolfless like me.

I wish there were others in the pack to ask about the signs, but I’m the only one. A crabby Merryweather elder told me when my coming of age ceremony didn’t result in a shift that I should consider myself lucky the pack won’t allow Wolfless to be killed to keep bloodlines strong anymore before he spat at my feet.

Crossing the cramped space to my workbench, I pluck the liatris petals and leaves, depositing them in a bowl to grind later once they’ve dried out. Then I take one of the small knives from the leather roll sitting to the side, slicing the stem to small pieces. Next I add them to another bowl with a pinch of calendula flowers and a scoop of orange powder beneficial for inflammations from the row of vials on a spice shelf above the workbench.

I mash it together with a pestle and pour in a dollop of honey as Beatrix brings me a cup of hot water without being asked. She’s watched me make poultices daily in the last week for Lena’s cold.

“Thanks,” I murmur before adding just enough water to moisten the ingredients to hold them together in a paste.