Night and Neera: A Rejected Mate Story

Chapter 4: It Was A Blur To Me

"Alpha," two of the females in my pack nodded to me as my brother, my enforcer and I walked toward the pack offices. Strangely, they moved right past me without smiles, not even attempting to stop.

They were not the first ones this morning who had been...distant to me. This was beyond unusual behavior since my pack members always stopped to take my hand for a moment. My Alpha's touch was soothing, comforting to my wolves and I touched hundreds of hands a day.

"They're not happy with you," Aymeric said in a voice so low only my brother and I could hear him. As my enforcer, as the Alpha's Teeth, Aymeric made it his business to know what was happening in the pack, what the mood was, what rumors and gossip were swirling around.

"You completely upset the pack when you rejected your Howl," he continued, "if for no other reason than to provide further protection for the pack. The Lunaire pack Alpha doesn't have his Howl -- yet -- so you having yours would have been an advantage for us and a deterrent to the Lunaires if they thought of trying to break the truce. They do not like that you rejected what could have been so advantageous to us." 

"It's more than that," Néron sneered at my enforcer. My brother had been the one most obviously upset at what I'd done, or at least the only one bold enough to get in my face about it. Being my only sibling had both advantages and disadvantages, but one of the advantages was that he spoke quite freely to me, as no other member of my pack would dare. 

"You took years of tradition and threw it aside. You rejected your Destined One, your motherfucking Howl, Night -- sent by the Forces -- and you did so without hesitation. There have been rejected mates before, not many, but a handful. But you're the very first Alpha to ever reject his Howl. I don't understand it. Nobody understands it. OK, so you have feelings for Lindsay Morgan, but you shouldn't have been able to resist your Destined One. Your feelings for Lindsay should have faded away to nothing the moment you faced your Howl. From the moment you were born, Neera was stitched into every fiber of your being...and you resisted that. Hell, you not only resisted her, you rejected her."

For a moment, I remembered looking into her eyes. Neera's green eyes, so bright when she stood on my porch, looking at me, her mate brand visible. For just a minute, I felt the invisible bonds between us forming until, for some reason, I looked away. And then I'd decided to call the wolves to the Den.

"Well, now word's out about what happened. It spread like wildfire, Night. I can't even tell you how many calls I've fielded from other packs -- from Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Canada, to name a few -- all wanting to know what sort of fuckery was happening that you could reject your Howl."

My brother glared at me, then continued. "The rejection was on one level, but then you changing her pack status? What the fuck was that? You hadn't already humiliated the poor girl enough by fucking Lindsay right in front of her and telling everyone assembled that you didn't want your Howl?"

The whole time in the Den? It was a blur to me, a vague fogginess that was not clear in my mind, as if --

"She didn't show up with the other greens today," Aymeric said, trying to interrupt my brother's tirade. 

I'd been rubbing my chest as he spoke, but the pain that had begun wasn't going away. "Well, did you fucking check on her?"

"Sent one of my men," Aymeric confirmed. "They said she wasn't at her apartment. Her car wasn't there."

"Maybe she'd gone into town to give her notice?" Néron suggested.

I rubbed my chest, the pain still squeezing my insides. "That seems likely. Neera has always been dependable. She wouldn't want to just leave her job without telling her boss."