It was half eleven at night, and the world was spinning. I couldn't be blamed entirely for my current state; a good few of the older raiders had taken it upon themselves to teach the three of us 'how to party like wolves, not cubs', and had been forcing booze down our throats with almost back to back verses of we like to drink with Nat. Some younger teenagers had tried to keep up, but had all either chucked their guts up or tapped out about an hour ago, to the delight of the adults.
"You're gonna find your mates soon!" Sadie, a raider in her mid twenties, sang to me, slinging an arm around my shoulders with such gusto she almost knocked me over. I stumbled and my face twisted into a scowl. "What, you don't wanna?" It had been a good few years ago now, but I could remember that as soon as it struck midnight on her eighteenth birthday, she had sprinted round the raiding camp desperately until she found her own mate, managing a pretty quick time of twenty minutes to find her soulmate from the second it was possible.
"I mean, it'd be good to know, but like, if he's an arsehole, I don't care about the mate bond, ya got me?" I stuttered, but Sadie didn't look convinced in the slightest.
"You can say what you want, but you can't reject the mate bond no matter what, unless one of you dies! Arsehole or no, you'll be stuck with him. Or her. I get real mixed signals from all three of you, if I'm honest." She slurred, making me scowl.
"Well then, if I don't like him, I'll just have to kill him, won't I? Or get Nate and Gwenna to do it. I reckon they would."
"Nate'd poison them, Gwenna would outright beat them to death."
"Hell yeah I would!" Gwenna hooted, staggering into us and pushing an open, but surprisingly full, can of cider. I took a swig and almost gagged; it was half cider, half vodka, and I think that was a splash of whiskey as well? Ah, well, turning down a dirty pint on the eve of your birthday was bad luck, someone had told me. Definitely not a reliable source, but what was a girl meant to do?
"Who am I killing?" Gwenna asked as Sadie stumbled away.
"My mate, if I don't like him."
"Sure, I'll kill him if you kill mine."
"You got a deal. Should we kill Nate's as well?" As soon as I said it, he himself showed up, somehow more sober than both of us, but he had always been better at faking drinks than us, to be fair.
"As a rule, don't kill Nate's as well." He told us, letting us cling onto him for support.
"But what if they're an arsehole?" Gwenna argued as I nodded energetically along.
"I dunno what you're talking about, guys."
"Your mate!" His eyes widened.
"You guys do know that when a mate dies it hurts you, right? Makes you a broken person, usually a bit of a dickhead. Like da." He pointed out.
"Ha! As if that'd bother us!" I bragged, though in truth I hadn't actually known that. Never really bothered to ask. Never really had anyone I could ask, given that da hated to talk about mates. Nate just sighed, clearly dismissing any notion of talking sense into either of us. And yet, tomorrow, he'd try again; he always did. Ever the optimist, bless his heart.
"So, twenty minutes to go! How we gonna play this?" Gwenna asked, trying to jump around all excited like, but she was too drunk to anything but wriggle and then fall onto her arse.
"I'm gonna try and find her right away!"
"We play it cool as can be!" Nate and I said at the same time, giving each other disgusted looks. Jeez, I couldn't let him race around like a panicked kitten trying to find his mate, he would embarrass himself, and more importantly, me, as our reputations were somewhat entwined. I decided that the best way to stop him was to go shot for shot and hope he was too drunk to run around by the time midnight hit. With a plan in mind, I tried to put it into action, but before he was anywhere near the level of drunk I had been angling for, an alarm went from a clock someone had set up earlier, commonly used when seventeen year olds were about to turn eighteen, so they knew the precise moment that they could find their mate.
Gwenna leapt to her feet, barely balancing as she whooped. Nate started to stumble away, looking for his mate, while I stood awkwardly.
"Come on, Nattie, lets just do a casual round of the camp. See if anything, uh, happens, yeah?" Gwenna begged me, hanging onto my arm. I sighed, retiring myself dramatically to doing as she said. It wasn't like I wasn't curious to who was my mate, but I wanted to be cool about it.
"Fine. But we ain't running." I told her firmly, letting her pull me away from the cheering adults and dodging the birthday blows. I needed to go and see my da at some point, given he wanted to give something, but the old man was used to waiting on me. We couldn't walk in a straight line, but we were managing to do a lazy, crooked circle through the tents, both of us subtly sniffing the air to see if we could catch a scent that smelt particularly good.
We were halfway round when Gwenna stopped so suddenly I almost fell over and took her with me. She was standing straighter than she had for hours, eyes wide as she sniffed the air and turned her head, trying to figure out where it was coming from. I pulled my arm away from her, shocked, with a strange sense of dread growing in my stomach.
"You think you've got something?" I asked her cautiously, not that I got an answer. Her eyes were narrowed, and when I probed through the link, all I could feel was her wolf, completely focused on following the scent trail. Having nothing better to do, I followed her as she stumbled through the camp, growing closer and closer to where Theo had pitched his tent, away from his old team, because he had spat his dummy out and left it. At first, I was absolutely horrified at the prospect that that dickhead would be Gwenna's mate, but I was relieved when we got close enough and I could hear him yelling at Ada. Please be her, I thought, and not him.
Gwenna, with her usual bravado and lack of manners, went barging behind the tent to the clearing where they were arguing and stopping dead in her tracks, staring at Ada with such a sappy look that I felt slightly nauseous, bloody mate bond. Ada froze mid shout, sniffing the air and turning to Gwenna with surprise. She was only a year older than us, but the mate bond was a funny thing.
Everyone had to be eighteen before they could detect their mate, that seemed like a constant rule, but in most cases both parties had to be eighteen before either could sense their mate. Those with proper strong wolves could often detect their underage mate, though it was considered good manners to not tell them until they were old enough to find out for themselves. I wanted to clear out, let Gwenna do whatever the hell she wanted with Ada in peace, but I didn't trust Theo not to do something dumb, which is why I palmed my blade and got ready to call da, cos I was too drunk to take him down when he was sober.
"She's your mate, isn't she?" Theo asked, sounding surprisingly crestfallen as he saw the look on their faces. He hadn't noticed me, thankfully, because this was warming up to be a really awkward encounter as it was, without a seen spectator.
"Yeah. Yeah, she is." Ada said in a light, happy voice, dreamier than I had ever heard her. Theo opened his mouth to say something, changed his mind, sighed, and walked off into the forest, shoulders slumped, the picture of defeat. I didn't like him, but he had lost an awful lot in one day. Had I not been the last person he wanted to see right now, I might have even gone after him and been a decent person for once.
So I shoved my knife back into my pocket and slunk away, back to the main camp, not wanting to be present to whatever was gonna happen next. For the first time in my life, I felt quite lonely. Everything would change now. Gwenna wouldn't sleep with me and Nate, anymore, cos her and her mate would want a den of their own, and neither of them would have much time for me at all. Hell, maybe Nate had already found his mate as well. I gave a light tug on the link between us, but he didn't answer. Fine then, I'll go and see da. He'd probably want to wish me a happy birthday anyway.
Feeling quite dejected, I trudged back through the camp and up the hill to the ruins, avoiding the crowds. Unfortunately, I was waylaid before I was halfway there, pulled away, and forced to go another round of shots, even though my churning stomach was trying to rebel. This time I didn't get away from the birthday beats, and had to grit my teeth and bare the nineteen punches. Well, it would have been more, because I wasn't entirely sure that the guy administering them could count, but I put a stop to it before he could get carried away.
I found Nate because he was clumsily fleeing from his own beating, so I quickly wrapped him in a headlock and delivered it myself. I grinned down at my brother.
"Any luck with your mate?" I asked. He shook his head.
"You?"
"Nah. Gwenna found hers, though. It's Ada." Nate winced in sympathy, for Theo or Ada, I didn't know. "I'm going to go to da, you coming with?"
"No. I'll do another round of the camp first." He decided. I nodded and split off from him, continuing on to the ruins.
The wind had been quiet tonight, but now it picked up, the familiar sound of the air screaming through the broken structures. When it hit me, though, it was carrying a familiar and yet foreign scent. For a second, my wolf took over, driving me towards the source until I swiftly wrestled control back and stopped. Shit.
No. This wasn't happening.
I continued on the path that my wolf wanted me to go, praying to anything that was listening for it not to be what I feared. But as I made my way through the ruins, I knew it was true. The room the alpha was in had a window hole in the wall, so I ducked under it, taking a deep breath to confirm my terrifying theory. I was right.
The alpha was my soulmate.