“Yes, she does. Look at her.”
“What? Just because she isn’t stick-figure Barbie, like those girls,” I pointed to Tiffany and a group of other girls gathered around a table talking, “doesn’t make her different.”
“Man, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but let it go. She’s of no consequence to us, and in a few years, she’ll be little more than a faded memory to everyone in this room.”
Not believing that my best friend could be such an ass, I turned from him and went in search of Danielle and her sister. I hadn’t known it at the time, but Dave had been playing a part, pretending to go along with the status quo, to keep the peace. I had every intention of introducing myself to the girl and doing my best to prove to her that we weren’t all so hard to like. My search proved fruitless though. By the time I caught up with Danielle, her sister had left, but not before giving her the birthday present she had brought.
“Happy birthday, birthday girl,” I said, giving the love of my best friend’s life a one-armed hug. “Whatcha got there?”
“A present from Leigh.” My heart broke at the sight of the tears that were flowing down her cheeks.
“Your sister’s here. Where is she? I haven’t officially met her yet,” I said, all but cutting off the rest of her sentence, wanting to jump right to the Danielle-introducing-me-to-her-sister part of this conversation.
“She left,” she said, looking down at the gift in her hand so that I couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. “She couldn’t stay long. She only wanted to give me her gift.”
“Doesn’t she have to fly into town? Could she not find an earlier flight so that she could spend more time with you?” Danielle didn’t react to my judgmental tone. She simply looked at the lilac-colored paper, sighed, and tucked the gift away to presumably open later before going to find Dave.
Chapter 2 ~ Pack Orders
~~~Ryan~~~
Tiffany patted my arm to draw me out of my thoughts of Leigh and back to the matter at hand. I was her escort for this event, not by choice mind you, but it would be rude of me to not pay attention to what I was doing. The woman stood too close to me as we made our way to the chapel entrance and down the aisle, causing my wolf to snarl in disgust and beg me to back away from her. Another thing he had never done when in the presence of a fellow pack mate. I couldn’t blame him though. If she had been any closer, I would’ve been carrying her. When she slid her hand up my arm, I did let my wolf snarl at her once, but that didn’t seem to bother her. By the scent wafting around her, it turned her on, which was disgusting.
Briefly, when we first entered the room, I cut a glance over to Leigh, but she was looking down at her hands and not up at us. I could see tears rolling down her cheeks and her body softly heaving. Her tears made my muscles clinch in anger. The result was my pulling Tiffany tighter to me, giving the woman the wrong impression. My wolf screamed at me to push Tiffany aside and comfort Leigh. If the simple act wouldn’t have disrupted and possibly even stopped the wedding, I would have obeyed him.
Not caring what anyone thought, said, or did, when I released Tiffany—by released, I mean forcibly pried her arm out of mine—and took my place behind Dave and his best man, I turned to watch Leigh. I wanted her to see me, to know that I was watching her, to maybe understand that I cared even if no one else seemed to. She never looked my way. Her head stayed bowed until her sister and father entered the room. She stood with everyone else as the two passed through the doorway. Dave’s mother’s overly dramatic tears drowned out her sobs. Leigh’s entire body heaved from the force of her tears. With the shade of red her face was turning, I feared she was going to hyperventilate.
More than anything at that moment, I wanted to snatch Leigh up and put her behind her sister. Okay, what I actually wanted to do was take her far from that place, but I knew putting her in line with her sister would make her happier. She belonged behind her sister as the maid of honor. I took comfort in seeing Danielle turn to Leigh and mouth, ‘I love you,’ which made Leigh cry harder and brought tears to Danielle’s eyes.
My body jerked. My wolf’s attempt to free itself of my human skin rippled my flesh, and if it hadn’t been for Dave reaching over and grabbing my shoulder, I think I would have jumped from the stage, shifting mid-flight and attacking everyone in the room who had brought such misery down on Leigh.
“Ryan,” Dave said in a whisper, staring directly into my eyes. “Calm down. This will be over soon.” His tone echoed with a command that neither my wolf nor I would dare defy.
I nodded, breathed deep, and felt my wolf settle a tiny bit.
I heard murmuring from the wedding party and the crowd, signifying that I wasn’t the only one who saw Danielle’s actions and that Dave wasn’t the only one who saw my near transformation at Leigh’s reaction. At that moment, I was proud of us both for our acts of rebellion even though no one else was. Dave’s mother would be livid, but she wouldn’t dare make a scene. The Council would bring us both in for questioning. My parents would threaten to disown me, but none of that mattered to me. I was telling them all to get bent after the wedding anyway.
My blood boiled a second later though, when I saw Mr. Alexander tug slightly on Danielle’s arm to get her to turn around. He didn’t look over at his eldest daughter or say a word about what Danielle had done, but his silent command said it all for him. Danielle was to ignore Leigh. His expression was hard, not showing any remorse or satisfaction in what he did. The pack would be proud of him. Any other action would have shown weakness, and would have probably been an automatic expulsion from the pack. The man was torn; I was sure. In his place, I don’t know what I would do. Either way you hurt one of your daughters.
The Council’s justification for their insistence that the Alexanders keep Leigh out of family gatherings once Danielle and Dave started dating was that she wasn’t a supernatural. When Mr. Alexander had refused to comply with the Council’s edict, they had ordered Dave and Danielle to split up because the Alexanders were technically no longer fully pack after claiming Leigh and moving outside of pack territory. Their refusal to obey pack orders on the matter concerning the couple would further demote their status in the supernatural world.
Mr. Alexander had tried to argue that even though Leigh wasn’t his by blood that didn’t mean he loved her any less and didn’t mean she was any less his daughter. The argument hadn’t worked when Leigh was an infant, and it didn’t work that time either.
The Council had given the Alexanders a choice: shun their eldest daughter or keep their middle daughter from being with the man she loves. Mr. Alexander didn’t want to lay the decision off on his middle daughter, but considering he wasn’t going to outcast one daughter because another had a crush on a guy, he decided that Danielle would have to be the one to decide between her sister and her boyfriend. The Council hadn’t liked his decision but had understood it.
What the pack hadn’t realize was how much Danielle loved Leigh and how much Dave loved Danielle. Danielle chose Leigh. Dave and her parents had initially tried to talk her out of it since at the time Leigh was making plans to move to Washington for graduate school because of a writing award she had won, which was going to pay for her first year. They thought it a ridiculous choice when Leigh wasn’t going to be around anyway.
I wasn’t there when the couple split up, but Dave told me most of it later that night. She invited him to her parent’s home, explained how she felt about the Council’s ridiculous rules, and told him that she could no longer be with him. Dave understood her reasoning, but was annoyed that there was so much drama over a mere human. To an extent, he held to some of the same beliefs the pack did when it came to humans and other non-pack members, but his love for Danielle held more power over him.
The following week he filed a formal request to leave the pack, so that he could be with Danielle. When he took his decision to Danielle, she told him she didn’t want to be the reason he left his pack, but if he did, she would leave with him. Her paren
ts weren’t happy with the idea of them leaving the pack but said they would support their choices and even said they would consider joining a new pack with them.
Our Council wouldn’t hear of them leaving, of course. That would make the pack look bad. Would bring shame down on the Council. They also, we would all find out later, feared Dave starting his own pack and taking a great deal of the Pine Hollow—that’s the name of our town and pack—pack members with him if he did so. Therefore, they tried to work out a second option.
What the new agreement boiled down to was that over time, the Alexanders would separate themselves from Leigh as much as possible. The separation was a necessity that the Alexanders knew they would have to do anyway, considering the life span of the average shapeshifter. Leigh would eventually notice that her parents and siblings weren’t aging normally, so in order to keep their supernatural status a secret, they would have to extricate themselves from her life somehow before she grew suspicious.
The next stipulation was that the Alexanders had to move back to pack territory if Dave and Danielle married. The family had moved to a small town twenty-minutes south of Pine Hollow right after Leigh was born per the orders of the Council. The move kept them close enough to get to the pack when they needed to but far enough away that Leigh wouldn’t be privy to any pack business. The second condition was the second biggest strain on the family at the time of the wedding. They hadn’t told their eldest daughter they were moving out of her childhood home and that where they were moving to, she couldn’t come. I guess her parents felt that if they all but ignored her, she wouldn’t care about their moving on without her.
The third stipulation was that the Alexanders had to keep Leigh as far away from other pack members as possible, which was why she wasn’t encouraged to stay long at family functions that involved the pack—if she was even invited—and another reason why she wasn’t allowed to be part of the wedding. At the time, no one had understood why the Council saw Leigh as a threat. She was one girl. If need be, the Council could get a witch or the Regent to wipe her memory of things she shouldn’t know. But I figured it out rather quickly the morning of the wedding after touching her—though I think I had known deep in my soul before that moment—one of the things they feared happening. My wolf had definitely known.
There were probably other stipulations, but Dave didn’t list them all. The only reason he had told me what he had was because I had been the only person to condone his wanting to leave the pack to be with Danielle, and I had planned to go with him, something Dave was both shocked and grateful to hear and had used in his argument with the Council. I hadn’t even met Leigh at the time, so her side of things hadn’t factored into my decision. My family wasn’t as important as Dave’s was to the pack, so my leaving wouldn’t have affected much, but the pack couldn’t let two of its newer generation leave, so they had compromised. Our leaving would have shown the rest of the shifter world that the pack wasn’t as strong as they thought or portrayed themselves to be while holding onto old traditions.
The act of defiance would have proven that the packs’ antiquated beliefs weren’t standing up to a changing world. There were rumors in the supernatural community as to the possibility of the supernatural world coming out of the closet, so to speak. My pack was resisting these changes, but they knew that if they enforced their rule and the supernaturals came out, then there wouldn’t be anything stopping the Alexanders from telling their daughter who and what they were. There was also the chance that the coming out would never happen, so the pack and the Alexanders had done their best to work with each other, not that any of the decisions were good for Leigh, who was left feeling unwanted and like an outcast amongst her family.
I haven’t had much of a say in any of the goings on with the pack or with the wedding up until that point, but from that day forward I had decided that I would. I would no longer sit around and watch my people or her family treat her as an outcast. Danielle, Dave, and I were her family despite whose blood ran through her veins, and she deserved to have a family that loved her.
Chapter 3 ~ Here Comes the Bride
~~Leigh~~
Danielle didn’t bother to acknowledge my father’s actions or the scathing look her soon-to-be mother-in-law gave her and me when she told me she loved me; she simply gave me another warm smile and turned to face her future husband. She was absolutely radiant in her strapless dress. I chose to focus all of my attention on her and not the eyes of nearly everyone in the room boring into me. I had long since grown used to the way my family and the people from Pine Hollow detested me. I didn’t care if they didn’t like that my sister loved me despite their hatred. My father’s reaction only slightly bothered me. If he had simply looked my way for an instant, I could have deciphered his feelings on what he had done. The glance I gave my mother broke my heart. For half a blink, I thought I saw sorrow and respect for my sister in her eyes.
Danielle was the only one of them aside from Ryan who bothered to acknowledge my presence, but that was all right. She was the only one of them I cared about, though I’ll admit to a slight attraction to Ryan. Okay, I felt more than a slight attraction to the man.
I’ve never been close to my younger siblings, considering how much older than them I am. Maddie, who was born six years after Danielle and Grady, who came along two years after Maddie, are eight and ten years younger than me. The age gap and the fact that there was something blatantly different about me kept us from ever being close. As much as I love my parents, we’ve never had the bond they had with their other children. There has always been a distance between us. I’ve never been able to figure out why we could never connect the way parents and siblings should. Reason after reason has swum through my mind since I was a young child, but very little of it was plausible or truly made sense.
Until Danielle started dating Dave, though, they had never been mean to me, never beat me, talked down to me, or treated me as being less than them, even though I’ve always felt as if I were beneath them. I’m not saying they started abusing me after Danielle and Dave got together, but they have distanced themselves from me a great deal over the last few years.
I don’t blame Dave. He has been great to me—not overly loving, but decent. His family and my parents’ extended family, who have started to play more of a role in our lives since the couple met, on the other hand, have, at times, been downright cruel to me. Those people have called me fat to my face. Have left a room because I entered it. Have told my parents not to bring me to functions inside Pine Hollow.
On one occasion, a woman threw away a present I brought for my sister the second I sat it on the gift table. I lost my shit at that. I snatched it out of the trash, called the woman a bitch, and slung the piece of food that had stuck to the package at the woman’s face where it slid down her cheek. My father had asked me to leave, not bothering to listen to my side of the story. I simply handed my present to Danielle and walked away. After that, I only came when Danielle begged, and I only stayed long enough to personally hand her a gift, say hello to her, or make plans to meet with her later.
Until Dave, my parents were estranged from their families and their hometown. No one has ever told me why. That isn’t to say those people have had nothing to do with us. On many occasions, I have been around those people, so to an extent, I was used to getting such crude treatment from them, but I always thought their dislike for me came from their dislike of my parents, but the older I got, the more I realized that wasn’t the case. I appear to be the reason my parents hadn’t gotten along with their families. Once my parents started treating me like an outsider, their families warmed to them and accepted them back into their lives with ease. I don’t know what I could have done to them to make them behave that way toward me. Their disdain goes back to my earliest memories, so as an infant, there wasn’t anything I could have done to them besides exist.
I’ve never asked my mom, but I’ve always wondered if my dad wasn’t my biological dad. Maybe she was pregn
ant when she met him, and he loved her so much he didn’t mind, or maybe she cheated on him or someone had raped her. All of those things could have caused a rift between my parents and their families. Actually, as strict and old fashion as their families are, they could have simply been pregnant with me before they married and my presence was a reminder of my parents’ deviant behavior, and that’s their problem with me.
For a time, I even wondered if I was adopted because I don’t favor either of my parents, but I don’t look so unlike them either that I couldn’t possibly be theirs. I discarded that theory early on in life, because they didn’t have a reason to adopt. My mother is, to this day, very fertile. She and my father want to have more children, and unbelievably, my parents are still virile enough to have them and take care of them at their age. I’ve also seen pictures of my mother during her pregnancy with me and ultrasound photos. I’ve even seen my parents’ marriage certificate, which shows that they were married a good year before I was conceived. Normally, I would say that would disprove some of my other theories, but all of it, even the pregnancy photos, they could have faked.
Adoption was still my biggest theory, but I couldn’t figure out why they would go through such an elaborate scam to hide something like that from me, not when telling the truth would have saved them and me so much grief. I’ve seen how miserable my parents have been living outside the boundaries of their childhood hometown, how heartbroken they’ve been over not being able to be part of family gatherings. I’ve also seen how much happier they are now that they have been allowed back. They wouldn’t have given all of that up for a stranger, wouldn’t have sacrificed so much for someone who wasn’t their blood. When I think of my situation that way, I realize how much they do love me and how awful they must feel about having to divide their loyalties. That didn’t make things hurt any less or make me any less angry with them. I personally would put my child above anyone else, even my own parents. I think any good parent would, no matter how old the child.
Outcast (Supernaturals Book 2) Page 2