"Raevyn," I breathed out the second I shifted.

She seemed to float down the rocks to us, three naked young women utterly awed by meeting the Raevyn Guérir.

"Let's find your clothes and get back to your hotel so we can move along," she said, her voice low and soft. She flipped her golden blonde hair over her shoulder and walked ahead of us, as if she knew exactly where we'd stashed our clothes.

"Wait a minute," I whispered to Owena and Echo, my voice little more than a quiet exhalation of breath. "Tell me I'm not hallucinating, but wasn't she completely bald a minute ago?"

"Bald as a bowling ball," she laughed. And that was it. No explanation for her hair, no explanation for her being able to hear me. Unless she was wolf, but never had the rumors said that about her.

In fact, Raevyn Guérir may have been a legend, but as we'd discovered on our road trip, she was a very mysterious legend since nothing was actually known about her. The three of us probably knew more about her than any other living creature.

She had a bald, tattooed head. Sometimes.

She also had waist-length golden blonde hair. Sometimes.

She looked ageless. I couldn't even begin to guess how old she was.

She knew things. How to find us. (How did she even know we were looking for her?) Where we'd stashed our clothes.

Once we made it to the tree, we grabbed our clothes and pulled them on, and she continued on to the hotel, through the lobby and up to our room.

"Get packed and let's go. We have things to do," she said. So we threw our dirty clothes and toiletries into the duffel bags and left the hotel, still so early that most people weren't awake yet.

We threw our duffels in the trunk. Echo was driving this morning, and Owena looked at Raevyn. "Are you driving with us? Or...?"

"Or flying around on my magical broomstick? No, it's over forty thousand miles so it's in the shop getting a new transmission." She rolled her eyes at all of us, then got into the front passenger seat.

Owena and I exchanged a glance and got into the back seat. All righty then.

We drove for a while in silence, and then Echo announced she was stopping at McDonald's for breakfast and coffee. She shot a look at Raevyn.

"So, do you...eat?"

At that, Raevyn burst into laughter. "What the hell do you think we are? Some sort of vampire that survives on blood?"

Once again, Owena and I exchanged a glance. "Well," I started to say, "we aren't really sure what to make of you."

With a shrug, she conceded the point. "Fair enough. We'll talk after breakfast on the way to our place."

"Oh," I said as we inched along in the drive-thru line, "do you live with someone?"

"Yes, with me," the bald woman said. Not going to lie, we all lost our shit and screamed.

After we calmed down, the bald woman laughed. "God, that never gets old."

"OK this is...different," I said, trying to be diplomatic and not piss off this woman who had extraordinary abilities that I couldn't even begin to comprehend.

"I can see where you would think that," she agreed.

When it was our turn, we all ordered breakfast sandwiches and hot coffee. We parked and ate our food, then the bald woman directed us back on the highway. "We're just about two hours away, so we have time for your questions."

"I have about a million," I said. "First is, who are you?"

"I'm Raevyn," she said as if that was the most obvious fact in the world.

"Wait, I thought the other -- the blonde lady -- was Raevyn."

"No, I am," she assured us. "My friend is Blaisall." She turned and looked at me. "You two have much in common. Four hundred years ago, she was the first rejected mate."

For a minute, we all just absorbed that shocking-on-so-many-levels information.

"I don't...I don't even know what to do with that," I admitted after a full five minutes of silence.

"It's simple, really. Her mate rejected her. We never knew why, exactly. But he was weak in his mind; his elevator didn't go all the way to the top floor, if you know what I mean. The Forces usually don't give a wolf like that a mate. But in their wisdom, which we can never hope to understand, they did, and he ran off after her mate brand appeared -- and he was never seen again. She was devastated."

"I understand," I said softly. Because I did. The pain had been battering me again today, still not constant, but it was hitting me more often than it did yesterday. "So, you're telling me that Night is weak in the mind and that's why he rejected me?"

"Oh, no," she said. "Alphas since the beginning of time have been strong minded. The Forces never make a mistake with Alphas. No, your mate's mind is well and good."

"I see," I said. So Night had rejected me just because...he wanted to reject me. Because of that bitch Lindsay Morgan. Or maybe because of me. Maybe it was just me.

"The why is not important right now," Raevyn said to me. "We must first deal with the pain, which I suspect is bit worse than yesterday, isn't it?"

I bit my lip as a new wave washed over me with perfect timing. "Yes. It's a little worse," I confessed when I could speak again.

Owena lightly slapped my arm with the back of her hand. "You were supposed to tell us if the pain started!"

"Well, excuse me for not wanting to worry you!" I snapped at her. "I was worried we wouldn't be able to find the Raevyn, and then that would have made you and Echo even more upset, and then I would have gotten upset because you two were upset -- it would have been a mess!"

Poking a finger at my face, she snarled at me. Or her wolf did. "You tell us everything," she demanded. "No more secrets! We can't help you if we don't know what's going on."

I'd never seen Owena lose her temper with me before, but this girl was about to skin me alive, and I could only be thankful she didn't have a knife.

"I promise," I said, chastened. My two best friends had left pack lands with me, and although three was better than one alone, we needed our bigger pack and the comfort and familiarity they provided. My friends had sacrificed a lot to be with me, and I needed to remember that they were there to provide comfort, not to have me play the martyr and protect them from what I was going through.

"You damn well better," Owena grumbled.

"You better," Echo...echoed.

"Raevyn, I still want to know how you and Blaisall...work," I finished weakly, not knowing how to describe what I wanted to say.

"It's a miserable story," she said softly. "Way back when, I was an enchantress in a world filled with many of my kind. Then the wolves and the magicks went to war -- the wolves started it, by the way. They feared our power. They hunted us ruthlessly, using some magicks they'd captured and tortured to get past our spells. The wolves captured me, and held me powerless with one of our captured magicks. I noticed Blaisall standing there, at the edge of the crowd gathered to watch another dirty magick be destroyed, her eyes agonized from the pain of her rejection. They were about to tear my throat out and at the last moment, just as the Alpha lunged for me, I slid out of my body into Blaisall's. I watched through her eyes as my throat was torn out and my body crumpled to the ground."

We all sat silent after that horrifying picture she'd painted, imagining what it would be like to watch our own throats being torn out, spectators to our own demise. We hadn't even realized there were enchanters at one time, so long had it been since they existed in our world.

"I was one of the last magicks alive. The wolves decimated our kind. Maybe a few survived, but if they did, they hid themselves well and cloaked their abilities so they could survive. In all these years, I have not heard of another one, but I have to believe that more than I survived. The funny thing is, in their pursuit of destroying us, by killing off the magicks, the wolves lost their longevity somehow and began dying off after living a hundred years or so. We magicks were the fountain of youth for all magical creatures, apparently."

"I'm so sorry," I told her, and Echo and Owena murmured their agreement. "We definitely weren't taught about that war in school."

"That was a dark time in the history of the wolves, a shameful time that I do not doubt they wish to forget. Back then, they tore out our throats with joy, but many generations later, the memories of the war had faded, the reality of the magicks was gone for the most part -- and like many things in history, it became a story and then it faded away."

"So, ummm, you don't have a vendetta against wolves or anything, do you?" Owena asked.

Raevyn gave a short laugh. "I live in close quarters with one, you could say, and that would make things quite uncomfortable."

"So how does it work?" I asked. "Sharing a body, I mean."

She shrugged. "Give and take. Sometimes she wants to be out -- if we go in public, Blaisall is always out and moves me aside. Other times, I move her aside when I want to be out; but sometimes when she is out, I simply watch through her eyes. I am stronger than she is with my magic and I could control her, but we find it works better if I don't. It's unfair."

"And what about her wolf?" Echo asked.

"She is there, and occasionally she gets a run, but since the rejection, she is mostly quiet. I help with the pain of the rejection in exchange for my life."

"Blaisall still feels it?" I asked, terrified, trying to imagine hundreds of years of feeling even worse than I was already feeling.

"Indeed, she does," Raevyn said. "Being rejected by your Destined One is a pain like no other."

"Great," I said.

"I can help, Neera. Since Blaisall, I have helped the four others who were rejected."

"So I'm only the sixth one to be rejected?"

"Yes," Raevyn said. "But the first Howl ever. That is simply unprecedented, and I have never heard the like in all my years. No Alpha would ever reject his Howl. That is giving up a power like no other. Until now, it has been unthinkable. Rejecting the Howl sent by the Forces is just...not done."

Wanting to turn the subject from me being a Destined One loser like no one before me in the history of wolves, I asked, "Can you sever the connection?"

I was hopeful that maybe the rumors were wrong.

"Absolutely not," she stated firmly, without hesitation. "But I can help you with the pain. Relieve some of the discomfort so you can lead a somewhat normal life. I don't say this to discourage you, but you will always have pain. I can make it bearable, nothing more."

"That's better than nothing," I said, feeling a bit dispirited.

"It is," Raevyn said with a decisive nod. "You're already finding the pain uncomfortable, and it only gets worse unless I help. Be thankful there were others before you -- I learned a great deal through trial and error."

"Do you have to take over my body, too?"

She actually laughed at me. "No, Neera. I don't."

"So how do you do it?"

"Some spells. Some potions."

Echo jumped into the conversation. "How did you find us? I've been trying to figure that out."

"A rejected mate is big news," Raevyn said. "Almost immediately, we heard whispers and rumors that the Alpha of the Aibek Pack rejected his Destined One, his Howl. Brutally rejected her in a manner so terrible --"

"OK, OK, we've already read the book and know how that story ends. We don't need to keep revisiting it," I grumbled.

"You'll need to take the next exit," Raevyn directed Echo. "We're almost to our home. Anyway, Echo, to answer your question, I called her to me. It's a lovely little bit of magic that guides the one in need to you."

"That makes sense," I said. "Because I was freaking out trying to figure out how in the heck we were going to find a mysterious legend that might not even exist."

"Oh, I exist," Raevyn said breezily.

"Just one more thing I want to know," I told her. "Am I the only one feeling the rejection, or does Night feel it, too?"

Raevyn smiled. "Now that's a very good question."