My Alphas: The Complete Series (11 page)

Kita could be extremely blunt. It was one of her best - and worst - qualities.

“When will the inspector be arriving?” Edon asked, changing the subject.

Kita took the hint.

“Not for months. Mr. Earl may come too.”

Mr. Earl was a lawyer who lived in Hinton. Friendly to werewolves, he’d agreed to help them negotiate their way through the requirements to claim formal title over their land. The cabin they’d built had been a vital step. The government inspector would have to confirm it met their convoluted specifications to be deemed a “dwelling”. Then they would be one step closer to gaining control over their land. Rey had called it a foolish task but had then largely ignored it. Every time Kita requested the inspection, it seemed to get further and further away, being dragged out and delayed.

Edon looked at the map spread on the table. Another human foolishness Rey abhorred but couldn’t be ignored. Edon had sketched the boundaries of their territory. They were hemmed in with Utson on one side and Turo on the other. In the other direction was the town. The lines on the map meant nothing to werewolves. The pack that could hold the land was the rightful possessor of it. But the humans encroached more and more as the years went by. Edon wanted the entire territory to be declared as held by werewolf so the humans would stop their creeping expansion.

They were so
close
he could almost taste it. Despite the growing rift between he and Rey that had come out of nowhere, they’d almost done what no other werewolf pack had: obtained formal title. Their territory was secure and stable and their pack strong. Then had come the dead bodies and the stirrings in the town to have them culled.

And now, right in the middle of it, her.

Cass Green.

She had a hold over at least half his mind at any given time. Even as they’d been tearing the invaders apart, Edon had been thinking about her safety. During the long night with its meager catch, Edon had many hours in the dark to let his mind run free and it had focused on her the entire time.

“When it rains, it pours,” Vara said, looking down at the map.

Edon had discussed with her many times the prospect of taking a mate but the conversations always ended up in the same place: what about Rey? He would want to take a human mate also and to sire cubs. Then the pack would split as the werewolves favored one Alpha over the other. Eos and Trammel had shared a mate, a tenuous situation that lasted until she showed favor to one over the other and the pack split into two, shortly before they were obliterated.

“Indeed it does,” Edon replied, his mind drifting to Cass again.

All things were coming at once but it wouldn’t be he or the Arctos pack who drowned in the flood. There must be a way through and it would present itself soon.

“We will double the scouting missions and place outposts here and here,” Edon said, using his finger to touch the map.

As soon as he was done here, he’d find Rey.

He had a new idea for him.

*

“Don’t yell the answer,” Cass hissed to Nia.

They were in the sorta-hot spring and some of the other werewolves were lounging downstream, washing blood off themselves. Cass was asking Nia questions but Nia was having trouble understanding the concept of volume control.

“Use your inside voice,” Cass said.

“My inside voice? It’s my voice,” Nia replied, perplexed. “Hey Mera! Do you have an inside voice?” she yelled out to one of the werewolves downstream. She shook her head as Cass tried to sink below the surface of the water, sure the heat of her embarrassment was going to boil it soon.

Nia turned back to her, hands on hips, looking like a river nymph.

“Well, I only joined a few years back. I was with Eos pack but it got destroyed by the Utson pack and I ran away before they could catch me. I came to Edon and asked if I could join Arctos and he said yes.”

Now that Cass was asking so many questions she felt like she was a spy like Kita suspected.

Nia continued giving her a history lesson. The Turek pack had split into two - the Eos pack and Trammel pack. Both were destroyed by Utson. Rey came from the Areylon pack. His father had died after a challenge and the pack disintegrated with too many beta wolves battling for control. Edon and Rey had gathered up the remnants and brought them into Arctos.

The most intriguing part of the story was that Eos and Trammel had shared a human mate before the entire thing collapsed. Cass had never heard of such a thing before.

“So who were the werewolves who attacked this morning?”

“We don’t know. No one has ever smelt them before.”

According to Nia the mystery of the attackers was the talk of the pack, vying for popularity with others topics such as Cass and Rey mating and followed by discussion of which Alpha would win when they did fight again.

Cass had hastily changed the topic off her sex life and focused back on the attackers. They weren’t Utson or Turo and Nia speculated they must have come through the town somehow - although on the far side of it was human settlements and no werewolves at all.

“I think the Yuma pack sometimes roam over there though,” Nia had added.

There were so many names - packs and werewolves both - and Cass wished she had some paper to write it all down so she could keep it straight. To make matters worse, the werewolves from different packs had very similar sounding names. Mera, Nia, Kita… Arctos, Areylon, Turo, Turek…

Nia ducked under and then swam to the side of the pool, pulling herself out to sit on a sunny rock with her legs dangling in the water. Cass tried not to look at her perfectly flat belly and sank further down into the water.

After eating (more roast boar) and calming down from Kita’s interrogation, Nia had taken her to the hot spring again. The mid-morning sun was strong, warming the nearby rocks and many werewolves came and went, washing blood off themselves before returning to the den. Cass kept looking but didn’t see either Edon or Rey.

“Do you think they’re going to fight again?” Cass asked Nia, who had her eyes closed, basking in the sun.

“I think so. Hey Mera! Do you-”

“Shhh!” Cass splashed Nia.

“Oh right. Inside voice.” Nia returned to sunbathing and drowsing.

Cass didn’t know how long it took to remove Rey’s scent from her but she wasn’t taking any chances. The werewolves had no soap so she’d resorted to rubbing her body with handfuls of gritty sand from the bottom of the spring.

As a ritual it calmed her but in that calmness her mind began chattering like crazy. She feared Edon and Rey would fight and the first she’d know about it was when the blood-soaked victor came hobbling down the hill, half-dead and seeking to mate with her to secure his claim. Shortly thereafter more werewolves would come bolting out from the trees and slaughter them all. She’d either die or be claimed by another Alpha and turned into breeding stock.

Deeper than the fear of getting something she didn’t want was the fear she’d get
exactly
what she wanted. Some quiet part of her stated she’d mate with the Alpha, whichever one that was, bear his children and live as Pack Mate in the den.

Cass had known how werewolves mated but she’d pushed it off to the side as she’d moved through selling her possessions and travelling to Hinton. She realized now she’d been in denial, even with all the books and websites she’d read.

In her mind, an Alpha had been a strong man. Perhaps gruff but loving and kind.

Rey was nothing like that. He was downright terrifying. A wild werewolf who did what he wanted when he wanted. He seemed as likely to kill her as mate with her. And Edon - on the surface he appeared more civilized than Rey, more open to expressing his feelings but after seeing him fight Rey and then destroy the invading werewolves she realized he was a dangerous Alpha too. He was strong and brutal, the same wild animal underneath but better able to cover it up.

Both of them were utterly overwhelming.

The morning drew on, Cass planning on staying in the water until she turned into a prune or Rey’s scent washed away. She managed to get Nia off the topic of cubs and how excited she was to be raising Cass’ cubs and how cute cubs were and on to random pack gossip.

Nia was chattering away about some werewolves she didn’t know when two small children came running out of the forest, laughing. A boy and girl, about four, stark naked and both with dark hair and blue eyes. They stopped when they saw Cass watching them from the pool and then shifted, turning into cubs. Barking and yipping they took off, back into the forest. Cass had assumed the entire pack were adults and given there were no human mates, there wouldn’t be any children.

“Who were those children?”

“Cubs,” Nia corrected. “Yola and Jara. They’re Rey’s.”

“Those are Rey’s… cubs?” It felt strange to call children cubs but Cass went with it, desperately trying to hang on.

“Yup,” Nia said, apparently oblivious to the look of shock on Cass’ face.

“Rey’s cubs?”

“Why is that so hard to believe?” Nia asked and lay back on the sunbathing rock.

Cass stared into the forest as the sound of the cubs’ excited barking faded away. Just when she thought she was starting to understand, everything got flipped upside down again.

Rey already had cubs. He’d already taken a mate. But where was she? What had happened to her?

“Where is their mother?” Cass asked.

“Dead. She died in the wilderness. Froze to death.”

Cass felt an icy fear grip her heart. Maybe everyone was wrong about Pack Mates and the supposed position of privilege they enjoyed in the pack. Thus far she’d been ignored or glared at. Perhaps love ‘em and leave ‘em was Rey’s M.O. and she could be his mate as long as she pleased him. But when she didn’t…

She made a sudden decision.

She had to leave.

But how?

*

Edon climbed higher up the mountain, the chill of the thin air battling with the glare of the sun that had seared away the clouds. He was heading to what he privately thought of as Rey’s bluff. He’d known Rey would return there after dealing with the attacking werewolves so they could speak, far away from the pack who would be watching and listening.

Unspoken between them was also that it was far away from Cass and her maddening scent.

Rey was sitting on a boulder in human form, looking out over the valley, his feet pressed flat against it. Edon felt relief when he saw this - at least it wouldn’t be another one of the one-sided conversations he’d had with him a hundred times before. Edon shifted, feeling the chill of the wind touch his skin and moved around another boulder which blocked the cold flow. He leaned his back against the sun-warmed stone and relaxed.

“She was naked.”

Edon glanced across at Rey and nearly laughed at the distraught look that crossed his face. It was as though Cass being naked was some treacherous trick he’d fallen prey to. Something deeply unfair and dishonorable.

“So it goes using a gun and then nudity? Or is it the other way around? Which is the more dishonorable?”

Edon couldn’t help himself. He laughed and then laughed even harder at the sour look on Rey’s face.

“If you had gone to her room when she was naked then our positions would be reversed,” Rey said.

Edon pulled himself together. They were talking and that was more than they’d done for many months.

“Yes, you’re right,” he said once he wiped the grin off his face. “Bringing her to the den was a good idea but leaving the choice unresolved wasn’t.”

They sat there in the sun listening to the cold wind blowing.

“I went there to kill her. If she was gone we wouldn’t have to choose. We could keep going,” Rey said.

“Why didn’t you?” Edon asked, feeling the fragile connection between them trembling. If he put too much weight on it, Rey would shut down.

Rey gave him a look that was dead flat and serious but Edon saw the mischievous glint in his eye.

“As I said, she was naked.”

Another minute of comfortable silence passed. Edon wanted to talk to Rey but also didn’t want to break the temporary spell of the past. They had been friends since they first met despite their many differences and upbringing and that friendship had deepened over time into an unbreakable bond.

Well, almost unbreakable Edon reflected.

“Carcer is the new Turo pack Alpha. He has aligned with humans. Men were set up over the ravine. They killed those two werewolves with guns. High caliber,” Rey said finally.

Werewolves soon learned about guns if they wanted to survive but it had been Edon who taught Rey the difference between low and high caliber. Low was a survivable wound. High was your head exploding into chunks.

“Shall we split the pack?” Edon answered.

They had considered and rejected the idea in the past and now with the attack it was more than clear they were stronger together than they were separately. The unspoken bond they shared that made them such successful warriors was telling them breaking apart now would ensure almost certain death.

“Carcer is insane. He needs to be put down. He is surely behind the dead humans,” Rey said.