by J. L. Wilder
Nothing is going to stop me from finding those Arctic Wolves and taking them out.
Fortunately, Victor had always been a skilled navigator, and he was in no doubt now that he was moving in the right direction. All he had to do was to head due north. That was what his father had always told him. The Arctic Wolves were directly to the north of the Vancouver Wolves.
Unless they’ve moved in the past twenty years, I guess.
But Victor thought that was unlikely. Confidence would have made them complacent. He did not believe there had been a serious threat to them since the day his own father had attacked them, and two decades of feeling safe would have convinced them that there was no need to uproot themselves. No, they would be living in the same place they had always been. He was sure of it.
He packed up his bag and closed it, ready to resume his journey. Then he closed his eyes and sank into the base instincts that lived at the back of his mind.
Run. Hunt. Fight.
He felt his body reshaping itself. His shoulders twisted forward, his hips to the sides. His spine lengthened and his face took on a lupine form. Fur emerged, protecting his skin and keeping him warm. His feet and hands sprouted pads to help him run safely over uneven terrain and claws with which to defend himself.
He bent his head and picked up the backpack between his teeth, and then resumed his run.
BY THE TIME HE CALLED a halt for the evening, the sun was going down. Victor could hear the trickling of a river nearby. This would be an ideal place to spend the night.
Of course, the fact that it was a water source meant that it would likely also be a popular place to spend the night, and the last thing he wanted was to run into larger predators. Victor was pretty confident in his ability to defend himself, but if something took him by surprise while he was sleeping, it might end badly.
Maybe I shouldn’t have traveled alone. If I had a packmate with me, he could have stood watch while I slept, and vice versa.
But it was too late for that. He was on his own, and he was just going to have to make the best of the situation.
He found a crevice between two rocks near the riverbank that was just large enough to conceal the body of a wolf. He wouldn’t be able to sleep in human form—the space wouldn’t accommodate that shape as neatly—but that was okay. It was safer to have his teeth and claws at the ready while he slept.
He nosed his backpack into the crevice and headed off in the direction of the sound of the river, hoping to get the lay of the land before it got too dark.
He found his way to the river quickly enough, but he stood back hesitantly once he reached it. The current was swift, and although Victor was a strong swimmer in the lake near his home, he didn’t love the idea of trying to battle those rapids in the dark.
He would come back in the morning. When the sun was up, he would feel safer taking his chances with the water. In the meantime, there was enough left in his bottle to see him through the night.
Suddenly, there was a rustling sound in the bushes on the opposite bank.
Victor froze.
He knew he was difficult to see in the dark. His fur was a charcoal gray that made him all but invisible. Still, he lowered his body to the ground, ready to spring into action if whatever it was made its presence known and posed a threat.
He waited, hardly daring to breathe, not wanting to give away his position.
A moment later, a fat possum emerged from the bushes. It clearly didn’t see Victor—he knew it would have run if it had. It waddled down the bank and into a thicket of reeds and disappeared from view.
Letting out a long sigh, Victor retreated slowly back toward his cave.
It was just a possum. Nothing to worry about.
By the time he had backed his way into the crack between the rocks that was to be his shelter for the evening, he was feeling silly for having been worried at all. He was a wolf, after all. There wasn’t much in the forest that stood a chance against him in a fight. Even another wolf, a wild wolf, wasn’t likely to give him much of a run for his money. Wild wolves didn’t have a human side. They had only their instinct. Even when Victor was in wolf form, he was a human at his core. He would always have tools in his arsenal that true wolves didn’t have.
He lay down on the ground and rested his head on his paws. The rocks served as effective wind blockers, keeping him nice and warm. This would be a comfortable enough place to sleep.
It occurred to him, as he gazed out at the night beyond him, that this was the first time he had spent a night alone away from his home. This was the first time he had spent a night away from his pack. They had traveled sometimes, but they had always been together, always in groups.
Now, Victor was completely on his own.
He relished the idea, but there was something frightening about it as well. Wolves weren’t meant to be solitary creatures. They were meant to be surrounded by a pack.
I’ll never understand why Pax lives the way he does, he thought idly. Pax could have simply submitted to Donovan and joined his pack years ago, but he hadn’t. He had chosen to go off on his own.
Victor felt surer than ever that the way he lived was the only way to live. The best way to live. You had to have a home and a source of income. You had to have a way to protect and provide for your pack. And you had to have a way of keeping them loyal to you.
Victor had all of those things.
I shouldn’t have worried about whether I would be able to be a good alpha to my pack, he realized. We have a good life. I have everything I need to make sure they’re taken care of and happy.
And once he had dispensed with the looming threat of the Arctic Wolves, their lives would be better than ever, and Victor would be more certain than he had ever been in his life that his father would be proud of him.
He allowed his eyes to drift closed.
It’s not so bad, really, sleeping out in the wild. We should do it more often. Go camping or something, just for fun. Not as a way of life, of course. But as a pastime...why not?
He drifted slowly off to sleep.
Chapter Three
LILY
Caleb wasted no time in organizing patrols to search for the southern wolf who was allegedly coming to spy on them.
Lily ate breakfast, as she always did, with her mother, Sophie. As the pack’s matriarch, she was also mother to most of the rest of Lily’s generation. Only a few members of her pack had been born of other mothers.
Despite the fact that she had an overwhelming number of children, Sophie had always done her best to carve out one on one time with each of them. Breakfasts were the time she spent with Lily.
Usually, Lily appreciated her time with her mother. But today, she would just as soon have skipped it. The moment Caleb had begun stirring this morning, Lily had started itching to take advantage of the new freedom she was sure she was about to enjoy.
“You’ve hardly touched your rabbit,” her mother observed.
Lily looked down at her plate. “Not hungry, I guess.”
“You know how important it is for you to eat well,” her mother lectured. “It’s more important for you than it is for any other member of the pack.”
“I know,” Lily sighed. This was an old conversation. “Because I’m an omega.”
“Yes, you are,” her mother said. “I know it doesn’t feel important to you now, but one day you’ll be happy you took such good care of your body. You’ll need it to be in prime condition if you’re to carry a litter and continue the strength and prosperity of this pack.”
“Which is the main reason I exist, right?” Lily asked.
Her mother sighed. “There’s no need to be dramatic about it, Lily,” she said. “You know, if you belonged to one of the southern packs, the way I did when I was growing up, your lot would be a lot worse. You would have an alpha chosen for you, and you would essentially be his property. He would consider it his right to force himself on you and breed with you as often as he liked.”
“
I know that,” Lily said. “I know the southerners are barbarians, and they treat their women like objects. You’ve told me plenty of times.”
Her mother’s voice softened. “I’m just saying you should be grateful for how good you have it,” she said. “You say that breeding is the only reason you exist, but of course it isn’t. You know it isn’t. We all love and value you as a person.”
“I know that,” Lily said. “But you talk about my carrying a litter as if it’s something that’s going to happen soon.”
“We don’t know when it’s going to happen,” her mother said. “Finding your mate can happen unexpectedly, Lily. It’s not something you can plan for. And when someone imprints on you, you and he might find that you’re unable to wait, to make a plan regarding when you want to have children. You might find that your urges get the better of you.”
That was easy enough for Lily to believe. She didn’t think she would even feel compelled to wait for someone to imprint. If a friendly shifter offered himself to her with no strings attached, she would probably take him up on it just to sate the arousal that had been burning within her for so long.
But she couldn’t tell her mother that. She knew what her mother would say—that she had to wait to find her mate. That as an omega, if she had sex with anyone, she was sure to become pregnant, and she didn’t want that to happen with a random stranger.
But there was no chance that it would happen. That was the problem.
“Mom,” she said. “No one is ever going to imprint on me because I never meet anyone.”
“It’ll happen when you least expect it,” her mother said fondly. “Someone will come into our territory, and he’ll see you, and he’ll imprint and want to stay with the pack.”
“No one is ever going to come into a territory that’s dominated by a pack as big as ours,” Lily protested.
“Some of your brothers and sisters have found mates,” her mother pointed out.
“My brothers and sisters are all allowed to go miles away from the cave,” Lily said. “They go away for days at a time. That’s how they’re meeting people. None of them met their mates here.”
“You know why we allow them to roam farther than you can, Lily,” her mother said. “The world isn’t a safe place for an omega. You’ve grown up in a pack that respects and values its omegas, so you’ve never known anything different. But most of the wolves out there aren’t like we are. They treat their women badly. And when they see something they want, they take it.”
Lily sighed. Her mother had been kidnapped twice in her youth by unfriendly packs looking to take advantage of an omega, so of course, she had trauma and hang-ups about it. But things weren’t like that in the north now. The violent bear packs that had lived there at one time had been driven south, and the wolf packs who treated omegas badly were also below the sixty-sixth parallel. As long as Lily stayed within the arctic circle, she knew she would be perfectly safe. There was no reason she couldn’t go looking for a mate.
No reason except for the fact that her pack would always be inordinately protective.
But today, no one was watching her. Her fathers all had their eyes on Caleb, advising him as he laid out the strategy for the first battle he would ever manage as an adult. The rest of her siblings were attentive to the assignments Caleb was giving them.
Only Lily’s mother was paying any attention to her at all. But Lily knew that wouldn’t last.
And sure enough, after breakfast ended, Sophie turned her attention to her eldest son and to the others who were receiving their marching orders. It was easy enough for Lily to sneak away in the confusion.
She set off at a jog as soon as she got out of the cave. The plan was to travel east. There was a lot of ground to cover that way. If she tried to go west, she’d run into the ocean before too long, and going north would only lead her, eventually, to a barren tundra. East was her best bet if she wanted to find other wolves, wolves who didn’t yet belong to a pack.
Maybe someone who might be mine.
Her pack would be angry at her for running away. She knew that. But when she came back with a mate, there wouldn’t be much they could do or say. They would have to respect the choice she had made to determine her own future, to find herself a mate. They would have to be pleased that she had taken action to grow the pack, which was what they had all told her for years was her main job.
And besides, if they’re really angry, my new alpha will protect me. He won’t let anyone do anything to me.
She wondered idly what he would be like. Tall and strong, hopefully, but with a gentle nature. She wanted a man who wanted to take care of her, a man who wanted to make her happy.
Just thinking about him made her whole body hot with anticipation.
She closed her eyes and exhaled. She had to let off a little steam. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to focus on which way she was going, and she wouldn’t have a hope of finding her way back after she found her dream guy.
She ducked under a pine tree and stripped out of her clothes. She lay down on her back and enjoyed the sensation of the wind brushing across her skin, imagining that it was a lover’s hands.
Living in close quarters with her family had left her with very little idea of what to do with her own body, but she was in no particular hurry today. Already, she had traveled farther from the cave than she had ever been before, and she was sure that no one would come looking for her there. She had plenty of time to experiment, plenty of time to discover what she liked best.
Instinctively, her hands went to her breasts, feeling the weight of them, squeezing their supple shape. She brushed her thumbs over her nipples and found that she liked the sensation—it was as if they had a direct connection to the heat at her core that had been tormenting her. She stroked them slowly, gently, feeling them grow hard under her touch.
Her hands were so small, her fingers so narrow. What would this feel like if it was a man with his hands on her?
She brought two fingers together and did her best to imagine that they were one, a thick finger belonging to her imaginary mate. She traced them down the length of her torso, along the crease of her hip, and then slowly pressed them inside herself.
It was as if a deep ache was finally releasing. Already, she could tell that this wasn’t enough, that she wanted more. But it was something. It was closer to satisfaction than she had ever had.
She allowed herself a long, luxurious stretch of time spread under the tree, feeling wanton and fearless, exploring her body and the way it responded to her touch. This alone had been reason enough to justify her running away from her family. She was glad she had done it. It was hard to imagine ever going back, knowing now that she had the freedom to give herself even this little bit of pleasure and relief.
At last, though, she knew that she couldn’t remain where she was any longer. She had to keep moving or risk attracting the attention of predators. Lily’s plan was to scale a tree when the time for sleep came in order to keep herself safe from unwanted attention, but there were still a few more hours before nightfall. She could cover a bit more ground.
She got to her feet and pulled her clothes back on, dusting off the dirt and pine needles that clung to them. Then she stepped out from under the tree—
And paused.
Which way had she come from?
It didn’t really matter, of course. It wasn’t as if she was planning on heading home right now anyway, and she could worry about navigating when she was ready to make the return trip. She’d have a mate by then if everything went according to plan. He would be able to help her figure out which was the right way.
Except...she had been deliberately working her way east, using her knowledge of cardinal directions based on where things were in relation to her family’s cave. She knew that the river was north of the cave, and she’d used that information to help her figure out which way was east.
Which way was east now?
She realized, with a pang of fright, that
she had no idea.
She forced herself to take a deep breath and steady her nerves. This was exactly the kind of thing that her family members were afraid would happen to her if she went off on her own, and she wasn’t about to let them be proven right.
The river. The river would be her way out of this mess. She knew that it flowed from east to west. All she had to do was to find it, and then she could walk in the opposite direction of the current. That would put her back on track.
The only problem with that plan was that she didn’t know which way the river was either.
But she couldn’t have wandered too far from the bank. She would try one direction, and if it didn’t work out after a while, she would backtrack and try another.
God, Caleb would be laughing so hard if he knew I had gotten myself into a situation like this.
She swore to herself that she would never tell anyone in her family about this predicament. She would take the secret to her grave.
She set off at a jog, hoping to go no further than a mile before she found the river, but keeping in the back of her mind that she might have gone slightly further away from it than that. She knew she could go for about a mile and a half at this pace without feeling tired. Maybe that would help her judge when it was time to turn back and try a different direction.
But as she ran along, the sky got darker and darker, and before she knew it, she was stumbling, barely able to see the ground in front of her.
It’s not safe to keep going.
She hated the idea of stopping for the night before she had figured out where she was and where she was going. But she had to admit that the mystery would be much easier to solve when the sun had come up. It was anxiety-inducing not to know where she was going next, but it would be far worse if she were to injure herself while she was alone in the woods. Then she would really be in trouble.
She sighed, found a sturdy looking tree with thick branches, and began to climb.
