by J. L. Wilder
© Copyright 2020 by J.L. Wilder- All rights reserved.
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Feral Alpha
Omega University
By: J.L. Wilder
Click to Receive a Free Copy of Brother’s Wolf (Full length)
Table of Contents
Feral Alpha
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Next in Series: Alpha Bully
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About The Author
Feral Alpha
Chapter One
XAVIER
“Whiskey,” Xavier growled.
The clerked eyed him nervously, then pointed. “It’s that aisle back there,” she said.
Xavier nodded and lumbered off. He knew his appearance was probably intimidating to someone like this clerk, who looked like she couldn’t be a day older than twenty-one. She was willow thin, her straight hair in two braids on either side of her face, making her look a lot younger, and she wore an Aurora College sweater.
She could not, in other words, have been more human if she’d tried.
Xavier had no idea what he looked like. It wasn’t as if he kept a mirror handy. But he hadn’t combed his hair or washed before coming to the liquor store, and he knew for a fact that his clothes were visibly dirty and frayed at the hems.
Xavier hadn’t been human for the past three months.
He wandered back to the whiskey aisle, staring at the bottles. The more time he allowed to go by between interludes as a human, the harder it was to adjust. He felt like he was shambling. His body felt strange and unwieldy.
He tried to read the labels on the bottles, but the words swam before his eyes. That was an ability that would come back given time, but Xavier had no intention of remaining in this form for long.
He grabbed two of the bottles at random and returned to the counter.
The clerk had been watching him. He supposed it made her nervous to have him in her store. She rested a hand on her cell phone as if preparing to call for help.
Xavier felt like rolling his eyes. She had nothing to fear from him.
She took the whiskey and scanned it. “Fifty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents,” she said.
Math, like reading, was another skill that eluded Xavier after so much time divorced from his human self. He fished in his pocket, pulled out a handful of crumpled bills, and tossed them on the counter.
“Enough?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s...” She frowned and sorted through the bills, pushing two of them back in his direction. “This’ll cover it.”
“Okay.” Xavier put the extra money back in his pocket.
The clerk put the bottles in a brown paper bag. She hesitated and then seemed to find her courage. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked.
“No,” Xavier said.
It was telling that she was able to make the distinction. Yellowknife was, at its heart, a mining town, and though it was also the seat of government in the Northwest Territories, there were still plenty of miners around. Xavier had seen them on his way in, with their stained work clothes and facial hair that he was sure rivaled even his own.
Then again, they probably kept their facial hair groomed. He did not.
He would shave today, he decided, before he left his human form. He would shave, and he would drink this whiskey.
He took the bottles and went out to the parking lot. Louis, his closest friend, was waiting in the truck. Xavier climbed into the passenger seat and set the whiskey down between them.
“Any trouble?” Louis asked.
“I think she thought I was a homeless person.” This was the longest sentence Xavier had spoken since resuming human form. He paused and thought over the words, making sure that they had come out correctly, and in the right order. “No problems, though,” he added.
“Ready to head out?” Louis asked. “Back to camp?”
Xavier nodded, leaning back against the seat and closing his eyes. “The sooner, the better.”
“You need to do this more often, you know,” Louis said. “It’s not good for you to be in animal form as much as you are. You’re losing track of the human side of yourself.”
“That’s why I live here,” Xavier said. If he’d wanted to stay in touch with his human side, he could have found a place in the city. He could have found a job. Human life was easy. He could have it if he wanted it.
“You sound like a wild animal,” Louis said. “If you could hear yourself, you’d know what I mean.”
Xavier glanced at Louis, raising his eyebrows. “Wild animal?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Louis said. “Like a full animal. An animal with no human qualities at all.”
Xavier shrugged. He knew what he was, and it was what he wanted to be. He wasn’t going to defend himself to his friend. Louis was a good guy, and Xavier liked him a lot, but he had never been committed to the freedoms that shifter life offered. He would never be at home in the wilderness of the Northwest Territories the way Xavier was.
Louis started the car and pulled out of the parking lot into the road. Xavier reached for one of his bottles.
“Not yet,” Louis said. “You can’t have an open liquor bottle in a car. You know that.”
Xavier frowned. He did know that, but it had been so long since he had been in a car at all that he had forgotten about it. “Maybe you should let me run home,” he suggested.
“Definitely not,” Louis said. “It’s almost sixty miles north of here. You’re fast, but it would still take you forever.”
Xavier sighed.
“This is good for you,” Louis said. “Staying human. Come on, talk to me. Tell me what’s been on your mind for the past few months.”
“You know what,” Xavier said.
“No, I don’t,” Louis said. “That’s the thing. As good as our communication is when we’re in animal form, I can’t actually read your mind. You have to tell me what you’re thinking.”
Xavier frowned. This ritual of talking through thoughts and feelings was not something wolves did. When wolves needed to communicate something, they did so physically. Xavier didn’t like having to translate his thoughts into words.
“The others,” he said at last.
“The rogues,” Louis said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about them too.”
“They’re in our territory,” Xavier said.
“Kind of,” Louis agreed. “But it’s not as if we have a pack. It’s not as if we can really lay claim to the territory. You and I are rogues too, for all practical purposes.”
“But we were there first,” Xavier said.
“There are more of them, though,” Louis said.
“So what? You want to leave?” His words were coming more easily now. Maybe Louis was right. Maybe talking was a good thing to do. It seemed to feel more natural the more he did it.
He wou
ld still be glad to return to the strength and safety of his wolf self, though. Just discussing the others made him feel like lashing out, and there was no point in doing that while he was in this soft human body. He would lose any fight he engaged in.
“I don’t want to leave,” Louis said. “I’m just saying, I’m not sure our chances of running them out of our territory are that good. We might have to put up with the fact that they’re there with us now.”
“How long ago did they arrive?” Xavier asked. “Do you know?”
Louis glanced at him. “You don’t remember?”
“I remember them getting here.” But time was more fluid in animal form. The days ran together. He knew it had been three months since the last time he had been human because Louis had told him so, not because he had any reliable method of marking the passage of time.
“It was at the beginning of February,” Louis said. “There was still snow on the ground, remember that?”
“Right,” Xavier said. “And now it’s...?”
“April third.”
“Two months and we haven’t done anything about them.”
“This is why you should come back to human form more often,” Louis said. “How were we supposed to do anything about them? We couldn’t talk to each other. We couldn’t make any kind of plan.”
“I can’t be human with them around,” Xavier pointed out, wondering why this wasn’t obvious to his friend. “You shouldn’t either. We’d be at an immediate disadvantage. Have you ever seen them human?”
“I wouldn’t know if I had,” Louis pointed out. “I have no idea what they look like.”
Xavier shook his head. “You should be able to smell them,” he said. “Honestly, the stink coming off of them, every time we’ve met—even in human form, I’m sure it would be overpowering. Maybe you need to spend more time as a wolf if your sense of smell is that dulled.”
“Look,” Louis said. “Tonight we drink. Tomorrow, we shift back, and I’m guessing you’re not planning to be human again for another three months.”
“You got that right,” Xavier said firmly. “Not under any circumstances.”
The current setup was one that he and Louis had agreed on after extensive negotiation about a year ago. If Xavier had had his way, he would have chosen to remain in his wolf form at all times. As an animal, he was strong and powerful, capable of defending himself. He was also free from the concerns of human life—worries about things like money and shelter. That was why, at the age of twenty-five, he had run away into the wild. That was why he had come north in the first place.
And Louis didn’t have to come with me, he reminded himself. It’s not like I forced him to come. It’s not like I even asked him to come. But his best friend had seen him sneaking out of the big ranch house their pack lived in and had followed. They had been twenty miles away before Xavier had realized he had company.
Four years had gone by since then. And in those years, Xavier and Louis had carved out an existence for themselves. They had a home—a warm, dry cave with plenty of space. They lived off the land. They had everything they needed. And if Louis was a little more insistent than Xavier would have liked about time spent in human form, it was a small price to pay. The once every three months agreement that they had made...Xavier didn’t like it, but he could live with it.
But then the others—the strangers—had come onto their land.
And that was something that Xavier could not tolerate.
“We need to make a plan,” he told Louis. “We need to decide how we’re going to deal with them. And I guess we need to do it tonight.”
“Xavier,” Louis said patiently, “we’re drinking tonight. We’re not going to be able to come up with anything good while we’re in our cups. Are you saying we shouldn’t drink this whiskey?”
Xavier hesitated. Louis had him there, and he knew it. Of course, he wanted to drink. If there was one thing human form absolutely had over wolf form, it was the ability to buy liquor and get drunk.
“We drink tonight,” Louis said. “We plan tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, I’m shifting back,” Xavier said.
“Well, you’ll just have to stay human for one more day,” Louis said. “Unless you think it’s not very important to make a plan for how we’re going to handle the outsiders.”
“They’re hunting in our territory,” Xavier said. “Of course, it’s important. Nothing could be more important.”
“Then it must be worth an extra day in human form,” Louis surmised.
Xavier frowned, seeing how he had been caught.
“I’m not trying to trick you,” Louis said. “I’m just saying that if you want to figure out what we’re going to do about the outsiders—which I think is a good idea, by the way—then this is how we do it. We either have to skip drinking tonight, which I don’t want to do since we’ve been waiting for three damn months to get a bottle together—”
“I don’t want to skip it either,” Xavier said.
“Then the only option is to talk about this tomorrow,” Louis said. “And we can’t do that if you’re a wolf, Xavier. We just can’t.”
He pulled the truck off the road and into a graveled clearing concealed by a copse of trees. “Come on,” he said, opening his door. “We can start talking about these matters tonight. We can’t make any hard and fast decisions while we’re drunk, obviously. But maybe we’ll come up with some good ideas that will spark our discussion tomorrow.”
“I have a good idea,” Xavier said. “We find them, and we attack them. Simple as that.” He got out of the car and grabbed the liquor bottles, setting off into the trees at a jog.
Louis pulled even with him and jogged easily at his side. “You know we can’t do that,” he said. “We don’t even know how many of them there are. There are at least four, though. It doesn’t matter how good you and I think we are in a fight. They will absolutely pulverize us.”
Xavier snorted. “No one can pulverize me.”
“You think you’re invincible,” Louis said. “But you’re not. They can take you out, Xavier.” He paused. “We should ask ourselves why they haven’t attacked us already,” he said. “They’ve got the greater numbers. If they really mean to stay in this part of the country, you’d think they’d want to run us off.”
“The fact that they haven’t must mean that they know something we don’t,” Xavier said. “They must be scared. Maybe they’re terrible fighters.”
“Okay, maybe it’s that,” Louis allowed. “Or maybe they’re excellent fighters and they just don’t especially want to kill us. Or maybe they’re not planning on staying, so there’s no point in picking a fight. We don’t know the answers to these questions.” He glanced at Louis. “I feel like you forget that there are complex reasons behind things like this.”
“And you always want things to be more complicated than they are,” Xavier said. “Sometimes, things are simple. The outsiders aren’t here for any complicated reason. They came because our land has a water source and a lot of game. And if they haven’t attacked us, it’s because they think the cost to them would be greater than the reward. They think they wouldn’t win the fight.”
They broke into a small clearing surrounding the mouth of a large cave. The fire in the mouth of the cave was out, although some of the embers were still hot. Louis went to the fire and began to tend to it.
Xavier stripped off his shirt and threw it into the back of the cave. He joined Louis by the fire and twisted the cap off of one of the bottles of whiskey.
“You might be right,” Louis said. “You look at the world that way, so maybe they do too. But tonight, we drink.”
“Tonight we drink,” Xavier agreed.
He took a long swallow of the whiskey and passed it to his friend, determined to forget about the outsiders for one night.
Chapter Two
ZOE
Zoe carefully adjusted her ponytail and took her place at the starting line.
The girl next to
her glanced over at her and then looked away. Zoe wondered what she was thinking. She was the only omega competing in this event. Track and Field Day was one of the few things Shifter University and Omega University got together for, with the idea being that it was good for omegas to train for and compete in low impact sports. But even so, very few of Zoe’s friends actually did it.
The beta girls from Shifter University probably thought there was something wrong with her. They probably thought she was weird.
She tensed her muscles, doing her best to ignore the betas around her, waiting for the moment the race would begin.
The starting horn sounded. Zoe leaped forward, arms and legs churning, pushing off against the pavement with each stride.
She ran as hard as she could. She gave it her best, as she always did.
But this race was a sprint. It favored muscle over leanness. And Zoe just didn’t have the correct body type to compete with the betas around her.
She crossed the finish line in fifth place, a sense of discouragement settling in her chest. Off the podium again. Her chances would be better this afternoon, she knew, when the distance races would take place. But it was always disappointing to lose.
She jogged off the track and over to the stands, where her friend Daphne and Daphne’s alpha, Logan, sat waiting. She dropped into a seat beside them, crossed her legs one over the other, and leaned back on her elbows, allowing the sun to hit her face.
“Good job,” Daphne greeted her.
“It wasn’t good,” Zoe objected. “I lost.”
“You beat more than half of them,” Daphne said. “I couldn’t have done that.”
Of course, she couldn’t have. Daphne had never undertaken an athletic pursuit in her life. She was active, of course—Omega University required its students to participate in physical activity, to make sure that their bodies were fit and ready for childbirth. But Daphne’s version of exercise tended toward gentle yoga, not competitive racing.
Athletics, meanwhile, was the one thing Zoe excelled at among her fellow Omegas. It was painful to have to realize that no matter how good she was in a race with other omegas, when betas entered the picture, she would never be able to keep up.
