Alpha Men of the Otherworld

by L. M. Mountford

  Shane just shrugged again, shaking off Danny’s arm. “Erza. She’s been trying to warn the packs. Some have listened, mostly the older packs with strong ties to the village, but most send our messengers away with their tails between their legs.”

  “Well, tell them to try calling first next time.” The witticism fell on deaf ears.

  “This isn’t a joke, Danny. They think it’s a trap, a ploy to seize control of their packs. They don’t trust her, the lone female Alpha that unseated Alfred Long Claw’s eldest pup.”

  “Well, I can’t say I blame them,” Danny laughed again, his face twisted with disbelief. “I mean, come off it and have a day off. This all sounds like a bad Ronnie’s sketch. For fuck’s sake, if you’d turned up on my doorstep and told me that story, I’d tell you to lay off the strong cheese at night. Wyverns can’t work together. Put four tribes of the buggers together at breakfast, half of them will be dead by lunch. Everyone knows that.”

  “Well, everyone is wrong. They’re out there, an army of those winged fire breathing buggers, and if Erza’s right, they’re coming our way.” His eyes were bright with the words, not the fierce bright fury of the wolf, but the fever of a true believer. Whatever lunacy had been going on here, it was obvious Shane believed every word of it. “The fight is coming, mate, whether we like it or not, and we’ll need all the packs united together. Mark my words, if we don’t all stand together to meet them, the age of the wolf will be done.” Then he turned on his heel and continued on along the path up the hill.

  Danny watched him go.

  Wyverns amassing, was it even possible?

  Just the thought sent a shiver through him.

  The wolf packs had been at war with the Wyverns since they first settled in Wales, long before even the Romans dared to settle on English shores. Raiding parties would cross the border to pillage and burn and occasionally a few of their clan chiefs would band together and attack a pack head on, but an army? A real army of monsters. It was as terrifying as it was ridiculous. There had never been anything of the like. Not one of their Kings could ever have hoped to muster such numbers.

  But there had been no lie in Shane’s eye. Had he seen it, witnessed it on the move? What could make him believe in the impossible with such certainty?

  He double timed it to catch up. “Look, alright, say I believe you, John Snow, what does this all have to do with me? If Erza wants me to fight, she could have just asked on a picture postcard. What’s with all the secrecy?”

  “Honestly?” Shane’s eyes softened. “I don’t know mate, she keeps everything close to her chest, but whatever she asks, just hear her out and give it some thought. This isn’t the world we grew up in anymore.”

  Then, as if by magic, the veil of woodland suddenly parted, and he was the boy Danny remembered once again. “Ah well, here we are. Welcome home.

  As vast as it was ancient, the Lacum Hall was a bastion of Victorian gothic architecture that had the look of Bella Lugosi’s weekend place.

  Danny’s eyes went wide as he stepped up to the monogrammed gate beneath a pair of huge stone wolves, rearing up and locked in mortal combat to form an arch. It looked much the same as he envisioned it, like a page torn right out of his memories, a physical link between his past and the present. Yet time had played her hand against his ancestral home. With each passing winter, the gardens had become overgrown. Creeper ivy had crawled its way up the missionary and there was a thick pelt of dust covering the inside of the windows. It was as if the spirit of the hall had abandoned it with him and his mother, and the building had been withering away day by day ever since. His childhood home was still there, but it seemed diminished, a hollow husk robbed of its former majesty.

  “Well, I’m off. See you in the Lamb when you're done. First rounds on me,” Shane said, hanging back by the treeline.

  Danny glanced back at him. “You’re not coming in?”

  Shane’s eyes widened at the suggestion, and he looked up to the upper levels, as if expecting to discover Erza watching them. “You’re kidding, right? Erza will have my hide on her wall, and my balls for chew toys if I step in there uninvited.” He laughed, but the sound was half-hearted and not enough to convince anyone he was joking. He shook his head. “No. Thanks but no thanks, afraid you’re on your own in there. Good luck, and remember, just hear her out before you answer.”

  “Yeah... sure, catch you later.” Danny nodded, lingering there to watch the other man turn back and vanish into the tree back the way they’d come. And for a long moment, he was sorely tempted to follow, to forget this fool’s errand and go back, but back where?

  Home? Did he even have one, really? Since his mother had died, it had been like he was simply going through the motions, never really settling, never marking his territory.

  University? What was for him there, a life living a lie, pretending to be something he wasn’t, and a girl who probably hated him that he couldn’t go near for fear of just face fucking her on sight whenever she came too close.

  What else was out there for him?

  Where else could he be what he was?

  What other pack would accept him?

  The man in him balked at the idea of returning to the village, but his wolf longed to re-join its pack and carried his feet up the stone steps to the front door. With a deep breath, he raised a hand to knock, but a cool breath of wind whispered across the stone, gathering and scattering the leaves littering the porch as the heavy oak creaked inward.

  Well, that’s not creepy at all...

  “Erza?” Danny called out, pushing the door open all the way. “Hello?”

  Only silence answered his call, so he stepped cautiously inside.

  The entrance hall was much the same as he remembered. Huge and cavernous with walls both of unfinished stone and wood panelling with the same ancient oak furniture scattered around it. The same depictions of nature scenes decorating the walls. Even the same Persian style rug running up the length of the grand staircase to the levels above. All that was missing were the countless generations of his family’s portraits that had adorned the wall before. Now they were gone, leaving nothing but the dark outlines that marked where each had hung.

  Danny had expected this, yet to see it with his own eyes. All those generations of his family removed and shoved into the attic, like they had never been. Despite himself, Danny’s eyes instinctively moved to the nearest shadow. His parents’ portrait had hung there. A fresco in vivid colour of the pair of them sitting on a sofa, with his brother standing at their father’s side, and he sitting in his mother’s arms.

  They had had so much fun that morning, and Danny had often paused to stare up at it and remember the day as the years moved on. His mother had kept a copy too, framed and sitting on her side table in a corner of her little council flat, but it was only a pale imitation. Yet the comfort it had brought her had helped her resist the bane’s inevitable end far longer than anyone would believe possible.

  Now it was all he had left.

  “So, lo-and-behold, the Prodigal Son returns...”

  A woman glared down at him from the top of the staircase. She was a striking beauty with a sharp chin and high cheekbones framed by a wild mane of tumbling raven hair that fell almost to her narrow waist. Garbed in a long dress of crimson that hugged her curves and enhanced the contrast of her ivory skin and ink black hair, she was just as tall and as fierce and beautiful as Danny remembered.

  “Erza...” he breathed out. Danny then dropped to one knee, head bowed. “Alpha of the Lupus Latr pack, I humbly beg your protection as I wander your lands.” It was the traditional oath a wandering wolf would swear to the resident pack Alpha when travelling through their lands, to show they meant no mischief. A harmless courtesy to show respect, but that didn’t mean the humiliation didn’t sting any less. Danny had to force himself not to grit his teeth as he forced out the words. “I swear by the celestial maiden that I shall do your pack no harm, nor seek to undermine your rule, lest my wolf b
e tamed, and the pelt ripped from me to adorn your hall.”

  With a coy, almost mocking smile pulling at the corner of her mouth, Erza recited back, “And I grant you leave to run through my woods, hunt my prey, eat from my table and lay by my fire. Rise with your tail high, in the protection and friendship of Lupus Latr.”

  With each vow, she descended a step so that by the time she was done, and he could rise, they were almost eye to eye. Hers gave him a quick once over, taking his measure. Her smile twisted like barbed wire. “Though from the look of you, it might be too late. My guard dogs weren’t too rough with you, I hope?”

  Her question had Danny’s eyes dropping to take stock of his appearance. His shirt was a ruin of torn and gore-splashed ribbons, his jeans split at the seams, and the remnants of his boots were reduced to aged sandals. “Maybe a little...” he mused to himself, before gold flecked chocolate clashed against icy blue as his gaze locked with Erza’s for the first time. “But, not nearly as rough as I was on them.”

  She arched a perfectly curved eyebrow, then threw her head back in a throaty chuckle that rolled over Danny like silk. “Well, it’s good to know that humans haven’t softened you up too much.” As she spoke, she descended the last steps of the stairs and swept past him, passing just close enough for him to catch hints of her scent fragrant with pine and freshly cut grass, before throwing open the door of what had been his father’s study. “I hope you weren’t expecting a fatted calf. I can spare a robe for your shoulders, and shoes for your feet, but first, why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”

  “Shane said you wanted to see me. He said there was something you wanted to talk to me about,” Danny answered, following her through to the study.

  It was like stepping through a door in time, back into his childhood, when he would play on the floor in this room and play knights and wolves with his toys.

  In his father’s day, the study had been a reflection of his personality. A masculine space, all dark wood furniture and leather sofas. Tall bookcases had lined the walls, stuffed with row upon row of books, ancient, dusty tomes and frayed dog-eared paperbacks. There had been tables strewn with maps, display cases exhibiting every kind of weapon known to man or beast, a wealth of strange and colourful artefacts Danny could have never begun to comprehend. At the back of the room had been the desk, a great ancient piece of dark oak with decorative etchings of running wolves carved all around the top. His father’s chair had sat behind it, an imposing leather-padded highchair with the back carved into the bust of a great snarling wolf’s head and positioned just beneath the tall windows that looked across the village. His father’s huge desktop computer was gone though and, in its place, sat a little compact laptop.

  “And I do,” Erza said, crossing the space to the drink’s cabinet in the far corner. “But that’s not what I asked. That’s why you’re here now. I want to know why you have come back, after all these years, to my pack. And spare me the bullshit story about getting homesick. We both know better.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he lied, just managing to slam his mouth shut on those very words. She was right, of course. It would have been a lame line at best. At worst, pathetically transparent. Once an exile, the wolf knew better than to return to its old pack if it valued its life. However, reluctant to meekly give away the one ace up his sleeve, he deflected the question. “Shane said you knew I was coming. Didn’t your crystal ball tell you why?”

  “Perhaps...” she purred, selecting a ruby decanter and pouring out two fingers into two glasses. Then, with a glass in each hand, she met him in the middle of the study.

  With a smile that was every bit as feral as the she-wolf she was, she offered him the drink in her left hand. Her eyes were bright and dangerous with a look that made Danny feel like she was looking straight through him, daring him to refuse. “Or perhaps I just want to hear you say it.”

  He hesitated. Was it all a bluff? Or did she know? Know why he’d come home. Know how desperate he’d grown.

  No, he couldn’t take the chance. If she was telling the truth and she caught him in a lie, things could go south real quick. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  So he took the drink. It was a foolish thing to do. Other Alphas might have poisoned it. After all, maybe he had never arrived. Maybe he had died in the struggle or had a heart attack on the walk up the hill or got struck by a bolt of lightning. Who was to know? Only Shane knew he was here after all, and he would be easy to silence if it came to that. No one would challenge Erza over the fate of a rogue. But he had his doubts. If she wanted to kill him, poison wouldn’t be quite her style.

  Erza was the first female Alpha in recorded history.

  The other packs looked down on her for that.

  If she was going to kill him, she wouldn’t do it in the dark.

  Poisoned chalices and knives in the night wouldn’t secure her rule.

  She’d want every werewolf in England to hear of it and know she did it.

  That she could do it.

  She would do it.

  She would need a show.

  So he bit the proverbial silver bullet and drank it all in a single gulp. It was hot and smoky and burned like fire all the way down. “I need your help.”

  Her eyes flashed with something, a wild, raw emotion that was both victory and fury all at once.

  “Obviously, but what are-” The words caught in her throat as she took a step closer, then stopped dead in her tracks as she caught his scent, and the musky flavour beneath. That scent! Her nostrils flared, tasting the air and her heart suddenly raced as each breath sent waves of sensation coursing through her, igniting her core, making her breasts heavy and nipples peak beneath the soft weave of her dress. “How long?”

  He stiffened. He’d never been this close to her before, and the sheer awareness of their proximity had him unsure of where to look. His cheeks started to burn under her inscrutable glare. As beautiful as she was treacherous, holding her stare for too long could be more dangerous than staring at her tits.

  Of course, that didn’t make the latter any less dangerous.

  “Sorry? How long...What?”

  “How long?” Erza repeated, breathless, suddenly feeling very hot as the fire started to smoulder in her core, growing stronger with every breath she took. Part of her wanted to run, jump away and get some much-needed distance between her and him. But that voice was weakening, growing distant and quiet beneath a fog, and instead another voice, as sweet and seductive as caramel whispered it was already too late.

  She knew she needed to fight it, to resist, but at the same time, she couldn’t help appreciating the sight of the young wolf before her. The way the torn and tattered remnants of his clothes hinted at a tight, strong body. Not bulky, but corded and well defined with natural muscle, just the way she liked them. His face was still a little boyish, but the lines of the man he was were clear to see against his thick black hair that was just that bit too long, and his storm blue-grey eyes were as sharp as glass.

  When she’d taken over the pack, she’d never given Danny much thought. He’d been just a snot-nosed boy of little consequence. His big brother had been her only concern then, the only thing standing in her way.

  However, Dereck Royce was long gone now though, and this brat had grown into a hot young man, still wet with the blood and sweat of battle. A stud who’d started his first cycle without his pack to guide him, and an ally she desperately needed in the war to come.

  The solution was obvious.

  “Fine, sit!”

  The order hit Danny like a crash of icy water to the face. “Pardon?”

  It came as such a surprise. He was sure he had misheard.

  “I said, sit fucking down!” Quick as a snake, she snatched the empty glass from his hand, placed both on the nearest table, then pushed him back down onto the nearest sofa.

  “H-hey wha- wait a minute! Erza, what are you do-” Danny trailed off, his eyes going as wide as saucers as she pushe
d down the shoulders of the sleeves of her dress and let it slither down her body to pool around her feet.

  Unashamedly naked, Erza just glared down at him. “What does it look like I’m doing, boy? Just shut up and strip.”

  She wasn’t in any mood for games.

  Not now.

  Not after what he’d done to her.

  “What? You can’t be-” His cheeks burned, and Danny looked away.

  “Get out of your fucking clothes!” she snarled, putting her hands on her hips and kicking the garment on the floor away. “You’re in heat.”

  “What!” In his surprise, his eyes snapped back up to her, but got lost partway and instead locked onto the rosy tips of her full teardrop-formed breasts. Though she was of relatively small stature, the werewolf Alpha was nonetheless full figured and beautiful, with long legs, a tight flat belly and a bountiful bosom that would more than fill each of his hands.

  “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” Erza growled, her eyes darkening with wild lust, raking over the sight of him stretched out before her until they landed on the tell-tale bulge forming in his trousers. The discovery sent a fresh rush of heat through her core. “You better enjoy the view while you can, boy. This is a one-time thing. Don’t think I’m about to become your bitch.”

  Swallowing what little moisture was left in his mouth, Danny forced his eyes up to meet hers. “But I can’t be. How’s that possi- hey, stop!” he barked in a sudden rush as she grabbed fistfuls of his trousers, half tugging, and half trying to rip them apart.

  “You want my help? This is the only way,” she snapped, even as he grabbed at her hands to force them away. Her heart pounded. The wet heat in her centre had begun to throb insistently. Damnit, now just being close to him was turning her on. “Damnit, do I have to do everything myself...Errr...fine!” Her eyes flashed lupin gold, and the space between them filled with the sound of tearing cloth.