by Loki Renard
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
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Taken by the Alphas
By
Loki Renard
Copyright © 2017 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard
Copyright © 2017 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.
www.StormyNightPublications.com
Renard, Loki
Taken by the Alphas
Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson
Images by Bigstock/romancephotos, 123RF/Gabriel Moisa, Shutterstock/Avdeyukphoto, and 123RF/Zacarias Pereira Da Mata
This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.
Chapter One
“Uh oh.”
Flakes of snow floated from the gray sky and settled on Addie’s old red baseball cap. Her eyes were cast skyward under the cap’s peak, narrowed at the weather, which was getting worse by the moment. It should have been in the low sixties, but the temperature was below forty and dropping steadily. The pass through which the road to her camp wound was likely already under two feet of snow, possibly more, and she was too many miles away from a snow plow to count.
This was bad.
She’d driven her truck out well past where the real roads ended a couple of weeks earlier, planning to observe the early to mid-fall migration patterns of deer in the remote Alaskan valley. The weather was supposed to be good, and it had been—until now.
“Dammit,” she swore to herself as she retreated back inside her tent. She tried the radio again. It crackled with static and nothing much else. Something had gone wrong with it days earlier, so she hadn’t gotten the weather report that had heralded this early winter storm—if there had been one.
She had thermal underwear and snow pants, but they weren’t doing a thing for her. She shivered and wrapped herself in her sleeping bag. It was cold, but she knew it could get much, much colder if the storm continued to blow up the way it was. It had been snowing for hours already and instead of getting lighter, it was getting heavier, driven on winds that were now buffeting the sides of her tent, making them billow close to her as the cold seeped through.
Addie set to work gathering every piece of warming material she had until she was a short, somewhat round figure inside the puffy layers of her bedding. All that could be seen were gray eyes peering out over the top of the sleeping bag, and a few tufts of blond hair sticking out from under her hat.
They’d advised her against coming out this far alone, but Addie had insisted she’d be alright. It was just a few weeks in the woods. She’d been camping since she was a kid and had done many field trips over the course of her studies, always in the Alaska wilds, and most of the time alone. She was famous for it at the university where at twenty-five, she was one of the youngest professors ever to receive tenure on the strength of her research.
As the day drew darker and colder, Addie began to regret what had now turned out to be a mistake. She had funding for a month of study in Alaska. It was September and snow wasn’t due until October. Pity nobody had told the snow that.
With little in the way of heating aside from the campfire that was now completely doused, and with her truck already half buried in the white deluge, it was all Addie could do to try to make sure she survived the dumping. The snow around her tent would act like insulation, up to a certain point, but it could also collapse the whole thing entirely if she was unlucky. She’d chosen an elevated place for her camp, on a ridge a little way beneath some small mountains. The area she was in was rife with ridges, ranges, and valleys that cut the vast landscape into what felt like more manageable chunks for study.
Though the nearby woods were obviously inhabited by at least one wolf pack and several bears, Addie instinctively felt that she was in more danger now, sitting in her tent, than she had been at almost any other time since her arrival. At least bears and wolves could be frightened away with a shotgun or pepper spray. The snow wasn’t going to be put off by either of those things.
The soft sound of the snow falling was deceptively peaceful. Sitting on her little camp stretcher, Addie looked up at the yellow peak of her tent as it grew darker with growing layers of snow. She knew she was risking being buried if she didn’t move soon, but where on earth could she move? The truth was, even though she was lying still, looking calm as a Buddha, she was panicking and the cold was already making her stupid. She knew a dozen survival strategies, none of which she remembered as the tent pole began to arch and strain under the weight of the snow. In a matter of seconds, the crisis that had been brewing for hours came to a head. The tent began to close in around her and Addie was forced to bolt for the flap, her heavy gloves struggling with the zipper. Outside the tent, the snow had already built up to her chest. She had to climb and crawl her way out of the campsite and then run through freezing snow, sinking in almost up to her waist with every other step. It took almost twenty minutes to reach higher ground on the mountainside and duck shivering into a cave that appeared out of the sleet almost magically. She’d never noticed it before, hidden among the rocky crags. If she hadn’t been running right past it, its yawning dark entrance obvious amid the white of the snow, she might never have seen it.
Her teeth chattering, Addie stood inside the mouth of the cave and looked out where all was covered with a picturesque blanket of white. A blanket that had claimed her camp and all her supplies as well. She had escaped the collapse of her tent, but that had not left her in a good position. She was now without food, without any source of heat, tired from fighting the snow, and facing an almost certain death. All because she’d made a dumb decision. Nature was merciless when it came to stupidity. It took all her energy to sink down on the floor of the cave, near the wall, out of the worst of the wind. This could very well be her last night on earth, and she was too tired to be afraid.
Grrrr…
A soft growl in the rear of the cave should have sent her screaming for her life, but she didn’t have the energy to scream or run anymore. She curled up in a nook of the cave wall, closed her eyes, and hoped that whatever was growling would leave her alone, knowing that was unlikely. She was a soft, meaty thing in an area of the wild where much of the prey had been gone for weeks. Her rational mind knew that she was in serious trouble. Her instinct made her curl up as small as she could and stay as still as she could.
She heard the shuffling of something heavy and large coming nearer, heard the heavy footfalls of a great beast. In the dark of her eyelids, she could imagine well enough what it was—a bear, likely preparing for a long winter’s slumber, disturbed in its preparations for hibernation by one last tasty morsel.
Addie was too exhausted to be terrified, or maybe she had entered a mental place beyond terror. The instinct that makes a mouse freeze in front of a cat or a deer balk in headlights had taken over. She did not make a move or a sound as the bear approached her slowly and sniffed her with its large, wet nose. She felt
the hot breath of the beast on her chilled cheek as it huffed her scent. She braced herself for the crushing bite that would surely come next, but to her surprise, it did not. The bear turned around, and to her great surprise, lay down. She felt the impact of the beast as its bulk came to a sudden rest on the ground next to her, so close to her that its back was pressed against her.
Part of her mind was insisting she run away from this dangerous predator. Another, more simple part was noticing that this bear, more than its bulk and muscle and teeth and fangs… was warm. In that moment, warmth meant more than anything else on the planet. Her body gravitated toward it with an instinct that was in direct opposition to common sense, and didn’t care at all. She was like a moth to a flame as she curled up at the bear’s flank and lost consciousness in that precarious position, not knowing if she would ever wake again.
Chapter Two
Addie did wake up again. It was many hours later and to a world quite different from the dark sleeting one she’d abandoned herself to in the night. There was no bear, of course, just the rays of the morning sun streaming through the mouth of the cave. The immense cold of the night had lifted a little and though she was chilled, she was no longer in imminent danger of death. How she had survived, she did not know. She realized that it must have been a hallucination of a bear, her mind’s desperate attempt to project an object of warmth and strength. That could not have kept her warm, but something seemed to have.
“That was a lucky escape,” she said to herself. “You should be dead, you know.”
“But I’m not,” she replied to herself.
“No,” she agreed. “Definitely alive.”
Talking to herself was comforting; it made her feel a little less alone. Though she liked her solitude, having someone else around would have been very useful in that moment. She stood up and walked to the mouth of the cave. Her footprints from the night before were long gone, buried under another couple of feet of snow. Addie was landlocked by snow and ice. Despair returned quickly, a sinking feeling in her stomach that left her on the verge of tears—until she turned and noticed something in a corner of the cave. Something olive green and square, unlike the craggy gray rock of the mountain.
Upon investigation, Addie discovered a small crate containing matches, kindling, some canned food along with a can opener, and various other camping items. A little further back in the cave, she found more supplies, a stack of chopped wood, and a rifle complete with a box of shotgun shells. They weren’t hers, she was certain of that, and she was almost as certain that they hadn’t been there last night. Or perhaps they had? Maybe she had run into the cave in such a panic that she hadn’t noticed the crate of lifesaving supplies just a few feet away? She was too happy at her discovery to question it. Food! Heat! And she had shelter in the cave. This was a literal lifeline.
* * *
Crouched on a ledge above the base of the cave, hidden in the shadows as he watched her make the discovery, Armel smiled. He had first noticed the girl when she had pitched her tent in his territory. It was rare to get campers or hunters this far out and her scent had drawn him across many miles. He had initially been confused that she seemed to be alone. She looked young, in her early twenties, in need of a guide. He could not imagine that she would be there by herself. And yet the scent did not lie. It was just her out there.
He’d watched her settle in and spend her days sitting in various hides she constructed herself, watching the world go by and making notes. He had wanted to talk to her then, but he knew it was better not to interact with people like Addie, so he’d kept his distance and watched her as she watched the world around her.
She was very pretty, a full-figured girl with blond hair just short of her chin. Her curves were very appealing to him. She was athletic enough to look after herself out there in the wild, not so slim that a day or two without food would put her into serious physical weakness. She had a body made for survival, for bearing young. Her scent was one of the most intoxicating he had ever smelled. His baser animal instinct told him to claim her, to take her to his lair and have his way with her, but Armel knew well enough that such animal behavior had not been understood for hundreds of years. She came from a different world, and it was a world he would have let her return to without ever becoming known to her if it hadn’t been for the sudden snow she had not sensed coming.
As the weather had closed in, he’d waited to see if she would save herself, but eventually fate had forced his hand. Once her tent went down it was only a matter of minutes before she would succumb to hypothermia. She was brave and smart enough to get herself to the cave, but then she was all out of options—and so was he. He had appeared to her in the form of a bear and in doing so he had broken his most primary rule. He never showed himself to people from the outside in either of his forms. But he could not allow his rule to result in the death of an innocent girl.
In some respects she seemed like a seasoned woods-woman. She knew how to build a fire and seemed able to handle her shotgun as well. He’d watched her take down a rabbit or two and cook them on her fire. He liked that she was capable of providing for herself. In other respects, her survival skills left something to be desired. She still hadn’t thought to check the rear of the cave where he was watching, for instance. She didn’t seem to notice his eyes on her, a strange absence of instinct. Then again, she was very distracted in that moment.
“Aw, man, this is awesome,” she mumbled to herself as she tore open the wrapper of a candy bar.
It was one of a very few he had stashed from his last trip into town a year ago. Armel did not usually have much of a sweet tooth, and he’d bought a few bars on a whim. Now, he wondered if it had been a whim at all, or one of fate’s tendrils winding back through time to guide his hand.
* * *
Addie was starting to feel almost happy. She was warm, she’d started a fire near the mouth of the cave so the smoke had somewhere to go, and there was food in her belly. The snow still had all her equipment swathed in several feet of its cold embrace, but she was alive and she had a weapon she could use to hunt with if she needed to. The gun was loaded and at her side, giving her a sense of security as she sat and watched the day go by. There was nothing to do, really, but wait for the weather to improve. The snow would melt, she was sure of that, and once it did she’d have a chance of digging her stuff out.
It was a long day, but she was used to long boring days. She whiled away the hours having interesting conversations with herself on a wide range of subjects. As the sun began to descend toward the horizon, a movement in the drifts below caught her eye. It had been a very still day, so her gaze was drawn toward the motion. She didn’t know what she was looking at, at first, a gray smudge against the white snow that grew larger and larger and seemed to be making a direct line for her. It was lost now and then behind ridges of snow, but as it mounted the last snowbank, she saw what it was. A wolf. A large, healthy male by the looks of it, boldly approaching her.
“Do I look like food?” She addressed the creature at a distance.
She expected it to bolt as soon as she made a sound, but still the wolf drew closer, oddly fearless. Most of the wolves Addie had seen preferred to stay far away from her. The best wolf repellent was simply being human. This one did not behave like the other wolves she had watched. This one seemed more intense and intent on something. She could have sworn there was a complex brain inside that furred skull, sizing her up. It didn’t seem aggressive, and it didn’t seem hungry either. It drew closer and closer still, navigated around the fire as Addie scooted backwards and picked up her gun.
“I don’t want to shoot you,” she told the wolf as her blood turned to ice. “But I will, if I have to.”
It lowered its head and sniffed the ground where she had been sitting. It looked more curious than aggressive, but it was an incredibly dangerous creature and she could only tolerate so much curiosity. The wolf was huge, bigger than she had known a wolf could be. She was sitting down, and it
s shoulder was much taller than her head. Its jaws alone were almost longer than her forearm. There was no doubt that it outweighed her more than twice over, and if it took even a single step more, she would have to shoot.
“Go on,” she said, waving the gun at it. “Go away. This is my cave.”
The wolf cocked its head at her, then made to take another step, which would have brought its jaws within striking range. This was it. She was going to have to kill it. There was some instinct telling her to hold fire, but she was done listening to instincts. Common sense told her that wolves that close had to die.
Before she could reluctantly pull the trigger, a roar behind her made the wolf freeze and pin its ears back. It was a roar of pure rage, loud enough to shake the ground and make her bones vibrate inside her body. A bear came charging from the hidden depths of the cave, frightening her terribly. She swung the gun around to face the bear, but the motion of the beast knocked it from her hands.
Fortunately, the bear’s rage was directed at the wolf rather than her. Addie scrambled for the gun, which was now lying a few feet away on the cave floor as the two beasts launched into battle.
The bear was larger and more ferocious, almost protective in its fury. As agile and fearsome as the wolf was, it did not stand a chance against the bear’s jaws. Addie knew she was about to see something very unpleasant, a kill not three feet from her, and whatever animal won, she was sure it would be her next.
She still could not bring herself to shoot either of the animals outright, so she fired a shot directly above their heads. It made a sound that rang loud and with a high pitch that made it impossible to hear anything. She felt as though she had been boxed about the ears.
