by N. J. Lysk
He couldn’t even imagine how to tell Josh. He was still angry at Gabriel, but at least he knew where they stood. He knew Gabriel would support him, but not ask him for anything he couldn’t give. Except Gabriel had failed, too. He’d failed Ray, and the pups, and the pack. He wasn’t the right choice. Josh was.
Josh was kind; he wouldn’t bring up what Nicholas had done, or make a fuss about the fact that Ray hadn’t stopped it. He’d be kind, loyal, and he’d become Ray’s first alpha to keep their pack safe.
He hadn’t made Ray any promises—a confession was not any more binding than feelings by themselves. If Ray didn’t ask, he wouldn’t have to take it back. Ray had been determined to keep things from getting too complicated between them anyway—the risk of loving Josh openly, of admitting his preference, wasn’t worth his pack’s safety. And having said it, it’d be easier to move on from it. Josh wasn’t perfect and being Ray’s first alpha would indubitably lead them to clashing before long. It would be easy to get angry at him, to resent the power Ray had given him because he needed his steering hand more than he needed his own freedom.
Ray didn’t doubt Josh would keep him safe, but it was hard to sincerely love someone with so much power over you. It was for the best, too: if the price of their safety was the romance they shouldn’t have had anyway.
But Josh was away at work, Irina was looking after the kids, and Ray was so tired still. Nicholas was dead and the other alphas had been taken back to their birth packs to be dealt with. It was over. Except maybe in Ray’s head. He didn’t know how to stop wondering what he could have done better, or how he’d live with what he had done. But he had a little peace now, a few more hours of silence before he faced yet another great change in his life. Maybe he didn’t deserve it, maybe it was just more proof of his weakness; but he would take it.
Breaking his own heart could wait one more day.
***
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The Stars of the Pack:
Omega for the Pack - When Ray presents as an omega instead of an alpha, his life changes forever. As a male omega, he's expected to mate with a select group of alphas and start a pack of his own.
Alpha for the Pack - Ray wasn’t ready to become an omega, but he’s come to accept his fate… until it seems the pack might need even more of him than he can give.
Protectors of the Pack – Pre-order now! Or subscribe so I can let you know. Or get the free short prequel right now!
Werewolves of Windermere:
The Mating Habits of Werewolves - Devlin is an omega with ambitions that have nothing to do with alphas, but when destiny comes calling, he may not have that much of a choice. A/B/O.
Alphas Alone - An alpha werewolf has some responsibilities he can’t ignore: finding an omega, protecting his pack, not falling for another alpha.
Standalones:
Soldier On - When a humble young man is captured by the enemy lord during battle, he is expected to offer defeat to his captor by allowing him to bed him. But he is young enough that the act might unintentionally activate a hormonal process that will irreversibly feminize him.
Omega On A Mission - Omegas are carers, not fighters, and Gabi is happy looking after his alpha. But when he comes across an animal in danger, his protective instincts flare up, and nobody wants to get in the way of an omega on a mission. A/B/O.
Omega Under The Moon – School is over and Cole is ready to take a break before adult life starts, but when a camping trip with his two best mates turns into something much wilder, it’ll change his life forever. A/B/O. M/M/M.
N.J. Lysk spends the day in an office with the heavy burden of a wandering mind. Nights are spent more enjoyably as that mind is let to wander free and darker desires to take hold in the form of these steamy forbidden tales.
With a genuine allergy to silver, a preference for werewolves was always a given, but it wasn’t until the wonderful world of Alphas and Omegas that inspiration struck. Other stories where love is a struggle will also make an appearance. Join the mailing list for book updates and free books, updates and more cool things.
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The Mating Habits of Werewolves – Excerpt
It had only been five months, but when I saw Brennan that day I knew he wasn’t the same brother I had known my whole life. He didn’t look any different than he had last Christmas, but there was a Dominant’s power to him now that he was head of the pack. My wolf knew it so abruptly and absolutely that I found myself slowing down -like the world as I knew it was getting redrawn in front of my eyes. It was like that really messed up image of the young maid who turns into an old lady with a hooked nose. There was my little brother in front me, but there was also my Alpha: the man who held my fate in his hands. He didn’t hesitate, scooping me up in his arms and crushing me close. He buried his face in my neck, breathing me in and murmured, “I miss his smell.”
Then he let me go and as though his voice had released me from a spell, I could see my brother again through the haze. The boy I had grown up with, played with, fought with. He had been bossy, sure, but he had been funny as well, and protective as all hell. He loved me and he was the only one that got how much I missed my dad at that moment. In that room where his smell was fading -an absence so physical it felt like I might fall into the void if I stumbled-, Brennan was there holding me steady. I got over my ridiculous shyness and pulled him into another hug.
And then my mum was there. I felt her before she even spoke. “Devlin,” she murmured, and it was like her heart was breaking in her voice. Or maybe it was mine. I let go of Brennan and enveloped her in my arms. She wasn’t a small woman and she was a wolf besides, so she gripped me back hard enough to hurt and I just thought Good. Nobody had hugged me hard enough for months. I returned the embrace equally hard, unafraid of hurting her with the strength of my emotions.
Brennan came closer and put his arms around us both with some difficulty. But it didn’t need to be easy to be right. These were my people and suddenly I didn’t know how I had spent so much time so far away from them. From my dad.
Maybe they were right and wolves weren’t meant to live away from their packs. Of course, wolves weren’t meant to die in their fifties either. It didn’t matter how strong or loved you were, not even how powerful. Nobody was really safe.
&
I woke the next morning feeling like I had travelled back in time: My room smelled just like it always had. Except for how my scent had faded from the clothes and the bedding, I could have been seventeen and waking up with the sun to go for a run before school. Or twelve and so ravenously hungry that I had woken in the middle of the night again to go for some of the leftovers my mother always left for me. But if I had been, my dad would have been downstairs or in his room, not in a box somewhere in town. I washed my face but I didn’t bother with clothes, too desperate to be on the move, as if I could outrun the turmoil of my own mind. As if my father’s absence could be filled with activity.
My mother, unchanged through the years -still as blonde and rosy as she had been on her wedding day-, seemed to feel the same way. She was busy cooking breakfast with her impressive methodical multitasking, so as to have everything piping hot simultaneously. Her smile was a poor imitation of true joy, but I didn’t doubt she was pleased to see me enter her kitchen, looking more zombie than werewolf, just like I had most mornings of my life.
She set a plate in front of me without speaking and I started to eat, waiting for my father to walk in and ask for a cup of strong tea. After a while I realised I had put my fork down at some poi
nt and my eggs had gone cold and the bacon had solidified into a lump of fat covered leather. My plate was still half-full but when I checked to see if my mother would get annoyed that I had wasted food, she just shook her head at me. “It’s fine, Devlin. I haven’t had much of an appetite myself. Just make sure you eat more later. You need your strength.”
I wished she could have been mad, or even bothered enough to give me a speech about those less fortunate than us needing the food I wasn’t eating. Then I would have known everything would be okay; that normal or something of the sort was still possible.
&
By dinner time the world was starting to look less like a scenario for my memories to play out and more like a place I inhabited. Of course, shock wearing off feels like abruptly noticing one of your limbs is missing. You understand the fact, but that does nothing to dull the pain or distract from the phantom ache that is the last clinging hold of what’s gone. There seemed to be reminders of my father everywhere: both his existence and his lack thereof. From random books left lying about in various rooms to an ashtray he had got from a Welsh pack when I was a kid and treasured ever since even though he didn’t smoke.
When the pain starts setting in, the body pushes you to curl up, to protect yourself from further attack. But there was nothing I could do to protect myself from it, so the next logical step was finding somewhere safe to heal. I wanted more than anything in the world besides a miracle (And why the hell not? I ask you. Wasn’t I a real life werewolf?) to hole up in my childhood room. I thought I could survive the day if I got to call my boyfriend and talk about anything other than what was happening around me. I was ready to listen to him go on about cricket if it got me out of my head or, alternatively, put me to sleep.
But death isn’t like other types of pain and I couldn’t miss dinner with the family on my first night. It wasn’t an unreasonable expectation, I suppose. We had not only lost my father, but we had also lost our Dominant and the pack was feeling uneasy over it. It was up to Brennan to show that he could take care of us now, and this was the first time he had gathered the whole pack together since becoming Dominant a fortnight earlier.
“This is a hard time for all of us,” my brother started, his voice quieter than I had ever heard it and everybody in the room went quiet at once. “Some loss is expected. It’s only part of life that the old should die and even though it is a terrible loss, we understand... We know, nature intended it that way.” He trailed off. Anybody who knew him must have been able to tell he had prepared the speech and just as I thought it, Brennan exhaled and stumbled on, “I mean, it isn’t a surprise and that helps...a little...but my dad...” He swallowed thickly. “This isn’t supposed to happen! We are stronger than most people on this planet, we are meant for more...we heal! I never thought I would be here,” he confessed, looking at us like he had unexpectedly found himself in our midst and couldn’t quite understand how.
“I thought I would have more time... But life is always a surprise, isn’t it?” he added, picking up his speech again. “And when you receive a blow, you have two choices: you can stay on the ground and whimper, or you can get up and push through and become stronger for it. We,” he insisted, looking around and meeting my eyes across the room, “are going to become stronger. Just like my dad would have wanted, just like we are meant to.” I saw my cousin Ian lean close and clap him on the shoulder, saying something too low for me to distinguish across the crowded room of cheering people. But I was glad Brennan wasn’t alone.
“For that purpose,” his voice easily overwhelmed the last of the excited whispers, “I have purchased the Davidson farm. We are expanding!”
Not surprisingly, there was some cheering --you take a bunch of territorial people and put them together, territory becomes a goal per excellence. Every eye in the room was on him, even the children’s. He smiled winningly at his wife Adora and she returned the smile with all the candour of a young girl in love. He had met her at the Winter Shifter Summit and brought her back with him, aglow and so enamoured that it was sickening to watch. “We are expecting a child!” Brennan said into the silence, grinning like a madman. I smiled reflexively. His happiness was spreading through the pack like a wave, so intense it was almost a physical sensation. The congratulations seemed to go on for hours, and grow more intense by the minute. I was about to get up from where I had snatched a place between Kirby and Clara --two of the other Omegas I had grown up with-- when my brother raised a hand to quieten everybody again.
“The next generation of the Hilliard pack will be twice the size of ours,” he continued in his booming voice, “and that’s why I have decided that every fertile Omega in the pack will bear a child this year.”
Kirby dropped her napkin, and Clara’s fists clenched right on the table where she had been tapping her fingers. The other Omegas were all around the table, sitting comfortably with friends and family. But in that instant I knew where every single one of them was because all of us had stopped, our thoughts grinding to a sudden halt in perfect sync. With all the pack in the same room, the pack sense was so strong as to almost constitute telepathy. I felt their shock adding to my own, like a mounting wave growing bigger with the push of the wave that follows it. Even Jason and Evangeline, both pregnant already, seemed shocked by the news.
Dominant Alphas nudged Omegas to reproduce when they thought they were ready and so the pack’s children would be in the same age range and would grow up together. It made the pack stronger to have members who were close to each other. But none of us had ever heard of a mass breeding like this, and an announcement at dinner no less! And then I realised something else: it wasn’t all Omegas who were in shock, just the younger ones. The older generation - my mother, my aunts and uncles - were all conspicuously calm at the news.
They had known. My mother had known and she had let me come back without even a warning. I tried to meet her eyes where she sat at the other end of the table --the place of honour for the Dominant’s mate. She must have felt the weight of my gaze, but she didn’t look up. Not at me, and not at anybody else. She was looking down at her food, methodically cutting the meat on her plate in small, even pieces that would cool down too fast for her to eat. The concern for starving people was over. What did that say about how badly we ourselves were doing?
&
I hadn’t paid any attention to the Alphas before, but it was hard to miss their joyous excitement. Now that I cared to look, it wasn’t hard to see that some of my cousins were missing from the celebration, and Alphas I didn’t know were there instead.
“Where’s Kenneth?” I asked Clara in a furious whisper.
She exhaled slowly. “He went to the Blackson Pack down in Liverpool. They sent Tonio in exchange.” She licked her lips. “There’s been a lot of socializing with other packs the last year and a half and now it makes sense. New blood.”
“Oh, God,” Kirby murmured, leaning in. “He’s been planning this.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment and missed whatever they were whispering over my head. I couldn’t stop thinking of my flat in St. Andrew’s, of my boyfriend Dan, of my thesis, of my friends, of my goddamn life! It was all there, but it wasn’t mine anymore. Just like that, Brennan had taken it all away.
“…too many Alphas,” Clara was saying when I zoned back in.
“What?”
She looked pityingly at me. “There’s too many Alphas and he can’t get more Omegas…”
She was right. Omegas only left their birth pack to follow an Alpha - either a close relative or a partner they had met and been courted by at a Summit. An Omega couldn’t walk out of their pack any more than a child could because they would be, as far as Alphas were concerned, just as vulnerable.
“Maybe he’ll let us choose,” Kirby suggested, sounding like she found the thought comforting. Like she thought that if we could decide which of the men in this room got to fuck and breed us, then it wouldn’t be so bad.
&
I cornered B
rennan as soon as the room started emptying and Clara and Kirby followed me to his study. They were both wary, but confident that I could speak freely with our Dominant.
“What the fuck is this?” I spat the moment the door closed.
He turned to me, looking genuinely surprised. “I just told you.”
“You just told us?” I repeated. “Like that? In front of everybody? Like we are just animals to be fucking bred?”
He frowned at me, like I was being ridiculous. Like I was being hysterical just like Omegas were said to be. “You are not animals, not any more than I am. You are Omegas.”
“We are people, Brennan!” I shouted. “We deserve to be fucking asked.”
“Oh,” he nodded, “but I am going to ask you. You can choose.”
“We can choose?” Kirby squealed from behind me. I turned on her, almost as angry with her as with my brother. But she seemed perfectly happy to ignore me in favour of the Alpha who held her fate in his hands. Surprising, isn’t it?
“Yes,” Brennan nodded enthusiastically, like he was finally being understood properly. I could tell he thought he was being kind, but I was too furious to care about his delusions of magnanimity. “I have done some research for you, but within reason it’s your decision who you mate with.”
Kirby relaxed at this concession. I was about to snap that I didn’t care to choose who got to use me as a fucking incubator when Clara volunteered, “I don’t think I’m ready.”
