by J. L. Wilder
They were all there, of course, on the day the babies were born. Even the toddlers were present, although Petra kept them off to the side and occupied playing a game with sticks and rocks.
Burton knelt at Sophie’s side. He let her squeeze his hand through her contractions and wiped the sweat from her brow as the first of their new litter of children entered the world. “A girl,” Marco announced, holding her up.
“That’s good,” Ryker said, glancing over at little Caleb, who was sitting apart from his siblings and watching the goings-on appraisingly. “We’ve already got a little alpha. We don’t want competition.
Marco handed the baby to Burton, who examined her and held her out for Sophie to see. “I think this one’s Ryker’s,” he said. “With that dark hair—what do you think?”
“No,” Sophie said. “She’s yours. Look at the nose. That’s definitely your nose.”
Burton felt a strange surge of pride. He liked not knowing which of the children belonged, in a biological sense, to which father. He would have felt strange thinking of any of them as more his than any of the others. They were all his. And there was no way to be sure that this baby girl was his biological daughter. But just the thought that she might be was enough to warm his heart.
She was followed into the world by two boys, right on one another’s heels and squalling as if they had been interrupted in the middle of an argument. “These two are practically identical,” Marco mused. “In fact, I think they might be identical.” He gave them to Ryker for examination.
“Can I have some water?” Sophie begged. Her eyes were bright with effort, and sweat was pouring off of her.
Burton looked over at Marco. “Can she?”
“Just a little,” he said. “Not too much. She can get her mouth wet.”
Burton nodded and grabbed the water basket he’d placed nearby. He lifted her shoulders carefully and held the basket to her lips.
Sophie sipped slowly, then looked gratefully up at him. “Thank you.”
He felt as if he had made her whole world. There was no feeling like it on earth. “Anything for you, Soph. You know that.”
“Okay, Sophie,” Marco interrupted the moment. “Here comes the next one.”
Sophie nodded and bore down, Burton and Ryker gripping her shoulders. A moment later, more cries rent the air.
“Another girl,” Marco said.
“How many more?” Sophie’s eyes were squeezed shut.
Marco placed a hand on her stomach, pressed down very gently. “At least one. Maybe two. It’s definitely a smaller litter than last time,” he said.
She barked out a laugh. “That’s good,” she said.
“You’re almost done,” Burton assured her. “You’re my hero, Sophie. I hope you know that. It blows my mind what you can do.”
“You fight bears,” she pointed out through gritted teeth. “And the southern wolves.”
“Bears are nothing. You manufacture people with your body. You’ve given birth to thirteen children, Sophie. That’s amazing. You’re amazing.”
“He’s right,” Marco said, his hand coming to rest gently on her knee. “We all think so. We all think you’re a hero.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“No, he’s not,” Ryker chimed in. “Our family, what we have...it couldn’t exist without you, Sophie. You’re the glue that holds us together, and you’re the one making our dreams for the future into a reality.”
“I’m so sorry I ever thought you would leave us,” Marco said. “I shouldn’t have believed it. I should have known you never would.”
Sophie smiled gratefully up at him. “Promise we’ll always be together?”
“I promise.”
“Burton? Ryker?”
“Absolutely,” Ryker agreed.
Burton nodded, glad that this reassurance was something he could give her. “There’s nothing that could ever come between us,” he said. “This life is the life I never knew I’d always wanted, and I’d never let anything take it away now that I’ve been lucky enough to find it.”
It scared him sometimes to think how close he had come to missing this. He had never been looking for a mate. He had never wanted a pack or a family. If he hadn’t stumbled across Sophie and imprinted on her without warning, he would never have known what he could have had. He would have thought his life of running alone through the woods was complete.
The final baby was born as the sun rose up over the horizon and gave the first light of day to the little family inside the cave. Marco held her in his arms, turning toward the mouth of the cave so that she could see the mild light of first day.
“Good morning, little girl,” he said quietly. “Welcome to the world.”
“Lily,” Sophie murmured. She had slumped back in Burton’s arms, exhausted from her ordeal, but her eyes were shining as she gazed at her youngest child. “I want to call her Lily.”
“Lily it is,” Marco agreed at once.
Lily. Burton turned the name over in his mind, marveling at how perfect it was. It already seemed to belong to his daughter.
He knew, from his experience the last time Sophie had given birth, that the next several days would be spent learning the new babies’ appearances, figuring out how to distinguish them from one another, and thinking of the perfect names for each of them. He knew that dozens of names would be offered up for debate and vetoed, and that the betas would weigh in with their own ideas and suggestions. Gradually, without rushing, they would find the right name for each child and begin getting to know them.
But this was new. Finding a name this quickly, one they all seemed to agree upon—that hadn’t happened before.
It was a sign. It had to be. It was a sign that there was something special about this name, and maybe even something special about this baby.
Marco gave her to Burton, and he looked down at her. She was the spitting image of her mother. Often, he found it difficult to say exactly who babies looked like, but with this one, there was absolutely no question. She was Sophie in miniature.
“She’s beautiful,” Burton said quietly.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. There was something magnetic about her, something he didn’t understand. It was as if she had been born with some kind of power inside her.
He reluctantly allowed Ryker to take her, to pass her off to Chrissy to be cleaned up and settled on the blanket with her four newborn brothers and sisters.
“Five this time,” Sophie said. Her breathing was beginning to recover, though she hadn’t made any attempts to extricate herself from Burton’s lap, where she lay propped up against him.
“That brings us to fourteen,” Ryker commented.
“Plus the four of us and four betas,” Marco added. “Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-three, when Petra has her baby,” Burton said.
“That’s a damn fine pack,” Ryker said. He sounded full of the same pride that Burton was feeling. “A damn fine pack. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of one so large before.”
“Do you think we’re going to be able to hold together?” Sophie asked.
“We don’t need to worry about that now,” Marco said. “We’ve just had these babies. When they grow up, they might go their separate ways. But for now, we’re all here, and we’re all family. That’s what’s important, right?”
“Right,” Sophie agreed, though Burton could still hear a faint note of doubt in her voice.
He squeezed her shoulders, easing out from behind her so that she was lying flat on the ground, tucking a sweater under her head to form a pillow. “You should get some sleep,” he told her. “Don’t worry about the future right now. Our babies are here. They’re healthy. They’re strong. We’re all together. Get some rest.”
The worry faded from Sophie’s face. She allowed her eyes to drift closed, giving Burton’s hand one final squeeze as unconsciousness finally overtook her.
When she was deeply asleep, her breathing soft and even, Burton got to his feet and left the
cave. He sat outside with his back to the rock, watching the horizon as the sun continued to rise.
He had only been outside for a few moments when Marco came out and sat beside him. He was holding the two newborn boys, one in each arm, and he handed one to Burton as he sat.
“What’s up?” he asked. “You hightailed it out of there. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Burton said, offering his finger to his newborn son. The boy clutched at it reflexively.
“Are you sure?” Marco asked. “Just overwhelmed by it all? Or what?”
“To tell you the truth, it was something Sophie said,” Burton admitted.
“That thing about the future?” Marco asked.
Burton glanced at him. “That got to you too?”
“I think about it all the time,” Marco said. “It feels like we’re on borrowed time sometimes. Just look at Caleb. He’s so fiercely independent already, and he’s not even two years old. What’s it going to be like when he gets a little older? How long will we be able to keep him under control?” He shook his head. “I look at you and Ryker, and I think about how you left your families behind to come north...”
“That’s not the same,” Burton said, though he was trying to convince himself just as much as Marco. “Ryker and I were unhappy in the families we had. They didn’t respect us. And we didn’t like the lifestyle they were living.”
“There’s no guarantee that our children will love our lifestyle,” Marco pointed out. “It is a little unorthodox. Living wild the way we do. We love it, but what if someday they want to connect with their human sides?”
It was exactly what Burton had been worrying about, and it pained him to hear the words coming from Marco. “Do you really think they’d leave us?” he asked.
“I think it’s too soon for us to waste our time worrying about that,” Marco said. “I know it’s hard not to, but honestly, I think we’d be wasting our time to focus on it. There’s nothing we can do about it now. When the time comes, when they’re grown up, they’ll move on to a different life or they won’t.”
Burton was silent, staring out into the distance. He wrapped his arms a little more tightly around the baby boy in his arms. This child had just come into his life. It was too soon to think about saying goodbye to him. Marco was right.
But how could he banish that thought now that it was here?
“Listen,” Marco said. “Whatever happens, whatever the future holds, there’s one thing this family absolutely has going for it.”
“What’s that?” Burton asked.
“The bond we have,” Marco said. “It’s deep. It’s probably deeper than what any other pack can provide. And even if our children need to see what else the world has to offer one day, I think we can count on the fact that they’ll never leave because they didn’t feel loved here with us.”
Burton nodded. That did make him feel a little better. “And I suppose they’ll always know they have a home here,” he said. “Even if someday they do decide to leave, they’ll always be able to come back to us.”
“That’s right,” Marco said. “I think we can count on the fact that they’ll always feel like they belong here with the pack. In fact, it might be that no matter where they go from here, the pack will go with them.”
“What do you mean?” Burton asked. “Do you think we’re going to go back to roaming around, the way we used to before we settled down?”
“No,” Marco said. “I didn’t mean it literally. What I’m saying is that when our children grow up, our pack will branch out. The hub might still be here, but offshoots of it can exist wherever they go.”
“That would really be something,” Burton said quietly. He imagined a future in which the members of the Arctic Wolf Pack were living all over the Arctic Circle, throughout North America, free to explore the land and set up their homes wherever they saw fit. He imagined migrating from one season to the next and coming across small pods of his own family members—maybe his children, or perhaps, someday, shifters he had never even met before.
He had to admit, it sounded like a wonderful future.
He looked down at the baby boy in his arms, who was yawning and kicking his feet absently. The future. He held it right here. Whatever would become of the Arctic Wolves, whatever was in store for their pack, it lay in the hands of his children now.
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Omega’s Harem- Feral Wolves of the Arctic Book 3: Available Live on November 19th!
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Prologue
PAX
It should have been raining, Pax thought as he stepped out of the long log cabin he’d been staying in for the past two weeks. It should have been a gray and dismal day. The sun shouldn’t have dared to show its face. Not today.
A titan was gone. A noble wolf, one of the finest warriors Pax had ever known. They were gathered here to honor him, and to mourn his death.
He crossed the yard to the place where Josh was to be buried. The hole had been prepared by some of the betas late last night, but Pax hadn’t personally examined it. Now, though, as he approached, he saw that Victor was sitting at the edge, his legs dangling morbidly into the grave.
Pax sat down beside him, though he crossed his legs beneath him rather than let them hang down. That idea was a little too upsetting. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said.
“He died too young,” Victor said. “He wasn’t even sixty.”
Pax nodded. “He was a warrior,” he said. “If he had to go, it’s fitting that we lost him in battle.”
Victor took a long drink from the bottle of beer in his hand. Then he tossed it across the yard. “It isn’t fitting,” he said. “It’s not right at all. He wasn’t killed in battle. He wasn’t engaging with an alpha from another pack. That’s what my father would have wanted. He was just attacked by a wild bear. There isn’t anything noble about that.”
Pax didn’t know what to say. Victor was right, of course. He hadn’t known Josh well, but he had known him well enough to understand that this death wasn’t one that did honor to the kind of man Josh had been. He had been an alpha who prioritized the strength and dominance of his pack above everything else. He had seen them through numerous battles, and he’d helped them grow strong and prosperous. Being ambushed by a bear on a run through the woods...that wasn’t a noble death.
But he couldn’t say that to Victor. Victor wasn’t just mourning the loss of a strong and powerful shifter. He was mourning the loss of his father. Today was twice as painful for him as it was for anyone else.
“It’s nice that so many people came,” he tried.
“They’re just trying to suck up to me,” Victor said moodily. “They know I’m the alpha of the Vancouver Wolf Pack now that Dad’s gone. We’re the strongest pack there is, and everyone wants my ear.”
“That’s not why I came,” Pax protested.
Victor glanced at him. “Maybe not,” he acknowledged. “Maybe you’re here because you owed my father something. After all, he did save you when the rest of your pack was destroyed.”
“That was twenty years ago.” Pax had been a child at the time. He hardly remembered it.
“You wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for my father,” Victor growled.
“I know that,” Pax said. “I’m not trying to downplay what he did. He took me away from the scene of the attack that killed my whole family. He found a home for me among a new pack. He is, in many ways, my savior.”
“That’s right,” Victor said.
“But he meant more to me than that,” Pax said. “And those things aren’t the reason I came here to help you put him to rest. He was the strongest alpha I’ve ever met, and he led the strongest pack of wolf shifters in the world. He’s a legend among our kind.”
Victor shook his head. “Not the strongest pack in the world,” he said.
“You don’t think so?” Pax asked.
“You know we’re not,” Victor said. “We might be the strongest civ
ilized pack. But there’s another out there, one that bested us and got away with it, back when you and I were barely out of babyhood.”
“Oh,” Pax said, awareness dawning on him. “You’re talking about the Arctic Wolves.”
“Who else?” Victor asked. “Just knowing that those beasts were still alive and strong tormented my father until the day he died. He hated them. He never got over the fact that they’d beaten him.” He shook his head. “He should have died fighting them, not some common bear.”
“If he’d fought them again, he would have beaten them,” Pax said.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Victor snapped. “You don’t know what they’re like.”
“And you do?” Pax asked. “You never met them.”
“My father talked about them all the time,” Victor said. “They were vicious brutes. They were horrible. They fought to kill. And the way they live...” He closed his eyes. “It isn’t natural.”
“What do you mean? Because they live in the wild?” Pax asked. “That’s not exactly unheard of. Lots of packs do it. I mean, no one I know does, but I’ve heard stories, and I’m sure you have too.”
“I don’t care where they live,” Victor said. “I’m talking about how they live. Their pack doesn’t submit to the charge of a single alpha. Instead, the whole thing is structured around a woman. An omega.”
“A matriarchy?” Pax asked. “I didn’t know that was possible for our kind.”
“It’s not,” Victor said. “There’s something sinister going on up there. She’s a witch. Father always said there was something strange about her, that she had the power to trap men by twisting their thoughts. She probably tricked the alphas into thinking they had imprinted on her somehow.”
“What are you saying?” Pax asked. “That she has some kind of supernatural powers?”
“She must,” Victor said. “She must be a kind of creature that you and I have never seen before if she’s capable of overpowering three strong alphas and bending them to her will, as my father described.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Pax said. “She was near your father’s age, wasn’t she? She must be getting old. Whatever power she might have had will almost certainly die with her. I know you wish your father could have been the one to snuff it out, the way he wanted. But at least it will be gone.”
