Harper (Destined for the Alpha Book 1)

by Viola Rivard

  Harper whistled. “Wow. You are one sexy tree. How did I not notice you before?” She started up the loamy hill. “Probably the whole being captive and fearing for my life thing. Kinda distracted me last night.”

  She stopped at the tree trunk, craning her neck all the way back, and then took another hit of her joint.

  “Mind if I climb you?” she asked. She waved her hand. “Nah. You don't mind. Here I come!”

  Her brother had taught her how to climb trees. He hadn't wanted to, but Harper had been insistent on following him. If she took a snapshot of the first decade of her life, there was a fair chance her brother's retreating form would be in it. It had been thirteen years since she'd lost him, but whenever she climbed, Harper did so without fear. Even after all of the time that had passed, she still imagined that if she slipped, he would somehow to transcend time and space to catch her.

  She had reached the topmost branch that could hold her weight when thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Oh, screw you,” she said to the sky. “Can't you see I'm trying to brood?”

  She settled onto the branch, silently taunting the sky to strike her down. Fat raindrops began falling on her face.

  Ignoring the rain, she took a final hit on her joint, and then put it out. There would be barely enough left for tomorrow night, but for tonight, at least, she would be okay.

  She slipped the roach in her back pocket and then raised her hand up to regard her palm. It was clean now, but she could clearly picture the pool of blood from that morning.

  In her mind, she pulled up the Google search she'd performed eight months ago, the last time she'd had the nightmares. Occasionally, she stopped smoking, just to see if the nightmares came back. She hadn't told Jo about the last time. Every time the topic of the nightmares came up, Jo would start in about seeing a psychiatrist or a counsellor, and that was not a conversation she wanted to repeat.

  Hemophystis—the medical term for coughing up blood. Beneath the blue header text was a bullet point list of possible causes. Though she was sure that each cause had been displayed in the same clean font, her memory distorted certain ones. “Congestive heart failure” was written in a neon red block font. “Embolism” was dark red and dripping, its ink running down over the cursive “Tuberculosis” and a list of syndromes she couldn't pronounce.

  “Trauma” had been one cause on the list, and the most likely of the bunch. Certainly, there had been trauma in her dream. But why would only the damage to her chest cavity manifest itself? Why not the mauling of her limbs or the breaking of her bones? It had to be something else.

  Only when she was high, was Harper able to consider any of this. Being high gave her a level of detachment that was crucial when contemplating the possibility that her brain was broken beyond repair, and she would either spend the rest of her life reliant on a drug or she would die from the inside out.

  Her thoughts cam careening to a halt as Shan finally arrived. She knew it was Shan, even though he was in his wolf form.

  She might have fallen from the tree, had she not been so stoned. Her hands snaked out to grip the branches around her as she stared in open-mouthed astonishment. Her first coherent thought was that she hadn't found one of her own joints, but one that belonged to someone else and had been laced with PCP, or some other hallucinogenic compound.

  As tall as an oak tree. That was what some of those unreliable accounts had claimed. He wasn't as tall as the tree she was in, but he was damn close. He approached her with a casual swagger, disturbing nary a leaf as he walked.

  She watched with bated breath as he circled the tree, analyzing her from every angle. If the move was meant to intimidate, it was lost on Harper. The sense of unreality was so intense that everything around her took on a dreamlike quality. It should have been frightening, given her nightmares, but there was no pervading sense of terror, banging like a drum all around her. She felt excited, jubilant, even.

  She lifted her hand, at first to wave, but then stretched it in his direction. She blurted the first words to come to mind, spoken with all of the earnestness and wonderment of a child.

  “Can I pet you?”

  The rain blotted out her scent, but The Wolf remembered it. He had already internalized it, in the same way that Shan remembered her name.

  The Wolf had no use for names.

  Names were labels of the spoken word. His life existed in sight, scent, tones, and touch. He had not even known Mother's name. Shan's was the only one he knew, and even that was more of a collection of sounds than a whole thing. His name was the sound of leaves, dry, but not yet fallen, being tossed on an autumn breeze.

  In the night before this one, Shan had lain across from this human. She had been in his bed and her scent had managed to penetrate The Emptiness. He had been drawn by the musky tendrils. They had wrapped around him, pulling him towards the surface, where he had tried to impress upon Shan the need to mate with her.

  Earlier in that night, Shan had sat near to her, watching her as she watched him. He had smelled her arousal, yet hadn't claimed her when he'd taken her to bed.

  Shan confused The Wolf. Whenever he glimpsed into the man's mind, he was left with a headache. It was nothing but jumbled emotions, clashing with motivations that made no sense to The Wolf. He was content to eat, sleep, and mate. He did not even have great care for the pack, though he did recognize that it was his and as such he had to sometimes fight to protect it. He couldn't have others thinking that they could take what was his.

  They were lesser beings—all of them. Their wolves were small, malformed beasts that had forgotten their greatness, allowing their human blood to subjugate them. He really could have done without them, but as soon as Shan reclaimed his form, he would inevitably return to preside over the wretched beasts.

  He circled the human, taking her in for himself. He had only yet seen her through Shan's eyes, which was like trying to hear a bird's song from the bottom of a lake.

  The Wolf, did not find any human form to be of particular interest, but from Shan, he knew what it was like to be inside of one of those warm, wet bodies—at least, to an extent. He knew that for Shan, the pleasure of pouring himself into a female was incomparable, but all The Wolf had ever felt were the rippling aftershocks. It was all he would ever feel.

  Though he could not see it himself, he knew that the female was exceptionally beautiful. Shan thought she was the most beautiful female he had ever seen, and that if she became his mate, all other males would envy him. The Wolf liked the idea of that, almost as much as he loathed the idea of her going to another male. If another male took her as his mate, then it would be Shan who was envying that male. The Wolf could not abide by that.

  Shan whispered in the back of his mind, creating a tug that would soon be a pull. He was ready to reclaim his human form.

  The wolf ignored him.

  It wasn't fair. Shan had had all night to regard her. He could spare The Wolf a few minutes.

  He sometimes ignored the tugs, if only to remind Shan that their relationship was symbiotic. If he tried hard enough, The Wolf could resist for quite a while. He'd once resisted for a full week before Mother and Father had forced him to release Shan. After that, Shan had locked him out for two weeks, just to spite him.

  They had stopped that dance long ago. They had learned to respect the tugs, and especially the pulls. Without that respect, the bond would have broken down, and that would have been very bad for the both of them.

  The Wolf came to a stop as the human reached out for him.

  She spoke. He recognized the questioning lilt, and nothing else.

  Though he didn't understand her words, he paused to familiarize himself with the sound of her voice. Like most females, she sounded soft and imploring. He especially liked the sound of her voice, but that was probably because she was his, or at least, she would be soon enough.

  Curious to know what she'd said, he passed her words through the filter of Shan's mind. It required The Emptiness
to be bridged and would make it easier for Shan to pull, if he was so inclined. The Wolf prepared his resistances. He wouldn't cede to Shan, not until he was ready.

  The Wolf hated Shan's translations. Shan could never send him anything plainly, it had to come weighed down with Shan's own feelings and impressions, and Shan's own opinion on how The Wolf should react.

  The human wanted to touch him.

  Shan thought this was funny and he felt affection for the human. Instead of trying to pull, he encouraged The Wolf to allow the contact.

  The Wolf did not need Shan's encouragement. No human had ever asked to touch him before.

  He lifted his nose to her, allowing her to reach out and press her hand to it. She stroked his snout. It was like being tickled by a feather, but he liked it immensely.

  Her scent accentuated the touch. He did not need the bridge to feel arousal for her. That was strange. Usually, when he felt arousal for humans, it was because Shan was too close to the surface. But this was his own. He knew the sensation well, as he sometimes felt it for the females in his pack, malformed as they were. As always, he could do nothing about it. Even the largest among them was much too small for him and could accommodate him no more than this little scrap of a human could.

  He exhaled his frustration, the air blowing her wet hair. She laughed and smiled and said something else.

  Shan told him she liked him.

  Growing excited, The Wolf wondered what else he could do to make her like him even more. He thought he should go hunt for her, but he didn't want to leave her presence. Perhaps he could get her to ride on his back and he could take her on the hunt. She would see what a good hunter he was, and then she would be more receptive when Shan was finally ready to claim her.

  Tug.

  The Wolf resisted. He considered closing the bridge, but she was talking again and he wanted badly to know everything she was saying. He tried getting Shan to translate, but he refused. That angered him.

  The Wolf was entitled to know what she was saying. She was going to be their mate, after all. He knew it, and Shan knew it, too. This time was different. The Wolf didn't know how, but he could feel it. This time, Shan wouldn't deny the impulse.

  This female would be their mate.

  As the realization crystallized in his mind, The Wolf was wrested back by a strangling pull and sent careening back across The Emptiness.

  Shan came into his form, his body brimming with tension and indignation.

  It was not unusual for his wolf to decide that he wanted to mate with a female. Over the years, the wolf's standards had declined dramatically. He now wanted to mate with just about any human that came along, and was quick to express his disappointment when the female passed to another male. Shan sometimes toyed with the idea of taking a mate, if only to shut him up, but that would be like gouging his eyes so as not to be bothered by the sun.

  He did not have time for a mate.

  There was too much to do. He had alliances to manage, trade routes to establish, a pack to lead, and if he took a mate, it would all go to shit. He was already up against the limits of what he could delegate, and it left him constantly moving from task to task. Unless he was sacrificing sleep, he seldom had more than a single free hour each night.

  And then, there were the circuits. The one year Shan had attempted to delegate the circuits, they'd managed to fuck up two critical alliances and he'd had to execute his head enforcer after he'd killed a group of humans. He needed to be there to keep order, which made it impossible to take a mate. The pace of the circuits was grueling. A human female couldn't be expected to cover thousands of miles in a few short months, even if she wasn't breeding. On the same turn of the coin, a wolf could not be separated from his mate for months on end. His wolf—stubborn asshole that he was—would pose a particular problem, as he was liable to lock Shan out and return home the moment Shan ceded control to him.

  For a moment, Shan was so consumed by his anger that he forgot that he wasn't alone. Then a small branch struck his head.

  He looked up to see Harper dangling on a too-high tree limb, her legs swinging back and forth. She had one hand over her mouth, stifling a laugh.

  Of course he wanted to mate with her.

  He hated that the wolf knew this, because it was going to piss him off all the more when Shan didn't mate with her.

  Harper was beautiful and he liked—loved her scent. She was also intelligent and somewhat clever. But those factors did not override his reasons for not taking a mate. Not to mention, she had not come seeking a mate, and Shan did not trust her.

  Within moments of talking to someone, he knew if they were trustworthy. With Harper, he'd been somewhat distracted by her other qualities, and so it had taken him a whole of an hour to determine that he could spit farther than he could take anything she said at face value.

  “How do you feed that thing?” she called down.

  At first, he didn't know what she was talking about, and then he remembered the wolf.

  It was impressive enough that she hadn't been frightened, but she had asked to pet him.

  “You're bigger than an elephant,” she said, punctuating the statement with a snicker.

  She began to climb down, and Shan felt a prickle of anxiety over how she hopped down, two slippery branches at a time. He positioned himself beneath her, prepared to catch her if she fell.

  “Just what every man wants to hear,” he said as she reached the final branch. He extended his hand to her, but she ignored it and jumped to land in front of him.

  “Everyone said you were big. I thought they were exaggerating. I mean, you really don't expect anything to be that big, 'cept for maybe a whale. Not that you're that big. How does it work? Does it hurt? You must expend so much energy. Aren't you exhausted?”

  At first, he couldn't reconcile the female standing in front of him with the one who had stormed away from him less than an hour ago. He leaned in, taking in her dilated pupils and the faint, earthy scent on her breath.

  “You're high.”

  “Oh, yeah!” she said, reaching into her back pocket. “I found this.”

  She held up a tiny scrap of burnt paper, presumably containing her drug. A grin stretched across her face.

  “No bad dreams tonight!” she declared. “I'm gonna sleep like a kitten.”

  Shan plucked the paper from her fingers, examining it with a frown.

  She asked, “Have you ever tried it?”

  “Are you trying to convince me?”

  “Actually, I'd rather just have it back. There's not really enough to share.”

  He handed it to her. “You have nightmares?”

  Her eyes widened. She had the look of someone who had inadvertently revealed the secret of a close friend.

  “I didn't say that.” She paused, putting a hand to the side of her face and sighing. “Well, I guess I kind of did. Okay, yeah, I do. But let's not talk about that.”

  He recalled her asking about her “medicinal marijuana” the night before, though she had only said that she needed it to sleep. When he'd left in the morning, she'd been in the midst of a bad dream. He'd assumed it had been because of him, but perhaps it was a chronic condition.

  Still, there had to be better ways to manage it.

  Not that it was his concern.

  “What do you want to talk about, then? Your friend, I take it?”

  With everything else that had happened, the human male had slipped Shan's mind. He'd already planned on having Gareth relinquish him to West's camp, but now Harper had complicated the matter. She had insulted him in front of his pack while making a bid for the male, and now he could not order Gareth to turn him over without seeming as if he was being strong-armed by a human.

  Harper gave him a conspiratorial look. “Actually, my plan is to engage you in several unrelated topics, gradually greasing the wheels, and then asking you about Ian.”

  He smiled despite himself. “And you're telling me this, why?”

  She s
hrugged. “I reckon you'll deduce as much, so why pretend? Hey, can we get out of the rain?”

  There was a fire burning in the den. It was the last of the dry wood, and it would die out long before the night was over. It would be a cold night.

  Harper crouched beside the fire, putting her hands up to it and turning them back and forth. Then, she started removing her clothes.

  Shan did not pay much attention when she removed her jacket. He might have noticed the way her wet blouse clung to the swell of her breasts. If he did, it was quickly forgotten as her shirt came off. His attention was then seized, first by her bare belly and then moving upwards to her breasts, which were encased in a lacy, cream-colored bra. The cups were just large enough to cover her nipples, leaving a generous view of her lush breasts.

  “Is this part of your plan to manipulate me?” he asked, finding it difficult to be annoyed.

  She looked surprised, but it could have been feigned.

  “It's cold and my clothes are wet. I thought shifters didn't have any hangups about nudity.”

  “I thought humans had more modesty,” he countered.

  She shrugged. “I think most humans are just insecure about their bodies.”

  He could have looked away as she removed her pants, but he didn't. Her legs were long and coltish, with shapely calves and thick thighs. He noted a birthmark on the side of her leg that was shaped like a star. Her underwear matched her bra.

  She kept her underclothes on, something that Shan was ambivalent about. She was so close to being naked, so near to revealing every part of herself to him, that the little scraps of cloth seemed silly and unnecessary.

  “I didn't see you around today. Were you busy?”

  “I'm always busy.”

  He wondered if she'd been looking for him. Had he been on her mind all day, as she had been on his?

  “What sorts of things do you do?”

  She was angling, but her interest seemed genuine, and Shan found that he wanted to tell her. Only Kalla ever asked how his day was, and he hadn't seen her since he'd left for the annual circuit.