Sex with her however would likely be a boring affair. He wouldn’t be able to touch her without her bruising and her mating screams would be too loud and annoying for him to enjoy himself.
So why couldn’t he look away if he disliked her so much?
Rey felt another rush of anger, this time directed at himself. Doubt and self-questioning was Edon’s territory. Edon was the one who’d rather use his words than his teeth. And now all these words in his mind were piling up and annoying him.
He let out a frustrated breath and tried it Edon’s way. Calm and rational.
The girl had some hold over them. Her scent was familiar but he still couldn’t place it. He wanted to mate with her and to do that, he would have to kill Edon. As Alpha he would kill Edon if he ever had to but he didn’t want that.
There was only one thing to do to resolve this situation.
He would kill the girl.
Satisfied he had a plan, he loped away into the forest.
*
As soon as the girl started crying, Edon felt the thrall fade away and the tiny whisper of rationality reasserted itself.
He was acting like Rey. In short - a crazy asshole who only thought of himself. What had he said? Nia will take you back to our den? Does the girl get a choice? Does
the girl
have a name?
Edon finished buttoning his shirt and walked over to the girl, wrapping his arms around her. Her scent rose up and stirred the madness inside him but he managed to keep it from overwhelming him and taking control. She wrapped her hands around his waist and sobbed into his chest.
“I’m sorry. What is your name?”
“Cass,” she mumbled into his shirt.
“You don’t have to come to our den Cass. I can have Nia take you back to Hinton. Do you want that?”
He let go of her - there was a limit to how long he could resist her scent - and stepped away.
The girl, Cass, was a blotchy mess. She wiped tears from her eyes and tried to breathe through a blocked nose.
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t guarantee Rey or me won’t come there to fetch you back to have our wicked way with you but I can at least ensure you get back there safely. Wolf’s honor.”
He held up his fingers in the Scout’s salute he’d learned in childhood amongst the humans and Cass laughed, the misery that had come over her disappearing.
She’s beautiful
rushed across his mind and he smiled back at her. Unlike Rey who was primarily raised in a pack, Edon spent the first sixteen years of his life living with humans and far preferred them to werewolf females. They were all hard muscle and sharp claws. Human girls were soft lines, curves and hips and an aching vulnerability. Although as Alpha, he enjoyed himself with the pack females there was something missing they could not provide.
He waited as Cass wiped away her tears and composed herself. She kept looking at him in small glances, as though she was afraid to meet his gaze and look fully.
No wonder given the craziness she’d seen. He and Rey had been ready to rip each other apart for her.
“Do you remember me?” she asked in a small voice.
“The girl in the forest bending over the stream drinking cold water. You were wearing a very tight top. You were nearly eaten by a werewolf.”
Cass looked down and turned red. She’d had no idea the werewolves had been watching her for some time.
“You saved me from attack. I never got a chance to thank you. So… thank you.”
“Are you thanking the ground or thanking me?”
Edon was near grinning now. He hadn’t been into a human town for at least six months and the easy banter that had made all the girls love him was coming back.
Cass looked up, her face still red.
“Thank you for saving me,” she said, quite deliberately.
They stood there for a moment before she added, “I can’t go back. I’m not going back. If you try to take me back I’ll turn around and come here again.”
His inner wolf leapt for joy at the prospect of her coming to the den, even as the moment was lessened by the idea only he or Rey would get to have her and the other would be dead.
“Do you know what that means?”
She hesitated and then nodded.
“Then please, come to our den.”
Nia had remained kneeling down during this entire exchange and this time Cass climbed up on her back. She gasped as Nia stood up and began to move, clutching her hands in her fur. Nia picked up her backpack in her teeth and soon was underway, heading to the den.
Edon watched her go, trying to calm his pounding heart.
He had to find Rey. Perhaps there was some way they could resolve this that didn’t end in death and disaster.
Knowing Rey, he doubted it.
*
Rey smelt and heard Edon before he saw him. As usual, Edon was spending his time lumbering around in human form and making no attempt to be quiet as he moved through the forest.
Rey had climbed to a high peak where the air was cold and thin. It was good - it cleared his mind of the girl and washed away the uncomfortable emotions that had been gnawing at him before like fleas.
Rey heard a branch snap and sighed at how obvious Edon was being. He knew he was making so much noise because he wanted Rey to hear him, to know he wasn’t creeping up on him. Although Edon had never been able to sneak up on Rey. Since they had first met they’d played the stalking game many time but Rey always managed to hear or smell Edon before he got close enough to pounce.
Edon emerged from the trees and walked up the rocks toward him as Rey regarded him with a cool gaze.
Human form. Dull teeth, no claws, and fingers and thumbs barely made up for those deficiencies. At least males could be strong and muscular. The female of the species was so ridiculously fragile it was a wonder they survived at all. If werewolf females weren’t infertile, they’d never bother with humans again.
“I have an idea,” Edon said, finding a rock to sit on
.
Rey detected the scent of the girl on Edon’s shirt. The smell of her tears, of fear and arousal mixed together. It was a heady combination.
So Edon had an idea, as he always did. But Rey knew better than to dismiss his friend. His ideas had helped grow their small pack of two to a strong pack of forty and had secured them a large and expanding territory.
“Staying as a wolf for this then?”
Rey nodded, not bothering to shift to answer. He knew it frustrated Edon to have one-sided conversations but was in no mood to care right now.
“Very well,” Edon said, picking up a stone and moving it from hand to hand.
“She is the girl we saved from Carcer. Remember her scent?”
As soon as Edon spoke, the memory crashed into Rey. They had at other times saved humans from werewolves but there was only one
girl
they both remembered. After they had left her with her people they had moved away into the forest, both pondering the strange feeling that had possessed them. They had stopped two miles away and shifted to human form to talk. Rey had been the first to say it:
“I want to go back. I want to… protect her.”
It wasn’t quite right. There was a strange mix of feelings. Desire. To protect. A type of hunger that couldn’t be satiated with food. A feeling he wanted to fight his friend.
“I feel the same,” Edon had replied.
Being from a pack that had barely functioned over the years, Rey had little idea of what had happened. Edon, who had been raised by humans, had no idea as well. They had returned to the campsite but the girl and her family were gone, her scent fading on the breeze, vanishing all too quickly. Despite both of them being injured and needing to rest, they had followed it thirty miles until it had disappeared.
With the girl gone and no way to find her, Rey had forced her to the deep recesses of his mind. He was an Alpha, in supreme control of himself and he lived in the now, not the past. An Alpha didn’t dwell on what had happened and torment himself with what ifs.
They only spoke of the girl one more time - a year later when they returned to the campsite. There had been plenty of humans there with their nubile teenage daughters but not the one they were looking for. They had left, never to return.
It had been Edon who suggested they start a pack and work together as Alphas. Rey had taken some convincing, every instinct he possessed telling him a pack only needed a single strong Alpha. But after years wandering the territories together they had come to rely on one another and although it was unspoken, they were far stronger together than apart. And so Arctos Pack was born.
Edon had been right and together they had carved out their own territory, taking on larger packs and claiming them. They had gained strength so fast females voluntarily left their packs to join Arctos.
And so it had gone for years, never speaking of the girl, her scent a distant memory. Working together as Alphas and never discussing what the future might hold. Eventually, one would want to find a mate and then they would fight, the pack possibly breaking apart. But Rey lived in the now and on this topic, Edon joined him.
“We have imprinted on her.”
Rey snorted in disbelief. Imprinted on her? That
human
? He knew to have cubs required a human female but he’d always assumed she’d be an asset to the pack and he’d feel nothing for her. She’d stay in the den and he’d mate with her when the curse came. When it passed, he’d return to rutting with werewolf females. The human would be nothing more than a source of cubs for the pack. It was the way his father had been with his mother and after she died it had been the way he’d been with his next human mate. Rey had only loved one human female, his mother Elise, and that was the end of it.
“Her name is Cass Green and we have imprinted on her,” Edon said, ignoring Rey’s snort. “She refuses to return to Hinton so I have sent her to the den with Nia.”
Rey rolled his eyes at this. Refused? No one refused Rey’s commands, especially not a weak human.
“We can fight to the death and the survivor claims her or…”
Rey waited, feeling his ear twitch.
“… we can let her choose. The one not chosen leaves, taking five females with him.”
Rey didn’t snort this time. It wasn’t common for packs to split but it did happen from time to time. Around the time they had first started the Arctos pack, the Turek pack nearby had split in two, the twin brothers Eos and Trammel taking half the pack and half the territory each. They were both killed and their packs obliterated within a year by the Utson pack but Rey considered that was because they were weak, not because the idea of splitting was itself flawed.
“What do you think?”
Rey made a noise that was neither yes or no. Edon with all his ideas hadn’t come across the simplest one: kill the girl and let things go back to the way they were. Even if they had imprinted on her when they were younger, surely it was weak and would disappear if she were dead.
Rey stood up and walked down the hill, heading to the den.
“Consider it Rey. We can let her choose.”
Let her choose. Rey knew Edon would be upset once the girl was dead but was sure he’d calm down eventually. He wasn’t thinking straight. He’d tear her throat out and then it would be done.
*
As Cass rode the brown wolf, her face pressed against its fur, she felt that same strange serenity from the deep past come over her. It was a welcome change from the terror - and lust - of the last half hour. She’d pushed the blur of it all out of her mind and tried to think calmly about what she’d done - what she was
doing
.
Well, I’m riding a brown wolf into a werewolf den
she thought.
Nia, she reminded herself. Underneath this fur was a woman. Although Cass had studied, obsessed, read about and generally absorbed every piece of information about werewolves she could find there was a big difference between reading about something and seeing it. Like being told about kissing and then having a first kiss.
Cass pushed away that thought as a sudden image of her kissing Rey came unbidden into her mind. She’d kiss him and then turn to kiss-
“Stop it,” she muttered to herself.
Nia stopped, turned her head and looked at her quizzically.
“Not you. Sorry, talking to myself.”
Nia made a snuffling huff noise that sounded like she was laughing and started walking again.
Cass turned around but Edon was nowhere in sight. And Rey had snarled at her before disappearing. She was alone in the forest on the back of a brown werewolf.
Not alone. There is a person under there.
Cass felt herself relaxing against Nia and found she didn’t have to hold on. The werewolf was broad and moved with ease over the varied terrain, never jolting her passenger.
As Cass sighed and her muscles unwound another thought rose up. What had Edon said? He and Rey were the Alphas of Arctos pack?
Alphas. Plural. Not singular.
It was rare for a pack to have two Alphas. When it did happen, they were invariably brothers, identical twins and each had a human mate. There was no way Edon and Rey were twins and they weren’t brothers. So how…?