Chapter 3
Something really was in the air today. First Linc and his pacing. The guy was a cucumber; he didn’t do anxiety, short temper, or any of the regular shit alphas liked to excuse with a shrug and the smug proclamation that, hey, it was just an alpha thing.
Linc had gotten me all the way to distracted, or maybe I’d been distracted even before I’d ripped out those old boards.
Bless Linc for insisting we buy a nice fixer-upper out in the middle of nowhere, but it was a lot of work, and with me being the only one who knew how to handle any kind of tool without posing a threat to myself or the people around me, I did most of it.
I didn’t mind. This way I got to make things the way I liked them without Ell or Linc getting so much as a halfhearted veto in the matter.
I still hadn’t gotten the damn deck done when Ell got home from the clinic, and that really wasn’t Linc’s fault, even if he had been off all afternoon and all kinds of distracting.
Ell walked in about two minutes after I heard his car approach over the gravel drive. I focused on the board I was hammering and listened to his footfalls. They were a little heavier than normal, so he’d gone grocery shopping.
“Linc’s out?” Ell asked from the kitchen, raising his voice ever so slightly to be heard through the closed patio door and over my hammering.
“Went for a run,” I said before I brought the hammer down on the final nail. “Felt sorta out of it.”
Ell pushed the door open, and his scent, overshadowed by disinfectant and the powdery smell of children, washed over me.
I looked up at him, and damn. Sometimes you just had to stop and wonder how those broad shoulders fit into his white doctor coat.
“Wouldn’t mind a run myself.” Ell looked at the deck. “I don’t think we’re in danger of the boards giving out from under us anymore.” He pointedly let his eyes come to rest on the part I hadn’t gotten to yet.
“Don’t say anything. It’s been a slow kinda day. I’ll finish this up tomorrow.”
“I wasn’t going to criticize you. I’m going for a run. Do you want to join?”
I sighed and sat back on my heels. “Yup.”
Ten minutes later, Ell’s gray fur flashed through the foliage on my right as we both dashed forward, paws digging into the soft forest floor.
I jumped on a boulder and broke into a howl to let Linc know we were joining him even as Ell dashed past. He stopped ahead of me, braiding his howl with my own.
Linc’s answering howl came from a lot farther off than expected. Definitely the borders of our territory, possibly even somewhere in the true wolves’ hunting grounds.
Ell wouldn’t like that. He was big on conservation, and the things he said to me when I forgot to sort the trash would make his small patients look terrified.
We exchanged a quick glance before we broke into a dead sprint. Linc’s howl hadn’t just been a greeting. He needed us there, and fast.
Ell fell back to let me take the lead. He could be faster if he wanted to be, but while he’d been born out here—a few towns over, into the Wind Creek Pack—he’d only returned three years ago. I, on the other hand, knew these woods like the pattern of my coat.
The fastest route was across some cracks in the forest floor, and it included a short swim. The river was shallower elsewhere, true, but Linc kept howling for us to move our asses, so we did.
I could hear Ell behind me, probably because he wanted to reassure me I hadn’t lost him. Ell could be too damn quiet, the creepy stalker wolf of our little pack. Again, how the man had ended up tending to sick children with all his super creepy attributes, I had no idea.
After the swim, we didn’t so much as stop to shake the water out of our coats, but with a few more jumps and hard turns to avoid thick undergrowth, we were pretty much dry anyway.
The reason Linc needed us became obvious even before we got to him. The scent of blood hung in the air, human male.
Now, I was pretty damn certain Linc hadn’t done any hiker chomping—he really was too cultured and well-behaved for that shit—but things getting out of hand when our kind ran into hikers or hunters happened.
We were larger than normal wolves by a lot, and humans scared easy and acted damn stupid once they were scared.
But the scent here wasn’t at all… Hell, I didn’t know. Blood, sure, but something else. Something…familiar, as if I knew the person on the ground, even though I was sure I didn’t.
Ell overtook me at some point, his damn muscles pushing out speed effortlessly. The scent became more intense. It was as comforting as a hug, but it was a lot more besides. Oddest thing, that. I wanted to bury my nose in it, roll in it.
Ahead, Ell jump-changed, only slowing down fully when he was on two legs again.
“Oh,” he said before stopping dead for a heartbeat as if his damn power cord had been cut.
Then he leaped into action as Linc shifted as well. Well, fuck it. Looked like we were all going to be doing this naked in the woods, so I shifted too.
“He fell,” Linc said as I approached the human on the forest floor.
Idiot wasn’t anywhere near geared up enough for a hike out here. Didn’t look like a damn hiker at all. Black hair, bit long, but the cute kind of long. He was super pale and still, not moving at all. I swallowed hard, because my throat had suddenly gone all dry.
“He…” I said. “’S he okay?”
Ell stared at the human as if he was the first of their kind he’d ever seen as he ran his hands over him.
That did something to me. I wanted to do that, but I knew Ell was the one the idiot human needed.
I took a deep breath and tried to work out where these weird urges were coming from, and then it hit me.
“Mate,” I said. “He’s my mate.”
Once the words were out, I knew it was right. My granny had said once that you just knew when you found your mate, sure as you knew the sun was up and not the moon. That simple.
I’d thought maybe Ell or Linc were mine, but this was something else entirely. I’d have laid down my life for this idiot human hiker in a heartbeat, even though I’d never even met him before.
Linc dragged his eyes off the human and looked at me. “What did you just say?”
He sounded oddly vulnerable. Linc did not do vulnerable. It shook me.
“He’s my mate. Is he going to be okay?”
“He’s your mate? How… How? He’s mine. Mine.”
Linc looked confused. In another alpha, those words might’ve been a challenge, but Linc was too secure in himself for that, too comfortable with his position. Linc didn’t do posturing.
Ell glanced over his shoulder before looking back down at the human. “This can’t be right. He’s my mate. And we need to take him home. I need to get that wound cleaned.”
Ell ran the back of his hand over the human’s cheek with the utmost tenderness. What the fuck?
I stepped up next to them, knelt, reached out to take the human’s hand, and found his fingers wet and icy from having been on the ground too damn long. I wanted to swaddle him in a blanket, and—damn. I wanted to croon and wrap myself all around him.
“I didn’t want to move him,” Linc said. “I was afraid… Is his neck okay?”
“Nothing’s broken,” Ell said, giving me a strange look.
Then he gingerly cradled the human’s shoulders and brought him into a sitting position, careful to support his head, before he removed the human’s shoulder bag.
“Can one of you take that? Look for an ID. I don’t think he was planning to be in the woods. ”
“Hold on just a hot minute.” Linc took my mate’s bag. It had his scent. Gods, but I’d never loved a bag more. “Are both of you saying he’s your mate as well?”
Ell gathered the human in his arms and stood, a large, naked werewolf carrying an unconscious not-hiker. If this hadn’t been my damn mate, I would’ve made some joke.
Something else registered. “I don’t mind this. You touching him. But he’s hurt, so I should mind, right? He’s still bleeding too.”
Ell nodded. “Yeah. We need to take him home.”
“What the hell?” Linc asked even as Ell started walking.
“He’s my mate,” Ell said. “He’s yours and Dom’s too. Guys, at what point did we enter the twilight zone?”
I took our mate’s bag from Linc, who seemed too stunned to speak, and slung it over my own shoulder before going through it, that magnificent, perfect scent all around me.
“He has a laptop in here. Who the fuck carries a laptop into the woods? What was he thinking?”
“He’s your mate, and he’s Dom’s mate too.” Linc followed at a dazed trot. “Well. Well.”
“He’s human, Linc. Maybe focus on that if you want to drive yourself crazy over something.” Ell spoke in that damn reasonable tone I was sure he used on bawling toddlers to calm them the fuck down.
I growled. “You’re right. He’s one human, and we’re three alphas. Isn’t it usually one mate per alpha? Also, as our human mate, shouldn’t he be more, you know…female?”
Linc’s nostrils flared, and Ell clutched our mate close as he weaved around trees with low-hanging branches.
Ell cleared his throat. “He might have omega potential.”
Linc shook his head. “They don’t exist anymore. And everything I know about them says it’s one alpha for each omega, typically the strongest in a pack. This is real though. It doesn’t bother me that you’re touching him, Ell.”
“Yeah, and it doesn’t bother me that you suggest it should bother you.”
In an extra compartment of the bag, I found our mate’s phone. “Jackpot.” I turned it on. Or tried to. “I think this ran out of juice. How does he have no power bank in here?” I rummaged on. “Wait, this works. I can use his laptop for charging.”
“Instead of charging his phone in the middle of the woods, can we focus on getting our human mate back to the house where I can properly treat him?” Ell’s patience was fraying.
“Right. Ell, can you carry him home? Or I can take him for a while,” I offered.
“Give him to me.”
Linc’s voice was pleading. Damn. I’d never heard Linc plead or beg before, and I had tried getting him there in the sack more than once. No such luck.
“I…I have him right now, and it’s fine. Dom, run ahead and find me the fastest way on two legs. Linc, maybe you can make sure the hu—our mate’s laptop gets to the house in one piece while Dom scouts?”
I liked that idea, if only because it would give Linc something to do other than obsess and worry.
I raised the bag. “Shift, I’ll get the strap around you.”
Ahead of us, Ell started jogging as the brambles receded and offered a route that was more open.
Linc gave a quick nod then shifted into his night-black wolf.
He was a damn sight to behold, that was for sure.
In my wolf form, I still had the whole ginger deal going in most of my coat, although the area around my muzzle was a darker brown, almost black.
I knew I looked kind of odd, like a washed-out orange cat or something, but Linc?
Linc was exactly the wolf you wanted as your mate.
I tried not to drift too deep into self-consciousness about my looks as I made sure the strap was secure around Linc’s neck. He still took the bag in his mouth so he could keep it steady and ensure nothing of our mate’s got broken.
I shifted as well and got ready to sprint ahead of Ell, but before I did, I spotted one of the real wolves peeking out at me from behind a few saplings to our left. It was strange that she was getting so close. When our eyes met, she sort of yipped at me.
I stopped and glanced over at her. She lowered her head and eyes in a gesture of submission before turning on the spot and looking over her shoulder. She wanted me to follow her. Odd.
Ell and Linc weren’t too far ahead, so I decided to check out what the wolf wanted in case it had anything to do with our mate. Maybe there was something else of his there. It would be difficult to tell over the scent of his blood, which still permeated my awareness.
I followed, and when the wolf saw, she jumped ahead of me. It wasn’t far, just a few leaps down a rock outcropping.
I gasped. The rocky character of the woods could make scents difficult to follow, especially if you added wind into the mix. That was the only reasonable explanation I had for missing this—the scent of more blood…and also death.
The wolf yowled in grief and walked up to the dead wolf on the forest floor. I joined her slowly, sniffing him. A few hours dead, I thought, and killed with a rifle. The entry wound was in the side of the head, which would have killed him instantly.
The wolf looked at me from a few paces away. I howled in acknowledgment of the loss, but there was nothing I could do for her. Her head dropped as if she’d held out hope only to find it crushed.
I padded toward her, and she let me. I bobbed our heads together in a gesture of support, but beyond that, I couldn’t spend more time here.
I left the grieving wolf to catch back up with the others and our mate, but the scent of death lingered.
I grieved for her, and I wanted to know who would shoot a wolf in the fucking head, but it just wasn’t my top priority right this minute.
Our mate was. Making sure he didn’t—fuck.
I couldn’t even think that. He’d be okay. He just had to be.
I sprinted to get ahead of Ell. Linc gave me a curious look when I got back, but when I didn’t shift, he accepted that it wasn’t anything of immediate concern, and that we could get to sorting it out with everything else later.
How we would sort everything out, I didn’t know. For something like three alpha wolves having one mate, one human mate, there were no guidelines whatsoever.