Extra Alpha Training
“Try again, Collin. Tell me what’s around you.”?
Collin screwed up his face. A blindfold covered his eyes, and a flurry of information was bombarding him now, sounds and smells that- on the daily- were more than he could sometimes bear.
“There’s too much,” he complained, frustration welling up. “I’m not good at this.”
“No one is.” The low voice carried a chuckle with it, one of surprising affection. “It takes everyone time and effort to get good at anything worth doing.”
“I bet you didn’t have to try.”
“Oh, believe me, I did.” He felt Aegis lean in behind him. “Tell me three things you can smell around you, and we’ll take a break.”
Collin tried to focus. Nearby, a bee’s buzzing burst out over all the other sounds for just a brief moment, floating lazily from one flower to the next; a cricket suddenly burst forth, hours ahead of time, just so it could break his concentration.
Sweat beaded on his brow, and Collin tried to focus, to smell. He breathed in, and a barrage of scents hit him. Some were sweet, and a little familiar.
“I can smell… candy,” Collin said, uncertain.
“Can you give me more than that?”
“Like what?”
“How far away is it? What sort of candy?”
Collin blew explosively up out of his mouth. “Am I supposed to be able to see that?”
“Yes,” Aegis chuckled.
Collin tried. He tried very, very hard. Another smell was already trying to suffocate the one he’d just managed to nail down, if even partially.
“This one’s closer,” he said, tilting his head. “Is… it’s sweet. Sugary.”
“Good.”
“It’s… uh.” Collin tilted his head. “Cotton candy?”
Aegis laughed and lifted up Collin’s blindfold. Standing in front of him was Annie, her grin spreading from ear to ear as she proffered forth her prize: an entire cotton candy, apparently just for him.
“Stop working him so hard,” she scolded, pointing at Aegis with a finger. “He needs a break.”
The enormous werewolf- the Alpha of Collin’s new pack, his new home, his new… everything- gave her a wry grin. “We’ve only been training for an hour,” he said.
“You realize he has homework, right?” Annie rolled her eyes, then grinned at Collin. “Dylan and I are going to start a movie if you want to join us.”
“I thought you had homework?” Aegis scoffed.
“We finished our homework, Alpha. Collin hasn’t finished his.”
“Says you,” Collin scoffed, pulling the blindfold off. “I did most of my homework at school, remember?”
“Oh, right.” Annie made a face, then shrugged. “You joining us, or not?”
“I’ll come in a minute.”
She nodded, before spinning on her heel and bounding off toward the house.
Aegis sat beside Collin as he slowly pulled off tiny puffs of cotton candy; the taste exploded on his tongue in a way he couldn’t have explained to either Dylan or Lucy. Everything these days was too much; too much sound, too many smells, too much flavor, too much sensation.
“I’m never going to get this down,” Collin grumbled, frowning. “Why did I have to be a werewolf?”
“Life does what life wants,” Aegis observed. “We’re just here for the ride.”
“I want to get off the rollercoaster, thanks.”
“Alas, but that’s not an option.” He ruffled Collin’s hair. “It didn’t exactly come easy to me, either.”
“That’s not what everyone else says,” Collin said dryly. “You were a prodigy, according to my classmates. ‘Alpha Aegis knew how to do everything the day he first shifted’. They all say you’re the strongest Alpha out there.”
Aegis considered this for a moment, looking out. He wasn’t anything, really, like what Collin or Dylan had expected. Sure, he was huge, and broad, and powerful, and walked like he was a wall of muscle, but he was… complicated. He wasn’t filthy rich, though he lived with his big-time streamer sister Jade, who was, in fact, quite rich. He was a mechanic, and he often smelled faintly of mechanical oil, people, and dirt. He dressed in a messy fashion, wearing a black leather jacket over ripped jeans and shredded up boots.
But he couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else. When Collin had first seen him, something inside him had reacted. It knew the second they locked eyes: Aegis was an Alpha.
Not just any Alpha, either. His emotions, if uncontrolled, could lash out in a surreal, supernatural tide of power that was completely undeniable.
And somehow, Collin had a fraction of that bubbling down deep within him.
“You doing okay?” Aegis asked suddenly.
Collin looked up, surprised. “What? Why?”
Amber eyes watched him for a moment. “You’ve had a lot sprung on you in a very short period of time. You’ve gone from a very normal, 11-year-old boy, to being a werewolf, to finding out you’ve got the Alpha gene, to nearly losing your mother. Now you’re taking Alpha lessons from me.” He gave him a wry look. “I’ve noticed you pulling back a bit from everyone.”
Collin looked down, the cotton candy turning to ash in his mouth. “I keep thinking about… about mom,” he said suddenly. “If I’d been stronger, better, faster… maybe I could’ve stopped that guy from biting her.”
“You did enough that day,” Aegis pointed out. “More than I could had done at your age.”
Collin snorted.
“Seriously. When I was 11, I barely had control over myself; I was constantly lashing out, and everyone was confused and alarmed.” Aegis was grim for a moment. “My father had to come down hard on me because otherwise… I might’ve been too much for the pack.”
“What do you mean, ‘hard on you’?”
“We trained every waking moment. For a while there, it was touch and go on if he’d even let me go to school,” Aegis said, looking off in the distance. “If I had less control over what was going on in my body, then he kept me at home, and we worked on self-control.” He looked down at Collin. “What you accomplished in that clearing, Collin, took me months to be able to do.”
“Because you’re powerful,” Collin argued. “You can protect mom.”
“Collin… you’re eleven,” Aegis reminded him. “You’re not supposed to be able to master everything overnight. You haven’t even gotten form mastery, and you’re already able to issue commands grown werewolves follow.” Aegis squeezed his shoulder. “You’re doing fine.”
But Collin wasn’t so sure. He kept playing the scene of his mother getting thrown in his mind, over and over again…
“What does it mean, to be an Alpha?” He asked aloud. “What does it mean to be anything?”
Aegis huffed. “Whew. Asking the heavy stuff.”
Collin flushed. “Sorry-“
“No, no. They’re good questions. An Alpha is someone who looks out for the pack.” Aegis leaned back, crossing his arms. “Sometimes, this is from seriously dangerous threats, like a rogue werewolf, or a band of roaming werewolves.”
“Right…”
“Sometimes, it’s settling arguments, resolving feuds, keeping the peace. If one of the kids at the school pulls a prank on a kid from one of the other packs, I mediate. If the guy running the grocery store is unfairly hiking prices, or one of the local gas stations starts trying to fleece us, I have to get in there and diplomatically handle it. If the FBIDWC reaches out and asks if we can take another newly shifted werewolf, I have to figure out if it’s going to rock the balance of the pack or not. I have to vet them out, do background research, set them up for quarantine.”
Collin blinked. “That’s… a lot.”
“The safety of the pack is primary,” Aegis commented. “I look after the pack as a whole. Your job, one day, will be the same.”
Collin looked at the floor. “A different pack, you mean. My own pack.”
Aegis gave him a peculiar look. “If that’s what you wanted. I had you in mind for the Black Lake pack, of course.”
“But…” Collin turned red, and he stared hard at his feet. “I mean, I know you love my mom and all, and you’re… you know. Really good to us. But I’m not… you don’t have to pretend-”
Aegis gently conked him on the back of the head, earning a squawk out of Collin and nearly knocking him off the perch they were now sitting on.
“Cut that out,” he said, though there was a gruff playfulness to his voice. “I want the whole package, Collin. It’s not just your mom. I know I’m not your dad, but I care about you. I want you all. All of you.”
Collin didn’t say anything. He swallowed, stared at his feet, and nodded. He’d have died before he ever told his mom, but a small part of him had always yearned… hoped… imagined what it would be like to have someone you could lean against.
He just hadn’t imagined it’d be an Alpha werewolf mechanic in a small town.
“Now,” Aegis said, shifting, “the rest of the pack has its own place in the grand scheme of things. Paul, for instance, is my right hand. One day, you’ll have a Beta of your own. Could be anyone; could even be Annie.”
“She’d like that,” Collin said, trying to imagine Annie as a Beta. “I think she would, anyway.”
“Probably. You’ll also likely get an Omega, just like Lawrence.”
Collin glanced at him. “But Lawrence didn’t want to be an Omega.”
“No, he didn’t,” Aegis agreed. “But that had less to do with actually being an Omega- which he is very, very good at- and more to do with problems he had with the way things were done. He didn’t like the way the world worked, and he didn’t want to admit it. A part of him simply wanted to fight the fact that there are things in this world that he can’t control, and I was an easy outlet for that.”
“That’s not fair to you, though.”
Aegis chuckled. “One day, you’ll understand, but the Alpha’s job is to weigh the needs of the entire pack and try to make choices that they think will benefit everyone. If railing against me meant that he could do excellent work for everyone else, then it was well worth taking.”
Collin shook his head. “I don’t know if I can do something like that, Aegis.”
The man surprised him with a bark of a laugh. “Of course not,” he said, shoulders shaking with mirth. “You’re eleven, Collin. You don’t have to worry about anything like that for now. You’ll understand it better as you get older, and as the future of the pack gets older with you.”
Collin considered that gravely. If Aegis really was serious about Collin taking over one day, then… well, of course it made sense that the very kids he was going to school with would one day be his pack.
There was something very sobering in that thought.
“I can tell you were meant to be an Alpha,” Aegis commented, and Collin realized he was watching him very closely.
“What? Why?”
“You don’t really shy away from the reality of how serious your position is,” Aegis said. “You can sense the weight of the job. You’re already embracing it, even if you think you’re not.”
Collin didn’t say anything, but plucked off a piece of the nearly forgotten cotton candy and ate it.
“You want to try one more time?” Aegis asked gently. “Once you finish that, I mean.”
“Yeah.” Collin nodded thoughtfully. “I think I do.”
“Good. You need to be able to close your eyes and see the world around you at any given time,” Aegis warned, standing up. “Eventually, we’ll get around to practicing fighting.”
Collin nearly choked on the cotton candy. “Practicing what?!”
“Fighting! An Alpha must always be ready to defend his pack!”
Collin groaned. “I’m going to be training until the day I die!”
“Better get started then. If you’re done, put that blind fold back on and tell me what’s in the world around you.”
Even if it was hard work, Collin decided that overall, he was still glad they’d come to Werewolf Hollow. Before, their world had been quiet, sad, and lonely. Their family had been small. He loved his mother, of course, but she had been worked very ragged; he didn’t need to be an Alpha to see that.
Now, they all had so much warmth. Maybe the future was a little scarier, a little more grim, a little more serious… but it was still warmer.
That made everything else all worth it.