Omega's Bears (Hell's Bears MC Book 1)

by J. L. Wilder

  I carefully toss the water skin onto the river bank and begin the careful process of turning around so I can crawl up the rock and back on to the land, but suddenly, my knee slips on a patch of moss and I slip backward. Before I can process what’s happening, I’m in the water.

  It’s freezing. The cold stabs right to my bones. The current is strong and pulls me right under and I thrash, fighting to get my head above water, feeling like I’m going to scream. I can’t open my mouth. I can’t move. I can’t get my feet under me. I can’t....

  Something powerful erupts from within me and my head breaks through the water into fresh air, shooting upward, my body expanding as my core temperature rises. Suddenly, without warning, without planning it, I’m strong and powerful, tall and warm. I rise up onto my hind legs and throw my head back, sniffing the air. In my bear form, I’m infinitely more aware of everything around me. And moving along the wind, I smell a familiar scent, a scent that sets my mouth watering.

  Fish.

  I haven’t had fish since joining the Hell’s Bears. Luka explained to me, back in our old cave, that they were out of season and we’d have to wait a few months for the fishing to be good. But no one told this group of fish. And no one told them there’s a full grown bear standing in the river waiting to intercept them.

  I’ve never fished before, but I’m doing a lot of things lately that I’ve never done before, and this feels so natural that I don’t even question it. My body knows what to do. I position myself carefully and hold still so that the ripples of my movement won’t alert the fish to a threat. Then, I wait, watching the water below me for the shimmer of scales. I try not to think about the delicious taste of fish and what a nice change it will make from the red meat we eat every day. I try not to think about how I’ll cook it—grilled to perfection over our fire with blueberries, or, if Jack approves them, maybe those mushrooms. I don’t let myself think of the expressions on the guys’ faces when they see I’ve brought home dinner. I focus all my attention on the water. In bear form, it’s easy to stay focused.

  And before long, the fish appear, the early morning sun sparkling off their bodies. They’re massive, each one as long as my arm in human form. Salmon, I’m pretty sure, though it’s hard to be positive. All my experience with salmon comes in the form of eating it. I’ve never dealt with a live fish before in my life. I’ve never had the occasion to.

  Now I know instinctively what to do. I dart my paw into the water, claws out, and snatch up a fish on my first try. It wiggles desperately in my grip as I pull it out of the river, but I’m strong enough to maintain my hold with ease. I lumber up onto the riverbank and give myself a good shake, whipping the water from my fur. Though I’d like to shift back to human form for the journey home, I know the cold will be agonizing on my bare skin. I put the fish in my mouth. I’ll come back for my fruit basket and water skin once I’m dried off and dressed.

  The hardest part of the journey home is when I’ve reached the cave entrance. Belly crawling through the narrow passage has become easier with practice, but doing it naked is a different proposition. The cold ground rubs my skin raw and I know I’ll be covered with dirt and mud by the time I emerge into the cavern. There’s also the fish to contend with. It’s slimy and slips from between my human fingers every couple of feet, leaving me to feel around in the dark until I can lay my hands on it again.

  Finally, I make it into the cavern. I’m so relieved that the trek is over that at first, all I can do is hurry over to the fire and sit in front of it, warming my frozen extremities and hoping for my hair to dry quickly. As soon as I’ve thawed out enough to move, I pull on a set of clothes and tie my hair back. Then I set back out for the river to retrieve the fruit and water skin I left behind.

  Making the journey fully dressed and without a large fish in my arms is significantly easier, and I resolve never to complain about the narrow squeeze in and out of our den again. As long as I’ve got clothes on, it could always be worse. I snack on blueberries as I make my way back to the cave for the second time today, a sense of pride and accomplishment starting to fill me. I’ve never provided a meal before, not like this. I’ve picked berries, certainly, but to bring home meat for the whole clan is a different feeling. And the fact that it’s fish, a deviation from our normal diet, is the cherry on top. Finally, we’ll have some variety, and it’s all thanks to me.

  What difference does it make, really, that the Hell’s Bears took some money from a convenience store? How could I have allowed myself to worry about that for so long? And why do I need to know what it’s for? I’m sure Jack has his reasons. He’s never led me wrong, after all. He’s my alpha, and I need to trust him. It’s not my place to ask questions. My responsibility is to follow. I owe him my allegiance.

  And I need to trust him, too, when it comes to everything else that went on between the two of us. Jack is levelheaded and always thinks through the consequences of his actions. He’d never do anything without being sure it was the right decision. He cares for me. He cares for Ryan. And most of all, he cares for the peace and unity of our clan. He’s not being a dominant alpha with no consideration for anyone, claiming me as his own, in spite of Ryan. He’d never do that.

  He imprinted on me. Perhaps he couldn’t help himself. But I don’t think that’s right. After all, hasn’t Ryan been resisting the pull of his imprint ever since it happened? And when Jack imprinted, he had my clothes off within seconds. He didn’t even try to resist. He just took me, right there in the forest.

  God. I can’t deny that it was hot. I can’t deny that I want it to happen again. I just wish I could stop feeling so anxious about that. I wish there was some way I could be sure that I wouldn’t be blamed and that my new clan—the men I’m beginning to feel a real bond with—wouldn’t experience any fallout over this.

  I emerge into the cavern, basket and water skin in hand, and stop dead.

  Luka, Ryan, and Jack have all returned from their hunt in my absence, and they’re all standing by the fire and staring at me with shocked expressions on their faces.

  My heart drops into my stomach. They know.

  Chapter Twelve

  The moment seems to drag on forever. The shock on their faces freezes me where I stand, and I know—I just know—that Jack has told the others about what happened between us. Suddenly, the fact that the whole thing was entirely instigated by him feels irrelevant. I’m consumed by guilt. I feel as if I took him out into the woods to seduce him behind Ryan’s back, playing both men against each other, and now I’ve torn the family apart.

  I need to think of something to say. But there’s nothing. I open and close my mouth a few times helplessly. I should just apologize, throw myself on the ground at their mercy, but I don’t want to start out that way. Especially since, as a pesky and unhelpful voice in the back of my mind keeps reminding me, I’m actually not sorry at all. I liked being taken by Jack. I want it to happen again. And to my great surprise, that hasn’t changed the way I feel about Ryan at all. Standing there, looking at him, I find myself just as attracted to him as ever.

  I need to figure out some way to make this right. I kind of do resent Jack for having put me in this position. This is all his fault, I realize suddenly. He knew that Ryan had imprinted on me. When he imprinted too, the two of them should have talked it out. Or he should have had some kind of conversation with me after we were together and let me know what was expected. Or he should have broken the news gently to Ryan, or not told him at all. I don’t know what the right solution would have been, exactly. But I do know that Jack is my alpha and that I depend on him to act with reason and intelligence, and ever since he imprinted, he’s been doing neither.

  It’s his fault I’m in this terrible position. He’s the one who’s put me here. But there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’m going to have to say something to these boys. They’re all staring at me. They’re waiting.

  But just as I’m about to speak, Luka breaks the silence. “Cami. What the
hell?”

  My heart sinks. If Luka’s angry at me, gentle-natured Luka, who has no stake in this at all, I can only imagine how Ryan must feel.

  But Luka laughs. “Did you go fishing?”

  It’s only then that I catch sight of my fish, lying on the floor in front of them. “Yes,” I say, feeling shell-shocked and unsure of what’s coming next. Is Luka laughing at me? Am I in trouble for going out fishing? “I thought...I thought you’d like something different.”

  Ryan lets out a laugh that’s more of a roar. It isn’t his angry roar, and it isn’t a warning. It’s a joyful sound. He crosses the cavern in two strides, scoops me into his arms in a massive hug, and twirls me around. “I didn’t know you could fish!”

  “I didn’t either,” I admit. “I never tried it until today.” He sets me down and I step back quickly, still shivering with adrenaline and the fear that I was about to be exposed. It seems clear now that Jack hasn’t told Ryan anything. My eyes dart to him, but he’s turned his back to me now, screwing the cap off the water skin I brought back and taking a long drink.

  Luka, meanwhile, has moved my fish to the flat rock where meat is prepared for cooking. He pulls out a knife and offers me the hilt. “You ought to be the one to clean it,” he says. “It’s your catch.”

  I shake my head and take another step back. “I’ve never cleaned a fish before. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “Then it’s time you learned,” Jack says, still not facing me. “Luka?”

  Luka nods. “Come on over.”

  There’s no avoiding it. I’d rather not take the knife to the fish—now that I’m in human form, it’s a lot harder to forget that it was a living animal, an animal that I killed. I’d rather sit on the opposite side of the cavern, the way I usually do when food is being prepared, and imagine that the meal that comes to my plate was always a steak and never a deer or a rabbit. I think of the salmon fillets I’ve eaten in my life, pink and square and flaky, and then I think of the silver wriggling fish with the wild eyes that I pulled from the river today. Even though I know the two things are the same, it’s hard to reconcile. I don’t want to be involved in this process.

  But the men are watching me, and I know this is the next step in becoming a true Hell’s Bear. When I first arrived here, I never thought I’d be able to learn to live outdoors and off the grid the way they do. Now I think I might prefer it to the sheltered and comfortable life I used to know. I’ll never stop missing my old clan, and I’ll never stop wishing they were with me, but I have to admit, I’m grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to experience this new lifestyle. I remember wondering, once, why the Hell’s Bears would choose to live the way rumor told us they did. I remember Berto telling me dismissively that they were wild. They were renegades. They didn’t care about being part of society.

  Now I’m wild too. And I kind of like it.

  And at least it will be Luka teaching me how to clean the fish. Things with Jack are so fraught right now that I don’t know if I could even sit next to him without catching fire, and every time I look at Ryan, I feel consumed by guilt, as if I’ve betrayed and lied to him. With Luka, at least, things are still simple.

  I sit beside him on the floor of the cave and take the knife he offers me. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “So you said,” he says with a smile that immediately puts me a little more at ease. “Don’t worry. It’s easy. I’ve done it dozens of times; I won’t let you go wrong.” He wraps a cloth around the fish’s tail and hands the bundle to me. “Here’s where you hold on. You don’t want to try to grip the fish itself or the spines might cut your hands.”

  I nod, trying not to look too nervous, and grip the tail as instructed. Luka shows me how to use the edge of the knife to catch the scales and flick them off the body of the fish. I get the hang of the technique soon enough, but I can’t help flinching every time I run the blade over the fish’s body. It feels violent, horrible, as if I’m skinning the animal, which I suppose I basically am. Because I’m so uncomfortable with the process, I’m going incredibly slowly.

  After a moment, Luka takes the fish from me and scales for a minute himself. “Just keep going,” he says quietly. “Don’t get caught up thinking about what you’re doing, okay? It’s very natural. Every animal eats. This fish ate other fish while it was alive. Now you eat the fish.”

  “Nothing eats me,” I point out.

  “Perks of being an apex predator. It’s not like you designed the system, and starving yourself won’t change it.”

  “I don’t really have a problem with eating the fish,” I admit. “Preparing it like this just makes me feel bad. Like, it was just out swimming in the river and now I’m scaling it with a knife? I feel like a serial killer.”

  Luka regards me for a moment. “You’re very empathetic, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly empathetic, but it does make me glow a little bit that Luka thinks so. Maybe my problem isn’t that I’m too soft. Maybe it’s just harder for me to dissociate from the feelings of this fish than it is for other people. It’s a charitable interpretation of my reluctance to scale the thing, at any rate.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Luka says. “I’ll clean the fish. You don’t have to do it.”

  “Jack wanted me to.” It’s hard to resist the pull of an alpha’s command.

  “Jack didn’t order you to do it,” Luka points out. “He just said it was time you learned. So you sit here and watch me, and I’ll do it, and you learn.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  After that, the fish preparation goes much more quickly. Luka has the whole thing clean of scales and gutted in a matter of minutes, and it’s obvious that he’s done this many times before. What’s more, I actually do learn. I pay attention to his steady hands and the steps he follows, and by the time he’s finished, I’m reasonably confident that I could do it myself if I was ever on my own and needed to prepare my own dinner. Jack was right—it was a good thing for me to learn. And Luka was right too. I benefited a lot just by watching.

  Dinner is a magnificent spread. Luka fries up the fish with the mushrooms, which it turns out are safe to eat. Because of my catch, none of the men need to go hunting this afternoon, so we all spend the day around the fire telling stories. I learn more about the history of the Hell’s Bears. Jack is the clan’s fifth alpha—it’s stayed in his family throughout the generations. Although two generations back, the clan split. Some of the Hell’s Bears wanted to live in the city, and not live like wild bears. That explained why the pack was much smaller than I had thought. Ryan talks about how good it is to be close to his bear side, an idea I’m truly beginning to understand after my adventure in the river today. “Being a shifter is a rare gift,” he says. “I’ll never understand those who try to live like regular humans. That isn’t what we are. We’re humans, but we’re bears too, and we have to embrace both sides of ourselves.”

  Jack leaves for a while just before dinner is served and returns with a twelve pack of beer. We so rarely have anything to drink besides water that it’s a rare luxury, and we carefully and equitably divide the cans among ourselves and drink them slowly as we savor the fish dinner Luka has prepared for us. By the time the cans are empty and the food is gone, we’re all feeling warm and more tired than usual. It’s a relief to pile together and feel the familiar sensation of one another as we descend into sleep. Even my anxiety about Jack and Ryan has diminished somewhat. I’m sure it will all work itself out. After all, these men are as close as brothers. They would never let anything come between them. And as I lie here in the dark, nestled among the three of them, I feel miles away from the worries of the past couple of days. I was silly to let this get to me.

  After all, what was that Ryan said tonight? We’re not like regular humans. The animal side is more pronounced in us. It’s part of being a shifter. And part of being a Hell’s Bear is learning to embrace the
animal within. And giving in to the pull of an imprint is just about as animalistic as you can get.

  But then, why hasn’t Ryan done it yet?

  I push the thought out of my mind and allow myself to sink into the comfort of my family around me. Just as I’m closing my eyes though, I’m jolted awake by something powerful—something electric—that begins near the small of my back and jolts outward in all directions.

  Behind me, Luka shifts, and the rhythm of his breathing changes as his hand moves possessively over my hip.

  Chapter Thirteen

  What do you do when every member of your clan has imprinted on you? How do you negotiate that situation when, as far as you can tell, none of them are talking to the others about it?

  I handle it by staying away from the others as much as possible. In the evenings when they return from the hunt, I grab the water skin and run down to the water to refill it, taking the longest possible route. I account for my long absences by telling them I’m hunting for new berry bushes. I don’t know whether they believe my excuse—I catch Jack giving me a funny look once, and I know that if any of them visited the river, they would see that the berries there are plentiful and that I don’t need an alternative source. But no one questions me.

  In part, that’s probably because Jack and Luka have some idea of why I’m staying away. I haven’t spoken to them about it—I don’t dare—but I have to imagine they’ve pieced it together anyway. They both know they’ve imprinted on me, although I highly doubt they know about each other. But they both know Ryan imprinted first, and they know that I know that.

  It’s strange being the one with the most information. I’m not used to it. In my old clan, the others generally discussed important things without me and made decisions without my input. I didn’t mind. I was the omega, after all, the one with the lowest status, so it only made sense for me to stay in my lane and do as I was told. But I have to admit now that, as complicated as things have become, there’s a part of me that likes knowing everything and being in what feels like a powerful position. It’s scary—it would be easy to make a decision that would be wrong for all of us and create friction and division among the clan. But at least that decision won’t be made for me. It would be simpler if the men all got together and decided whom I should belong to, but I like that—for now, at least—I have the controlling vote.