As soon as he backed away, another paw hit him in the side, scoring harsh lines in his skin. Tristan snarled with pain and threw himself at the attacker, knocking him over. A few more wolves raced over to hold the bear down, and Tristan shoved his claws into the shifter’s neck and ripped at its thick fur until he tore straight through its jugular. Scarlet blood splashed his paws and he backed away, the sight and scent of it filling his mind.
He immediately threw himself back into the fight. He was lost to anything else but the conflict. He knew only the fight. Somewhere deep inside his chest, he felt as though he should be remembering something else very important but it was swept away in a tide of sensation as the battle raged on around him. His packmates lay on the ground, too many to count. The dirt of the camp floor was mud, dark and thick with pools of blood. His fur was splashed with it. It was all he could smell.
Again and again, Tristan dove at the first thing he saw. Using his paws and his jaws, his pure brute strength and ferocity, he attacked without a single thought as to his own safety. The bears never knew what hit them; he made certain of that. When it was he who was attacked, he made sure that the bear who did it never lived to hurt anyone else.
On and on, the battle dragged out. It was impossible to tell who was winning. Tristan didn’t care. The blood lust was upon him, and he killed indiscriminately.
Then, a dark shape slammed into his side and knocked him over. Crashing down, he kicked out with his back legs and pushed himself back up. His ribs ached fiercely, and he was suddenly aware of exactly how exhausted he was. He didn’t care. Standing before him was a grizzly, as dark as the night sky, as powerful as an oak tree. Its small black eyes smoldered with angry fire, and it opened its jaws and roared. Inch-long fangs gleamed in the sunlight.
Tristan stared at George, and he raised his tail up high over his back and spread his legs wide to find a powerful stance that rooted him to the earth. There, he waited for the grizzly bear to attack.
Somewhere deep inside his chest, he became aware of Jack’s presence. The omega was in pain, a pain that was one hundred times as terrible as when he woke up in the middle of the night.
Jack needs me! he thought suddenly, his first thought since the battle began. His ears twitched, the urge to race to his mate practically overwhelming all other senses. Then, he shook his head and faced down George again. Who knew what was happening with Jack, but he was no use at all to his mate if he was dead. Turning his back on this beast would surely be the death of him, and he knew that he couldn’t die.
Come get me, he thought, staring into George’s furious eyes.
The grizzly stomped its enormous front paws, making the ground shake, and then it charged. Its shoulders heaved up and down uncontrollably as it ran, thick fur and a dense layer of loose skin covering its body bouncing with the run. It was huge and lumbering and graceless in a beautiful way that held the eye until there was nothing left to see but darkness.
Tristan held his ground, staring at the grizzly. A snarl curved on George’s lips, and he sank his teeth into the alpha wolf’s shoulder, deadly-close to his neck.
Howling, but knowing that this was exactly what he had wanted, Tristan lurched his head down and bit the side of the bear’s head as hard as he could. Something came over him, some extra surge of strength from somewhere deep inside his soul, and he clamped his jaws down as hard as he could. His top fangs punctured through the grizzly’s ear, ruining it, while his bottom fangs were straining against the thick bone beneath George’s eye socked.
Shaking his head furiously, George reared up onto his hind legs. Tristan felt his body whipping around, his joints snapping painfully as he was tossed; losing his grip, he hit the ground roughly and then just lay there, stunned.
Black dots gathered in his vision as he struggled up to his paws again. Well, three of his paws. His front right leg shrieked with pain when he tried to set it down, so he held it up against his chest and watched closely as George came lumbering back around for another powerful attack.
This is it.
He wouldn’t survive another impact like that. He would be too weak to get up in time. Everything was riding on this moment.
He braced himself lightly against the ground with his three good legs, and waited until the very last instant. As George hit him, he let the grizzly bowl him over onto his back and then gripped the underside of the bear with his legs. Gripping skin and fur with his claws, he darted his head forward like a snake and bit the grizzly’s throat.
He met nothing but fur, his fangs closing on nothing. Without missing a beat, he tried again and this time got his mouth wrapped around George’s thick throat. With his hind legs now, he started kicking and viciously raking his sharp claws at the bear’s stomach, tearing out clumps of fur and ripping soft flesh wide open.
Trumpeting in anger, George rose up and then dropped down onto his stomach hard, smashing Tristan awkwardly into the ground. His neck pressed backward at an uncomfortable angle, Tristan very nearly blacked out. But he didn’t let go. He didn’t stop clawing. Even as George slammed him down again and again, and his body hurt so badly that he knew he must be dying, he bit harder.
Darkness surrounded him, and still he bit.
Then, without warning, George dropped down and stayed down. Tristan was pinned beneath him, his hind legs trapped and immobile. And still he kept biting. He couldn’t stop.
Suddenly, he heard a roar of surprise and then a human voice that spoke in a range deeper than any wolf could ever possess. “George is dead!”
“What?” another demanded.
“No!”
Wolf scent surrounded Tristan, and then his pack were working to lift up the grizzly carcass so that their alpha could escape. He did so, and then transformed back into a human to take his first good look at the battlefield.
His camp was a wreck. There wasn’t a single doorway that had survived the onslaught, and there wasn’t a single inch of ground without blood upon its surface. The meeting area had become a graveyard, and it seemed as though every house now had gaping holes in its roof or walls.
It would take forever to rebuild, but he wasn’t concerned with that, at the moment. His focus was upon the group of bears.
Most of them were human now, and none of them were fighting. They had frozen in the midst of their battles, still clinging to wolves or otherwise rising up from the bloody ground. Sensing the ceasefire, the wolves were also frozen.
Every pair of eyes was either trained upon Tristan or the dead grizzly.
Tristan looked around, his chest heaving as he took in great gulps of breath. “Leave,” he said. It wasn’t a command. He didn’t have the power to make it be one. “Leave, all of you. Leave us alone. This land is ours. Take your dead and never come back.”
There was only silence following his words, but he didn’t speak again. He’d had his say. It was clear to everyone present that the bears had lost their leader. They had no one to unite them now.
One by one, those shifters who held onto their enemies slowly released their grips. Both sides separated, standing on opposite sides of the battleground except for those bears who mingled to gather up the fallen.
Tristan didn’t wait around to see what else happened. He should have seen them leave. He should have reassured his people that everything was going to be okay, and he should have walked amongst them to see who hadn’t made it through. He was the leader. Those were his responsibilities.
He was preparing to do those things when suddenly, a tiny wail rang out from the other side of camp.
He shouted, “The council will see to it that everything is taken care of. Excuse me.”
He didn’t care about his awkward exit, and he didn’t stop to see exactly how much of his council remained. His heart felt like it was going to leap out of his mouth as he turned and ran for the source of the sound. The wail carried on and on, coming from behind a building.
“Jack!” he said, and turned the corner.
His hear
t stopped.
Agatha crouched in the grass, smiling up at him. Tristan looked beyond her and saw his naked mate sitting against the side of the building, an exhausted look on his face. His curly hair was damp with sweat, and his grey eyes were shut tight. He looked as though he had been fighting a battle of his own, and he had.
It had been the most important battle of all, because in his arms he held a tomato-faced baby with a curl of pale, damp hair atop its pointed head.
Breathless, shaking, overtaken by wonder, Tristan collapsed down to his knees. “Jack,” he whispered. “Jack...”
Jack looked up, his eyes opening. A tremulous smile formed on his lips. “You’re such a pervert,” he rasped. “Spying on me naked like this.”
Tristan couldn’t help the tears that came to his eyes and spilled down his face like rain. Reaching out, he grabbed onto his mate and their child and pulled them both safe and tight against his chest. “I was so afraid,” he sobbed.
Jack lifted up his free arm to wrap around his neck, holding on tight without saying a single word.
After a minute of silence, Agatha cleared her throat.
Wiping his eyes, Tristan turned to her. “Are they okay? Did everything...go okay?”
The doctor gave a weary smile. “Of course everything went okay. I was here, wasn’t I?”
Tristan suddenly reached out and grabbed her hand in his. “Yes. Yes, you were. Thank you so much.”
Agatha smiled a little more warmly. “Jack here did most of the work. I just watched and yelled at him.
“A lot,” the omega muttered. His tone was grumpy, but his eyes were shining. “Tristan, we have a daughter.”
Tristan turned back to his family, and he shook his head with amazement. “A daughter... And she has my hair! But she’s so small!” A new sort of fear filled him. He was a dominant male who hadn’t spent any significant amount of time with a child since he himself had been one. How was he ever supposed to be a father? And the shifter cub was so small... He wanted to touch her, to stroke her new skin, but a sudden awareness of his own size made him stop.
Agatha nodded in agreement. “She’s a little bit early. I would have given it another few weeks before she came, but I bet she wanted in on all the excitement going on.”
Tristan shook his head with amazement. “Will being early hurt her? Like, how much does she weigh? Is that important? That’s what humans use, right?”
Laying a comforting hand on his arm, Agatha said softly, “She’s a little early, like I said. She weighs about six pounds. That’s not too bad. Plus, if she’s as much of a fighter as her parents are, I think she’ll be just fine.”
Relief stole over him, and he slumped against the side of the building. He was so tired that it felt like he could sleep for an eternity. “What do you think we should name her?” he whispered to Jack.
Jack narrowed his eyes a little with thought, before speaking up. “My parents used to talk about this old tradition shifters used to have. You name your child after what you see when you give birth to them.”
“And what did you see?”
Jack was quiet for a very long moment. “Well, pain, mostly.”
Tristan laughed huskily.
“But it was like a storm was raging all around me, what with the fighting... What about Storm?”
“Anything you want,” he said eagerly. “Storm it is. I love you, Jack.”
Jack turned his face to Tristan, his eyes shining. “I love you too, Tristan. I love you more than I ever would have thought possible.”
Overcome with emotion, alpha and omega clung to each other, feeding off each other’s strength. Agatha stood up and left them alone for a moment, as they shared soft words with each other about the future and rebuilding. Jack wanted to contact his parents still, and this time Tristan agreed. They talked of the damage done, and how Tristan killed George.
But mostly, they talked about the perfect little girl before them. Tristan could hardly believe that he had a daughter and a mate.
At the end of so much chaos, he was finally complete.
The End
Uriel’s Forest
Preston Walker
© 2017
Disclaimer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.
This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18).
Chapter One
Forest was suffocating when he came to. He gasped for air and got a mouthful of burlap. Coughing, he tried to rip the material away from his face, but his arms wouldn’t move. Neither would his feet. He panicked, hyperventilating, choking again on burlap dust.
“Settle down, dog. You’ll breathe easier.”
The voice was gruff and unfamiliar. Forest slowed his breathing, still coughing up dust. Every jerk of his body shot pain up from his wrists and ankles. He listened. Rattling, bumping vibrations told him he was in a vehicle, yet there was nothing to tell him why.
“What’s going on?” he asked. His voice sounded thick and strange in his own ears, and the cover over his face was hot and itchy. He swallowed another spike of panic. The man said nothing, though Forest could tell he was still there. He could smell him. He smelled familiar, somehow, but Forest couldn’t figure out why.
“Who else is in here?” Forest asked.
“Shut up, dog,” the man snarled. “No questions.”
No questions? Forest had nothing but questions! He reached through the panicked fog in his brain to the last thing he remembered. It had been a normal night. He’d gone to work, come home and made dinner before going to bed. He hadn’t noticed anything strange, and he knew he’d locked his door. So how on earth had he gone from sleeping in his bed to being trussed up in the back of somebody’s car?
Truck, he corrected. He smelled diesel fuel. He focused his senses to document more details. He was lying on something soft—maybe a mattress? Whatever it was, it was covered in a cotton-poly fabric and smelled of piss and sweat. It bounced off the floor when they went over bumps, but it didn’t slide when the vehicle accelerated, braked or turned, so it must have been attached to the floor somehow.
He smelled cigarettes next. Someone was smoking to his left, which he decided was the front of the vehicle. Either that or they were driving very quickly in reverse. That doesn’t make sense, he told himself. But then, none of this made any sense. He wasn’t wanted for anything that he knew of. He didn’t see why anyone would want to kidnap him. He lived a quiet life tending to the birds in his local aviary. His social life was minimal, and he hadn’t gone on any crime sprees, so what had they taken him for?
The man had called him dog twice. He mentally worked on that for a while. Was it a regional slur, or did the man simply have a tiny vocabulary? He couldn’t think of a region or culture that routinely or stereotypically used dog as a slur, so he had to let the question go unanswered.
The texture of the road beneath them changed. They were rolling along gravel now and had slowed considerably. The ride was growing bumpier by the second, and every lurch caused him pain. He made the mistake of yelping when a particularly large bump jerked him sideways, making his elbow twist, and he got a boot in the belly. He gasped for air and coughed on the dust. Finally, after what could have passed for a century in hell, the vehicle came to a halt.
He heard doors open to his right, then more opened to his left. Nobody spoke, but he knew there were three of them. Four hands moved over his ankles and wrists, releasing him from whatever had been restra
ining him to the mattress. They slid him across what was certainly the bed of a pickup truck, and caught him on the other end. His wrists and ankles were still bound, and they carried him like a roasting pig up a dizzying slope. He wanted to demand answers, but he didn’t know how far down the ground was, and he didn’t want to risk being thrown over the side of a cliff or off a bridge. Though that might be their plan anyway, he realized.
For the life of him, though, he still couldn’t figure out why he’d been taken. He heard the heavy slide of metal against metal, and then he was underground. He could smell the damp earth, mingling with the scents of old wood and rust. The further down they went, the colder the air became. So they aren’t going to toss me off a bridge, they’re going to throw me down a mine shaft. Lovely.
They stopped moving, and then he was falling. He braced for impact and was surprised when he only dropped a couple of feet onto something soft. He curled into the fetal position and waited.
“Which one is this?” a thin male voice asked.
“The potential,” the gruff man replied. “The one from the aviary.”
“Excellent. Put him in room forty-three.”
“Sir... room forty-three?”
“Did I stutter?”
“No, sir, but... that’s the room with the—”
“I know who’s in there,” the thin voice snapped. “Put him in there and don’t question me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Forest heard the doubt in his voice and shuddered. Who could be bad enough to make his own kidnappers hesitate? Someone cut the rope off his ankles, and the two men from the truck hauled him to his feet. They led him over metal floors. Left, right, two lefts, and a right; he kept track of their route, though he doubted it would do him any good. They came to a stop and someone finally ripped the burlap off his head. He gasped and blinked, blinded by the sudden light. His vision cleared and he saw an old metal door inscribed with 43.
He looked at his captors. Neither of them wanted to open the door, that much was obvious. They were virtually identical; incredibly pale, bald, and built. One had blue eyes, the other had green, and they wore identical black fitted t-shirts and slacks. He noticed the holsters on their hips and the steel toes on their boots, and wondered again just what the hell he’d gotten himself into.
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