I Am The Alpha

by A. J. Downey

  At six feet even I was considerably longer than her, and with her body pulled back against me, the top of her head just reached my chin and the gentle curve of her ass was pressed firmly against my groin.

  Ah.

  That was nice, and what I really should have noted first upon waking. With the realization there was no stopping the immediate physical reaction of my body as my cock slowly stirred to life. Painfully so, as it tried to straighten against the confining material of my jeans. She stirred in her sleep and shifted her weight, unknowingly grinding her ass harder against me and I bit back a groan.

  She’s the enemy, dumb ass, I thought.

  She’s the daughter of the enemy, came the counter argument, unbidden from some further portion of my mind. You know damn well you want her. You know what you’d love to do with her. So why fight it?

  Because she’s still the enemy! Her family hunts and kills our kind!

  Right. Keep telling yourself that. In the meantime you might want to get your hand off her tit before she wakes up.

  Great. I was totally losing an argument with myself and had no idea which side was the angel versus which was the devil on my respective shoulders. I went to roll onto my back away from her, only to find my hand held fast and I blinked, surprised to realize that in my sleep my right hand had somehow worked its way under her thin lace and satin of her nightgown and the warm weight of her breast was cupped comfortably in my hand. I could feel the nub of her nipple pressed into my palm and the partial erection I had been working on suppressing? Yeah it exploded into a full blown hard on that had me wincing.

  She had neglected to wear anything beneath the gown, perhaps out of habit? More likely because I hadn’t thought to put anything out for her. I didn’t think she was comfortable enough with me at this point to simply sleep in such a state of undress but… Maybe she didn’t think she had a choice, you’ve given her so many this far. Dumb. Ass.

  Fuck me and fuck this fucking nightgown! The entire garment had been pushed up by my arm to just below her breasts, leaving her completely naked from her chest, all the way down the length of her body. I admired her long, slim legs, for half a second too long before I remembered I needed to untangle myself.

  My cock twitched in my pants and I fidgeted against the painful feeling until I had myself comfortably situated, pain there necessitated my immediate attention. When I stopped dealing with that, she moved again, pushing her ass back hard and the length of my dick landed naturally between the cheeks of her ass. I froze. All I would need to do was unzip my pants and I could so easily find her opening, slip into her, plunge to the hilt inside her…

  Pulling away suddenly became an exercise of supreme will, but I managed it. I carefully worked my hand out of the top of her clothes and tried to pull her gown down without waking her but everything I tried caused her to stir in her sleep. I could just imagine the reaction if she woke to me pulling at her sleepwear so I finally just rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling with her gown still bunched around her waist. Oh well, it was still better than it’d been.

  I found the idea of sleep bordering on the impossible after that. The foggy lethargy I had felt when I first woke was gone, swept away as if by hurricane force winds and the only thoughts that could occupy my mind were memories of her breast in my hand and her ass pressed against me while the scent of peaches filled my senses.

  I’d had an idea of what to expect when I first came looking for Chloe Young. An image built in my head based on the information I had read on her. The real thing was very different than I had expected, however. The fact that she appeared to know nothing of what her father did might have had something to do with that. I tried to ignore it. I’d been taught to ignore it, trained to ignore things like that. An enemy was an enemy and enemies were to be eliminated. Now I found myself caring for her injuries?

  I mean, logically if she were injured she couldn’t make attempts to run. But, logically, if she were injured worse, or if her feet became infected she could slow us down. I scoffed at myself quietly. I could try to rationalize, could try to justify it all I wanted but there was no denying the facts.

  I didn’t help care for her feet because it was the practical thing to do. I didn’t help care for her feet to build a trust so she wouldn’t try to run off on me again. I didn’t buy her shoes and toiletries for any reason other than I was starting to like her, and I have a great deal of difficulty being an asshole toward people that I actually liked. There were so few of those in the world already, I couldn’t afford to push them away by being a total dick.

  Chloe had a backbone, she didn’t take my shit, but she was a smart girl too. She figured something out, she didn’t back down. Didn’t shy away. Even after her attempt to bolt I could still see her trying to figure out a way to resist, to get away. I could also tell that she wasn’t willing to put anyone else in harm’s way to further her own agenda of achieving freedom. It was the diametric opposite of her father. I mean, I’m not going to lie, it was hard to believe that Chloe was the daughter of that ridged old bastard. Maybe she took after her mother? We didn’t have anything on her except when and how she’d died…

  Whether it was the erection I was still fighting to calm, the smell of her filling my nose, or the lingering effects of sleep deprivation, I couldn’t tell you. But when the knock came at the door, interrupting my idle thoughts, I didn’t take a moment to think. I didn’t question, I didn’t wonder: Who the fuck would be knocking on the door of our motel room at half past three in the goddamned morning? No, I just got up to go answer it.

  I moved off the bed a little too quickly, which startled Chloe awake. I noted her hurriedly pulling down her nightgown out of the corner of my eye before I grabbed the doorknob, threw back the deadbolt and pulled the door to our room open.

  Sloppy. Very sloppy. So incredibly goddamned sloppy!

  The fist that slammed into my face was roughly the size of a cinderblock and pretty much felt the same with all the weight and force behind it. I mean, it belonged to three hundred pounds of bone and muscle all fueled by a hardcore animalistic rage. My nose shattered, blood spattering my front and I’m pretty sure two of my front teeth were knocked loose. My head snapped back so hard that I felt and heard several loud pops in my neck and pain radiated out across my nerve endings, through my shoulders and down my arms. The kind of pain that communicated in no uncertain terms that I was well and truly fucked.

  I went flying back through the air, across the room, sailing clean over Chloe and the bed to land against the wall, sliding down it onto the ground in a heap. That fucking sucked. That sucked hard.

  “You should know better than to steal from us, William.” The voice was deep. Exceptionally so. Darth Vader eat your robotic heart out, kind of deep. I pushed myself up so I was sitting against the wall, using it at my back to support me while blood streamed down my face. I shook my head to clear it but all that did was set off white sparkles, flitting at the edges of my vision. I scrambled to my feet and over the bed, putting myself directly between Chloe and our visitors.

  I towered over Chloe but the two men that entered the room towered over me to an even greater degree. Over six and a half feet tall each, they both wore oversized pants and boots like me. Instead of jackets though, they each wore white hooded sweatshirts with the sleeves torn off, mostly because sleeves wouldn’t have stretched far enough to encompass their massively muscled arms. They wore no shirts underneath the open zip-up hoodies, and as they stood shoulder to shoulder between me and the door leading out into the night they tossed back their hoods in unison. I always wondered if they practiced that shit in a mirror somewhere to get their timing right.

  Square jaws, high cheek bones, short cut hair spiked up in the front like a couple of Jersey Shore douchebags, they had eyes so dark they could have been black. They were identical twins, monstrous of size and the cold look in their eyes told me in no uncertain terms that the blood I had already lost would be the least of my worries in a mome
nt.

  “Chloe,” I said quietly. “I’d like for you to meet my brothers, Romulus and Remus.”

  “Is kidnapping something of a family business?” She snapped. She tried to be angry, she really did, but I think she’d realized that we were in the middle of something seriously dangerous and fucked up. She didn’t know that any attempts at her seeming nonchalance were totally ruined by the scent of her fear. I didn’t want her to know that though. I needed her to be brave right now.

  “Not exactly,” I muttered, never once taking my focus off of the twins. “You might want to get your stuff together, put some clothes on or something while my brothers and I… talk.” I noted that she was moving behind me, pulling on clothes before I could even make the suggestion and that, for once, she’d followed along with what I’d told her to do without complaint. Yep, the girl really did have some smarts, for all I’d been calling her stupid all this time.

  “Give her to us, Baby Brother,” one of the twins ground out, damned if I could ever really tell which was which. “Give her to us and we might just let you live through this. Father’s death demands blood.”

  “And I will be the one to provide it, should it come to that,” I grated.

  Rom grinned, at least I was guessing it was Rom. “Little Cub,” Yep, it was Rom. He was the only one that called me Cub like that. Derisive, insulting. “What chance do you really think you have? The two of us next to you? We’re stronger. We’re older and we’re more experienced. We’ve killed many that have threatened us and you? You’ve killed none by comparison. The Pack will accept one of us as Alpha over you. Can’t you see that?”

  I was silent for a moment, reaching for that animal that resided inside me. Praying I still had the edge I would need to survive this.

  “You might be bigger and stronger and have more experience than I do Rom,” I admitted. “But you constantly underestimate me, and you always forget, I’m faster!” My voice deepened as I spoke and the two giants before me seemed to shrink as I grew. My skin darkened, covered quickly in short hair from head to toe as my fingers and toes grew longer, each tipped with a razor sharp claw. The bones inside my body cracked and shifted sickeningly as my body changed and my jaw mutated, pushing out into a short muzzle, mouth filled with two rows, top and bottom, of wickedly sharp teeth.

  As the transformation finished I stood in the center of the room, seven and a half feet tall, stooped because of the ceiling, and I knew I looked like something out of a horror film. Behind me I could hear Chloe screaming, almost hysterically. I glanced over my shoulder at her, one gleaming amber eye meeting hers.

  “Run,” I rumbled and then I took my own damned advice. I ran, right at the twins with my arms held out to my sides to catch them, and hold them from Chloe. As I slammed into them I grabbed tight, digging my claws into whatever flesh I could reach and I kept going. The door and the frame around it, cracked and erupted in plaster dust and splinters. The second floor, thin metal railing of the open air breezeway on the motel did nothing to slow our progress as I carried them both out and through it, into thin air.

  A single story drop doesn’t leave a person a lot of time for thought, so action took its place. I pulled with my right arm and tucked in my knees. Just as Rom was about to hit I shoved hard. The force of my kick propelled him down and Rem and I were launched back into the air. A Jeep took the impact of Romulus’ body, hood caving in and the windows shattered in a pretty spectacular explosion of glass. While that was going on, I grabbed hold of Remus with both hands and threw him toward the ground as hard as I could.

  He landed, part way through his own transformation, head and shoulders first with a sickening thud that cracked the asphalt beneath him and with any luck, his skull right along with it. By the time I landed, lightly on my feet, both of them were standing and almost fully transformed as well. I’d always been able to shift faster than the both of them, but now, the advantage I had gained in size and strength vanished in the face of their hybrid states.

  The twins were well known throughout the Pack for being two of the biggest, most powerful of us all. I was in trouble. Lightning quick they rushed me, low to the ground and all teeth and claws, bloody intent in their eyes as their toes dug deep lines in the blacktop. I leapt just as they reached me, desperate to keep out of reach. Just as I cleared their heads I felt long fingers wrap around my ankles, sharp claws dug into my leg and a hard tug sent me slamming into the ground. A pained howl ripped its way from my throat and I kicked instinctively. I caught a piece of one of them, not sure which, or what piece but whatever it was; it counted for something. The grip on my leg loosened and I managed to roll free.

  I stood in the middle of the parking lot as human voices rose in the otherwise still night. Lights turned on in several of the rooms but all I dared focus on were my brothers as they circled me.

  “Don’t you remember this game, William?” Rom growled as they moved. “Father used it to teach us to fight.”

  “And you never were very good at it,” Remus added. I kept my head on a swivel, swinging back and forth, feet moving in a tight circle constantly to keep them in sight as they moved. They were right though. I never did very well at this game. When your life is spent in constant battle you always want your opponents to underestimate you.

  Without a sound Remus rushed me from behind. The same tactic as always. A feint from one of them to draw my attention and hide the real attack. I ignored Remus, and took the glancing swipe of his claws to my shoulder as I kept my focus on Romulus. When he rushed in I grabbed his extended arm, turned and threw him over my shoulder.

  He let out a startled yelp as he crashed into his brother and the two of them went down in a tangle of limbs and claws. The revving of a car engine drowned out their growling roars and Chloe, beautiful Chloe, raced up in my car, the headlights cutting through the gloom.

  She slammed on the brakes in front of me and I leapt, leaving the ground, and the tangled wolves behind. I latched onto the passenger side of the car, yanking open the door and by the time I tumbled into the passenger seat, I was back to looking human. The cuts to my shoulder and puncture wounds in my leg, which had been stinging annoyances at first, became painful wounds, burning like fire and had me groaning pitifully. My shoulder roared in agony as a series of blows landed against it.

  “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! Chloe! Quit hitting me goddamn it!” I roared, doing my best to fend off her wildly flailing fist.

  “Get out!” she screamed. Her eyes were wild, knuckles white on the steering wheel as she continued to hit me with her right hand. Her foot slammed on the brakes again, probably to try to force me out of my car.

  “No! Don’t stop!” I ignored her still flailing arm, leaned over until I was practically lying in her lap and reached down to shove my palm into the gas pedal. The car shot forward and she screamed, both hands now on the wheel as she steered. “Don’t stop, don’t slow down, just get us the fuck out of here!”

  Behind us a pair of voices rose in animalistic howls that rapidly faded away as we sped off into the night. The twins’ hunt had to begin anew.

  It took a good half an hour to get Chloe to calm down. I wasn’t surprised though, she had seen something rather disturbing. Something she had never been exposed to, and I whole heartedly believed that now. She didn’t have a freaking clue about her father’s true line of work. Luckily, she had enough sense not to try to stop again after her initial attempt to get me out of the car. She had also stopped trying to hit me.

  She got back on the freeway heading east, back the way we came, but there was little I could do about that at the moment, so while I waited for her to calm down and start asking questions I pulled a bottle of water out of the glove box and downed two of the same Vicodin that I had been giving her. My ankle wasn’t too bad, the four deep puncture wounds had already scabbed over. My shoulder was worse, but it was still healing nicely enough so I wasn’t overly concerned. Of course with my metabolism the two pills did little more than a couple of aspirin
would for a human. Still, something was better than nothing until my body could repair itself.

  “What the fuck are you?”

  Chloe’s speaking surprised me and I glanced away from the road to look at her. She was a mess. The bruising on her wrists stood out sharply against her pale skin, her hair, a tangled wild mass surrounding a face that screamed she was still in shock. She was a whiter shade of pale, her eyes sunken, almost hollow despite how wide she held them. Her lips were pressed into a tight line, whether to keep from crying or screaming or both I couldn’t say, but maybe I could head some or all that off at the pass. She seemed to operate better when she was pissed off.

  “I would think that was fairly obvious,” I said, laying thick the patronizing tone. “I’m a man that turns into a wolf like creature. You’re smart, I’m sure you can put two and two together.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she snapped, some of that fire I first saw coming back, which was much preferable to the sad and subdued version of herself from the last day or so. “Werewolves? That’s a fucking fantasy.”

  “We prefer wolf-kind, but you’re more or less correct. Werewolf does fit the bill, we just don’t like the term.”

  She took a deep breath. “And those were your brothers back there?”

  “Not by blood. They’re the biological sons of my adoptive father, the Alpha of our Pack. The man that made me wolf-kind in the first place.”

  She laughed, a high pitched, hysterical kind of giggle for a second before she bit her tongue or the inside of her cheek, pressing her lips closed again. I could smell the coppery tang from the small, self-induced injury. Hard to miss in the close confines of the car. My stomach clenched and it reminded me how much energy I had burned in my transformation. I needed to eat, but we needed to put more distance between us and the twins right now, more than I needed to fulfill the need to refuel. Food could wait.

  “Are they the ones you were talking about?”

  “What’s that?”