Feral Wolves (Feral Wolves of the Arctic Book 1)

by J. L. Wilder

  Marco stroked her cheek gently. “You can do this,” he told her. “You’ve been doing so well. I know you can do it.”

  She looked at him, sweaty with effort, her eyes shining with fear and determination.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he told her quietly. “I couldn’t imagine a better, braver omega. I couldn’t imagine a better mother.”

  Sophie gritted her teeth and nodded.

  “Okay,” Petra said. “Time to push.”

  Marco had imagined the birth of his children for months now, but in the end, it was nothing like he had expected. He had thought he would feel some change when the first baby was born, when it was placed in his arms and he was told that he was a father.

  But he didn’t.

  He felt as if he had always been a father.

  Fatherhood had been growing within him, just as these babies had been growing within Sophie, for the past nine months. And now that they were here, the only thing that had changed was that he could see them.

  He wanted to hold them. He wanted to spend time with each and every one of them, to promise them all the things that were in his heart. But he couldn’t look away from Sophie.

  As the final baby was born, she cried out along with it and fell back in Ryker’s arms, her eyes drifting closed.

  “Are you okay?” Marco asked anxiously.

  “Yes,” she panted. “Tired.”

  “You can rest,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze. “Take a nap. It’s all right. You’re done. The babies are here.”

  She shook her head and opened her eyes again. “I need to see them,” she said. “I need to meet them. They’ve been inside me all this time, and now they’re gone—it doesn’t feel right. I need to see that they’re okay before I go to sleep.”

  Marco nodded. He could see the sense in that. “Petra?” he called over his shoulder. “Are the babies cleaned up?”

  “How many?” Burton asked, looking faintly embarrassed “I lost count during all that. How many did we get?”

  “Nine,” Chrissy said. She came over and sat beside Burton, one of the babies cradled in her arms. “Nine in all.”

  “Nine!” Marco was blown away. He had lost count too, and somehow it had seemed like both less and more than nine. The birthing had seemed to go on forever, as if the number of babies was infinite somehow. But nine?

  “Are they all okay?” Sophie asked. “They’re all healthy? Ninety fingers and ninety toes?”

  “Ninety toes,” Marco murmured wonderingly.

  “They’re all fine,” Petra said. She brought one of the babies over and placed it carefully in Sophie’s arms. “This one is the last born,” she said. “A little girl.”

  “Wow,” Robby observed. “She looks just like you, Sophie.”

  “Really?” Burton cocked his head to the side and frowned. “How can you tell? She just looks like a baby to me.”

  Marco laughed and held out his arms for another one of the babies. Cam handed him one. “That’s your alpha,” he said. “I mean, it probably is. Your firstborn boy, at any rate.”

  “They outnumber us now,” Ryker said, shaking his head. “One litter, and the new generation already outnumbers us.”

  “That’s the way it should be,” Marco said quietly. “The pack should grow like that.”

  “And what happens when they grow up and have children of their own?” Ryker asked. “We’re going to outgrow this cave real fast.”

  “It’ll sort itself out,” Marco said. “Some of them will go off and start new packs. Their own packs. Offshoots of this one. That’s the way shifter culture used to be, right? Back in the beginning? All the packs were related, all of them were tied together. There was no feuding between packs, the way there is now in the south, because shifters were all family.”

  “That’s what the bears were afraid we were going to do here,” Sophie said. “They thought we would create a network of interrelated packs, and that one day all the land up north would be ours.”

  “We don’t own the land,” Marco said. “Land can’t be owned. But yes, our family will grow, and one day the Arctic Circle will be a place where wolves can feel safe and free.”

  Sophie’s eyes drifted closed. At the same time, the baby in her arms yawned and settled into sleep.

  Ryker grinned, leaning back against the cave wall. “Don’t bother taking the baby back,” he said, wrapping his arms around Sophie and supporting the baby with his hands. “We’ve got her.”

  Petra nodded. “Marco, Burton, the two of you haven’t slept much lately,” she said. “Why don’t you get some rest while Ryker sits with Sophie? The rest of us will babysit.”

  “I’ll take you up on the babysitting,” Marco said. “But I’m not actually tired, all of a sudden.”

  “Neither am I,” Burton said. He was holding two babies, one in each arm. “Want to take a walk?”

  “What time is it?” Marco didn’t want to go out if it was dark outside.

  “Just after dawn,” Burton said.

  Marco nodded and got to his feet. “That sounds good,” he said, shifting his son in his arms. “It’ll be nice to show this little one the world.”

  “Don’t be gone too long,” Chrissy warned. “If Sophie wakes up and sees that you and some of the babies are missing, she might worry.”

  Marco nodded. “We’ll just be down by the river,” he said. “Someone can run down and find us if anybody needs anything.” He kissed his fingers and touched them gently to Sophie’s forehead, careful not to wake her. “Sleep well, beautiful,” he murmured. “You did wonderfully.”

  Burton led the way out of the cave and Marco followed.

  Stepping out into the early morning light, he imagined that he was seeing the world for the very first time. Everything he had taken for granted all these years—the smell of the forest, the feeling of the sun on his skin, the sound of birds welcoming the day—suddenly seemed new.

  He knew his children would have no memory of this day, of the first time their fathers had taken them out into the woods. But Marco was equally sure that he would always remember what it had been like to stand here with his son in his arms for the first time.”

  He and Burton walked down to the river and sat on the bank, dangling their feet in the water.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” Burton said quietly after several minutes had passed.

  “What is?” Marco asked. “The fact that the three of us are simultaneously fathers of the same group of children, and we’ll never really know which ones are biologically ours?”

  “Well, yeah, that,” Burton said. “But I was talking about the fact that we’re fathers. At all.”

  Marco shrugged. “It’s weird,” he agreed. “And yet, at the same time, kind of not weird at all.”

  “I hope I don’t mess it up too badly,” Burton said.

  “You won’t,” Marco said. “And that’s one of the perks to having three of us. If one of us makes a mistake, the other two will be there to set it right. These kids have four parents—not to mention four loving betas. They’re never going to want for anything in their lives.”

  “I hope not.” Burton looked down at the babies he held. “I never thought I’d care this much about anything, you know? I mean, I love Sophie to the ends of the Earth. Don’t get me wrong. And you and Ryker are my brothers. But these kids...man, I just met them, and if anything happened to them, I think I would forget how to breathe.”

  “I know what you mean,” Marco agreed. Already, he had shifted his son’s position twice in his arms, trying to keep the baby from being exposed to the sun for too long. Considering that it was a cool spring morning and the sun was still just barely peeking up over the horizon, it was something about which Marco knew logically that he didn’t really need to be concerned.

  But he would fight to protect his son.

  He would fight to protect all of his children. He would do whatever it took to make their lives safe and happy.

  He eased himself slowly bac
k against a boulder, propping the baby against his knees, and looked it in the eye. Unlike the one Sophie had been holding, this baby was awake and alert, perhaps because he had been taken out of the cave and given so much to see.

  “I don’t know you at all yet,” Marco murmured. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re like. I don’t know what you’re going to grow up to be. But I can’t wait to find out all about you.”

  The baby waved his fist in his father’s face.

  “Whatever you are,” Marco said, “whatever kind of life you decide to live—it’ll be all right. If you love pack life and want to stay with us forever, we’ll be glad. If you decide that this way of life isn’t for you and you want to run off and be feral, that will be okay too. In fact, you’ll have some great people around you who can tell you all about that life and how to be strong in the wild.”

  The baby yawned. He couldn’t have cared less.

  “Maybe you are an alpha,” Marco said. “That’s what your Uncle Cam thinks. Maybe he’s right. And if you are, maybe someday you’ll find an omega of your own. Maybe you’ll start your own pack. Maybe you’ll find your own place to live, somewhere not too far from here, and raise a family, just like I’m doing right now. Maybe one day, you’ll sit with your son somewhere else along this very river and tell him about shifter life.”

  The baby was starting to fall asleep now. Even the fascinations of the outside world couldn’t compete with the fact that he had been through the exhausting ordeal of being born that morning.

  “Yeah, I get it,” Marco said, rocking him gently. “You get some sleep. You don’t have anything to worry about, son, I promise. Your parents have made these woods a safe home.”

  Next in Series

  Feral Alphas- Feral Wolves of the Arctic Book 2: Now Live!

  Omega’s Harem- Feral Wolves of the Arctic Book 3: Live on November 19TH!!

  Sneak Preview: Feral Alphas

  Branches whipped Dina’s face and shoulders as she ran.

  She had never been this far south before. It felt wrong to be this far south. The air was too warm, and the sounds were nothing like what she had grown used to in the forests of the Arctic Circle. The animals were different here.

  Everything about her life was going to be different here.

  But there was no going back. The life she had once known was over, thanks to those treacherous wolves.

  How can they call themselves feral? she thought, not for the first time since the alpha wolves had ordered her out of their territory. They’ve formed a pack, for fuck’s sake.

  Packs were taking over everywhere, it seemed.

  Packs were the reason Dina had gone north in the first place. There was no place below the sixty-sixth parallel for a beta bear like herself, not unless she wanted to be the property of an alpha. And she did not. The idea of belonging to a pack had never been anything but awful to Dina.

  What am I going to do now?

  Staying up north hadn’t been an option. The wolves had made that abundantly clear. Any bears who stayed up north would be viewed as enemies. Of course, that was nothing new—feral wolves and feral bears had been enemies for decades. But now the wolves weren’t feral any longer. They were a pack.

  That pack had descended on Dina and the temporary allies with whom she had grouped up and had torn them apart as if they were nothing.

  We did start it. We kidnapped their omega. Of course they were going to retaliate.

  Dina pushed the thought away. They had only kidnapped the omega to try to break the bonds that existed between the men of that pack. If they hadn’t grouped up the way they did, none of it would have been necessary!

  But what was done was done. She had been exiled from the north. She could never go home.

  And what was there for her here besides pack life? She would never join a pack. She would rather die.

  The outlines of a third idea began to take shape in her mind, but before the picture could resolve itself, the forest gave way to a clearing. She found herself staring across what could only be described as a lawn at a massive ranch-style house.

  She froze.

  She was in bear form. The people who lived here would know only that a bear had appeared on their property. They would be afraid. They would keep their distance.

  Unless one of them owns a gun or something. She began to back away slowly.

  Then she caught a whiff of the air.

  Wolf!

  Before she had time to react, the door of the house opened and a man came running out. As she had feared, he had a gun in his hands, and he aimed it in her direction. But the smell of wolf was also pouring off of him so strongly that she knew at once that she had stumbled into a pack of shifters.

  She had only a few moments to make a decision.

  I don’t stand a chance if I try to fight them. He can’t be the only one. The rest are probably watching from the windows of that big house. Dina was a good fighter, but she didn’t like to enter a fight without knowing the odds were in her favor. That was exactly what had gone wrong with the wolf pack up north, and it had almost resulted in her death.

  She considered running. But she couldn’t outrun a bullet, and she had no idea how good a shot this man was. If he managed to hit her, there was no one around who would be able to help her treat the wound. A gunshot, even in the leg or shoulder, could be fatal.

  There was only one option that gave her a decent chance at survival. She didn’t like it, but it was the only choice.

  Dina shifted into her human form, dropped to her knees, and held up her hands in surrender.

  The man stopped running toward her, but he didn’t lower his gun. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know anybody lived here. I don’t mean you any harm. If you’ll let me go on my way, you’ll never see me again, I promise.”

  The man frowned. Now that Dina got a good look at him, there was something stupid-looking about his expression. He had heavy eyebrows and a glare that made him look as if he thought he was a lot bigger than he actually was.

  “I should take you to Josh,” he decided.

  “Who’s Josh?”

  “Our alpha.” Now there was a faint note of pride in the man’s voice. “This land belongs to the Vancouver Wolf Pack.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t know that,” Dina said. “If you let me go, I promise to leave your land right away.”

  The man shook his head. “Josh is going to want to talk to you,” he said. “You’d better come inside.”

  “What if I refuse?” Dina asked.

  “If you refuse, Josh will probably come outside,” the man said. “He’s watching us now. If he has to come out, there’s going to be a fight, and I doubt you want that.”

  Dina didn’t like the way this man was talking to her, but what could she do? He was right. “I don’t,” she agreed. “Put the gun down and I’ll come meet with your alpha.”

  The man shook his head. “You don’t call the shots,” he said. He gestured with the barrel of the gun. “This way.”

  So Dina, out of options, allowed herself to be marched across the lawn and into the house at gunpoint, simmering with an unpleasant combination of terror and rage.

  The house’s door opened onto the kitchen. Several people were standing back from the windows as if they had just been leaning up against them, taking in the action in the yard. As the door closed behind her, one man stepped forward. “Everybody, go into the den, please,” he said. “Eddie, you stay.”

  The man with the gun took a seat at the kitchen table. “You got it, boss.”

  “You must be Josh,” Dina reasoned.

  “That’s right,” the man said. “Who are you?”

  She hesitated. “If we’re going to talk, tell your man to take his gun off me,” she said. “I haven’t done anything to threaten you or your pack.”

  “You’re on our land.”

  “I didn’t know this was your land,” she said, exasp
erated. “I told him to let me leave, but he didn’t want to. I’d be just as happy to be nowhere near your land, believe me.”

  Josh pondered for a moment. “Put the gun down, Eddie,” he said.

  Eddie looked somewhat disappointed, but he set the gun down on the table. Dina couldn’t help noticing that he kept it within easy reach, in case he wanted to pick it up again.

  “Satisfied?” Josh asked.

  She wasn’t—she wanted to get out of their house—but she didn’t want a fight with these men, so she nodded.

  “Now tell me who you are,” Josh said.

  “My name is Dina,” she said.

  He waved his hand at that information. “What pack are you with?”

  She lifted her chin. “I’m not with any pack,” she said.

  Eddie let out a quiet hiss. “She’s feral,” he said.

  “Are you?” Josh asked her, his expression darkening.

  “I’m on my own, if that’s what you mean,” Dina said. This was hardly the time for pure honesty about what she thought of those who chose to live in packs, but she was surprised by the negative reaction. “That’s good news for you. It means no one else is coming this way just because I did.”

  “You have a point,” Josh conceded. “But what brings you in our direction in the first place? I thought all the feral shifters lived much farther north.”

  “That might be changing now,” Dina said darkly.

  “What do you mean?” Josh demanded.

  Dina hesitated. Sharing information with wolves definitely ran counter to her instincts. But on the other hand, it seemed clear that this pack had an unfavorable view of those they considered feral. Maybe they would recognize the danger inherent in what was happening up north.

  Maybe the enemy of my enemy is my ally.

  “I was run out of the Arctic,” she said. “So were the other bears I had been traveling with.”

  “Your pack?” Eddie asked.

  “Not my pack,” she said sharply. “We had grouped up for a few weeks, nothing more. That happens sometimes.”