Omega's Harem (Feral Wolves of the Arctic Book 3) Read online

“He said everyone,” Carolyn pressed. “Come on, why are you arguing about it? It’s getting dark anyway. You were going to have to start heading back to the cave soon enough.”

  That was true. Still, Lily hated being fetched back even a few minutes early. She would have liked to enjoy the last few moments of daylight before returning home.

  But that was the life of an omega for you. There was always someone trying to control what you did. Even in her pack, which was full of people who loved to talk about how admired and respected omegas were, how prized they were, Lily had always felt as if no one was interested in doing anything more than bossing her around.

  It was one of the many reasons she was eager to find a mate and begin a life of her own, away from the family that had raised her.

  Of course, there was another reason for her eagerness to go off on her own, one she felt she couldn’t discuss with anyone—her body’s omega needs had begun to awaken in the past few years. There were many days she spent feeling positively wild with arousal, certain that if she met another wolf in the woods, he would become her mate. It seemed unavoidable.

  Unfortunately, meeting someone had been almost impossible. Her family kept such a close watch on her that she could never manage to get more than a few hours on her own.

  Whenever she had a bit of freedom, she would use it to run as far away as she could, hoping against hope that she might finally find another wolf, a possible mate, someone to quench the flame that seemed to burn hotter and higher within her with every day that passed. She did her best to get as far away from her home as she could, knowing that it was very unlikely that anyone outside her pack would come near the home of a group as large and dominant as her family. They would be too afraid.

  How do they think I’m ever going to get mated? she wondered unhappily as she followed Carolyn through the woods and back to the cave that was the primary home for the Arctic Wolves. They never let me meet anyone outside the family, for God’s sake!

  It was definitely a problem that was unique to Lily. Her brothers had been allowed to roam as far as they liked—not only on their missions below the sixty-sixth parallel to learn what the southern wolf packs were doing, but in other directions as well. Caleb had actually been encouraged to go out and look for a mate. Lily had no idea why he hadn’t. If someone had been encouraging her to find her mate, she would have been gone so fast, they wouldn’t know what had happened.

  Her sisters had had the opportunity to roam as well. They were betas, of course, so the rules that governed their lives were necessarily different from the rules Lily had to deal with. But she didn’t see why this particular difference had to exist. Carolyn was free to go wherever she wanted as long as she reported how long she was planning to be gone. Lily, meanwhile, couldn’t be out of sight for more than a couple of hours at a time.

  It was maddening—she just couldn’t get far enough away to meet any potential mates!

  She knew that her family did plan on seeing her mated eventually. It was something that had been referred to in the abstract. Someday, when Lily is mated, people would say, as if it was a guaranteed event, but not one that needed to be discussed or planned for.

  Well, it isn’t going to just happen. I’m going to have to make it happen!

  And it was going to have to be soon. With every day that went by, Lily felt more and more frustrated. Her body craved satisfaction.

  That wasn’t the kind of thing you could express to your parents or your controlling older brother.

  One of these days, lily was going to have to take matters into her own hands. She was going to have to find herself a mate. Because she couldn’t go on living with this feeling that her very skin was about to catch fire with need.

  In front of her, Carolyn walked on, totally oblivious to Lily’s frustration. They were all totally oblivious. “I don’t know what Darren found,” she was saying, “but apparently it’s a big deal. He seems pretty upset about it.”

  “Darren worries too much,” Lily said. “I’m sure everything’s fine. The southern packs haven’t given us trouble in our lifetime.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Carolyn said. “But you know what our parents say as well as I do. They were hugely dangerous back in the days before you and I were born. They kidnapped Mom, and then they tried to attack our territory. They’re insane.”

  “They must have realized it was a waste of time to try to attack us,” Lily said. “That’s why they’ve left us alone for twenty years now. They know we’re stronger. I don’t know why we even bother sending spies down to keep track of them. We’ve been doing that for a long time, and there’s never been anything interesting to report.”

  “Well, there’s something to report today,” Carolyn said. “You didn’t see Darren. If you had, you wouldn’t think it was nothing.”

  Lily didn’t argue further, but she was sure her sister was overreacting. The southern packs hadn’t posed a serious threat in decades. They had been roundly defeated the last time they had tried to come north—it was a story Lily had grown up hearing—and if they ever tried it again, they’d be defeated again. Lily was sure there was nothing to worry about.

  They made it back to the cave without incident. Caleb was standing outside, looking like a guard. Lily thought it was a ridiculous posture, but she didn’t call him on it. Caleb needed to feel important.

  “Where have you been?” he asked her.

  “I was just taking a walk,” she said. “I’m still allowed to do that, aren’t I?”

  “We’ve been looking for you,” Caleb said. “How far did you go?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t measuring it.”

  Caleb scowled. “Maybe you should stay closer to home, if you can’t report accurately on where you’ve been.”

  “She was just on the other side of the river, Caleb,” Carolyn spoke up.

  Lily shot her sister a grateful look. It wasn’t true—she hadn’t been anywhere near the river. Carolyn must have known how painful it would be for Lily to lose what little freedom she had. Lily didn’t feel like she had many allies among her pack, but it was nice to know that Carolyn could be counted upon to have her back.

  Caleb glowered, but he couldn’t object to Lily being by the river. It was less than a mile from home. “All right,” he said. “Get inside, both of you. Darren is about to start his report, and I want everyone to hear it.”

  Lily thought about stalling before going into the cave, just to make the point to Caleb that she wasn’t subject to his orders, but she decided it wouldn’t be worth stirring up trouble over something so minor. She followed Carolyn inside and took a seat by the wall at the back of the cave, behind several of her siblings, where she thought she might not attract a lot of attention. She didn’t want to be a focal point during this meeting. If she made herself too visible, it was always possible that whatever they were there to talk about would turn into how are we going to protect Lily, specifically, from the southern threat?

  Darren was standing in the middle of the cave. Lily’s fathers stood around him defensively, as if he had suffered some sort of attack. Seeing them like that, Lily felt a pang of worry for the first time. Maybe something had happened to Darren. Maybe she had been wrong to brush off Carolyn’s concerns as an overreaction.

  When everyone was settled down, Marco, the most diplomatic of Lily’s fathers and the de facto leader when the whole pack met like this, held up his hands. “Darren has just come back from a reconnaissance mission to the south,” he said. “He has something to report to us all.”

  Darren stepped forward. “The southern wolf packs are planning an attack on us,” he said.

  A murmur went around the cave.

  “What do you mean?” someone asked. “What kind of attack?”

  “When are they coming?” another voice questioned.

  “How big is their force?”

  “Do they have weapons?”

  “Quiet,” Marco said. “Darren, tell us exactly what you saw and he
ard.”

  “They were having a funeral,” Darren said. “It sounded like one of their alphas had died. A man named Josh.”

  “Josh is dead?” Lily’s mother spoke up.

  Lily looked at her. Her face was pale.

  “They were talking about you, Mom,” Darren said. “They said you were some kind of witch, that you had powers you were going to use against them.”

  Their mother shook her head. “You all know that I came north after fleeing a southern pack,” she said. “Josh was the alpha of that pack. I’m not surprised that he would create such lies about me to try to frighten his packmates. But I thought he knew better than to mount an attack against us again.”

  “It seems like he did,” Darren said. “But now that he’s dead, his son is the alpha of that pack, and he wants revenge. He said his father had been obsessed with us throughout his life. He seems sure that his father would have wanted him to attack us.”

  “What does he plan to do?” Caleb asked.

  “He’s coming north alone first,” Darren said. “He’s going to scout us out and report back to his pack. Then they’ll decide what kind of force they need to take us out.”

  “Well, that’s easy enough,” Caleb said. “If he’s coming alone, all we have to do is find him and take him out.”

  “Be cautious, son,” said Marco. “It may seem as though we have all the advantages, but if there is only one of him, it will be easier for him to keep himself hidden. We’ll have to make sure we don’t allow him to get behind our lines and then back out again, and that might be difficult.”

  “We can take him,” Caleb said confidently. “It’s only one guy.”

  “We’ll have to put together a plan,” Marco said. “We’ll need to figure out how best to cover our land so that he can’t slip through our defenses.”

  Lily had heard enough. She rose into a crouch, picked her way through the crowd, and slipped out the mouth of the cave. It was easy enough for her to disappear from a pack meeting. No one was watching her.

  It wouldn’t be long before someone looked for her, though, so she didn’t dare go far. She wandered a few yards away from the cave and took a seat beside an oak tree. If anyone cared to search for her, they would find her in moments.

  So it was finally happening. The southern packs were making their move.

  It was something they had talked about for years, a spectral nightmare that had loomed over the Arctic Wolves. But Lily had never believed that it would actually come to pass. It was a scary story from her childhood. It didn’t seem real.

  But it was about to become real.

  Lily knew she ought to be afraid, but fear wasn’t what she felt. Instead, there was a sense of excitement, of a potential opportunity that she might be able to reach out and grab if she was clever enough.

  One man, one spy from the south, wouldn’t pose a threat to her pack. Caleb was right about that.

  But they would be distracted. They would have a lot to do, a lot of ground to watch. They would be spread thin.

  And that would mean less time for them to keep watch over Lily.

  If I’m ever going to find myself a mate, now might be the time to act. She would have unprecedented freedom to roam. She would be able to travel farther from the cave than she ever had before.

  And if she was lucky, her thirst for someone to love would finally be quenched.

  Chapter Two

  VICTOR

  It was good to be away from the pack, Victor thought as he ran, and it was even better to be away from his human form.

  Humanity carried complicated emotions. Sitting at home, human, he had been mired in feelings of grief for the loss of his father. He had felt certain that he was already letting his father down with his leadership of the Vancouver Wolf Pack. He had worried that he would never be able to guide and protect the Vancouver Wolves as well as his father had. And he had been angry, unmanageably angry, at the Arctic wolves for the long shadow they had cast over his father’s life.

  The moment he had entered the woods and shifted into his animal form, all of those feelings had become muted.

  It wasn’t as if they were gone entirely. He still felt intermittent pangs of sadness when he thought about his father. He still felt curious about what his pack was doing back at home without him, and whether Pax was doing a reasonable job at protecting them.

  But it was his anger, now, that dominated his emotions. He was furious with the Arctic Wolves. They had poisoned his father’s entire life. They had poisoned Victor’s entire life. They had always been out there, undefeated, a threat that couldn’t be dealt with.

  Victor was determined to deal with them now.

  He had packed a backpack full of clothes and food supplies, and he ran with the straps clutched in his mouth. It was a difficult way to travel, and he would have much preferred to be unencumbered. But Victor wasn’t like those wild wolves of the north. He wasn’t someone who could get by with no supplies. He wasn’t about to hunt his own meat on this journey and eat it while it was still raw and bleeding. Victor was civilized.

  That was one of the greatest points of contention between his own pack and the Arctic Wolves, he thought as he ran. Victor, his father...really, all of the southern wolf packs were civilized. They were well connected to their humanity. Even lone wolves like Pax, who didn’t belong to any group or have any permanent home, knew how to present themselves. Pax could sit at a table and eat a meal using silverware. He wore human clothes. He earned money the human way, doing odd jobs as he roamed from town to town.

  But the Arctic Wolves were another matter. They were barely human at all.

  Victor’s father had told his pack tales about them. They were feral, he’d said, completely wild. Not only did they hunt their food and eat it raw, but they also depended on natural sources of water, and they lived outside like animals. They might as well have been pure wolves and not shifters at all, for all they kept in touch with their true human natures.

  Victor found it appalling that anyone could lean so hard into the wildness of being a wolf. His animal side was an escape and a luxury to him, but it was important to stay in control. That was the only way an alpha like himself could hope to maintain leadership over a large pack like his. You had to keep in touch with your analytical side. You couldn’t allow instinct to trump reason.

  As a wolf, Victor was ruled by instinct. As a man, he was able to take a step back and apply logic to whatever situations he found himself in. And he knew how important that was. Without it, his pack would have fallen apart.

  A pack needed a strong leader.

  A pack needed a clever leader.

  Wolves just weren’t clever. And men were.

  That was probably why the Arctic Wolves had fallen sway to the charms of an omega.

  That was the part of their story that always shocked Victor the most. There were three senior alphas up there with that pack. It was a situation that should have led to a battle for dominance, with one of the three alphas emerging victorious. But to hear Victor’s father tell it, they had never bothered to fight one another at all.

  There was something wrong with them. There had to be.

  And it was something that would never happen to Victor because he was in touch with his human side. As a human, he had the common sense to realize how dangerous an omega could be. He had the wits to control himself around women, and to make sure he subdued any omega he came across before her wiles made a fool of him.

  You had to be careful around omegas.

  Victor’s father had been a great example of that. His mother had been an omega, and his father had kept her under tight control. She had never been permitted to leave the house. She had stayed confined to her quarters, visited only when it was time for her to breed, and on special occasions allowed out to join the family at the dinner table. And she had been perfectly happy with her lot because Victor’s father had never allowed her to know anything different.

  Victor would follow that example whe
n he found an omega of his own someday. She would be fully compliant. She would feel lucky to submit to his will.

  He came to a halt under a pine tree. He had been running for over an hour, and it was time for a break. One had to make sure to break regularly to ensure that the wolf instincts didn’t take over too powerfully. Wolves were not good at keeping track of the passage of time. If Victor wasn’t careful, he knew, he would spend the entire day in wolf form, and doing so could allow him to drift from his skills of logic and reason.

  He resumed his human shape beneath the tree, dug around in his backpack, and pulled out shorts and a thin white tank top.

  He dressed quickly and then leaned back against the trunk of the tree, taking in the quiet of the woods around him. At home, there was never a peaceful quiet like this. There were always people running around and making noise, demanding Victor’s help or asking him to weigh in on disputes.

  They were his pack. He cared very much for them. He would never abandon them.

  But God, they could be frustrating at times!

  He rummaged in his backpack again and pulled out a can opener and a tin can full of beans. He hadn’t brought any silverware along, but that was okay. Honestly, it made more sense to eat with his fingers while he was on the road because he had no idea when or where he would have an opportunity to wash any silverware.

  He ate the beans slowly, taking the time to enjoy every bite. His run had left him hungry, of course, and it was good to be able to take the edge off of his appetite. But it was also a privilege to be able to relax and take his time with his food. Back at home, if he’d tried to enjoy a meal slowly, it would have been snatched out from under him by a hungry packmate. The only way to ensure that he got to keep his food was by issuing an order about it.

  It felt nice not to have to do that.

  He finished his beans and pulled out a bottle of water. He confined himself to drinking only a quarter of it, knowing that this water would have to last him at least until he found a natural source where he could refill the bottle. He wasn’t looking forward to drinking disgusting river water. But he would do what he had to do in the interest of fulfilling his father’s last wish.