Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
Worry fills Annie’s eyes as she scans my face, trying to figure out what’s bothering me, and probably whether she’s safe. I need to stop. Focus. I flash her a reassuring smile.
These are tomorrow’s problems, after all. Tomorrow’s grief. She is here beside me now. In this moment, I have all I need.
I spear another apple bite.
“Bite of Affa?” I say, offering the chunk to Annie, intentionally passing the fork near Efa’s mouth. Her snout goes full wolf, and she snaps the apple off the tines, scarfing it down with a very self-satisfied smacking of her lips.
Annie laughs, low and sweet, and my muscles swell, whether from pride or the excitement she stirs in my belly, I can’t tell.
“That was one for you. This one is for Annie,” I warn Efa. I do a little defensive maneuvering as I offer my mate the next bite. It makes it to Annie’s mouth, but it’s a close thing.
“Me now!” Efa demands, but when I offer her the next chunk, she pinches it off the fork, and with no warning, tries to feed it to Annie by ramming it through her closed lips. Annie’s head jerks back, her fingers flying to her face. I tense.
Annie recovers almost immediately. “Oh, delicious,” she mumbles as she collects mashed apple from her chin and shovels it into her mouth. “Thank you for sharing with me, Efa.”
Efa, pleased with herself, reaches down, grabs another handful of hash from my plate, and is halfway to smashing it into Annie’s mouth when I catch her by the forearm. “Whoa, sweetling. Too much of a good thing.”
Efa, quick on the pivot, twists her little arm like a snake and crams the fistful of food into her own maw.
“Oh, Efa, no,” Nessa sighs, noticing what her littlest is doing. She’s got her other two sitting nicely beside her with handkerchiefs tied around their necks as bibs. They’re scooping up their breakfast with their own spoons, delivering most bites with an admirable deal of accuracy, and here we’ve got her youngest, standing half on Annie’s lap and half on mine like she’s driving a chariot with chunks of hash in her hair and potato smeared on her face and under her nails.
I am not bad with pups, but I usually work with the older ones, teaching them to track and hunt. I’m not useless with a baby, though. I don’t want Annie to think I’m inept.
“No worries, Nessa. We’ll get her cleaned up,” I offer. The moment the words escape my lips and the eyes of every dam at the table light up, I know I’ve made a mistake.
“Oh, thanks, Alpha.” Nessa widens her eyes at me and blinks. “Little Bowen and Maeve could use a washing, too, if you’re going down to the stream.”
Her other two pups immediately clamber down from the bench, breakfast forgotten, their wolves yapping.
“If you’re heading down to the stream, could you take Noctiluna, too?” a female calls from the end of the table.
What have I done?
“Leon, finish your food. Alpha is taking you all to the stream,” Delphie says to her little one.
“Auggie, clear your place,” Lilliwen tells her youngest. “Don’t make Alpha wait for you.”
By the time we leave, I’ve managed to get us saddled with seven little ones. Annie doesn’t seem to mind the company. Efa insists on holding one of her hands, and Auggie wins the tussle to hold the other.
The other pups shift to their fur, leaving their drawers and dresses behind for their dams to pick up. They trot along with us,weaving around Annie’s legs, brushing her calves and generally doing their best to trip her. I keep a hand on her elbow.
“Is this too much?” I ask her quietly as we make our way down the grassy slope to the stream bank.
She shakes her head. “It’ll be nice to wade. Is the water cool?”
I nod. “It comes down from the peaks past Salt Mountain. This time of year, it’s mostly snow melt.”
She lets out a soft, longing sigh. The sound twists my belly tight. Her demeanor is definitely changing, even since last night. She’s less guarded, more distracted. She was like this last time, too, toward the end. Back then, I thought she’d accepted that we were mates, but she’d resigned herself.
A surge of acid burns my throat. I can’t do it again—not knowing that she doesn’t really want it.
But I’ll have to. I could never leave her to suffer alone.
My wolf rattles my chest. He wants out to fight off the threat to his mate. He doesn’t understand. Maybe that’s a blessing.
The pups squint at me and scrunch their snouts, wondering what my wolf is rumbling about. The more skittish ones trot away from me warily. They scent my distress. Annie must as well. I have to hold it together. The world isn’t ending yet. We’re going for a swim.
When we get to the stream, I dart behind a thick blackberry bush to shuck my pants. I toss them onto the brambles and shift. My wolf takes a second to sniff the air, reassuring himself that whatever upset me wasn’t a real threat like a feral or a rabid, natural wolf. Then he takes another second to munch a few of the unripe berries before concluding that they are, indeed, unripe before bounding back around the bush.
He rumbles low in his throat to herd the pups toward the stream. The males race full tilt into the freezing water and then yowl and shiver dramatically, affronted by the cold. The females hesitate at the edge, gingerly dipping their paws into the water and yipping among each other.
The pups can all swim, but they’re still small, reckless, and rambunctious. Auggie, who’s made of more daring than muscle, makes an instant break for it, sailing the current almost past the sharp bend downstream before my wolf can bound through the water to fetch him back. Meanwhile, back by shore, Bowen slips on a slick stone and stages a dramatic slow-motion drowning in the five-inch shallows like a turtle stuck on his back.
Annie bends over and rightens Bowen, her top getting soaked in the process. The thin fabric molds itself to her body—the flat of her belly and flare of her hips. I force my wolf’s gaze away, and good thing I do, because Leon is stealthily floating past like a log, trying to get past me. My wolf plucks him out of the water by the scruff of his neck and carries him back to the wide, deep spot by the willow where most of the pups are still gathered.
My wolf chases the males back onto the bank, herding them until they’re huddled in a pile of unchastened, wet, wiggly fur. My wolf plants his paws in the stream, lifts his head, and howls. Every single pup freezes, ducks his head, and peers up at me with big, round, innocent eyes.
Annie freezes, too. Shit. I’ve frightened her. My wolf snaps his jaw shut. She scans the shore quickly left and right. Is she going to run?
My wolf and I hold our breath.
She steps forward on frozen legs, like how the female pups walk the little rubber dolls with big tits that Alroy brought back from a trading trip to the human village. Her fear is etched on her face, but she keeps coming, placing herself in front of the pup puddle.
She stares down my wolf, her neck stiff, her hands shaking. She’s protecting them from me, defending them with her body.
Pride swells my heart.
There she is. There’s my mate.
My wolf plops his butt right down in the cold current, landing right on the pokey edge of an underwater rock. He swallows his yelp and tucks his ears down.
Annie curls her trembling fingers into fists, her chest rising as she draws in a long breath. The fear recedes from her eyes as she realizes there is no real threat.
She clears her throat, turns to face the pups, and says in an impressively even voice, “No floating past that bunch of blue flowers there, okay?”
The pups blink up at her in unison. My wolf lumbers back to his feet, flicking water from his ears as they pop back up.
“You bigger pups pick a little partner. If your partner falls over, you have to help him up, okay?”
I can say with confidence that none of the pups—except for maybe Leon, who is wickedly advanced for his age—understands her. Little ones, when they’re in their fur, are all animal instinct. They recognize her authority, though. After all, my wolf submitted to her.
“Do you understand?” she asks them.
Efa’s wolf yips, scampers over, and leaps up on Annie’s legs. Annie takes that as agreement. “All right, then,” she says to the others. “You can go back in, but don’t go past the lobelia.”
The pups burst back into action, the females racing rings around Annie’s ankles, yapping for her attention, while the rest bound into the stream, splashing and paddling their way toward my wolf.
I sigh. I knew this was coming. At least it’s my wolf’s dignity at stake here, not mine.
For the next hour, the pups swarm my wolf like he’s the sycamore tree. They climb his flanks, playing king of the mountain and wrestling each other for a seat on his back. When they’ve got a quorum, they howl until my wolf obliges and paddles in circles like their very own boat.
Of course, when the pups least expect it, my wolf rolls or dives under, and they all tumble off his back and into the water, yowling with delight and then whining at him to let them do it all again.
The females stick close to Annie, longingly watching us from the bank as we play. Our females aren’t wary of males or averse to roughhousing, but they’re loyal like their dams, and Annie isn’t joining in the fun, so they’re going to stay with her.
Annie’s gaze darts from pup to pup to pup like she’s keeping a constant count of them. She’s standing guard. I understand. Don’t I do the same all day as I wander the camp and our territory, making sure that all the elders have made their way to their usual spots, that yesterday’s scouts have returned and today’s have left, that no tripwires have been tripped, no signal stones have been knocked over?
You can’t keep watch every minute. Your eyes get blurry and your brain dulls. I won’t nag Annie into joining us, though. No one could stop me from my rounds.
Efa’s wolf is the bold one who tires first of the status quo. She bites Annie’s pants and tugs with all her strength toward the stream, and Annie finally realizes there’s a posse of female pups waiting for her to get wet.
“Oh, you want to swim with me?” she says, and the female pups bay in a chorus of sweet, high-pitched, slightly aggrieved howls. Annie chuckles. “All right then.”
She bends over and rolls her cuffs to her knees. The females zig and zag around her legs as she makes her way to the edge. My wolf immediately shakes himself free of pups and bounds over to meet her, splashing through the water, soaking her in a wave of spray when he skids to a halt.
She laughs like chimes. He slaps the water with his happy tail.
“Hi,” she says softly.
He watches her take one tentative step and then another into the stream. When the water is mid-calf, she exhales and says, “Oh, it’s so cool. That’s so nice.”
The female pups step daintily into the water beside her. Their decorum lasts a solid ten seconds before one of the males—Auggie, I think—bowls into Noctiluna as he chases a tadpole, and the other females set after him for revenge like born huntresses. Efa’s wolf is the only one who stays with Annie, imitating my mate’s watchful supervision of the scene.
Annie will be a wonderful dam.