“You smell divine.”Dom leaned forward.“Sick, and like dried blood, but divine all the same.”
Marcus snorted, but his lips curled up a fraction.“I’ll pretend that’s not creepy at all.”
I put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder.“I want you to keep your head dry for another day, but you can take a bath if you want to after dinner.How does that sound?”
Marcus relaxed against me.“Sounds good.”
He was more likely to pass right out after dinner, and that would be for the better.What he needed most right now was rest.
Marcus looked from Dom to me.“I thought the thing about alpha wolves and beta wolves got debunked.How’re you all alphas?Does that just mean you expect everyone else to be submissive to you?Is naked wrestling out in the woods your thing?”
Dom burst out laughing.
Linc sighed, then spoke over Dom’s laughter before covering the soup to finish cooking on the stove.“We’re not wolves.But the alpha thing is truer for werewolves than for regular wolves.”He joined us, taking the seat on my other side.“Most of our kind pair bond, and one person is usually the protector, the alpha.Like most things, it’s more of a sliding scale than a true binary, but it’s something you can tell about another wolf just by watching them.It’s in how they carry themselves, how they talk.More often than not, alphas are guys.”
Linc looked at me, probably trying to get my opinion on whether to explain about female alphas and their slightly different anatomy, but I didn’t want to overwhelm Marcus, so I gave a minute shake of my head.
With his laughter ebbing, Dom was moving closer, just an inch.I locked eyes with him and held his gaze to warn him against going too fast.
“You want me to be your…what, your submissive human beta?”The panic was back in our mate’s voice.
“You’d be shit at being submissive, wouldn’t you?”Dom’s eyes were bright with humor.“Plus, you’re conflating sex stuff with how people are.That misses a lot of the important points.”
Linc sighed.“What Dom is trying to say is that an alpha isn’t out to dominate and force their mate to submit to them.I will grant you that a lot of alphas like to posture, and they can get pretty loud in public.But not every alpha is the stereotype.Anyway, it’s never the alpha who gets to make decisions.It’s usually the beta who decides they’ll give the alpha a chance.Or not.”
“Although mate bonds tend to be different,” I said.
Dom snorted.“Yeah, this one is different, no shit.”
Marcus frowned.“And what does that mean?”
Dom lifted up his hand and counted on his fingers.“One: Our mate’s human.Two: There’s three of us and one of you.”He stopped, his eyes doing a full circle in their socket as if he were looking for the next item.“Okay, so just those two things.”Dom put his hand back down.“But they are major things, I’d say.”
Marcus stared at him.“Wait.What you’re saying is, this mate thing never happens with more than two people?Or with humans?Then does that mean I’m a…werewolf?”
Linc shook his head, chuckling softly.“No, you’re not.And there’s no chance of turning you.We’re all born like this.It’s just a rare thing to happen between humans and werewolves, and it’s rare to be between more than two people.The instances I know of don’t involve a human mate and usually it’s some configuration of male and female wolves.”
Linc left out that same-sex mating hadn’t been heard of unless the human was an omega.That was for the better.There was a possibility that Marcus might be related to an omega—we had heard stories about the trait showing up in families—and maybe him mating to all of us was just nature being serendipitous, similar to how thousands of years ago, blue-eyed humans had started popping up around the Black Sea.
Marcus nodded.“You’re saying this could be wrong, then.In fact, you have to be wrong, because this is cuckoo crazy.”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah, nope.”Dom dared to shift another inch closer on the couch.
Linc crossed his arms.“We’re right about this.Let’s get some food into you, and then we can talk more.”
9
By the time I had sort of accepted that I had sort of ended up in bed with werewolves, sort of, said werewolves had fed me soup and more tea, and… Well, I passed straight out after that from a combination of food coma, what-the-fuck-syndrome, and the aftereffects of taking a fall in the fucking woods.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep this time, but I woke up back in the same bed they’d put me in earlier, and I was still wearing the flannel.
Gods, I had to talk to them about the flannel.
Golden afternoon light slanted into the room, and while my throat was still sore, my head felt better, inspiring me to look on the positive side of things.For example, there was no massive dog snuggling next to my legs.Correction, no werewolf.In his wolf form.For which he had to get undressed.
I gasped, though no sound came out of my sore throat, when I realized the werewolf had been naked in bed with me all this time.Then I realized all dogs were always naked with their owners, and my mind spun out of control.
