The wolf yowled in grief and walked up to the dead wolf on the forest floor.I joined her slowly, sniffing him.A few hours dead, I thought, and killed with a rifle.The entry wound was in the side of the head, which would have killed him instantly.
The wolf looked at me from a few paces away.I howled in acknowledgment of the loss, but there was nothing I could do for her.Her head dropped as if she’d held out hope only to find it crushed.
I padded toward her, and she let me.I bobbed our heads together in a gesture of support, but beyond that, I couldn’t spend more time here.
I left the grieving wolf to catch back up with the others and our mate, but the scent of death lingered.I grieved for her, and I wanted to know who would shoot a wolf in the fucking head, but it just wasn’t my top priority right this minute.Our mate was.Making sure he didn’t—fuck.I couldn’t even think that.He’d be okay.He just had to be.
I sprinted to get ahead of Ell.Linc gave me a curious look when I got back, but when I didn’t shift, he accepted that it wasn’t anything of immediate concern, and that we could get to sorting it out with everything else later.
How we would sort everything out, I didn’t know.For something like three alpha wolves having one mate, one human mate, there were no guidelines whatsoever.
4
Icarried the human all the way back to the house.We were tougher than humans, but even so, the soles of my feet tingled, unused to walking over branches and pine needles.Once we made it into the house—Dom’s porch still needed some careful navigating—the scent of home soothed me.Dom and Linc kept close, though they shifted back almost as soon as we were inside.
I carried our mate…the human into our living room.His blood was all over my left side.Head wounds bled a lot, so that was normal.But… There were so many buts here.
The first was the most immediate one.He was hurt.I was pretty good at diagnosing serious injury, much better than humans could ever hope to be.It was why I’d gone into pediatrics to begin with—trauma and sickness could be harder to detect and diagnose in children, and I had a chance to save more people in that field.
That was how I knew, rationally, that our mate—that the human wasn’t in immediate danger of dying.But he was hurt.
Moments after he’d shifted, Linc came close, carefully taking our mate’s cold hand in his.“What do you need?”
“You can put him on my bed,” Dom offered in typical Dom fashion.He looked up from where he was plugging the human’s phone in to charge in our living room.
“Dom, clean towels on the couch.Linc, my bag.”
They sprang into action like the best ER nurses I’d ever worked with, and I only had to wait seconds before I could put the human on the couch without having to worry about getting anything worse than what he’d already come into contact with into his head wound.
Dom had also switched on the lights, and Linc had my bag open.He was hovering, but he had no idea what was what or what I needed, and I’d get this done faster myself.Looking at the way he was clenching his jaw, he knew it too and hated it.
“I’ll clean the wound first, then stitch him up.”I pulled on gloves as Dom started to hover as well.He took up position behind the couch where he had a good view of the human, whom I gently turned on his side so I could work.
Linc frowned.“He’s pale.”
I nodded.“From the cold and the blood loss.It’s nothing he won’t recover from.”
As I put on my gloves and started working on our—the human, I considered the second but.The human was, well, human, but he was definitely our mate, that I was certain of.It happened sometimes with wolves.There were theories about it sometimes being due to recessive traits in the human population, especially given the fact that omegas had once existed and that it had only ever been humans who had that special trait.
On the more supernatural end, some legends said that certain humans had the souls of wolves and that their true mates were drawn to that.I didn’t subscribe to the latter belief, and with omegas being all but extinct, I hadn’t seen any research corroborating the former, so all I knew was that wolf and human matings happened sometimes.But not a lot.
I looked up.“Dom, don’t just stare at him as if he were a fallen angel, get him a blanket.”
Dom jumped into action, and the human had a blanket on him even before I had gotten the first stitch in.
“Also, go through his phone.It’s getting late, and if he’s supposed to be somewhere, we need to let them know before anyone files a missing person report.”
“Let’s see.”Dom powered up the device, his face looking paler in the light coming from the small screen.
“For fuck’s sake.His screen isn’t even locked.Um, guys.”Dom looked up from the phone.“Some guy called Stevie has been trying to reach our boy.”
Linc came up behind Dom, all growly, and took the phone.“Let me see.He hasn’t responded.‘Call me, babe, and let’s talk about it.’What the fuck is the matter with Stevie?He’sours.”
“He” being the human.I felt the same way as Linc did about this, about this man whose skin I was stitching up, whose scent was home and family.I couldn’t help it.
Dom shifted again and climbed on the couch next to the human’s legs as a wolf to warm him up.That was a smart move.I realized it was a move I’d like to make myself; climb under a blanket with the human, pull him against my chest, feel his breath against my skin.
Well, there certainly was little point in denying that this man was my mate.
