Fated To The Alpha: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (11 page)

“There she is,” Tara pointed to one girl whose head suddenly breached the surface of the water. The girl began climbing out of the lake, wringing out her chestnut brown hair, before she stopped with her ankles still submerged when she noticed me.

“Hi, I’m Elena,” I said. “You’re Andrea? Ricardo’s daughter?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” she nodded, carefully bending down to pick up her towel, never taking her eyes off me. “Did you want something?”

“Just to meet you,” I shrugged. “I’m getting to know the pack.”

The girl looked at me uncomfortably, looking like she was trying to use her towel more to hide than to dry off. “Did my dad send you?”

My brow furrowed. “No, why?”

“I don’t know… he just has my schedule worked out for me a lot of the time. I thought maybe he’d want you to get to know the girl who’s gonna be married to the next alpha or something.”

Now why did that sound familiar?

“Your parents told me that wasn’t a sure thing yet,” I offered. “Doesn’t your brother want to be alpha too?”

“He can have it, for all I care.”

“Come on, Andie,” Tara said. “We’re not here to talk about that. Elena just wanted to be friendly. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Sure it is!” one of the girls sitting around said.

“Totally!” chimed in a boy, who rose to his feet and stepped up beside me. “And can I just ask: this thing with Jeremy, is it serious?”

“Hey, hey,” Jeremy objected, stepping in between us and gently pushing the boy aside. “Gear down, Tyler. She’s not on the market.”

Another girl got up and took me by the hand. “You want to come for a swim with us?”

My worried and defensive face brightened into a smile. “Actually, I’d love to!”

“Come on!” that girl chirped, as she and a few others went dashing for the water and dove in.

I turned to Jeremy as I crossed my arms and lifted my shirt up. “Last one in’s a dirty skunk!” I cheered. He didn’t quite match my enthusiasm as I hurriedly stripped the rest of my clothes off and raced after the excited kids into the lake. He eventually did join me, shaking his head and chuckling softly as he shucked his own clothes and followed me in.

I bobbed my head beneath the surface and swam about, goading Jeremy to chase me, before I came up for air again and saw Andrea still standing at the water’s edge. “Come on, Andrea!” I called. “I came down here to meet you!  Don’t be a spoilsport!”

She seemed to contemplate it for a second, and then sighed, having made up her mind. She dropped her towel and dove back in.

One of the boys came up beside me as my shoulders rose above the surface. “That’s a wicked scar, lady,” he said. “Must’ve been some fight you got in.”

I turned my head to look at my right shoulder, having almost forgotten about the nasty bite I’d sustained that night when my pack attacked theirs. “Uh, yeah… real bad fight.”

“Was it a Caldour?” the boy asked. “’Cause you should see the scars some of them have given our pack!”

“No, stupid, it wasn’t a Caldour,” said a girl. “She’s from up north, remember?  She’s never met the Caldours.”

“Hope she never does,” another girl said. “Some of the shit those bastards have pulled… just sick!”

“Seriously,” said another boy. “My dad told me about this time when the hunting party brought down a whole bunch of deer, only to have the Caldours show up, give half our hunting party stitches and limps for a month, and steal the entire kill!”

“How ’bout the time they broke into our food stores and stole the kill we’d made the day before,” said another, “and then tried to say they had the right to it because we poached it from their territory! Like come on! Like our guys are supposed to give up a chase just because the animal crosses some invisible line? Get real!”

“Those Caldours are all so anal about those damn borders!” one of the first girls complained. “It’s like crossing over it is the eighth Deadly Sin!  And they keep trying to push it further back so they can hog more land!”

“They killed my grandfather,” someone said.

Everyone turned to the boy who’d spoken. “Yeah, I forgot about that,” another boy said. “It was like ten years ago, wasn’t it?”

“A raid,” the vulnerable-looking kid said. “Middle of the night. Unprovoked.”

Naturally, by now I was back to being uncomfortably silent. Jeremy swam up to me, putting a comforting hand on my arm below the water’s surface, where no one would see it. I cast him a brief glance, trying as hard as I could not to let my discomfort show.

Unfortunately, my discomfort didn’t go unnoticed, but it was misinterpreted. “Hey, maybe we should change the subject,” one of the girls said. “I think we’re scaring Elena.”

“Hey, don’t worry, lady,” the boy named Tyler said, his grin telling me he still wanted to appear macho in front of me. “We got the best fighters and guards you’ll ever find in this pack! No way any stinking Caldour is gonna get his jaws on you!”

“I don’t think they’d care about her,” a girl said. “She’s not a Morgandorf, right?”

“You think they’d make that distinction?” said a boy. “They’re Caldours. They’d kill anyone.”

Wow. This was worse than I thought. I was beginning to get the real sense of just how deep this feud ran. I always knew there was animosity, but I never got the idea that this was really what the Morgandorfs thought about our pack. If Charlene could hear them now…

“Guys, come on!” Andrea finally spoke up. “Elena just got here and we’re being all doom and gloom in front of her. Let’s stop talking about the Caldours.”

Everyone seemed to agree with that. They went back to swimming around and talking about normal teen things, about what they were planning on doing later, or who was hooking up with whom, or whatever. Normal stuff. A few of them started asking me questions about life with my old pack. Was it very different there?  Were there any guys in my life before I found Jeremy?

My favorite question was from a skinny blonde girl named Corrine, who asked, “Was everyone in your pack a douche, or just your alpha?”

“Well,” I shrugged, “Not everyone was such a douche, but some of them were.” I looked pointedly at Andrea as I added, “My dad was too.”

It was enough to get Andrea’s attention.

“It wasn’t just that my alpha wanted to force me to marry him,” I said. “My dad wanted it too. ’Cause he wanted his grandkids to be alphas. So he arranged the whole thing for me.”

“What a bastard,” a girl named Tammy said. “You didn’t have any say in it or nothing?”

“Most everyone in the pack thought this was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me,” I said. “Nobody seemed to get that I didn’t want him. Least of all my dad.”

I kept watching Andrea as I spoke. I could see that my words were ringing a chord with her.

“Well, fuck him,” a boy named Michael said. “You’re better off without those guys. This is the pack with the real wolves!”

“Oh, yeah, like you?” a girl named Sandra taunted him.

“Need convincing, baby?” he challenged, before he began swimming after her.

Things quickly devolved to teenage water hijinks from there. I mostly hung to the side and watched the chaos unfold, letting myself be amused by it as much as I could after everything that had just been said. I reminded myself that I couldn’t show vulnerability, but nobody minded if I continued holding onto Jeremy. We eventually decided to climb out of the lake and relax in each other’s arms on a spare towel.

I soon noticed that Andrea wasn’t joining the fun either. She obviously had some things of her own on her mind. Especially since she kept looking at me.

Eventually, after Andrea had toweled off and dressed, she came up to me and said, “Can I get a moment alone with you?”

I spared a glance at Jeremy, who just shrugged. “Okay, sure,” I said. I untangled myself from Jeremy and got my clothes on again, before following her toward the trees, where she found a secluded spot amid the woods.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.

She looked at the ground uncomfortably. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was rude when you got here. The first thing you asked me was if I was Ricardo’s daughter, and I thought the only reason someone would want to know that was because he sent you to find me. Like he arranges everything that happens to me.”

“Believe me,” I said, “the last thing I want to be a part of is anyone making a girl’s choices for her. Not after what I went through.”

“I get that now,” she said. “So I want to say I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” I said, reaching a hand out to place on her shoulder. “Nothing to apologize for. If I were in your shoes, I probably would’ve thought the same thing.”

She hesitantly raised her eyes to me.

“Don’t sweat it,” I reassured her. “Just be glad your dad doesn’t already have a husband picked out for you like mine did.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Andrea murmured. “If you ask me, I think he’s already auditioning guys for the part.”

I blinked, and then laughed. And after a moment, she started laughing with me.

“Well, as long as you get final say in the audition, count yourself lucky,” I offered.

“I sure hope so,” she said.

“But hey, let’s not get too stressed about that now,” I said. “You’re still young. You’ve got lots of time. Am I right in guessing you’re still a virgin, too?”

She scrunched her face uncomfortably. “Yeah, I am. I mean I’ve participated in a couple howls, but I’m not quite ready for the ‘roll in the dirt’ part.”

“Speaking of howls,” I said, “your dad said there’s gonna be one tonight. And apparently it’s for me. You think you’ll be there?”

She met my gaze with the most honest smile I’d seen from her yet. “You know, I think I will!”

“I want us to be friends, Andie. Can I call you Andie?”

“Sure. Should I call you Ellie, then?”

I laughed at the irony of her trying to abbreviate my fake name. “Call me whatever you want, I guess.”

Andrea looked toward the other kids still swimming for a moment, her look starting to take a turn for the mischievous. “Well, if you’re gonna be my friend,” she said, “I know something we can do.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That girl over there?” she said, pointing to a raven-haired girl currently doing tumbles in the water. “That’s Lauren. There was this boy I was pursuing for a while, and she knew it. Then the last howl happened, and she went and poached him. I caught her doing cowgirl on him right out in the open. Now it’s like I’m invisible to him.”

“What a bitch!”

“So you know what I’m gonna do?”

“I can’t wait,” I grinned.

“I was thinking about finding some of the ugliest worms and spiders I can dig up and sneaking them into her underwear drawer. Want to come with me?”

I grinned wide. “Sounds like fun!”

*

Ostensibly, gathering for the howl that night was no different than the ones I knew from my own pack. A bonfire burned, and the pack gathered around the big rock where the alpha stood above them all. But all the faces and scents were unfamiliar. It was a surreal feeling, entering into this very familiar thing surrounded by very unfamiliar people.

Most of the pack parted as Jeremy and I approached, ushering us to the front of the throng. “Let them through, everyone,” Ricardo said. “This howl is for her tonight.” We reached the front, and I looked up to the top of the rock to see Ricardo and Laura looking down at us. “Welcome, Elena,” he said.

I started to wonder if I was ever going to get used to being called that name.

“Everyone!” Ricardo shouted. “As you all know, we have a guest among us tonight. A lost soul, cast aside by those she once called her family. We of the Morgandorf pack have always prided ourselves on our devotion to family, to friends, and to pack. And if those words mean anything to us, we must be ready to offer them to someone who has lost them. Elena, you avoided us for a long time, despite having found someone in Jeremy. I’m here to say you had nothing to fear from us. And with all of us here, she will have nothing to fear from anything else, will she everyone?”

Everyone raised their fists and howled in agreement. I looked around me at all the smiling faces I saw looking at me. I never could have imagined this happening: I was a runaway, a fugitive from my own pack, being welcomed with open arms by the pack I had always been taught to hate and fear. Just so long as they continued to believe I was someone I wasn’t.

For the most part, the looks on their faces told me I was in good shape on that front. They all were smiling at me, welcoming this “Elena” they thought I was.

But somewhere amid that crowd, I could swear I felt one set of eyes looking at me with something less favorable. I couldn’t quite locate where it was; there were too many faces to sift through. But someone here wasn’t reflecting the same kind of enthusiasm as everyone else.

Ricardo went on, “You all know that our village hasn’t been the safest place lately. Especially after the recent attack we suffered from the Caldour pack. And we all know that an attack like that could happen again at any time. Which is why it’s more important than ever that we stay vigilant, now that this newcomer is among us, who has more reason than most to be afraid of strange packs. The Caldours are ruthless, they are merciless, and they don’t take prisoners. We’ve all seen the kind of fury they have.