The Savior of the Wolves

The Alpha's Son (part 2)

~ Aiden's POV ~

Lately, if I hang out in the dining hall for supper, I get surrounded by everyone. I know I’m their future Alpha, but I’m not today. Today, I can feel their eyes on me. Like most days, I can sense their pity. The young wolves especially. They know they can easily find a mate. Most of them already have and those are the ones who pity my brother and me the most. They know we may never have what they have. Our destiny has been altered. There isn’t a female noble anywhere around here anymore.

Our pack friends are young, without the training I’ve had, so I can’t blame them when they link to the group instead of their mate and share intimate talk with the entire pack. I have to live with accidents like this. I have to live with their apologies when there shouldn’t be anything to apologize for. I have to live with the intimate touches and secret glances. 

I loathe their pity. But they know what I’ll give up if I mate with a beta or delta wolf. What our pack will lose. The protection. How they feel is out of devotion and care, but it angers me. Torments me. More than I have admitted to anyone.

So, I keep avoiding the crowds. As much as possible lately.

As I enter the side door to the back of the kitchen, Anna smiles at me and grabs a carry-out box. She puts my food in it and pats my arm with her empty hand, as she hands me my supper to go. She’s almost an elder and I can sense that she has a better understanding of how I must be feeling. She never pries. She does, however, slip me a surprise treat that I didn’t ask for.

I walk silently to the main library unnoticed and take my usual seat and open the last journal I was reading the day before. I’m drawn to the letters and journals that depict the attacks. The attacks that slaughtered so many female nobles.

The attacks are why I have so little interest in the mundane tasks around here. I can’t make myself interested in whether we patrol in groups of six or eight. In intervals of four or six-hour shifts. My pack...all of them...seem to know their place in the fluid existence of our species. And they are proud of everything that they do.

I envy them. I want to feel pride. But I feel something else.

I turned a year and a half ago, as all wolves do, on my eighteenth birthday. The pain was unimaginable. So much worse than I had been warned. But nothing could have prepared me for what happened. Bones moving, skin tearing, teeth ripping through my gums, and somehow it healed almost immediately as my body transformed in an instant from a dark-haired man to a large black and gray wolf.

I remember the pride in my mother’s eyes as she looked at me. I was too exhausted to understand it then, but she saw my father and herself in me. I was a mix of their coats. My father’s fur is jet black while my mother’s is a pearlescent silver. Every alpha in my bloodline loses the Luna’s part of their coat once they become alpha. I have no desire to become an Alpha though. I have had little desire for anything at all since I turned.

For after the turn, the goddesses have your mate destined for you. I hear others talk. I know that to them, the pain of the turn was worth it. They’d do it all over again. Because they found their mate. 

But I just got the pain...followed by the void. 

I can tell that it bothers my mother. So, I fake it. Almost every single day I fake it. I strut around like I’m proud and busy. Busy with training and studies...because that’s the show I put on for everyone.

Except for my brother.

So, mom is like most adoring mothers. She wants me to be happy. Fulfilled. And lately, she is mothering me to death. As Luna, that is her job and yeah, she does that to everyone for the most part, but I know it’s more with her children. She’s obvious in her attempts to pry. But that’s love, isn’t it? Obvious. 

Helping is her instinctive nature. Inbred in her since she was born. She was born to be an Alpha’s wife. A Luna. She was a female noble at birth. A “fem” we call them. She was born from an Alpha and Luna’s union. This marks them for the remainder of their life. As a fem, there’s a distinct scent on them that only a potential mate, another male noble (they are simply known as “nobles”) can detect. It doesn’t matter how far away she is either. Once a fem is of age, something in a noble knows and is drawn to her as though nothing else matters. And for a short while, to a noble, nothing else does. 

It’s not just the animalistic need to mate. The survival of the pack depends on him finding a mate. So the pull to her is maddening. The goddess made it so strong that he can’t...won’t stop until he finds her.

When a female noble comes of age...it’s magical. There is a change in the air. An entire destined pack can feel her. But no one can find her…except a potential match for her. Another noble. Her potential Alpha or future Alpha. 

The inconvenience of it all is that any unmated noble is led to her. He can smell her...track her anywhere. His wolf has one purpose now...and that is to protect her. Her survival is more important now than ever. And until the goddess shows if he’s the one destined to imprint with her, he can’t leave her. Because it’s so much more than her survival now. The survival of the species depends on this…on the destined Alpha mating with her to strengthen the pack.

So, the goddess will see to it that each Alpha or noble finds her. Or dies trying. The journals are full of stories of those who have done just that.

Maybe that’s why I am so obsessed with the main library and books so much more lately. The stories go back as far as time. There are countless books. What if attacks like this happened before? Did we miss something?

I have to know...because I am a noble. Just like my brother...just like my sister. I will only be drawn to a female noble. And my brother will be also. We would both long for her. It would tear at the unity of the pack…until the imprinting is complete…with one of us or another noble that we’ve never even met.

It just hasn’t happened yet. For either of us.

For any noble in years.

I often wondered if he and I should be separated. Until we found a fem that is. Logically, the distance would draw the closest brother to her quicker…the imprinting would happen…or not…and life would continue without a disaster...a fight amongst brothers.

My understanding is that if I find the fem first and nothing happens, I will protect her until he arrives. Sure, the fates could have it that neither of us should imprint with her and we’d both stay to protect her. The plus side is...a wolf knows she’s not his mate when the uncontrollable need for her dissipates. The instinct to protect her stays and that’s really all that matters until her true mate, her noble, finds her.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately. How could I not? 

My wolf is getting stronger by the day. Even tonight, I could feel him prying at my skin to shift. I already shifted this morning during training and sparring is usually enough. But tonight I could almost feel him begging me to let him out. I want to, but not without a release. I wasn’t going to spar with someone this late. Not when he’s feeling this aggressive. I’m not going to intentionally set someone up to be hurt. Not while feeling out of control. He’ll have to calm down...as much I felt the need for a release myself. 

He is my soul. At least that’s what he feels like to me. And he was begging me. Growling so high that I couldn’t concentrate to read.

“No!” I growled back at him as the sound settled to a whimper.

I’m not an asshole. I just don’t think he’s in control right now. I think I’d be halfway across the continent before I ever slowed him down. I’m inexperienced. I may be proud at times but I’m not stupid. 

So, I wasn’t going to shift until morning. 

God help me. I’ll probably never sleep tonight.

Sitting at a large oak table, holding a delicately aged journal in my hands, I shook my head with my eyes closed. I took several deep breaths…trying to calm us both down.

There was so much to still study. To learn. Something we missed.

This couldn’t be what life was supposed to be like for me. Forever. For future generations. I couldn’t just sit here, day after day, and do nothing. Dad was generous enough to put these studies into my schedule. He knew deep down that no one would put more time or energy into this. So when I pleaded my case, this became part of my duties.

I was drawn to these books. I knew it had become quite obsessive. I couldn’t help but be tormented wondering if fate had me here. Studying. The pull was strong for sure. I wanted to believe my purpose was to find an answer. It had bothered me for years that no one else seemed to see this need the way that I did. 

My fingers subconsciously rubbed the inside of one of the pages as I read, “What made these attacks different? How did they get to so many packs without us knowing? As news spread, it was clear that they were aiming to annihilate the strongest species first. The wolves. The vampires would clearly be next. Then the witches. 

“As the wolves began to retaliate, they had to regroup but their numbers were dropping by the day.” I continued to read that many years ago when I was a child, a wolf who claimed to be a noble, traveled from across the seas and said he was tracking the scent of a nearby fem. He spoke of horrors that plagued their packs. Attacks from everywhere.

“The rantings of a lunatic.” The books read. His stories were not of a sane wolf. “It had to be the result of a curse. He must have wronged a witch.” Nothing existed that he spoke about. No one knew that it was the scourges. So, as with most intruders, he was chased to the farthest corners of the country…far away from our packs.

“We drove him away and drove away the only warning that “they” were coming.” Those words hung there ominously on the page.

Usually, pack links are only permitted within your own pack. But Alpha and Lunas can link if the other pack allows it. So what happened? Was there just no time to warn others? Did no one open the link? Entire packs perished because they had no idea of the evil that was raging a war all around them. Destroying so many brothers and sisters.

Now, I want to believe it is a myth, but it’s been said that the scourges drained the fems of their blood before they were killed. The betas and deltas were slaughtered quickly, but the fems were killed slowly. And for what?