Owned by the Alphas Universe: The First Wolf
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Jen Cooper
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The Wolf
Book 1: The First Wolf
GALEN
My breath misted in front of my face in the darkening night. I cupped my hands over my mouth and blew, trying to warm them inside my gloves, but it barely helped. My fingers were frozen, aching in the cold.
It hadn’t been this cold in a long time, and everyone knew what it meant. The villagers were already preparing, more tense than usual with the whispers going around.
There was to be a birth. In winter. I sometimes heard the mother’s cries from all the way out on my farm.
She begged for mercy from the realm, begged her body to wait. But our realm didn’t work that way. We all knew that.
I stood on my porch, lit by lanterns that the icy wind tried to blow out. The sheep were still in the paddock, but I needed to move them in before the snow came.
It wouldn’t be long now.
The frost this morning had only been a warning. One I planned to heed.
I stepped off the porch, heading to the paddock. I had a thick coat on, my boots insulated with fur, and the cold still bit into my skin.
I pulled my scarf up over my mouth, squinting against the harsh wind that yanked back the soft spikes of my dark brown hair.
I yanked my hood up and looked down at my boots against the frozen ground as I made my way to the paddock.
I spent the next hour getting the sheep into the barn. I didn’t normally put them in there, but something told me this winter was going to take a toll on everyone. Including the animals.
Putting them in the barn was all I could do to help. I gave them hay and locked the windows tight.
Which is when I saw a pool of red outside. My stomach sank, my skin prickling as I went out to check what it was.
I knelt to the ground, one knee on the packed dirt next to the small puddle. It was definitely blood. I narrowed my eyes, checking around me.
I had counted the sheep as they went in. I hadn’t been missing one then, but I hadn’t counted again on my way out.
The wind howled around me as I squinted into the dark. I grabbed one of the torches from the side of the barn, locked the door, then followed the spots of blood.
My breath still misted, my hand shaking with the torch. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find, but I knew it was bleeding, and that was enough to make me nervous.
I followed the trail around the paddock, along the path I took into the woods when I needed firewood.
I glanced up at the small hill that crested between my farm and the forest, pausing mid-step when I saw what was there.
A wolf.
A gray-and-white wolf with blood covering its snout, one of my sheep dangling from her jaw.
I pursed my lips and glared at the wolf. It was a female; that was easy to tell from the swollen teats.
She had given birth recently.
A pang of empathy hit me. It was getting colder, the wildlife scarcer as they huddled away for the winter.
She was hungry, and so was her family. But my sheep were what fed the village, especially in winter.
And if I did nothing, she’d come back for more. So I met her yellow eyes that looked almost neon in the dark. I shook my head slowly at her so she understood I didn’t appreciate what she had done.
She whined, then bowed her head lower.
I frowned. Bowing her head was a submissive gesture, and yet she wasn’t backing down.
It made no sense.
She whined one more time, then turned and took off over the hill.
I huffed, my breath warm against the scarf. Then my feet were moving to follow her before I had even decided to in my head.
Something was wrong. I wasn’t sure how I knew that, but I did.
Wolves around here were territorial; they didn’t come near humans, preferring the secluded mountains. This one was desperate, and something in my soul told me I had to figure out why.
I raced after her, picking up my axe from the kindling chopping-block at the mouth of the forest. I tracked the wolf’s footsteps and my sheep’s drops of blood deep into the forest, the night getting darker as I did.
The flame of my torch lit my way, but it wavered, threatening to go out more than once.
My body ached and felt frozen, my eyes stinging from the wind.
I almost gave up a few times, but every time I thought about it, the wolf turned.
It was as if she was checking to make sure I was still following. She bowed her head each time, still on the defensive, not the attack.
“What’s going on, girl?” I asked into the wind, but she just whined and padded faster through the forest. She didn’t even seem to care that I had an axe.
I had come across wandering wolves before, and they had always cared if I carried a weapon or not. But not her.
So, I kept following her, deeper and deeper, until the wolf came to a stop. I inched forward through the trees, holding the torch up to see through the dark.
The wolf had stopped at a large pile of rocks and dirt, stacked at the mouth of a cave in the side of a jagged mountain. It didn’t look stable at all, but the wolf stayed close to it.
She turned to me, dropped the dead sheep, and yapped.
I frowned and eyed the stacked debris, not sure what she wanted until I heard the tiny whimper coming from behind it.
My heart stopped for a moment, my breath hitching.
Another whine carried past me on the wind.
I stepped forward. That whine wasn’t coming from the wolf in front of me.
I knew what that meant, and my stomach turned.
The wolf stopped eyeing me and picked up the sheep in her teeth. She tore a piece off, then began digging through a part of the dirt and pushed the piece of meat through the tiny hole she had made.
Faster and faster she worked, shoving the pieces of sheep meat through before the hole she made could be swallowed again by the debris.
She looked back at me and whined.
I pulled my scarf down. “What’s behind there, girl? Your family?” I said, daring to take more steps.
She yapped at me, her eyes flicking to the axe.
I lowered it to the ground, moving slowly so she knew I wasn’t going to do anything to her.
All thoughts of teaching her not to come to my farm went out the window, because this wolf needed me.
Her eyes were open and expressive in a way no wolf I’d ever known was. They were usually guarded and aggressive, but she was in survival mode.
There was a small yapping from the other side of the debris that turned into a whine, and I knew it was more than survival. This wolf was in mother mode.
“Your pup is there?” I asked.
The wolf barked at me, and I assumed that was a yes.
So I went forward, trusting the wolf enough not to attack as I checked over the stack of debris.
I ran my torch over it, hoping there was some easy way to get it out of the way without collapsing the side of the mountain into the cave.
I pulled back. This was not going to be easy. Any piece could be the wrong piece to move.
My tentative trust with the wolf could be destroyed if I was the reason the whole thing collapsed.
I turned to her, about to talk to her like she could understand me, when a small white puff fell on my hand, soaking into my skin. It was ice-cold, and my eyes fluttered closed at the timing.
Snow.
It had come.
Winter had chosen this moment to arrive, and if I cursed, I would have some choice words for the realm.
I opened my eyes, and the snow was falling fast around us, blowing in a flurry with the wind, settling on the ground. I shivered as it soaked into my coat bit by bit.
The temperature had already dropped considerably, and I knew it would only get colder.
I glanced back through the forest. I was deep in it, farther than I would have dared travel without incentive this close to winter.
It was going to take me substantial time to get back home. All the time I had to spare, I assumed.
My heart churned faster, my pulse thickening in my head as I faced my options.
If I left the wolf and her pup, they would be dead by morning, but I would get back in time before the exposure could take me.
If I stayed and got the pup out, I would be stuck out here in the snow when it hit the freezing temperatures that killed half our village every winter. I would be another casualty of the snow.
But could I go back to my small cabin, sit in front of my fireplace, hear the crackling of the wood bring me heat while the snow fell on the window outside—knowing I had just condemned a mother and her child to death?
