Capturing the Alpha (Shifters of Nunavut Book 1) (10 page)

“We can fence in that region over there, and then build a barn—”

“Where the fuck are we going to get the wood for that, Dax?” Tallow said, cutting the male off for the sixth time. She spun in a circle, waving her arms at the open tundra. “Wait, let me guess, you’re going to grow a forest first, then cut the trees down, then build the barn,
and then
domesticate a herd of muskoxen.”

Dax gave Zane a desperate look, his big eyes pleading. Like most of the wolves, he had no idea how to manage Tallow. Half the time, Zane didn’t know either.

“Let him finish, Tallow,” Zane said, patting her on the top of the head. She made a face at him, but quieted down.

It seemed like he spent almost every day stuck between two or more of his wolves, mediating one discussion or another. He wouldn’t mind it so much, if it left him with any time to do the things that he enjoyed, hunting in particular. But all too often, the morning hunt left without him, while he lagged behind listening to proposals and bickering.

The sun was still to the east, but creeping ever closer to the center of the sky as Zane stood on a melting snow dune, staring out over a valley of dark rock, which held the beginnings of mossy vegetation.

“There are forests to the south,” Dax said, his eyes on Zane as he spoke. “It would be an endeavor, I know, but we can bring the wood up, and in the long term, it will be worth it. We could have milk and cheese. Maybe we could even use the manure to fertilize crops. I have some ideas on how we could grow them inside of the barn.”

Zane waited for Dax to finish, and then gave him an approving look. “It is a very good idea, but there are some things you’re not considering. Least of which is that I don’t believe the muskoxen will ever be at ease around us. They can sense what we are, and it would be very difficult to domesticate them. The other issue is that if we begin building structures around the area, we could draw unwanted attention to ourselves.”

Dax’s idea to domesticate muskoxen had been brought to Zane on many occasions, usually by shifters who’d spent a decent portion of their lives among humans and were eager to bring human ingenuity to the pack. He was accustomed to turning down the proposal, though he never enjoyed doing it.

“We may as well start building houses,” Tallow said, unable to hold her tongue. “And while we’re at it, we can put up a neon sign that says SHIFTERTOWN in big, flashing letters. And beneath that, it’ll say…”

Zane would have reprimanded her, but the wind shifted and a faint scent seized his attention. His mouth began to salivate, and he walked away from the arguing pair, his nose guiding his feet along the scent trail.

On the opposite side of the dune, he could see three figures in the distance, heading towards the inlet. Another sniff of the air had him scowling, and he was following after them before he could think better of it.

It was a long run, even in his wolf form, but he managed to catch up to them as they reached the docks. Boaz was in one of the boats, holding his stomach and laughing hard enough for tears to spring from the corners of his eyes. Kuva stood by the boat, casting a concerned look at Ginnifer, who stood with her hands clenched into fists and a sour look on her face.

“I knew you wouldn’t do it,” Boaz said. “You owe me fifty bucks.”

“I never said I wasn’t gonna do it,” she shot back. “All I asked was if he thought the boat would hold all three of us.”

His laughter dying down, Boaz said, “You’re shaking like a leaf. Just wait here and I’ll get the shots—”

“I’m shaking because it’s like, negative ten degrees out here.”

Zane shifted back into his human form as he approached, but none of them, not even Kuva, noticed him right away. It pissed him off to think that he could get so close to Ginnifer without the beta male noticing.

“Let me help you,” Kuva said, putting his hands on Ginnifer’s hips. He tried to lift her up, but she let out a whimpering cry and wriggled from his grasp. Boaz broke into another fit of laughter.

“Fifty bucks,” he taunted. “And not that Canadian Monopoly money, either.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Zane asked, stalking over to the end of the dock.

Kuva looked up, startled, and Boaz went pale in the face. Ginnifer looked surprised, but however angry Zane might have appeared, it didn’t seem to faze her as much as it should have.

“We’re working,” she explained, motioning towards the boat. “Kuva offered to show us how he catches fish.”

Zane folded his arms across his chest. “You can film that from the shore.”

Her face tightened. “I’m getting on the damn boat. Why does everyone think I won’t get on the boat?”

It took Zane a second to realize that they were having two different arguments. Eyes narrowing, he said, “No, you’re not getting on that boat. You’re not going anywhere but back to the den.”

Her anger gave way to confusion. “What? Why?”

Zane was so accustomed to being obeyed, that her questions gave him pause. He knew why he didn’t want her on the boat. It wasn’t safe, and more to the point, he didn’t want her going anywhere with Kuva. Just seeing the other male put his hands on her made Zane’s teeth gnash together.

He made his voice hard. “You made us walk halfway across the island because you saw a whale, and now you’re jumping back into a boat to take pictures of catching fish? Get back to the den and let Kuva do his job without you slowing him down.”

Zane turned and walked away, the hurt look on her face making him angrier with himself than he was with Kuva.

***

“What do you think is up with him?” Boaz asked. He kept his voice low and looked over his shoulder to make sure the alpha wasn’t nearby.

The trek back to the den was almost a half hour, and Ginnifer’s legs were tired. They’d been walking for ten minutes before anyone said anything, but her mind had been buzzing. She’d seen him speak firmly to his pack members before, but never really to her, and that had been plain mean. It had taken her aback so much that she wasn’t even angry, just upset and wondering what she’d done to make him talk to her like that.

“Maybe he’s having a bad day,” she offered.

Kuva said, “He has not been himself since Indigo ran away. I believe it was difficult for him to miss the mating thrall.”

“The what?” Boaz asked.

Ginnifer knew a little about what Kuva was referring to. The mating thrall, or frenzy, as it was referred to in some literature, was the precursor to mating, when a male shifter laid claim on a fertile female. It was supposedly an intense, hormone-fueled experience, with generally resulted in conception, which solidified the bond between mates.

In simpler terms, Kuva explained as much, and then added, “Indigo left the same day Coral was becoming fertile. Zane did not stay to mate with her, not even once. Perhaps if he did, he would not be so…”

Kuva trailed off, seeming not to want to speak poorly of his alpha.

“Dick-ish?” Boaz offered.

Ginnifer chewed on this information as they walked. From what Zane had told her before, she had a feeling that he might have left as much for his own sake as for his sister’s.

“When will it happen again?” Ginnifer asked.

Kuva shrugged. “Another month or two? Our kind is not fertile every month, not like humans.”

He put a hand on Ginnifer’s back, and she inwardly sighed. “I think we can make it back from here,” Ginnifer told him. “Why don’t you go fishing? Maybe I’ll be able to convince his holiness to at least let Boaz join you tomorrow.”

She was relieved when he left, and she and Boaz fell into easy conversation as they headed in the direction of the spire. While Boaz was telling her about an interesting piece of footage he caught, she noticed something. Right at the juncture, where his neck met his shoulder, were two puncture marks.

“Did…did Tallow do that?” she asked.

His hand went to his neck, but unlike Ginnifer’s reaction when he’d noticed her mark, he stroked the area gently, a warm smile spreading over his lips.

“She gets a little overzealous sometimes.”

“Didn’t it hurt?”

His cheeks reddened. “A little, I guess. To be honest, I didn’t really notice at the time.”

“Are you two…”

“It’s personal.”

The sense of hurt she’d already gotten from Zane only deepened as Boaz shut her out. There was something else there too, a more insidious feeling that she didn’t quite know what to make of.

“You seem to have a lot of personal things going on lately,” she muttered. “I hope you haven’t forgotten what we’re supposed to be doing here.”

She recognized how hypocritical that was, and felt guilty when he apologized to her.

Boaz said, “It’s just…women, they never look at me the way she does. With everyone else, I’m always marginalized, but with her…”

“Boaz, you don’t mean that,” Ginnifer said, shaking her head. “What about me? You and I, we’ve always been best friends.”

“I know I’m your best friend,” he said. “But I’m also a man. And Tallow, she sees that.”

“So, Indigo, do you want to show us what you’re doing?”

Ginnifer tried looking over her shoulder, but Indigo put her hand on Ginnifer’s face and pushed her back.

“Stop crowding me,” she said, eyes focused on her task.

From what Ginnifer could see, she was using a pair of tweezers and the tip of a rattail comb to gingerly prod at wires on some sort of circuit board.

“Do you want to
tell
us what you’re doing?” Boaz asked hopefully.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

It was the third time in the past four days that they’d come to Indigo’s room to try and interview her again. Getting even the smallest bit of information from her was like pulling teeth, and somehow she seemed to always redirect the conversation from herself. Ginnifer thought she secretly enjoyed the company, almost as much as she enjoyed annoying them.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Indigo put the comb down and reached over to the table beside her bed. She picked up a folded piece of notebook paper and handed it to Ginnifer. “I heard you were going to Port Trent with Marl and Zo. Pick those things up for me.”

Ginnifer unfolded the paper and scanned the list, which filled the page on two columns, including everything from shampoo to industrial strength batteries.

“Where am I supposed to get all of these things?” she asked.
And furthermore, how am I going to carry all of it?

Indigo bent to reach under her bed. She pulled out a shoebox, and when she opened it, Boaz made a strangled noise. There were stacks of Canadian money, without a single small denomination to be seen. Indigo grabbed a wad of fifties and tossed it at Ginnifer.

“It’s all easy to find, trust me. Make sure you bring back my change,” she said, before resuming her project.

Ginnifer glanced at the list again, then put back half of the money, and then half of what she had remaining.

“I think this will be enough,” she said slowly. “Um, Indigo?”

“Hm?”

“Where’d you get all that money?”

Indigo glanced up, her expression blank. “My mom left it for me.”

“Was she rich?” Boaz asked from his perch behind the camera.

“She was a bank robber.”

Ginnifer and Boaz stared at her, until Indigo shook her head, grinning. “You two can be so gullible. If you want to know about my mom, you should ask anyone but me. She died when I was seven. I barely remember her.”

“My grandfather died when I was six,” Ginnifer said. “And I remember him pretty well.”

“Good for you,” Indigo muttered.

And uncomfortable silence fell over the room, the only sound being the scrap of metal on metal as Indigo worked. Ginnifer studied her face, wondering what parts of her came from her mother. She looked so much like Zane, from the shape of her Cupid’s bow lips to the way her dark brown hair always wanted to fall to one side. The only real difference Ginnifer had noticed were her freckles, which she usually kept hidden under makeup.

When she’d first met Indigo, Ginnifer had taken her tendency to be brash for teenage petulance, but now she was starting to see that it was simply one aspect of Indigo’s multifaceted personality. In that regard, she was the complete opposite of her brother, who always seemed to choose his words carefully.

Except for the other day
, she thought.
Unless his goal was to humiliate me, in which case, he was spot on.

She hadn’t thought much about Zane in the past few days, except during mealtimes, when she sometimes caught sight of him in the common room. Or at night, when she closed her eyes and it seemed as though he were tattooed on the backs of her eyelids. And then there were her dreams, which had gotten so graphic that Breeze had taken to waking her by sprinkling cold water on her head.

“My mom died of cancer,” Indigo said, not looking up from what she was doing. “The doctors only gave her a few months to live, five or six, I think. When she met my father, she stopped thinking about dying and started living. She fell in love. She lived for eight years after that, but she was always sick. That’s how I remember her, being sick. Smelling like death and decay. And then when she died, she took my father with him. He just…checked out. Like it didn’t even matter to him that he still had a pack, or Zane, or…whatever.”

“And Zane raised you?” Ginnifer’s voice was barely a whisper, as though she were afraid she was going to spook Indigo into clamming back up.

“He took care of all of us,” she said. “He was my age at the time. I still don’t know how he did it, but he did. And he’s done a way better job than my father ever did.”

Ginnifer looked over to make sure that Boaz was recording, her heart thumping in her chest. Indigo wasn’t exactly baring her soul, but this was more than she’d ever opened up to them before.

“It must have been—”

Ginnifer was cut off by a shrill cry from the hallway.

“In-di-go!”

Indigo’s back straightened and her head whipped towards the door. “Don’t you dare come in my room!”

From the hallway, the voice came closer. “Where are my tweezers?”

Indigo stuffed the tweezers under her pillow, just as the pelts in her doorway were yanked back. A young woman stepped in, her pale blonde hair tied up in a big bun on the top of her head. She wore a dress of soft leather, and draped over her shoulders was a large pelt of white with gold overtones.

“You can’t barge in here whenever you want,” Indigo said hotly.

The blonde female wasn’t paying any attention to Indigo. Her mismatched eyes were on Ginnifer, staring at her with open hostility.

“What is
she
doing here?”

Ginnifer wouldn’t have to guess twice to know whom she was staring at. Coral was Tallow’s cousin, and the resemblance between them was striking, though Coral was a good six inches shorter, and had a more petite frame.

From what she’d heard of Coral, she’d pictured her as looking much younger, but in actuality, with her full chest, wide hips, and elegant bone structure, she appeared more mature than the slightly older Indigo.

“I’m doing an interview,” Indigo said, getting up off her bed. “And you’re interrupting.”

Boaz came out from behind her camera, extending his hand to Coral. “Hi. I can’t believe we haven’t met yet. I’m Boaz, I’m friends with Tallow.” When she didn’t take his hand, he awkwardly pulled it back. “So, you’re Zane’s mate, right. I thought you’d be taller. I think we’re almost the same height.”

Coral silenced him with a scathing look, and then turned to Ginnifer again. “That’s right, I
am
Zane’s mate.”

Were she still a teenage girl, Ginnifer might have cowered under that stare. But while it was definitely uncomfortable to be the object of Coral scorn, especially when she deserved it, Ginnifer recognized Coral’s display for what it was: she was insecure.

“I know,” Ginnifer said gently. “And you have nothing to worry about.”

It was the most she was willing to say with Boaz in the room, but she hoped that later, she could take Coral aside and offer her some sort of apology and reassurance. She could explain that she had been the one to make a move on Zane, and that she hadn’t known that he was promised to someone else at the time.

Coral blanched, her mouth hanging open, before she said, “So you know, if a wolf has claim on a mate and another one wants to challenge that claim, they fight. You should know, I am a good fighter.”

Ginnifer blinked as Coral began looking younger by the second.

Indigo said, “Oh, please. You couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag.”

“Stay out of this,” Coral bit out.

“Don’t order me around,” Indigo said. She went toe to toe with Coral, until the smaller female had to look up at her. Then, Indigo began to backing her towards the door. “Now, get the hell out of my room and stay out, or I’ll tell my brother that you’ve been flirting with Roch.”

“Like he’ll care,” Coral hissed, as she was pushed from the room.

She stood outside for a few minutes, ranting about her tweezers, but made no effort to come back in. Indigo stood with her back to the door, arms crossed beneath her small breasts. When Coral finally stormed off, Indigo seemed to deflate. She made her way over to the bed, collapsing onto it face first.

Once Ginnifer had processed the encounter herself, she went over to the bed and sat beside Indigo. Indigo turned to look up at her, but said nothing.

“Zane told me the two of you used to be friends,” Ginnifer said.

“Yeah, when we were kids. Before she got it into her head that she’s somehow better than me, all because she thinks she’s going to be my brother’s mate.”

Boaz said, “I thought they already were mates.”

“They aren’t yet,” Indigo said. “And they won’t be, if I have anything to do with it.”

“Is that why you ran away?” Ginnifer asked. “Because you knew Zane would come after you instead of mating with Coral?”

Indigo turned away, so that Ginnifer couldn’t see her face. While she spoke, Ginnifer waved Boaz from the room, and he took his camera with him.

“I figured I would either stop them from mating, or I’d be long gone by the time it happened. Either way, I wouldn’t have to be around here to see…” Indigo paused, and when she spoke again, there was a vulnerability to her voice that had Ginnifer reaching out to place a hand on her back.

“I’m half human. I might be able to take a mate one day, have pups of my own, but chances are, I’ll be like the rest of them. It’s not what I want though. I want a mate, and a family of my own, more than anything, and…I wasn’t going to stay here and watch Coral have everything I’ve always wanted.”

Ginnifer climbed in beside Indigo and put her arm around her. Indigo didn’t reciprocate, but she didn’t pull away either.

“Don’t tell my brother I told you any of this.”

“Of course not.”