Maris followed her aunt as the stern older woman weaved expertly through the crowd. Her sense of unease grew as they went deeper into the campground. The noise set her teeth on edge but she bit back a sigh and tried her best to keep her expression neutral, even if she knew it wouldn’t be hard for any of the other shifters to smell the distress on her.

One of the things she hated most about being a wolf: you couldn’t keep a thing to yourself. Your scent gave you away, even if your expressions and gestures didn’t.

They’d sent Aunt Nika to pick her up at the airport, a job nobody else wanted because of the stench of oil and metal but also because the elders of her clan who hadn’t forgotten her didn’t like her all that much. Aunt Nika was in that awkward place of older beta females, past her childbearing age but still driven by her designation to be useful to the clan somehow.

Non-alpha females of the Cliffwater Clan had a few very specific jobs, the top three being bearing pups, catering to the males, and keeping hearth and home. Maris supposed that fetching her from the airport fell under the fourth, doing the dirty jobs they didn’t want to do.

“Almost there,” Aunt Nika said over her shoulder. Maris heard the faint buzz of irritation under her aunt’s tone, and she wracked her brain trying to remember why before the elusive point of protocol came to her. You could generally tell how important a clan was, in terms of status and genealogical descent from the All-Mother and all-around power, based on their position in the camp. And the wolves of Cliffwater Clan were a relatively fair distance from the center of the encampment, where the tents of the Fireheart Clan were.

Considering they were there to pay homage to the new Fireheart alpha as he assumed the role of shifter king, their position on the fringes was something to be irritated about.

If you cared for shifter politics, of course.

Maris didn’t.

She had been away for so long, immersed in the human world with its completely different concerns, and had been around others of her kind so rarely, that the scents, sights, and sounds threatened to overwhelm her. She stumbled into her aunt’s back when Nika stopped suddenly, and the woman growled a little under her breath.

Maris flinched.

“Stupid, broken omega,” Nika muttered. “Watch where you’re going. We’re here.”

Maris sighed, sensing that Nika was going to abandon her now that she’d fulfilled her mission and brought Maris to the Cliffwater campsite. She figured she might as well say her piece before she lost the attention of the only person likely to talk to her all week.

“If you didn’t want me here, you shouldn’t have reached out. It’s been years. I could have stayed gone.”

“Wouldn’t have been proper,” the older woman said stubbornly. “You’re family, for all that you…”

She trailed off and shook her head.

“It’s fine. I can take it from here,” Maris said, hating the coaxing lilt to her voice. But it was what it was. She was what she was. An omega, born to serve and submit.

She liked it better among the humans, where she could pick and choose who she submitted to and where she wasn’t obligated to serve anyone.

Maris carried precious little in the way of baggage, just a backpack full of the essentials, and she made for it with the intent to stow it in the tent Nika indicated was for her use. She was sharing it with one of the younger wolves, an omega girl young enough she hadn’t even experienced her first heat.

Maris knew she could take the roommate assignment as an insult. She was in her twenties, a full-grown wolf despite being broken… she ought to have bunked with one of the other unmated omega.

But really, unmated omegas who had come into their heat were unbearably full of themselves, constantly preening, and spiteful as harpies. She should be grateful.

“Hey Amie,” she said as she pushed aside the tent flap and saw the young girl lounging on her sleeping bag.

“Hey,” Amie said. She didn’t lift her eyes from her cell phone.

Maris began unrolling her own sleeping bag, watching Amie out of the corner of her eye.

“Surprised that thing still works,” she offered after a minute.

“Less magical interference out here on the fringes of the camp. Still kind of hard to watch YouTube videos, though.”

Maris smiled. She hadn’t been around teenage shifters since she was a teenager herself, so she was glad to see that so little had changed.

“Well, we are up in the mountains,” she pointed out.

Amie looked up, finally, and stared at Maris.

“Hey,” she said slowly, “aren’t you…”

“Yep,” Maris said cheerfully, figuring that she could guess what Amie had left unspoken.

Hey, aren’t you the black sheep of the family? Hey, aren’t you the girl who left the clan to live among the humans? Hey, aren’t you the broken omega, the one who had never come into heat long past puberty?

“And you’re little Amie,” she continued, “though obviously not so little anymore. I haven’t seen you since you were still wearing pigtails.”

Amie scrambled to sit up, watching her avidly. She seemed to be taking in every aspect of Maris’s appearance, from her hair to her clothes.

“Wow,” she said finally. “Did you fly on an airplane to get here?”

Maris nodded, biting back a smile.

“You have to tell me everything. What it’s like living among humans. If you ever come across any other runaways. Do you…” She waved her hand, a little embarrassed, but pushed on anyway, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Do you ever, you know… mate with any humans?”

The urge to smile dissipated.

“Well,” Maris said carefully, “humans don’t really talk about, er, mating so openly. Not to say that they aren’t as obsessed with it as shifters are… but, you know, it’s just… different.” She frowned a little. “They’re not as enslaved to their biology, I guess. Anyway, I can think of any number of clan elders who’d be very upset with me for talking about humans with you. Why don’t you tell me what’s new with the clan? What’s the new Fireheart alpha like? Did they ever figure out what happened to the old alpha?”

Amie didn’t look pleased with the change of topic, but she went along with it.

“The Fireheart alpha is really hot,” she confessed. “Rumor is that the coronation is gonna be delayed because he’s knotting some omega or other. Imagine, letting an omega just walk around the camp like this so close to her heat!”

“Yeah, imagine,” Maris echoed.

Amie was too young to remember all the drama that had unfolded over the years regarding Maris’s—well, her brokenness. And Sara, Amie’s mother and Maris’s cousin, had always been kind to her. Probably more likely than others, at least, to remember the runaway omega kindly.

So Maris could ignore the little pang in her heart at Amie’s words. She would never be an object of derision for running around the camp so close to her heat, because she had never had one.

But she was okay with that. It had let her escape the biological imperative that other omegas were enslaved to, and it had allowed her to leave her clan and have a real career, be seen as a real person.

Nodding to herself, Maris sat up straighter.

“Well, good for the Fireheart alpha,” she said decisively. “It’ll mean a more stable reign for him overall, being mated so soon, not being chased by omegas put up to it by their clan elders…”

“Yeah,” Amie said dismissively. “Unless whoever that omega is was put up to it by her clan elders. Getting to him early is a brilliant tactic… and I heard that she’s from a clan almost as unimportant as us!”

Maris laughed a little. “You call it like you see it, little one,” she said.

Amie preened a little under the compliment, and then she blinked, gobsmacked.

“I haven’t even told you the best news yet!”

Humoring her, Maris scooted a little closer. “Go on, then.”

Amie ducked her head, and lowered her voice. “There’s…” She blinked rapidly, and started over again. “There’s a female alpha.”

Maris frowned a little. She didn’t want to hurt Amie’s feelings, but…

“There are some female alphas,” she pointed out gently. “Our clan hasn’t produced any in a while, but it’s common in some clans…”

Amie shook her head.

“No, no,” she said, and then blushed deeply. “A female alpha who can… knot.”

“Who can…” Maris trailed off, frown deepening as she considered. “Who can knot?”

She had to take a few more seconds to process it. All the while, Amie nodded vigorously, relieved that she didn’t have to go into further detail. Talking about such things must be extremely embarrassing for a young teenage girl who hadn’t had her first heat. Maris remembered her own embarrassment as she saw her friends and family members coddling the young girls who had come into their first heat and were, on the one hand, deeply embarrassed and distressed by all the changes and urges they didn’t understand and, on the other hand, so painfully in need of something they had been raised by primness not to talk about openly.

And Cliffwater omega girls were raised to be prim, she thought grimly.

Not that it helped them in the end; it only hurt them as they ended up caught between their biological urges and their lowly place of servitude in the clan.

“She doesn’t have a mate yet,” Amie said, growing more confident the less prurient the conversation became. “I’ve heard all about that part, at least. She’s not even a wolf. She’s a lioness from the Proudheart clan—they’ve got a lot of status,” she added. “Generals to the old Fireheart alpha. Might be that Zehr, the new Fireheart alpha, will rely on her in the same way his father relied on hers.”

Maris nodded slowly.

“So she’s a lioness alpha, and she can knot,” she said quietly. “That makes her, what? A lesbian?”

“We don’t use such words,” Amie said airily, waving her hand in dismissal. Then she giggled. “But I think it’s terribly cosmopolitan, don’t you? The humans have such a sophisticated way of looking at things like that.”

“Not really,” Maris said. “There’s more acceptance now, but people are slow to change, whether shifter or not.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’m so going to get in trouble for talking with you about this.”

“You’re the only person who’s honest and frank with me,” Amie said, “and I think it’s sad because I’ve only just properly met you. Promise when you leave after the ceremony you’ll stay in touch? Maybe even help me get out of here before I become bonded to some idiot alpha who’ll keep me on my hands and knees and never let me do anything more?”

Maris’s gaze softened. Amie sounded a lot like her at that age. She thought that the shifter elders would have a lot to contend with as this younger generation came of age, wanting more than what biology dictated and seeing the relative freedom of human women.

“Promise,” she said softly. “But don’t think the grass is greener. It’s not like humans don’t have a complex about sex. It’s just not…” She waved her hand vaguely.

“Yeah, yeah,” Amie said, mouth twisting. She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment, then stood. “I’m going to find my mom and ask her if we can go walking around. I mean, it should be alright, right? Neither of us…you know.” She waved her hand vaguely. “Sorry, but it’s true.”

“Yeah, should be fine,” Maris said after a moment, getting Amie’s drift. Amie was a little too young to be worrying about going about as an unmated omega, and Maris was, well… broken. “It’s totally true.” She huffed a little and got to her feet. “I’m going to find something to drink. I’m a little hot.”

“Okay. Meet you back here.” Amie got to her knees and pushed open the tent flap, holding it for Maris after she had exited.

They went their separate ways into the Cliffwater camp, Amie to find her mom and Maris to find refreshment.

She followed her nose toward the smell of grilling meat, and sure enough, found several coolers full of iced drinks. Bypassing the drinks entirely, she scooped up a chunk of ice and held it to the side of her neck. She’d apparently gotten soft after living among the humans and their reliance on air conditioning, because she just was not up to traipsing around in the wilderness anymore.

She slid the ice cube around to the nape of her neck, where it dripped down the back of her blouse. If her coworkers at the office could see her now, hair frizzed out thanks to the humidity, free of lipstick and flushed from the temperature…

“Maris? That you?”

She looked up, withdrawing the ice cube so quickly it slipped from her hand and fell to the grass. She met the eyes of the owner of that rumbly voice, seeing Brick, one of the guys she’d grown up with. He was eyeing her with some amount of surprise, which nevertheless involved more head-to-toe perusal than she was really comfortable with.

Now there was something human and shifter men had in common: feeling like they had a right to you.

“Yep,” she said, eyeing him right back. “It’s me. Back again.”

“Not for too long, though,” he hazarded. “You sure look different.”

“I’m not seventeen anymore,” she reminded him.

“You sure aren’t.”

She didn’t like the insinuating tone of his voice, and let him know it with a glare.

“You look full-grown to me,” he said appraisingly. “I mean, except…” He sniffed delicately. “You smell…”

“Unbonded? Yep. You know me, broken old Maris,” she said.

“No, you smell...kinda good,” he said, stepping closer.

She stepped backward just as quickly.

“I hope I also smell uninterested,” she said tautly.

His brows lowered, face looking like a thunderstorm brewing.

“You always were an uppity little bitch,” he said almost conversationally. “You never knew your place, probably owing to you being broken and all. Omegas are supposed to roll over and show us alphas their bellies, you know… Bet you give it up real sweet to all those humans you live among, but I’m doubtin’ you know what a real cock feels like. I can show you. Offered back then, and offer still stands now. Maybe having a knot in that cold cunt of yours will jumpstart your little omega self and you’ll be exactly what you were supposed to be.”

The bile in the back of her throat and the sting of unshed tears in her eyes were familiar sensations. It had felt surreal for Maris to be back here, among her own kind, until now.

Until Brick came out and said what everyone else has probably been thinking as soon as they’d seen her.

The rage and humiliation roiled ferociously within her, and she felt her top lip curl on a snarl as he invaded her personal space.

Most wolves didn’t even have a concept of personal space. It was a human thing, and a concept that Maris absolutely loved. He had no right to her personal space, and she gave that snarl a voice.

It wasn’t even a loud sound, but it hit him like a slap. He stared at her in bewilderment, then disgust, then some toxic mix of amusement and derision.

“You’re some kind of freak, huh?” he said loudly, drawing eyes toward them. “First there’s some alpha bitch says she’s got a knot. Then a fucked-up omega bitch growling at her betters. What’s this world coming to?”

He guffawed and stepped past her, his shoulder hitting hers hard enough to make her stumble back as he went off to join another group who’d witnessed the whole thing. Her face burned as she heard them, and the tears in her eyes, she knew, were tears of rage.

“Hey,” a soft voice said, and Amie stepped around her, laying a hand on her arm in concern. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”

She guided Maris out of the Cliffwater camp and on the fringes of the encampment proper, giving Maris a second to swipe angrily at her teartracks and take a long pull from the bottled water Amie handed her. She swished it around in her mouth and then spat it on the grass, as if to expel the foul presence of Brick and that awful scene entirely. Her second drink let her appreciate the coldness, and it calmed her racing pulse.

“Thanks,” she said quietly, and the younger girl nodded.

“You do smell distressed, though,” Amie said confidentially. “Maybe not distressed, more like… I don’t know. But it’s probably fine. You want to go find some food? There’s this group in the middle of camp with these awesome-looking kebabs and I really want to try one. Plus, maybe we can get a glimpse of somebody important.”

Maris had long ago learned that the more important a shifter was, the more likely they were to look on her in disdain. But to Amie gatherings like this were still fun, still a novelty, despite her typical teenage affectation of disdain, so she humored the young girl and went with her.

They were left mostly unbothered as they played tourists to the rest of the shifter encampment. It was easy to get lost, because the camp was just so big, and there was a smell of excitement and anticipation in the air—not the least because the new shifter king was said to be handsome, strong, and ready for a fight over whatever faction had murdered his father and precipitated his own early ascent to the throne.

There was tension, too—over that same murder, over various factions and politics Maris knew nothing about, over the rumors flying about the Fireheart alpha taking a nobody omega for a mate and making everyone wait for the ceremony.

Amie might have been more in touch with shifter matters than Maris, who had gone for many years with no contact whatsoever from her family, but that didn’t mean the pre-pubescent omega girl could point out anyone who was anyone. She did know the emblems of the major clans, though, and pointed them out to Maris while they passed back through the camp on the way back to the Cliffwater tents.

The closer they got, the more the air tasted of simmering tension.

“Something’s happening,” Maris whispered to Amie, drawing closer to the younger girl. She herself hadn’t assumed her shifter shape in several years, and the times she even thought about it she felt her wolf was so far distant in her mind that it might as well be unattainable, but she had taken a lot of self-defense classes over the years and she still had the strength of a shifter in her human form.

Then they passed within hearing distance of the shouting. The loudest voice was male and resolved itself into the deep tones of Brick. He was in the middle of a group of people, Cliffwater and others; neither Maris nor Amy was tall enough to see over the heads of the onlookers.

The scent in the air was sulfurous, full of anger and disdain, but even as Amie caught Maris’s arm and held on tightly, Maris tilted her head as she caught the scent of something strange.

Someone strange.

She licked her lips as if to sample the scent on the air, for all the good it did her. It was like dry heat, and sweet grass and sunbeams, and it left her wanting more, like a scent that made your mouth water for the lack of it against your tongue.

She felt hot all over, and wiped her brow with the hand not currently in the possession of a trembling Amie.

Brick’s voice could be heard over the seething crowd.

“I don’t know who the hell you think you are, you hellcat, marching into my camp uninvited—”

And then, much lower, in tones like a knife rasping against velvet—

“You asked for me, wolf. Demanded, in fact.”

Maris swallowed thickly.

It was an unfamiliar woman’s voice, and she didn’t sound the least bit afraid of Brick. In fact, Maris hadn’t ever heard a female shifter talk that way to a male shifter, not even an alpha female.

“I asked for Zehr,” he said, shouting now. “The king. If that’s what he is. If he hasn’t forgotten. Who does he think he is?”

“He knows who he is. The shifter king. And he will be obeyed. As will his generals, including myself, until someone comes along who believes he or she is more dominant. But I do not see such a shifter before me. I see only a rabble-rousing malcontent who wants to cause trouble to the shifter nation, and to our king. You will cease. He will take his mate. And he will be crowned on his own time. We serve him, you and I, and through him the All-Mother.”

There was a deadly pause.

“If you need a reminder, I will be happy to provide it.”

Maris couldn’t deny that she was riveted, just as much as the other shifters who stood in the circle around the arguing duo. There was something utterly un-omega-like inside her that rejoiced to hear Brick being given a setdown by that whiskey-sounding female voice. But there was something else, too…

She had been feeling a little off for the past few days and had chalked it up to nervousness and discomfort—the very opposite of the prodigal child returning home. Indeed, the child nobody wanted but had to accept for form’s sake. And then the tension and the sweating—well, she did spend a lot of her time among human, who loved their air conditioning. But now she couldn’t deny that something else was happening—at least in the tiny corner of her mind that was able to rationally observe herself and everything going on around her.

The rest of her was pushing forward through the crowd, and dragging poor Amie along as the younger omega maintained a death grip on her arm and whispered urgently, “What are you doing? Maris, come on!”

But she couldn’t stop. Feeling supercharged, she shouldered her way through the other shifters until she broke through to the center of the circle, her breath coming in ragged little gasps they sounded unnaturally loud to her own static-filled ears.

Her eyes skipped right over Brick, the very image of a huffing and puffing blowhard, to the tall, strong figure facing him down.

She was nearly six feet of hard muscle wrapped in the softest-looking dark brown skin Maris had ever seen. The woman’s hair, a jumble of coal-black and cherry-red braids, piled high over her forehead. Her nostrils were flared in what Maris’s hyperactive hindbrain knee instinctively was anger, although the rest of the woman’s demeanor was as cool as an early springtime rainshower.

The woman didn’t seem threatened at all, and Maris’s wolf, closer to the surface now than it had been since the last time she’d shifted ages ago, recognized why: Brick wasn’t the bigger predator here.

Maris was panting now.

Dimly she heard Amie’s urgent warnings to back away turn to alarmed questions for her well-being.

The dark woman, the alpha predator, had been in the midst of telling Brick to put up or shut up.

Then the wind shifted.

And blew Maris’s scent, which had been clinging tightly to her skin in the humid air, across the circle.

The crowd stilled for one long, breathless moment, and then everything happened all at once.

Amie, shoved to the side, yelped in pain and tried in vain to push her way back to her cousin. Many in the circle had mates and so they didn’t react blindly to the scent of an omega coming into her very first heat, but there were plenty of unmated alphas in the crowd, and the strange scent of an all-at-once heat emanating from a full-grown woman had them lunging toward the trembling, sweat-soaked figure.

But Brick got there first.

He growled long and low, steady rumbles that he directed at perceived rivals as he darted forward.Before Maris knew what was happening, she found herself bent halfway backward, Brick’s hand fisted in her hair as he tilted her back, taking a long whiff of her neck, nipping sharply at it. His face was half-buried in the crook of her shoulder but his eyes, mean-looking on a good day, stared malevolently at the others.

By the All-Mother… he was making a claim.

A dim sense of alarm spread through Maris at the realization. Disastrous first heat or not, she could not let herself end up bonded to Brick. She had a job and a life far from here, even if the haze overtaking her vision at the grip of his hand in her hair made seeing that, or anything else reasonable, nearly impossible.

“No,” she said, though it came out more like a moan. She struggled, too, but any onlooker might have mistaken her movements as finding an excuse to generate friction between her body and another’s.

But she couldn’t help it.

She was on fire.

“No,” she said, louder. “Not you.”

“She doesn’t want you, Brick,” Amie hollered. She hovered nearby, favoring one of her feet which had been stomped on during the initial rush; impossibly brave, a very young and unseasoned omega raised in a conservative clan, risking a sound thrashing and likely much worse to protect a new friend against someone far more powerful than her.

It broke Maris’s heart.

Amie continued, “Let’s take her back to Aunt Nika and the other women. They’ll know what to do.”

Incensed, Brick snapped at her, even as his hand tightened on the hank of hair in his grasp. Maris lifted her hands to pull at his fingers, which didn’t budge. He snarled, “I know what to do, cub. Mind your business while I do what should have been done a long time ago.”

He turned, yanking Maris with him, but stopped all of a sudden. Through the tears streaming down her face, due to the pain and the heat and the humiliation, Maris saw a sight that sent her heart to thundering even harder.

The dark woman, whom Brick had referred to as a “hellcat,” blocked their way.

Legs spread a little wider than shoulder width, arms loose and ready at her side, Ember found herself staring down the Cliffwater alpha and the omega he had by the hair.

Her blood sang in her throat and she felt her fingernails lengthening into claws, but she clenched her fists and breathed deeply. She was too old to experience a change just because battle made her lose her focus.

And she had lost her focus, as soon as the wind had brought the wolf girl’s scent to her.

Like most cats, Ember didn’t like dogs.

Didn’t like their looks or their smell. Especially mean-faced dogs like Brick, who was the living embodiment stereotype of a meathead frat boy if ever she had seen one.

And like most cats, Ember wasn’t the least bit intimidated by him, even though Brick clearly thought she should have been.

She had a bit of a reputation, after all, which had only grown in size as her friend Zehr had ascended to the shifter crown and had asked her to stand by his side through the troubles that had beset wolf-kind lately.

She had gone to the backwoods clan who had been demanding recompense for the coronation ceremony’s delay, to keep the peace as Zehr had asked her to do. And it was for him, and for the sake of the nation that he would lead, that she had tried to talk to this pathetic rabble-rouser. But the rabble-rouser hadn’t wanted to talk, and the untimely omega’s flowering had diverted the whole purpose of her appearance entirely.

That didn’t explain why she stood before the wolf alpha and the wolf omega, looking and feeling like she was ready for a fight.

The alpha wolf growled, and Ember tamped down on the threatening rumble she felt welling up from her chest.

She wanted the girl.

The girl smelled better than any dog had a right to. She smelled the way honey tasted, and the way sunshine felt. And she was beautiful, with a wealth of long brown hair and eyes that looked too big for her face.

By the All-Mother, Ember hadn’t done a foolhardy thing in her life.

Tasked with leadership from a young age, she’d always used restraint and circumspection, especially considering how controversial the Proudheart lionesses were after their defection from the lion clans of Africa and their relocation to North America.

But the lioness in her chest didn’t care for restraint.

“Give me the girl,” she said into a blanket of silence broken only by the whispering wind, and the appreciative sniffs the others were still giving that honeyed scent, and the tense whispers as everyone caught on to what was happening.

Brick laughed.

It was a nasty sound.

He shook the omega a little, and she cried out.

“This? This broken thing? She abandoned her clan and dared to show her face again. She goes into her first heat several years too late and in front of everyone, embarrassing the Cliffwater clan.” He shook his head. “She is Cliffwater. She is mine.”

He took another step forward. Ember raised her chin, staring him down.

“Please,” the omega whispered. It wasn’t clear to whom she was pleading, or what she was pleading for. But the word went straight to Ember’s heart as if it were a crossbow bolt.

She stepped forward and drove her fist into Brick’s throat. He gasped and released the girl immediately, who fell to the ground and curled up into a ball. Then she reared back and swung again, upward this time, connecting with his chin with a crunch. He dropped like a sack of stones.

Ember felt profound satisfaction at the ache in her fist, and flexed her fingers lightly as she turned to the omega on the ground. Her young friend was by her side, talking softly to her, petting her hair and looking more worried than a child should ever have to look amid so many adults. Ember shook her head impatiently and gestured to a woman who smelled like seasoned wolf omega.

“See that the young girl is taken care of,” she said. The woman looked ready to protest, but Ember merely fixated her stare on the woman, who jumped immediately into action.

“Hey, Amie, let’s go find your mom, okay?” the woman said softly, prodding the girl to move from her friend and away from the circle.

The girl seemed to know when to quit, which signaled that she had more sense than most of her kind, but she looked back at Ember.

“You’ll take care of her, won’t you?” the girl asked her softly.

Ember stared at her for a long moment, and gave a decisive nod. The girl returned the nod with one of her own, satisfied, and allowed herself to be led away.

The crowd watched in almost perfect silence as Ember scooped the omega from the ground. She was so light and pliant that it was like carrying nothing at all, but the honey-and-sunshine smell of her reminded Ember just why she had decided to risk starting a blood feud with the dogs and enraging the king.

Ember took a deep breath, pulling in that scent and savoring it, and her resolve hardened. The crowd parted before her without question, and if any of the watching dogs had anything to say about the “hellcat aberration” they kept it to themselves as she passed through.

The walk to her tent passed by as if it were part of a dream.

When she got there, blessed silence met her ears and she deposited the omega on the camp bed, mindful of the girl’s doubtless tenderness. What had that imbecile said? That it was her first heat?

Explained why such a gorgeous little creature had been unmated, at least.

The omega rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, which were bright with the onset of her heat-fever.

“W-what…?” she croaked out, and Ember moved to a cooler she’d packed full of water, pulling out a bottle and unscrewing the lid.

The girl reached for it with eager hands that nonetheless shook quite a bit, and Ember made a small sound.

“Let me,” she commanded, and felt warmth suffuse her chest as she saw the girl obey immediately, her hands dropping to the bed.

Ember sat on the bed and pulled the girl to rest on her legs, elevating her head and giving her little sips of water until she gestured that she’d had enough.

“There you go,” Ember said. “How does your head feel?”

“Hurts.” The girl pushed herself up, and ran her fingers through her hair, wincing. “My hair hurts,” she said softly, disbelievingly. “How is that possible?” She massaged her scalp a little.

“I’m sorry he did that to you. It won’t happen again.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” The girl lifted those too-big eyes to her and did a double-take, sweeping Ember from head to toe. She worried her lower lip between her teeth.

“You’re not a wolf.”

“No,” Ember agreed. “I’m not.”

“You’re…” She frowned, but Ember’s attention was caught momentarily by the release of that lower lip from her teeth. It looked swollen and red from where the girl had chewed on it moments before. Her arousal kindled higher; it had only been banked by thoughts of taking care of the girl, not suffocated entirely.

“An alpha of the Proudheart clan,” Ember said.

She could see when the information clicked into place for the girl, whose eyes widened almost comically.

“I see my reputation precedes me, even for one who was said to have run away from her clan.”

“Yeah, well, look where that got me,” the girl muttered, and then tugged at the tank top she wore. “It’s so hot,” she said, and her voice was almost a whine.

“You’ll want to take it off. Please, don’t let me stop you.”

The omega eyed her suspiciously.

“Will I?”

“It’s your first heat, from what I understand.” Ember tried her best to look as harmless as she could, but felt as if she were failing miserably. The girl’s scent had, by this point, diffused through the tent; while the tent itself was well-ventilated, there was no escaping the scent of a newly flowering omega.

“I have been led to believe that one gets rather, er, hot.”

The girl sighed. Then she pulled the tank top over her head.

Ember did her very best not to stare. The lovely, creamy skin revealed by the girl’s disrobing was distracting, to say the least, but she wanted to set the girl at ease while she figured out what to do with her. The omega shimmied out of the jeans she wore, too, and cast them to the side to join her tank top.

“That’s better,” she said, settling back onto the camp bed in her bra and panties, but then she glanced up. “Why did you take me?”

“You said you didn’t want him,” Ember said. “Brick, that is.”

“You hit him,” the omega said. “You weren't even afraid of him. It was amazing.”

“It was nature,” Ember said, trying her best not to smirk but failing. “I am one of the king’s lieutenants. That dog couldn’t hope to stand up to me one-on-one.”

“Dog?”

“Er…” Ember frowned. “Wolf.”

“I’m a wolf, too. Or—or dog, if you prefer.”

“But you don’t smell like one.”

The omega’s eyebrows lifted. “What do I smell like?”

Ember said it without thinking. “Mate.”

“M-mate?” the girl stuttered. She was adorable when she was surprised, thought Ember, taking in the eyes which had gone comically wide again, the flush high on her cheeks. “How is that possible?”

“I told you, I am an alpha of the Proudheart clan.”

“But how can you—me—how can we mate?” the girl said helplessly. “If you’re a cat, and I’m a dog, and we’re both—”

Ember smiled, and she saw the omega’s flush deepen as she read Ember’s smile for what it was—a predator’s grin.

“I am unlike any alpha you’ve ever met.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, “Ohhhh.”

Ember saw that she understood, finally.

“S-so,” the omega said, a little too quickly, “that’s a thing. You’re…” She waved her hand in Ember’s general direction. “You’re—you can—and I’m in—and…” She gulped, and tried to recover her train of thought. “And here we are.”

“And here we are,” Ember agreed, her smile widening. She had meant to put the girl at peace, to take her from the clutches of that wretched dog who’d tried to claim her, and to maybe, just maybe, figure out why she felt so pulled to an omega not even of her own species. But this was just adorable.

She continued, off-handedly, “You’ll notice that you’re a little more clear-headed than you were when your heat first overtook you. In that crowd, with all that tension, you were a quivering mess. But here, alone with me… you’re still burning up inside, but you’re calmer. Your body knows me.”

The omega opened her mouth, and then closed it. Then she made a whining noise.

“I hate this. I’ll have you know that I’m a perfectly respectable adult. I have a job and a life far away from all this. I’m never out of control.”

“Do you feel out of control right now?” Ember asked, reaching forward to stroke the shining brown hair that fell over the girl’s shoulder.

She trembled under Ember’s hand.

“N-no,” she said, defiant to the last.

Ember smiled again. She wasn’t fooled.

“Of course not. But just in case you lose control, come closer. I’ll keep you safe.”

Maris knew that she had been lost long ago, as soon as the dark alpha had swept her up and carried her off from the Cliffwater camp, but it was only when the hand in her hair tightened fractionally, cupping the base of her skull at the nape of her neck, that she really knew it.

“You don’t even know me,” she whispered, eyes closing reflexively as the hand massaged the nape of her neck, at once soothing the tenderness of her scalp from Brick’s mishandling and also raising goosebumps on her skin.

The alpha drew closer.

Maris could feel hot breath trailing up her jawline toward her ear, could smell the complex scent of the oil she used on her braids. Her trembling increased, and her wolf, who had been inexplicably calmed by the alpha lioness’s presence just minutes before, now grew restless and agitated again.

“I heard your young friend. She called you Maris. Is that your name?”

She made a low sound in the back of her throat, a guttural agreement that sounded so wanton she immediately flushed a bright red and clenched her eyes closed even tighter against the wave of shame and excitement she could in no way deny, no matter how much she wanted to. And how she wanted to.

“See. Now I know that you are Maris. And I know that to be Maris is a lovely thing. Look at you, flowering before my very eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ll have to forgive my curiosity in such a sensitive moment, but it makes me wonder, what have I been missing out on all this time? Had I known that she-wolves could be so tempting in the first flush of their heat…”

Maris growled before she could stop herself, a mix of impatience bleeding into anger and more than a little jealousy.

The alpha chuckled.

“There I go again. Young one, you will have to keep me in line. And I think I’ll quite like it when you do. You will call me Ember, but later. For now, you will call me your alpha.”