now.
Then he was pulled out of the little fantasy that he’d been in and was thrust back into the cold, gray reality that was happening all around him. The wind still howled, the snow still fell in a thick
blanket that was blinding, and Morgan’s paws were starting to become numb because he was still standing in the wet rocks of the river bank.
Morgan had to step around Nick and find out what the deal was with that scent. He had to know what it was that made his body tingle so much, his tail all twitchy, and just every cell in his body excited for
no reason.
He saw it all right, and his heart sank.
It was a young man. A boy, really. The kid had to be somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, if that.
Half his body was in the freezing water, and he was naked. The
12 Marcy Jacks
naked part was enough for Morgan to realize that the poor kid was one of the wandering werewolves they were searching for, but Morgan inhaled deeply through his nose and didn’t catch anything familiar from any of the objects he’d scented before coming on out.
James had taken most of Phillip’s wolves back to their pack land to quickly gather their things together. Some of those things belonged to their missing, and before going out on their search party, everyone had been required to get the scent off of all of those objects so they would have an idea of who they were tracking.
The scent of this kid did not belong to any of the missing werewolves from Phillip’s pack that he could tell, though it was possible that being out in the wild for so long had changed his scent. He could be one of the werewolves that Deacon had forcefully transformed. Most of those wolves had gone wild, and that was likely the fate of this poor kid, but that hardly seemed to matter. He was still alive and breathing, despite the gray hue to his skin. Morgan suspected it was blue, but the weather made that hard to know for
sure.
Something in him stopped at the sight of the man. It was a sensation he’d never felt in all of his life, and he was fifty-nine years old, for another two days at least, and he was clinging to those days by the clutches of his fingers.
With a start, he realized what the heart-stopping, cease-to-breathe, organ-failing sensation was.
Morgan Dane was looking down at the naked, and almost dead, body of his mate.
Mated to the Wild Omega 13
Chapter Two
The storm had thickened to the point where it was virtually impossible for them to make it back to the pack without getting lost. At first, Morgan had thought that Nick would be able to make the journey with his superior senses and would be able to get some help for them.
Until the wolf had transformed back into a man and told him he
couldn’t smell or hear anything beyond the falling snow and cold, moaning wind.
Fucking perfect.
They had to find shelter. Morgan had picked up the smaller man that they’d found, practically in the water, and carried him bridal style. He hadn’t put the guy down since, even when Nick had offered to take over for him and give his arms a break.
The poor guy had stepped back quickly when Morgan growled at him, and growling at another alpha, unless you were trying to pick a fight, was never a good thing.
Morgan could just barely see the deep frown on Nick’s face through the fog of falling snow, and he quickly apologized.
“Sorry. I didn’t…uh, I didn’t like hearing that I wasn’t strong enough to carry him. We need to get out of here anyway, before the weather gets any worse.”
Nick’s frown didn’t leave his face, though the other man looked much more forgiving for Morgan’s blunder than he had before. “I wasn’t offering because of that, but you’re right. We need to go.”
Nick shifted his feet, the snow making a soft crunching noise. “Snowfall’s getting heavy,” he said. “Soon we won’t be able to move
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at all.”
“And I don’t think there’s any abandoned cabins out here that are conveniently placed for us to use,” Morgan deadpanned, holding his mate closer to his chest when the shivering became more violent.
Shit. His body heat wasn’t helping, and the man’s temperature was dropping even more.
“Actually, I think there is one,” Nick said.
“What?” No way. No effing way were they that lucky.
Nick nodded. “I scented the varnish ten minutes back the other
way. It was fresh, like they’d given the place a coat only a couple weeks ago, right before the snow started to fall. There was way too much of it to be from an open, freezing can somewhere. We’re definitely near a house.”
How they would get to that house, considering they could barely see each other, was a different story. Not to mention the possibility of it already being inhabited by people.
They had no choice. Unless they wanted to find a spot in the trees and dig a hole in the snow for themselves, they would have to try for the house.
The chance of building a small den was possible, and they could keep relatively warm using their body heat, which was probably what the other alphas were doing if they were still out in this shit, too, but that wouldn’t be nearly enough to help the man in Morgan’s arms. He would need more than that if he was going to survive.
“We should try for it,” Morgan said, stepping out of the blind wolf’s way. “After you.”
Nick had said the house was only ten minutes back, but they walked for what seemed like thirty. Nick hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that he was having trouble scenting anything. How could he? With the way the wind was pushing everything, they were lucky they hadn’t stumbled into the river.
Morgan shielded the
