The Mating Habits of Werewolves

Part 3

By dinnertime, the world was starting to look less like the scenario for my memories and more like a place I actually inhabited. Of course, like anaesthesia, shock wearing off feels like suddenly noticing one of your limbs is missing. You understand the fact but that does nothing to dull the pain or distract from the phantom ache that is the last clinging hold of all that is beloved when it's gone. There seemed to be reminders of my father everywhere: both his existence and his lack thereof; from random books left lying about in various rooms to an ashtray he had gotten from a Canadian pack when I was a kid and treasured ever since.

When the pain starts setting in, the body pushes you to curl up, to protect yourself from further attack. But there was nothing I could protect myself from, so the next logical step was finding somewhere safe to heal. I wanted, more than anything on the world besides a miracle, to hole up in my childhood room, call my boyfriend and talk about anything but what was happening about me. I was willing and ready to listen to him go on about cricket if it got me out of my head.

But Death isn't like other types of pain, and I couldn't miss dinner with the family on my first night there. It wasn't unreasonable, I suppose, we had all lost my father but we had also lost our Dominant and the whole pack was feeling uneasy over it. It was up to Brennan to show that he could take care of us now, and this was the first time he would gather the whole pack together since becoming Dominant a fortnight earlier.

"We have news," my brother announced and his voice quietened the busy dining room like nothing else could. Every eye in the room was on him, even the children's. He smiled winningly at Adora, and his wife returned the smile with all the candour of a young girl in love. He had met her at the Winter Shifter Summit and brought her back with him, aglow and so enamoured it was sickening to watch. "We are expecting a child!" Brennan said into the silence, grinning like a madman. I smiled reflexively, his happiness spreading through the pack sense like a wave, so intense it was almost a physical sensation. The congratulations seemed to go on for hours, although it was probably minutes, and I was about to get up from where I had snatched a place between Kirby and Clara, two of the other Omegas I had grown up with, when my brother raised a hand to quieten everybody again.

"That is not all, folks!" His voice easily overwhelmed the last of the excited whispers. "I have purchased the Davidson farm. We are expanding!" There was some cheering, not surprisingly, you take a bunch of territorial people and put them together, territory becomes a goal per excellence. "The next generation of the Hilliard pack will have to be twice the size of ours," he continued in his booming voice, "and that's why I have decided that every fertile Omega in the pack will bear a child this year."

Kirby dropped her napkin, and Clara's fists clenched right on the table where she had been nervously tapping her fingers. The other Omegas were all around the table, sitting comfortably with friends and family, but suddenly I knew where every single one of them was because all of us had stopped, our thoughts grinding to a sudden halt in perfect sync. With all the pack in the same room, the pack sense was so strong as to almost constitute telepathy and I felt their shock add to my own, like a mounting wave growing bigger with the push of the wave that follows it. Even Jason and Evangeline, both pregnant already, seemed shocked by the news.

Dominant Alphas nudged Omega's to reproduce when they thought they were ready and so the pack's children's would be in the same age range and grow up together. It made the pack stronger to have members who were close to each other. But none of us had ever heard of a mass breeding like this, and an announcement at dinner no less! And then I realised something else, it wasn't all Omegas who were in shock, just the younger ones. The older generation: my mother, my aunts and uncles, were all conspicuously calm at the news.

They had known. She had known, and she had let me come back for it without even a warning. I tried to meet her eyes across the table where she still sat at the other end of the table, the place of honour for the Dominant's mate. She must have felt my gaze and the weight of my attention as well, but she didn't look up at all. Not at me and not anybody else, she was looking down at her food, methodically cutting the meat in her plate in small, even pieces that would cool it down too fast for her to eat.