The Alpha King's Human Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Two A.M.
A hunter drops a wounded wolf at Tavia's clinic and leaves; at dawn the wolf is a naked man who grips her wrist and calls her mate, and black trucks fill the lot.
At two in the morning a man in a camouflage jacket kicked the clinic door hard enough to rattle the glass.
I was the only one downstairs, finishing the night's charting under one lamp.
My uncle Mort sleeps in the apartment above the waiting room, and he sleeps like a dropped anvil.
I opened the door on the chain.
"I hit a dog," the man said. "On Route 9. Open up."
He had mud to the knees and a heavy bundle across both arms.
When I got the door wide, the bundle was a wolf.
It was black, with one white front paw, and it weighed more than I did.
The man dumped it on the exam table so fast the steel boomed.
"Found him in the road," he said. "Car must have clipped him. Do what you can."
I put two fingers on the wolf's ribs and felt them lift, shallow and fast.
Then I turned the big head aside and saw the hole in its left shoulder.
It was round and neat, with burned fur around the edge.
"That's not a car," I said.
The man was already backing toward the door.
"Cash is on the counter," he said. "Don't call anybody."
He said it like he had practiced it.
The bell over the door rang, and his truck pulled out without headlights.
I stood there with my pulse in my ears.
On the counter lay a stack of hundreds, with a paper band still around it.
I looked at the wolf, and the wolf's pale eye rolled toward me and held.
It was not the eye of an animal that wanted to bite me.
It was the eye of something deciding whether to trust me.
"Okay," I said. "Okay, big guy. I'm not calling anybody yet."
I did what I always do when I'm scared, which is get very organized.
I drew up the sedative by weight, and I guessed the weight high.
I clipped the fur, flushed the hole and probed it with a long forceps.
The bullet had gone in at an angle and stopped against the bone.
I got hold of something flat and ugly and pulled it out in one piece.
It rang in the steel dish.
I tipped the slug into a labelled bag, because I bag everything I cut out of an animal.
Then I debrided, packed and stitched, closing the muscle in layers while the wolf's breath went slow.
When I looked up it was past five and the window had gone grey.
I wiped my hands, sat down on the rolling stool and let my head drop against the wall.
I remember thinking that I would just rest my eyes while he slept it off.
Something closed around my wrist.
It was warm and hard, and it woke me completely.
The light was pale yellow now.
On the steel table, where the wolf had been, lay a man.
He was enormous.
He had black hair cropped close, dark stubble and a long scarred forearm.
He was naked, and the white gauze I had packed into the wolf's shoulder sat on his shoulder.
My stitches ran across his skin, black and neat.
His eyes were the palest grey I had ever seen, and they were open and fixed on my face.
"Mate," he said.
His voice was rough.
His hand tightened on my wrist, careful, not cruel.
I did not scream.
I want that on the record.
I went very still, and I looked at his shoulder, where a thread of blood had started along my best suture line.
"Let go of my arm," I said.
"You are mine," he said, like it was a simple fact about the weather. "I knew your scent through the door."
"You've lost a lot of blood," I said. "You're confused."
"I am not."
"Fine. Then listen to me, because this part is real."
I leaned in until my face was close to his.
"If you sit up, you will tear forty stitches I put in at four in the morning, and I will not do them twice."
His eyes dropped to the wound and came back to me.
"Lie still," I said. "Or I swear to God I'll tie you to this table."
Slowly, the hand around my wrist opened.
He lay back, and a ghost of something crossed his face that might have been the start of a smile.
"You are not afraid of me," he said.
"I'm afraid of what you're doing to my suture line. Don't move."
I stood up on legs that did not feel like mine and reached for a sheet to cover him.
Then I heard the engines.
Three black trucks rolled into the lot with their lights off and parked in a neat row across the front windows.
Doors opened.
Six men came up the walk, silent, heavy through the shoulders, and the first one pushed our door open without knocking.
He saw the man on the table and dropped to one knee.
The others did the same, one after another, with their eyes on the floor.
"Majesty," said the first.
Then he lifted his head and looked at me.
His face went hard.
"The human has seen him change," he said. "Take her."
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