Ian's Choice (Wolves' Heat) Read online

  IAN’S CHOICE

  WOLVES’ HEAT

  A Novel

  Odessa Lynne

  ODELYN PUBLISHING

  IAN’S CHOICE

  Odessa Lynne

  Copyright © 2013 by Odessa Lynne

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for quotes used in any review, the reproduction or utilization of the work in whole or in part by electronic, mechanical or other means is forbidden without written permission of the author.

  Cover design by Odessa Lynne

  Cover photo of tree © Martine De Graaf | Dreamstime.com

  Cover photo of moon © Paul Ransome | Dreamstime.com

  Published by Odelyn Publishing

  odessalynne.com

  First Electronic Publication March 2013

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents portrayed in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales are entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an ebook store and purchase your own copy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About this Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Author’s Note

  Also by Odessa Lynne

  About the Author

  About IAN’S CHOICE

  Don’t run if they catch you unless you want claws in your spine and teeth in your neck and two hundred pounds of lust-crazed Wolf on your back.

  First contact between humans and the alien species they’ve nicknamed “wolves” couldn’t have been more tranquil. The wolves shared their superior technology and knowledge in exchange for a new home, and thousands of wolves abandoned their aging spacefaring ships to settle in Earth’s forested mountain regions.

  But the wolves held some secrets too close and humanity has begun paying the price.

  Once every three years, humans become sexual prey to a species that has no control over the urge to mate because of an unexpected and devastating attraction to human scent.

  Heat season has arrived and a pack of wolves are bearing down on Ian.

  His only choice, when he’s rescued by an Alpha drawn in by his scent: submit or die…

  Chapter 1

  Leaves crunched underfoot somewhere in the woods behind him. Ian bit back every scrap of breath in his body behind clenched teeth in an effort to remain silent, but he’d been running too hard and too long to hold his breath for more than a few painful heartbeats.

  Trees loomed under the sliver of moon, the rest of the fat round circle hidden by clouds and fog, leaving nothing but shadows and obstacles to fight his way through. If he’d stuck to the trails he’d be ambushed before he made it halfway back to shelter.

  Ian kept his eyes on the opening between the trees in front of him, his back to one particularly wide oak trunk in the thick, dense forest, the woods overgrown with too much brush to make travel quick or easy, and waited for a sign that told him he needed to run again.

  Rough bark scraped his palms. Sweat beaded over his lip.

  A dead limb had tripped him up and this was where he’d stalled, trying to catch his breath after a hard fall had left him with a trickle of blood at his forehead and a painful bruise on his ribcage. Last week’s seasonal storms had left a swath of destruction in their wake from high winds and heavy rain.

  He breathed out again, as slowly and carefully as his pounding heart would allow.

  A rush of crackling leaves filtered through the woods around him. He couldn’t even tell from which direction the sound came from but it didn’t matter. His scent would give him away.

  He jerked forward, taking off at a dead run, heading deeper into the woods as fast as he could get through the heavy brush, the muscles in his legs burning with effort. His cheeks stung with every slap of branch and briar, each stab and rip a reminder of claws and teeth, and what would probably happen to him when he couldn’t run any longer.

  He wasn’t foolish enough to believe he was doing anything more than putting off the inevitable. He had come out into the woods with a purpose, an intent, but his pounding heart and twisting gut told him he might have chosen to do something so, so foolish.

  Too late now to go back. Wolves had caught his scent.

  Everyone called them wolves, but of course that was just a human name for a humanoid species with retractable claws and sharper-than-human teeth; narrow eyes in as many colors as human, only brighter, bolder, prettier; muscle and bone of amazing strength and endurance; remarkable healing abilities. They were supreme trackers, but despite all that, no faster than a young, fit human in a headlong flight through the woods.

  Wolves they weren’t, not in any real sense of the word, but wolves they might as well be when they caught your scent.

  Ian was young enough and fit enough to give them a good run, but he didn’t have the endurance to keep it up indefinitely.

  Ian ran, jumping over more downed limbs, dodging moss-coated boulders, ducking under low-hanging branches, all while skirting the thickest brush and the deepest hollows, trying to stay ahead of creatures who seemed born for the terrain even though they hadn’t set foot on Earth before eight years ago.

  He could feel hot breath on his neck and hear the alpha howl on the wind behind him. His imagination, he was sure, but they were back there somewhere, locked onto his scent trail.

  He ran until his legs trembled with fatigue and he had to find another resting spot, giving up as much of the distance between him and the wolves as he’d gained.

  Humans were prey in a way they’d never been before, on the run and at the mercy of creatures that had tried and failed to overcome their own uncontrollable reaction to a species that apparently gave off a scent that made them insane with lust.

  The joy at realizing first contact with an alien race might actually be a wondrously peaceful experience had quickly faded to horror when the once-every-three-Earth-years reproductive cycle of the aliens had kicked in for the first time since their arrival.

  In the short time between their arrival in orbit around Earth and that fateful first heat season, thousands of them had settled on the planet with the gracious permission of Earth’s human natives. The wolves’ world had been devastated by some sort of cataclysmic event that had left them traveling space in aging ships. In exchange for freely sharing their technology and knowledge, the aliens had bartered a home and been welcomed, if not entirely with open arms, at least with little hostility. Whispers of a common origin circulated, because no one had actually expected an alien species to appear anything near human, and certainly not as similar as human and wolf turned out to be.

  No one, human or wolf, had suspected that when the wolves’ heat cycles hit, the human scent would set off an unexplained chemical reaction in the br
ains of the wolves that brought about unprecedented levels of aggression and sexual desire completely out of everyone’s control. They found the scent of human men in their twenties particularly enthralling, a blend of hormones and pheromones and body odors that fired their alien senses.

  In a single terror-filled month, the world as humans had known it for millennia had come to an abrupt and lurid end.

  A dark secret escaped, this particular knowledge not shared as freely as the rest: in their own society wolves chose mates by scent and strength. Alphas fought for dominance. Mates surrendered; they did not choose. Combined with the human scent trigger, the heat season got messy fast.

  Ian knew they’d tried to stop it; the aliens themselves, forcing pregnancy and drugs on as many of their people as possible to stop the heat season early. All they’d done was create an even bigger problem for the next cycle, the second since coming to Earth.

  The world might as well have ended then because it became clear that nothing would ever be the same again for humans.

  Earth had been on the verge of a worldwide economy when the wolves came; it never happened. Governments tried to exert more control, some fell, some strengthened, some merged. Ian paid attention to the changes close to home and nothing else; he’d been sixteen when the wolves found Earth; he’d been eighteen when disaster struck with that first heat.

  In the six years since that first heat cycle, Ian had spent his time watching the wolves birth thousands more. Groups of human renegades, going against the will of their governments, had wiped out as many of the wolves’ dens as possible, male and female, adult and child alike, trying to take back what they believed had been stolen from them.

  Now he was twenty-four, in the age group most at risk of finding themselves in the middle of the mating frenzy, impaled on a thick alien cock not all that different from a human penis.

  He had three wolves chasing him; he’d seen them just before the wolves had gotten wind of his scent when he was hiking the path between the county shelters open to anyone who needed a safe place for the duration of the heat season.

  He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to have three wolves holding him down and rutting into him, claws at his neck. Nothing to stop them from capturing and using him for the rest of the heat season to ease their ache.

  Ian ran again.

  The howling came too close, too fast. Weight slammed into his back and Ian went down.

  “No,” he said, barely able to breathe out the word. He wasn’t ready; he would never be ready.

  One of the wolves flipped him over onto his back. Ian dug his fingers into the moist earth, feeling the crunch of leaves and deadwood as he scrambled backwards. Eyes tracked him. Where human eyes glinted, reflective and bright, a wolf’s eyes seemed to glow in the darkness.

  If he pulled out any one of his knives and tried to fight now that he’d been cornered, his challenge would mean certain death. He’d lost his gun miles back, but bullets rarely stopped the wolves anyway. With such a small caliber weapon, only a head shot would have saved him, if he’d been able to kill all three before one of them got to him.

  Ian pushed himself to a crouch, ready to run again on instinct, but he couldn’t stop the mental replay of his own advice from the last heat cycle survival training session.

  Don’t run, not if you get caught, unless you want claws in your spine and teeth in your neck and two hundred pounds of lust-crazed wolf on your back. During heat, they’re not reasonable, they don’t respond to talk, and they either want to fuck you or kill you. Those are your choices. You fight, you die. You submit, you’ll probably live. When the cycle ends, the wolves are peaceful people, and they won’t want to hurt you. Just do whatever it takes to make it through until then.

  He’d survived the previous heat cycle unscathed, gone through multiple training sessions in those early years and when this cycle came around, he’d been drafted to teach others what he’d been taught about how to make it through alive if they got caught out in the wild by a wolf in heat.

  Fight and die. Submit and live.

  Another roar came suddenly, from the left, and Ian jerked his head around to see a fourth wolf running towards him.

  Fog interfered with a clear view, but Ian rolled to the side and curled his arms around his head, taking up a fetal position just in time to hear the hard smack of bodies and the deep-throated roars that he’d only ever heard during the heat season and never this close.

  Shit. He could hardly think, the wild pounding of his heart beating at his chest.

  A video of a mating frenzy had made the rounds a few years ago and it had been the scariest thing Ian had ever seen.

  His memory of what he’d seen was why he believed submitting was the only real answer when he’d been caught, why he knew challenging the wolves wasn’t a sane option when submitting to a lust crazed wolf meant sex: hard and rough, maybe, but even lust crazy wasn’t the kind of crazy that came with a true mating frenzy.

  That kind of crazy killed humans and wolves alike.

  A heat fight had set it off. It was still the early days before anyone really understood what was happening, that the wolves had no control at all over their reaction to the human scent while in the middle of their heat cycle. The scent of fear had kept it going, and when it was over, the pack of nearly twenty wolves had been decimated, and the human who had refused to submit and whose scent had started the whole thing, dead. Only one wolf had survived as far as Ian knew, the explanation accompanying the video saying that her body had known right away when she’d been impregnated by one of the other wolves. Her heat had stopped, and she’d crawled away from the heap of wolves and the single human and fallen asleep a good thirty feet away from the devastation.

  Ian cringed at every sound in the dark woods around him, holding tight to his position. Brutal roars and snarling howls accompanied yelps and gasps and the slam of bodies against tree trunks and the ground. When he fought back the fear enough to lower his arms, he saw that two wolves were down and the remaining two circled each other. He couldn’t remember from his earlier glimpse in the dark which one had been with the pack and which had come in on them but he didn’t care, not if it meant he was going to end up with only one wolf to deal with instead of three.

  With a wide slash, claws dug into skin just below the chin and the third wolf dropped, his gurgling howl ending on a whimper of pain. A human would die from that kind of injury to the neck but Ian had heard of wolves healing from horrific wounds. That was why the growing population scared so many humans. Each heat cycle brought thousands more, and unlike humans, they did not die easily.

  The cloud cover chose that moment to hide the light of the moon and Ian couldn’t even see the fog in the darkness. His breath caught at the shine of eyes getting closer and the rustle of leaves being swept aside by the wolf’s stalking movement toward him. The chuff of breath, fast and repeated, made his insides quiver. Ian curled his fists against the ground beneath him and he sat up slowly, careful to appear as non-threatening as possible.

  “Mine,” a heavily accented voice said.

  The wolves had started speaking human English with little trouble with the help of their advanced learning technology—technology they’d willingly shared with humans shortly after they’d arrived on Earth. Ian could speak the language of the wolves, even if his accent was horrible. But too many words didn’t translate exactly, their subtle meanings and cultural connotations lost. Those creating the translations had found close equivalents for the different human languages: alpha, beta, mate, mine.

  Strong hands gripped Ian’s shoulders, then slid down and clenched around his biceps. The wolf hauled him upright.

  Ian stumbled to his feet. This close, he could see the wolf’s cheeks and mouth and wide white teeth, and he was eye-level with the wolf’s human shaped nose, the bridge narrow and straight, the shadows deep and the faint moon glow doing little to help him see anything else.

  “Who are you?” the wolf asked.
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  Before Ian could answer, the wolf buried his nose against Ian’s hair, sniffing hard, then shifting to sniff at Ian’s ear and jaw and then moving roughly against Ian’s neck, the wolf using his head to push Ian’s chin back and up, leaving his throat exposed and vulnerable. When the wolf’s mouth opened and he breathed out against Ian’s skin, Ian gave a little jerk, his body reacting before his mind could tell it to stop, the sharp tingle spreading through him more fear than anything else. The hands on his arms tightened, and the wolf shoved his face closer, hot breath and teeth grazing Ian’s jaw, scraping audibly over the day’s growth of beard.

  “Your name?” he said again, his demanding tone almost a growl, enough to further unsettle Ian’s nerves.

  “Ian. My name’s Ian.”

  “You shouldn’t have come out into the woods, Ian. You know that, though, don’t you?”

  Ian gave a jerky nod, then recognized that the wolf was waiting for him to speak. “Yeah,” he said. “I knew better.”

  There was something different about this one. Unlike the others, he hadn’t surrendered his control to Ian’s scent or the heat yet, his calm in stark contrast to the wolves who’d been chasing Ian through the woods.

  “If I hadn’t caught your scent and slowed them down, they would have already had you on the ground. Could you have handled three wolves on you like that?”

  Ian tried to clear the nervous catch from his throat before speaking. His hands shook as he wrapped them around the wolf’s wrists. “No.” He was proud of himself for keeping most of the tremble out of his voice. The adrenaline he’d been running under hadn’t yet worn off.

  “Weapons?”

  “Uh. A couple of knives. Here.” Ian slowly reached for his waist, and pulled a knife out of his belt. Pointed it at his boot. “Two there.”

  “Remove them.” The wolf released Ian long enough for Ian to hunker down and slip the knives loose.

  “Toss them,” the wolf said.

  Ian grimaced but did as he was told. The knives hit the ground a few feet away.