Mated To The Alpha: A Standalone Wolf Shifter Romance, стр. 38
"You say that like it's a question."
"She is...protective. She wants the best for her loved ones. Thomas, Galen."
"But not Elam? He's her son, too."
"She says Elam is different."
"Different? How so?"
"I'm not sure. She won't elaborate."
"Elam said she wasn't happy about this dividing of the pack that Galen presented."
"She isn't. She doesn't think she should have to go. She thinks Galen should be Alpha."
"But he isn't. And even if he was, she'd have to give up the Alpha cabin, either way. To you and Galen, if not to me and Elam. Why does she care which son of hers is in charge? Either way she is still revered as mother of the Alpha."
A voice behind her, in Emma's ear, surprised her.
"Because Elam is a devil's spawn, just like you!"
With that, Emma's world went dark.
20
Emma felt a dull ache deep inside her head as she fought her way to consciousness. She instinctively knew that she needed to wake up, but waves of pain and nausea greeted her every time she fought her way to the surface. She knew she needed to fight through it, and open her eyes, but visions of her mother kept pulling her down, down, deeper into unconsciousness.
She'd never really known her mother, since she had died when Emma was so little, but she had no trouble recognizing her in her unconscious, troubled dreams.
The sound of Kate's pained voice pierced Emma's brain, and Emma tried again to wake up, to help her friend, but the pain and nausea as Emma surfaced again was just too much. And the pull of her mother's visions just too tempting.
Emma felt herself sinking into the abyss again, giving herself up to whatever tricks her mind was playing on her, just to see her mother one more time. She was still getting used to the whole 'seeing glimpses of possible futures' thing, so she wasn't quite prepared for her dead mother's visions to propel her into the past instead.
Emma suddenly saw herself at an Alpha Challenge, but this time it wasn't Galen and Elam fighting for position.
Her mother, Reine, stood tall and proud. Her snow white wolf, with its soot black paw, was fighting with a slightly smaller, younger version of what she knew to be Thomas's deep brown wolf.
There was another, already defeated, wolf watching from the perimeter. Emma assumed he was the third challenger Elam had told her about. The one who went after Thomas, just to be taken out by Reine, in defense of her brother, before the challenge had become a two wolf fight.
Emma turned her attention to Thomas's wolf, to start with, zoning in on him.
He was familiar, mostly, and didn't bring the longing that looking at Reine's wolf did as she tossed unconscious, her mind many, many years in the past.
Thomas was vibrant, young and full of life. Emma's reality intruded just long enough to register the thought that she wished she'd been allowed to grown up here, with these wolves, and had known Thomas like this- young and in his prime.
She heard a threatening growl, and turned her dreaming head just in time to focus in on Reine, before Reine's wolf attacked Thomas's wolf and the pair rolled around on the ground of the very same natural coliseum she'd watched Elam beat Galen in not very long ago.
Reine and Thomas fought for a long time, seeming equally matched. But Elam had been right- Reine had just a bit more.
She held a bite just a little longer, biting down just a bit harder. She was slightly quicker, and basically wore Thomas down by being what Elam had already told her, just a bit...more.
Emma could hear and feel the tensions and surprise around her as she sat in the dream coliseum her mother was showing her in visions.
Elam was right, no one had expected her mother to be victorious. This challenge, like Elam and Galen's to follow, was just supposed to be a formality.
Emma looked around in her forced vision, spying a young Ziva. She was perched on the edge of her seat, watching her mate slowly lose to his sister.
Realizing that she could see Ziva, and putting pieces together, Emma looked around for the younger version of her father.
There.
Her dad was there, watching his mate and Emma's future mother bit by bit become the pack's first, and so far only, female Alpha.
She noticed how young her dad looked. Young, and earnest, and worried.
Emma read so much love on her dad's face as he watched his mate.
She wondered what his back story was. How he, a human, had come to be the mate of a shifter. She made a mental note to ask him to tell her his story one day. She also wondered what he would say if he could see her, his future unborn daughter, if he just looked over here in her vision. But he never did.
His eyes never strayed from his Reine, and Emma eventually turned back to watch as her mother pinned Thomas for the final time, becoming in that moment the pack's new Alpha wolf.
There was no time for celebration, though.
A strange, wounded wolf burst onto the floor of the arena, shifting into his human form almost before he'd even come to a full stop.
Emma looked around, watching wolves and humans both react to the intrusion at first with hostility and then with an urgent call to arms once they recognized the wolf as being from the adjoining pack.
Something had happened while the entire pack was here, deep in the woods, holding its Alpha Challenge.
Something very bad, indeed.
Emma started to turn to the person beside her in her vision, to ask what was going on, but a sudden pain in her head made her stop.
She groaned as another wave of nausea rolled through her, and she looked to her dad instinctively, only to watch him shimmer and disappear as her vision faded, and reality came crashing down.
Kate.
She thought she