Desert Heat (Complete)

{Jedediah’s P.O.V.}

Either I was hallucinating, or Brandon just told me that Scanlan was the former Beta of Red Mountain. I couldn’t have possibly heard him correctly. There was just no way that this was true. A Beta is an Alpha’s right hand, aside from their Luna. A Beta is the Alpha’s biggest support and confidant. To betray one’s Alpha is unheard of. It’s straight-up blasphemous. As I was lost in my thoughts, the sound of a handclap cut through the silence and got my attention. I looked up to see Zachary clapping slowly and obnoxiously. “Well done, Beta Brandon,” he mocked.

“So … It’s true? You were Ricard’s Beta?!” I questioned. He gave me another dickwad smirk and tilted his head once, indicating that it was, in fact, true. The affirmation of his betrayal had my b***d boiling, and Gunner was so close to completely taking over. “YOU BETRAYED MY FATHER!?!” I roared, shaking the entire office.

“Your father!? What the f**k are you talking about!?” Scanlan shouted.

“Had you been listening, instead of being the pompous dickhead that you are, you would have heard Vivienne and Andre telling Jed who the Ricards are and where they come from,” Brandon stated.

“Also, if you had been using your werewolf hearing, you would have heard Vivienne call Jed a Supreme Alpha,” Dorian added.

“And the reason why my sister, who is only a hybrid, is able to fully shift into a wolf without losing her vampire half,” Andre chimed in.

“Jedediah Brinkley no longer exists because standing before you now Zachary Scanlan is the rightful heir to the Red Mountain pack. May I introduce Alpha Ricard’s biological son, Jedediah Ricard,” Dorian announced. Scanlan’s head whipped towards me.

“I, JEDEDIAH RICARD, HEREBY CHALLENGE YOU, ZACHARY SCANLAN, FOR THE TITLE OF ALPHA!” I roared.

“YOU CAN’T CHALLENGE ME!”

“He has every right to challenge you, Scanlan! Even more so because he is the rightful heir to the pack! You cheated your way into becoming an Alpha and subsequently burned the pack’s most sacred document in order to keep your lies concealed. But now, everything has come to light, and you will pay for your crimes! I will see to it that the Elders of Colorado learn of your treachery, and you are stripped of your rank!” Dorian snarled.

“YOU CAN’T PROVE ANYTHING!” Scanlan cried out like a whiny baby. “It’s my word against yours! I AM THE ALPHA HERE!”

“Actually, it’s your word against yours,” Brandon said as he pointed up above him. Scanlan’s head shot up and everyone saw his face turn stark white. “You really should learn to remember where you put your security cameras,” Brandon ridiculed him. I was about to throw his stupidity in his face, but the door to his office suddenly burst open, and Seth ran in out of breath.

“ALPHA! WE’RE UNDER ATTACK! ROGUES HAVE ENTERED THE TERRITORY!” Seth howled. I turned back and snarled at Scanlan. The challenge would have to wait. The pack needed protection, and with three of the four ranked members from Desert Moon and myself here, I was sure we could beat these rogues.

“Seth!” I called out.

“What?”

“Take Vivienne to my old bedroom and stay with her at all costs!”

“But I need to get back out—”

“DO AS I f*****g SAY!” I screamed at him.

“Okay, geez, you don’t have to scream at me,” he argued as he took Vivienne’s hand.

“Protect her with your life, do you f*****g understand me!? Keep Michaela away from her!”

“I got it. Don’t worry, man, I’ll protect your mate,” he replied and took her away.

“Mon Loup!” she cried out to me.

“Go with Seth, baby, I’ll be fine.”

“But!”

“No buts. I need you to listen to me very carefully, Mon Coeur. If any rogues get in and they find you, I need you to shimmer home. Do you understand? You leave Red Mountain, and you shimmer back to Desert Moon.”

“But J.D.!”

“I cannot lose you—or the pups—do you understand me? I cannot. If you die, then I die with you. Promise me you will shimmer home if worse comes to worst.” She gulped and hesitated but nodded anyway. “Good, now go!” I pushed her towards Seth, who dragged her out of the office. I turned back to Scanlan.

“Our personal issues will have to wait! Let’s just hope the men haven’t stopped training since I left!” I shouted at him and ran out of the door. Dorian, Brandon, and Andre were right behind me. Packhouse members were scurrying all over the place like chickens with their heads cut off. There was no organization, and it was absolute mayhem. No one was escorting the women and children to the basement.

“What the f**k is going on here!? There’s no order!” Brandon exclaimed.

“Where the f**k is Michaela!?” I asked, grabbing a passing pack member. “She should be leading the women and children to safety!”

“I don’t know, Jedediah!” the pack member shouted and ripped her arm away from me.

“This way, everyone! This way!” I heard a familiar voice. I turned around and saw Vivienne directing people towards the basements.

“Vivienne! What the hell!?” I yelled.

“Not now, Mon Loup!” she dismissed me and kept guiding the pack members.

“SETH!” I roared at him.

“Don’t yell at me, man! She threatened to drink my b***d if I didn’t help her!” I grunted in frustration. Seth was such a f*****g p***y. I would deal with him later.

“Leave it alone,” Dorian told me. I turned to face him and furrowed my brows. “She’s their Luna. She’s doing what she’s meant to do, and she’s doing it naturally.” He was right. I looked back at Vivienne, and I could see her moving in slow motion. She was guiding the pack members to safety, what the Luna of a pack was supposed to do in the case of an emergency.

“Come on! Let’s go!” Brandon shouted, diverting my attention. I reluctantly turned my back on Vivienne and Seth, and we ran out of the front door. Sure enough, there were at least two dozen rogues standing in the middle of the front yard. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. What stole the show was the fact that two very familiar wolves were standing to the left of the main point.

“MOM!? DAD!?” I exclaimed. Everyone gasped. The two wolves shifted back to their human forms, and sure enough, they were my adopted parents.

“Hello, Jedediah,” my mom greeted me.

“Son.” I was completely speechless. I had to be seeing ghosts. There was no way.

“You … But … I …”

“I know, you’re probably really confused, but we’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, sweetheart,” my mom admitted. She never used terms of endearment on me, so hearing her call me anything but my name was a little strange.

“And what day might that be!?” I demanded.

“The day where you take your rightful place as the Alpha of this pack,” my dad answered. Everyone gasped again and shifted their gazes towards me.

“Hold up, these are your adopted parents!?” Brandon asked. I nodded my head without looking at him. “And did they just admit that they’ve known about your pedigree the entire time!?”

“Yes, we have. We knew the moment he came to us,” my mom revealed. “Or rather, Luna Lynette knew.”

“I don’t understand. You guys were killed by rogues! How are you here right now!?” My mom was about to respond, but she was cut off by Scanlan making a scene.

“WHAT IS GOING ON OUT HERE!? WHY IS NO ONE PROTECT—” he stopped mid-sentence when he saw my parents. “What!?”

“Hello, Zachary,” my father addressed him with zero enthusiasm.

“You!? You’re supposed to be dead!?”

“Yes, well, I was about to explain everything to our son here until you rudely interrupted me. Now, if you don’t mind. Jedediah, we didn’t die that day. It was all part of the plan.”

“Plan!? What plan!?” I protested. Nothing made sense anymore.

“The plan to get you back into the packhouse where you belonged,” my father answered.

“You see, sweetie, Luna Lynette knew that you weren’t just some rogue pup left at the border of the pack territory. No, no, she knew that you were more special than that, and she told us exactly how special you were,” my mother explained.

“What?”

“Allow me to explain in detail,” another feminine voice announced. The wolves separated and out walked another ghost.

“Luna?” I gasped. The pack members gasped even louder and fell to their knees in respect. Her eyes shifted for a moment and landed on Scanlan. She smirked once before saying, “Hi honey, I’m home.”

“But how?! I watched you die!” he ululated.

“No, you watched as a wolf snatched me by its mouth and dragged me away into the depths of the woods. You didn’t even bother to come after me,” she sneered.

“Ly-Lynette, I don’t—” I stuttered in utter confusion.

“Jedediah, everything that has happened over the last 31 years has been planned from the day that I found you during my walk. You see, when I found you, you weren’t actually alone. You were being watched and very carefully, I might add. When I found you, you were crying and appeared to be alone. I picked you up because I wanted to soothe you, and that’s when a white and blue wolf came to me. She snarled at me at first but then calmed down after a minute or so. I thought she wanted to kill me, but it turned out she wanted to get a sense of who I was. There was no oral communication exchanged because she stayed in wolf form. But I knew just by her reaction that she was your mother. Not a single word was said between the two of us, but she wrote something in the dirt with her paw.”

“What did she write?”

“Two words—Supreme Alpha.” I furrowed my brows. “She nudged you with her snout and licked you very gently a few times as if she were saying goodbye. I could see the sadness in her eyes. But, based on how she was acting, it appeared that she no other choice. She bowed her head to me and then ran away. I knew what she wanted from me, so I promised her that I would take you in. I don’t think she realized that I was the Luna, but she trusted me with you anyway. When I brought you home that night, I was hoping that because you were a little boy, it would sway Zachary into adopting you. That way, you would become the Alpha when he passed his title along, but he refused to adopt a rogue pup. He told me to give you to Duke and Rayna Brinkley because they were having trouble conceiving. I didn’t tell them who you were at first. It was my little secret. But, when you turned ten, you seemed to outgrow a lot of the other males in the pack, and you were already stronger than most of the other Omegas. I didn’t think much of your size when you were a baby, because males wolves are large as it is, but you were just growing at an alarming rate. Rayna eventually came to me because she knew that a normal Omega couldn’t grow at that rate, and that’s when I told her about where I had found you and what your birth mother had written in the dirt.”

“After I told your father what the Luna had told me, that’s when we started to fight about you. Your father was afraid that if Zachary found out, he would have you killed. But I wanted to fight for you. For your birthright,” my mom disclosed to me.

“She eventually convinced me to go along with the plan. We would raise you until you were strong enough to challenge Scanlan, but things didn’t go quite as planned. Being so low in the food chain of the pack, we were never allowed in the packhouse for very long, and Scanlan refused to let you train. Though, I could never understand why. You were so much bigger and stronger than the other males your age,” my father interjected.

“When we realized that getting you to reach your full potential wouldn’t be as easy as we’d hoped, I went back out into the woods where I found you and left a note for your mother, hoping that even after so many years she would be alive and would find it. I went back every few nights to that spot until, one day, I found a small disk in place of the note I had left. I hid it away and brought it back to my personal office in the packhouse. I put it into my computer, and it was a voice message from a man. A very powerful man from his tone,” Luna Lynette explained.

“What did it say?” I questioned.

“He said that there would be an attack on the pack and that the Brinkley’s were going to be taken, but they were to be pronounced dead. The message indicated that they would be dragged into the woods and never to be found. Once they were announced as dead to the pack, I was to take you in and convince Zachary to train you to be a warrior for the pack. And it worked. But, you went away for college, and things between Zachary and I … Well, let’s just say I wanted out of here so badly, that I contacted your mother again and she was able to get me out with another attack on the pack. None of us had expected you to leave again for school, but you did, so we waited, yet again. But when you came back, things kept getting sidetracked. And then you left the pack. That really put a damper on our plans. So, we’ve just been waiting. We knew you would eventually figure it out and come back here.”

“YOU BETRAYED ME! YOU CONNIVING w***e!” Scanlan screamed at Lynette. The entire pack turned their heads and looked at him in disgust. “BY RIGHT, I SHOULD KILL YOU FOR YOUR TREACHERY!”

“You and what army?” she taunted. “As you can see, I have over three dozen wolves with me. What do you have?”

“I have my pack!”

“Really, because it looks like they’re not very happy with you.” Scanlan glanced around and finally saw the looks of disdain and disappointment. “And I would take a good look in the mirror before calling anybody a w***e, Zach. I’m not the one that was constantly cheating on their mate!” Pack members started to mumble and scoff at him.

“Wow, so not only do you hit women after kidnapping them, but you also cheated on your mate. The Luna of your pack. And here I thought I couldn’t hate you any more than I already do,” Brandon mocked. His comment about Scanlan’s battery and assault didn’t go unnoticed by the pack members, and I think that it was intentional. Hearing what Scanlan was capable of, everyone began to murmur even more, and some even went so far as to walk away from the packhouse to join the pack of rogues. Silently indicating that they would rather be rogues than be under his rule any longer.

“Where are you going!? Get back here!” he demanded.

“Oh, I guess the pack members would rather be with their not-so-dead Luna, than their weak, pathetic, and cheating Alpha.”

“Why you—”

“MOM!?” Everyone turned to the front door, and there stood Michaela.

“Oh, my sweet girl.”

“Mom, you … you’re alive!?”

“Yes, honey, I am, and I am so disappointed in you!”

“Wow, that wasn’t the heartfelt hello I expected,” Brandon muttered under his breath.

“What?”

“Michaela, I know I raised you better than … this,” Lynette scolded while gesturing towards her. “I told you that the mate bond was sacred and that you should always treasure it. Yet, the first thing you do when you find out that Jedediah is your mate is to reject him!?”

“I’m an Alpha’s daughter! I shouldn’t have been mated to an Omega! At least, that’s what I said at first. I took it back though!”

“After six years, honey. That’s not how it works. You also took it back after you had slept with every single male in the pack. You’re just like your father.”

“MOM!?” I had to admit, being away from the pack for over a decade definitely gave Luna Lynette some spunk.

“The truth hurts, doesn’t it, sweetie? I expected better from you after my death, but you got even worse. First, you steal the Alphas list from your father’s office, you stalk Jedediah to Desert Moon, you make our packs enemies because of your irresponsibility, and not only that, but you teamed up with a vampire to get Jedediah’s mate kidnapped.”

“WHAT?!?!”