The Alpha Claims His Mate

Chapter 1-1

1When Dr. Samantha Lashbrooke first started working as a professor at the University of Astoria, she had hoped that her job would be filled with exciting research. However, many of her colleagues were keen to snap up all the interesting and exotic research opportunities. This left Samantha to tend to the bright-eyed batches of undergraduate students.

It wasn’t terrible. The worst that could be said was that it was boring. She taught the same courses again and again. Her dreams of field research felt further and further away each year.

It wasn’t all bad. She’d managed to move up in the ranks. She wasn’t just teaching all the intro courses. She wanted to do research. However, she hadn’t gotten many job offers when she graduated and had to take this one. She wished that things had been different. But they weren’t.

Now, she was stuck in a teaching position. She hadn’t gotten to the point where she was looking for other positions. That’s how she’d gotten into this position in the first place. It had been pitched to her as a research position with a little bit of teaching on the side.

When Samantha saw how much they were offering her, she jumped at the chance to sign the contract. It was only afterwards that she realized that the research portion was cleverly worded to include research done for the classes that Samantha would be teaching.

Dr. Mara Gibson had taken her aside one year and told her that everyone had to pay their dues and the undergraduates were the lifeblood of the college. Samantha, or KJ as her friends called her, didn’t like that very much. She knew that the undergraduates were essentially bankrolling the university. But there were professors who actually enjoyed teaching and then there were those who wanted to research things.

Samantha had specialized her research in the interactions between various shifter populations. It was hard to get the money from the university to go off and embed herself somewhere truly interesting. So Samantha was left reading the research of others in her fields.

That had all changed when the same Dr. Mara Gibson suggested that she take a look into the dynamics in the Klamath River Valley. Initially skeptical, Samantha had fallen for the area. It was easy on the eyes, rugged and wild, but there was a decent sized town in the area so she’d be comfortable. The main thing that had drawn Mara to it was that it was cheap, but provided Samantha an opportunity to do the research that she so craved.

Samantha had been so excited when she’d gotten the request for the sabbatical in order to research the dynamics between the werewolves of Klamath Valley and the werebears of the Upper Klamath Lake area. She spun around and looked at the hotel room. It was certainly a nice one. Not like the Hilton or anything.

Samantha wanted to rent a little cottage by the lake, so she could go hiking and even swimming in the summer. But she was told that the lake was usually extremely cold and besides, as part of her job here she was expected to host events.

That was the irksome thing. This wasn’t a pure research post. As the Dean of Shifter Studies explained to her, Samantha was expected to do outreach and create a connection between the shifter communities and the humans in the area. While she thought it was silly, the city was paying for part of her salary for the year.

Still it was a good position. She kept repeating that to herself. It was a good position. Maybe eventually she’d believe it. Samantha sighed and set her suitcase down. She had only packed what she needed. A few professional dresses and work outfits, but the rest were jeans, hiking pants, and plaid shirts. She didn’t have to impress students or other members of the faculty here.

She had been warned extensively that there would be social events. But Samantha Lashbrooke didn’t think there would be anything incredibly fancy out here in Klamath Falls. She hung up her clothes in the wardrobe. She had packed lightly for the year. Most of what she wore was sorted into three categories: dresses, jeans and shirts, and outdoor gear. She had packed the most of the latter category.

It was not the end of the world if she showed up to an event over- or under-dressed. However, getting stuck in the wilds with the wrong gear could mean the difference between life and death. That was not a risk that Samantha was willing to take.

The hotel was an old historic building. She had a nice suite to herself and then there were various parlors downstairs where she could entertain if she needed to. But upstairs where she was, there was a small sitting room, in addition to her bedroom. The sitting room opened out on to a balcony that over looked the small gardens in the back of the house. She was on the second level.

The gardens were arranged so that the back yards of several other buildings met. It looked like it might go on for longer. The trees were planted to hide the fence from those viewing the gardens.

She could easily imagine some Victorian lady sitting here and holding court. Only, Samantha thought darkly, she wouldn’t be very happy. Klamath Falls was not a particularly large town and it had never been. She doubted that this had ever been the good place to be.

Shaking her head, she continued to put away her clothes. At least the place wasn’t decorated like someone’s idea of the Victorian era—that usually meant lace and frills and dolls everywhere. Samantha didn’t like dolls very much, it always seemed like their eyes were watching her.

With most of the busy work done, Samantha plugged in her computer and opened it up. She checked the various websites that the city maintained. There weren’t many meeting places that weren’t bars in the town. She could start anywhere.

The town had hoped that she would start symposiums, but what Samantha really wanted to do was make contact with the shifters of the area. There were many shifters. Cat shifters were some of the most common. Like the common housecat, they were everywhere. There weren’t many clans of them. Like the housecat, they preferred their own spaces.

Wolves and bears often shared the same areas. This wasn’t uncommon. What was uncommon was the existence of two equally powerful shifter groups sharing territory. Normally what happened was that one shifter clan took over the area and others moved on. Cities were different. But certain parts just drew more shifters of a certain type than others.

Samantha sighed. She didn’t want to start out with the bars. Despite the bear mace (which worked just fine on humans and other shifters) that she carried, she knew that she was no match for a shifter—or even a human man if it came to that.

This was not what she’d envisioned when she’d thought about her first research post. She pulled up her email and sent out emails to the shifters on the list. She decided that she would start with the top of the list and work her way down.

It was hard to make each email personal but get them done quickly. Still, Samantha thought that she did a good job of that. She came up with a basic format and tried to personalize it a little at the end and the beginning. She just hoped that they all didn’t get together and compare notes or something. That would quickly reveal Samantha’s little trick.

The downside was that unlike a large city, it didn’t seem like people checked their emails much out here. There weren’t any immediate replies. Samantha was bored. She wasn’t exactly sure what to do. She hadn’t had free time in ages. It was nice to not be held to the strict schedule of the university.

Samantha hadn’t had this much freedom since she was an undergrad. She didn’t like it at all. She had minored in Social Work then, but that was just to get more classes with the amazing Professor Samantha Whitehorse, a stunningly beautiful leopard shifter. Samantha had adored her and found her views so interesting—especially on integration.

Pulling up a word document, Samantha sat down to write out her plans. She was required to do four mixer-type events to pull the shifter community together in the town and allow the humans to mingle. From her research of the demographics, there were a lot of shifters in the area. Aside from the large bear and wolf populations, there were raccoons, various birds, a small amount of possums, and of course, cats.

But there were also the transplants. Samantha pulled up the results from the last census. A horse, a camel of all things, a goat, and parrot. The rest of the population was fairly mixed human. Samantha sighed. A mixer for the entire town was going to be difficult. It also seemed like a colossal waste of time.

Aside from the big divide between the wolves and the bears, the town seemed to be just fine. Most of the shifters lived in the city itself and were perfectly integrated, thus making a silly mixer useless. Still, it was what she was being paid to do. Samantha figured that she might as well work on a plan for those.

As the weeks passed, Samantha fell into a routine. She’d send out more emails. She’d receive no response. Then she would take the leased car and drive out to one of the trailheads and go for a hike around the Upper Klamath Lake. It was beautiful. The air had that nip in it and everything seemed fresh and crisp.

Samantha loved the outdoors and hiking. Nature was so beautiful. In Astoria she honestly didn’t have time for many athletic things—outside of the gym. She was stuck grading papers and preparing lectures. She didn’t have time to devote to anything else—especially since she was looking for research positions.

But out here, she was free for now. The large evergreens grew upwards toward the sky. In the distance a raven cawed—the echo distorted the sound, made it longer and more distant. It no longer sounded like something that came from an unearthly creature.

Warm and glistening with sweat, Samantha continued her hike. She hoped that she would meet a shifter in the wild but she never did. She’d purchased a tent from the store in town and extended her trips. But she never saw anything. Samantha knew that there were shifter settlements out here but she’d yet to see any evidence of that. She hadn’t even stumbled upon a bear print or wolf scat.

If she didn’t know better, she’d look at this area and declare it free of bears and wolves.

Maybe that was the point.

Samantha looked around at the mountains rising up around the lake. There was snow on them. Soon the weather would turn from pleasant crisp to freezing and snowing. She wasn’t looking forward to that. Even though she lived in Astoria, she didn’t like the cold. That and it would be impossible to go out and hike in the area with all that snow and ice on the ground.

She pulled out her smart phone and entered the note. It was worth recording that there seemed to be no native wolves or bears in the area. She went and sat down on a rock near the trail. There was a lot of research done on the effect of shifters on the native animal populations, but that wasn’t Samantha’s area of interest.

Honestly, she was dying to know how the rivalry between the bears and the wolves had all played out. She turned around and headed down the trail. She needed to get the library and do some research.

In the library, she learned that, to her dismay, the feud went back since the beginning of record keeping in Klamath Falls. The earliest records that she came across referenced events years and sometimes decades earlier. Samantha sighed.

Almost as discouraging were the accounts of failed attempts at repairing the divide. It was natural that two power shifter clans in the same area would quarrel. Samantha continued reading about the raids and the wars that had been fought in the early 1800s, when the area was just beginning to be settled.