Cry Wolf

I love Patricia Briggs’ books.  So I was pretty excited to start reading Cry Wolf, the first book in her Alpha and Omega series.  I got through the prologue, which dealt with a random character, then got thrown into the story at a point that most definitely wasn’t the beginning.  Annoyed, I charged my Kindle, bought and read the novella that takes place before this book, then went back to it.  Now everything made sense (and I knew who all the wolves in the first chapter actually were).

Once I got through that hurdle, I found I had a hard time putting the book down.  I’ve stayed up way too late over the last few nights reading it (I started it at 2am on the 7th, and finished it a little before 4am today).

Cry Wolf is about werewolves Charles and Anna.  Charles is a two-hundred year old very dominant alpha wolf (second to his father, who is the alpha of all the wolves in North America).  Anna is a rare omega wolf, who is sort of like a medicine woman; she exudes peace and can calm the rage of other werewolves.  Anna was turned into a werewolf against her will and brutalized (that all happened in the novella).  She falls outside of pack structure, so dominance doesn’t actually work on her (alpha wolves can normally command more submissive wolves to do things; those commands just slide right off of her).  In her old pack, she was kept ignorant of her powers and was told she was a useless submissive wolf.  With Charles and his father Bran, she starts to realize that she is neither useless nor submissive.

Charles’ wolf decided as soon as he saw her that Anna was his mate.  This is super strange for him as well as her because he’s never had a mate before.  Suddenly he finds himself not only determined to protect her (from danger as well as potential rivals like Asil, an ancient wolf who is almost as old as Charles’ father), but also able to let down his guard and relax (thanks to her Omega powers).

The story alternates between their two viewpoints.  Neither one really talks to the other one (sometimes because they aren’t given the time, other times because they’re afraid to express their feelings).  When they get to Charles’ home in Montana, Anna is overwhelmed and feels like she doesn’t belong.  It doesn’t help that Bran’s mate Leah comes over to make a power play with her, and that Charles keeps wanting to leave her behind on things because he doesn’t want to subject her to seeing him possibly kill again.  Charles is also injured (from the novella - he got shot three times with silver bullets, and one of the bullets wasn’t properly removed).  But he isn’t given a chance to heal because there’s a werewolf attack in the nearby mountains.  As his father’s enforcer, it’s his job to deal with it.  Normally that would mean killing the wolf, but with Anna coming along, there’s a chance they can bring him in peacefully.

But the rogue lone wolf is not the actual problem - he was a man changed when he defended a student in the mountains from an attack.  It seems there’s another wolf running around.  And it looks an awful lot like Asil’s mate who died two hundred years previously. Died to a witch....

This book didn’t do anything amazing, but I still had a lot of fun reading it (like I said, I stayed up waaaay too late while reading it).  I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series (after a break to catch up on sleep though!)