Page 78 of His Bonded Omega Mate
Roan’s laugh was lovely. I could just see his beaming face, white teeth glinting. “Yeah. turns out demons aren’t so bad. Plus, Cody and Toth are royalty.”
“Oh, my goddess! Really?”
“Really. Princes. Anyway, Toth has a farm and grows these massive apples, as big as your head apparently, called hell-spice apples. He and Blake want to make a specialty cider from them.” Roan sounded so excited, it was cute. “He and Kade are about to portal there. If everything goes according to plan, we will have a permanent portal to Toth’s farm and the demons will help us with their magic. Seems like Cody is pretty powerful now his demon nature has been unlocked.”
“Wow!” I sat back on my stool, the pages in my hand momentarily forgotten.
“Sorry, I distracted you. I just found out the visit was happening today when I got in. They’ve kept it locked down until it was really going ahead.”
“It’s fine. That’s so cool. Our elders taught us that demons were bad, but if they can have children with witches, then they must be blessed by the goddess, too. Right?”
“Guess so. I’d like to meet them myself, but they don’t want to draw too much attention by so many of us going. You were looking for something. Comparing DNA?” Roan drew me back to my task.
“Well, in this beta, there is a new gene on this strand of DNA.”
“I’m already lost.”
“Trust me, I knew a little bit about DNA before all of this, but I’ve had a crash course in genetics now. Think of it like a code. You have an area in your coding that makes you have the alpha traits, such as your knot.” I shifted, thinking of it. Damn, what I wouldn’t give to be stretched — I needed to focus. “Okay, so you’ve got a gene, one that I don’t have as an omega. Mine is different. You don’t have that one either. The betas don’t have either gene, but in the sick that had the beta sickness for a month, there’s something there. One that neither of us have. I just wanted to check a beta that hadn’t had the sickness, then maybe one that was only sick for a short time to see if it was the sickness that caused this. Like a mutation.”
“Makes sense. Do you think this gene does something?”
“Maybe. It’s strange that we don’t have it and they do. It must be there for a purpose.” Carefully, I lined them up, looking for the correct line. This person hadn’t been sick. “It isn’t there.”
“What?”
“Roan, this person is a beta, and they weren’t sick. They don’t have the new gene.” I stood and started grabbing charts. Flicking through them, I found the one for Chase and the one for Axel. Then lined them up. “Holy shit!”
“Hiro? What’s happening?” Roan sounded ready to run to the clinic at a moment’s notice.
“Chase only has half the gene. Axel’s looks different from this person’s, but it is in the same place.”
I was already pulling more files when he spoke. “Grab more. This is it Hiro! I feel it.”
Without looking at names, I took all the betas that had woken after two weeks with Chase’s. They all had the malformed gene on the right line, which I told to Roan.
Next, I looked at all the betas that had woken up after a month. Some, roughly half, had one gene, the rest another. Both were in the same place.
My eyes filled with tears as realization dawned. “Roan. These are new omega and alpha genes.” My hands shook. My entire body quivering as the knowledge took hold. “Everyone that was sick for a month has them.” I was overcome with emotion for a minute over this gift that the goddess had bestowed on us.
Sniffing, I pushed the tears away. I needed to check the profiles of Asher and Tate before and after they changed. All betas that had been sick had submitted to genetic testing as part of the investigation. I found the appropriate files.
“Hiro? Are you okay?” I had the phone on speaker on the desk. I wandered over to it, the two files from Tate in my hand. “Oh wow!”
“What is it?” Roan sounded worried.
“The gene, it’s there in the first test after they woke, but it looks slightly different since they changed.” So before we bonded, they had the gene. It was there, clear as day. Then after we bonded, it had altered slightly. I’d always worried that we had caused this, but no, Tate and Asher were the same as all the other betas. They all had the ability to change designation. My mind was blown as the information soaked in. “Do you know what this means?”
“What?” Roan sounded ready to run to me.
“It means it wasn’t us that changed them. We only unlocked it. Tate and Asher were meant to be turned. We have to unlock the gene in the others.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Roan?”
“We didn’t do this? It was meant to happen?” He sounded choked with emotion. For the last few months he’d carried around all this guilt, knowing that Tate hadn’t wanted to be an omega at first. With every day that passed, he seemed to grow into his new role. He was excited to meet his baby.
“No. We just unlocked it. If I’m on the right track, it was likely we unlocked it with the bite. It has a chemical in it that starts a heat. It’s possible that it does the same thing on the gene. Our bonding bites were just the key. It seems like it only takes as long as the sickness took to be complete. I mean, these are just guesses, but they feel right.”
