Page 1 of The Omega's Alpha
Chapter One
Quin was walkingon a dusty road to nowhere. He was at the head of his pack—his soldiers—gun cradled in his arms, borrowing as heavily from his wolf as he could, even though he knew he’d pay for it later. Once they were safe, he could pass the responsibility on to someone else while he recovered, but he had to get them to safety first. Except, when he spun in a slow circle to check on them all, it wasn’t the humans he’d known when he’d been overseas, but his pack. His real pack.
He was leading a bunch of Mercy Hills shifters. Abel, and Cas, though he hadn’t seen Cas in eight years and in the dream he was still a scrawny teenager. Ozgur, who had been his best friend until they turned nine and Ozgur’s family had moved away to Winter Moon because he could work on cars there. He didn’t look anything like Ozgur had, but somehow Quin knew it was him. An older woman whose name he couldn’t remember but he knew in that same dream certainty that she was from Mercy Hills. A few others—people he knew well, some he just knew by sight.
And then it all went to shit.
A heavy wave of doom rushed over him. He tried to get them to run, to take cover, to get out of the way of whatever it was that was coming, while trying to walk through air like cement, his body refusing to obey his commands. The gun in his arms twitched and he looked down and it wasn’t his gun anymore, but Cas. Or what was left of him.
“Hey, Grampa.” Cas grinned, his jawbone hanging loose and sickening in his face. Quin tried to put it back, because it shouldn’t be attached only on one side, but it kept slipping out of his hand and he still had to run, but he was so tired, and then they were all dead, all but him. He couldn’t see them, but he knew it—
Quin woke up face down on the bedroom floor, next to the little table that held his alarm clock, his phone, his glass of water. The table was on its side, the phone half in and half out of the puddle forming in front of the glass. Stupidly, he stared at it, then reached out and batted it away from the water. It skittered across the fake wood of the floor, leaving a thin damp trace of its passing, and came to a stop against the far wall with a clunk.
He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the floor. His nights had been broken by nightmares since leaving the army, but nothing like this. They were getting worse, and more frequent, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He supposed he could talk to Adelaide. He could try to access his veteran’s benefits, but he’d have to go outside walls for that and, well—he’d just gotten home.
Damn, had it really been only a month?
And just like that, his brain kicked off into overdrive, and any chance of getting to sleep disappeared in a puff of smoke. Not that sleep was likely after one of those dreams, with his heart still racing and all his senses straining for threats that weren’t really there. But sometimes he could just roll over and force himself to sleep, like he had before he’d come home.
Not today.
Quin sat up in bed and scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair until the last cobwebby feel of the dream had left him. The sky was still pitch black outside his window—no one would be awake to distract him.Might as well get some work done.He reminded himself that it would get better—he’d only been Alpha for a month and this stage where everything seemed to take him two times longer than Abel said it should would eventually come to an end.
He pushed himself to his feet and shambled toward the bathroom.
Chapter Two
Acoupleof hours and halfway through his second cup of coffee later, Quin’s phone rang.
“Hey, you want to come over for breakfast?” Abel’s voice bounded out of the phone, sounding far too cheerful for this early in the morning. Whatever time that was—he’d kind of lost track. Quin glanced at the clock on the computer screen. Six o’clock. Okay, it wasn’t that early, but he’d been up since three, and it was the third day in a row this had happened. He was more tired than hungry, but the lack of sleep and the stack of paperwork, reports, and decisions to be made reminded him too much of the army. It laid a veil of history over everything he looked at that colored it all dust-beige and dead, and sucked some of the joy out of being home. But being home was still better than being in the army.
“Sure.” He’d only been home a month, barely scratched the surface of this new life, but he’d already figured out that Abel’s pups could chase away the ghosts of the past better than anything else. And there were—other—reasons for him to visit as well. “Right now?”
“Whenever you get here. Bax and Holland put together some sort of baked egg thing that they promise is good enough even the pups will eat it.”
Quin chuckled. “I’ll be right down.”
“I do my best to hold off the ravening hoards.”
Quin stared at his phone for a moment after Abel hung up and tried to put his thoughts in order again. Unfortunately, where Holland was concerned, instinct took point in that hunt and he found himself thinking things he had no right to think. Hell, he hardly knew the other man. And even if he did, it wasn’t like Quin was good mate material, with the long hours and the nightmares and the …other symptoms.
He pushed it all away, the memories that rushed forward unbidden at odd moments, the sensation of being watched, the tension when things got too quiet around him. Maybe that was what Abel’s pups did for him—they buried the silence in their joy in life.
The coffee in his cup was lukewarm. He debated drinking it anyway just for the caffeine, then shook his head and dumped it in the kitchen sink. There’d be better at Abel’s and, to be honest, what was a half-mug of cheap instant going to do for him anyway? It was Bax’s one personal splurge, and one that Quin appreciated whole-heartedly. He’d have to find some expensive brand of beans to give him for Christmas, but he didn’t know a damn thing about coffee except that sometimes it kept him awake.
Having in-laws was both fun and stressful.
It wasn’t quite raining, more a heavy drizzle that was still on the fence about whether it wanted to be mist of full on rain. Quin pulled the brim of his ball cap down over his head and tugged the neck of his winter jacket closer, squinting up at the sky.Fuck it.He went back into the building and signed out one of the pack’s vehicles, a small Ford sedan with a pristine interior.
In the car, it took less than ten minutes to get to Abel’s house. He pulled up in front of the building with its welcoming porch and the lights gleaming through the windows like beacons of warmth. The roads still hadn’t been officially created here, though the repeated press of feet and tires had worn tracks from the town to this still mostly unpopulated area. Not for long—Abel had done amazing things since he’d taken over as Alpha. Would Quin do as well? He hoped so.
The front door opened and a little ball of fur came pelting out onto the porch, deftly evading his father’s attempt to grab him before he could escape. The dark tips on his ears identified him as Fan. The second one to sneak out past her father’s legs had more brown around the cheeks and chest—Beatrice. Noah waddled out to the door in human form, but showed more sense than his brother and sister and hung out in the warmth of the entryway.
The puppies barked at him and Abel crept out onto the damp boards in his sock feet to try to push them back inside. It made Quin want to laugh, but laughter was still difficult for him, so he smiled and climbed the steps up onto the porch.
He and Abel hugged briefly. “Let’s get inside before they get all wet and I end up on the couch.”
Quin looked at him sharply, wondering if he’d read Bax wrong the few times he’d met him, but Abel’s eyes danced and it was enough hint for Quin to realize that Abel was joking. His suspicion was confirmed when Bax, belly huge with Abel’s first pup of his own line, floated slowly out of the kitchen. “Abel! I’d never do that. At least, not with winter coming on. I’d freeze.” Abel grinned and put an arm around Bax’s waist to pull him into a kiss, the pups leaping around their feet. Quin relaxed and reminded himself that this was pack, and omegas were notorious for their devotion to their mates—after twenty years of watching every interaction he had with his command structure, he was hunting problems where there weren’t any. It was good that Abel had someone he could joke with.
