Page 81 of The Omega's Alpha
“Give me a second to get my jacket.” It was the end of June, but still cool enough at night that I liked to have something more than a t-shirt.
“I’m not taking you down there, Holland. Quin would have my head.”
I glared at him, but he just shook his head and left, closing the door with a snap that said as well as he might have, “No.”
No matter. I put my jacket on anyway, waited a few minutes until I was sure he was gone, then I went out too. And, I took the van. Because I’d been learning to drive and, while I didn’t have my license yet, who was going to stop me here in the enclave?
I didn’t even scrape it against the side of the garage gate leaving, which was more than Bram could say. It trundled over the rough track and I was careful not to drive too fast, because I wasn’t that comfortable yet. Eventually I made it down to Mac’s and Jason’s new house, right next to Abel’s, and stopped there. I wanted Bax too. What had started out as a sort of defiant act against being over-protected became an experiment, but I needed the True Omegas for it.
I knocked and stuck my head in through the door. “Jason?”
“In the kitchen!”
I walked through the house, a carbon copy of the duplexes in the newer section of the enclave. Another young family had the other side and there was already talk of adding an extension to make more bedrooms, as she was pregnant with their fourth and his mother lived with them as well.
Jason was wiping down the counter and stove, the kitchen spotless like mine never seemed. I suppressed a sigh and declined his invitation to sit down. “Could I borrow you for an experiment?”
“What kind?” He folded his cloth neatly and hung it over the handle of the oven.
“I want to see if you and Bax together can do something to calm down the tension in the Green Moon shifters.”
He gave me a sharp, understanding look. “And between them and us, right?”
I nodded.
He sighed. “You know that I don’t know when I’m doing it, right? I can’t do it on purpose.”
“Can we try?” I knew Bax could. We talked about it, in hushed whispers while the alphas were off discussing whatever was currently amusing them.
“The pups need to go to bed soon.” He stared at me for a moment. “All right. I think Cale is still over at Bax’s. Maybe they can stay there. But I can’t be late.”
“I don’t think this will take long.” I felt like a pup and was nearly dancing with impatience by the time Jason had called over to ask Cale to watch Macy and Seb and we’d collected the pups to walk next door.
Bax met us in the back yard. “What’s going on?”
Jason sent Macy toddling off toward the little sandbox Abel had built in the yard and set Seb on the ground in Bax’s ‘baby jail’, a small fenced yard for the babies. “Holland wants to have an experiment. I hope it works, because we’re gonna need to be able to use it on our mates after.”
Bax gave me a knowing look. “I think I know what he wants to try.” He didn’t sound enthusiastic, but he’d been Alpha’s Mate to two packs and he’d never quite shaken the sense of responsibility that came with that position, even though it technically wasn’t his anymore. “Okay, let’s go.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Idroveus over the grass and the ripped up earth where the wall had once stood, a forty-some-odd foot section that we’d opened up to make a rough gate into the expansion. We passed Bram’s house, but no one seemed to be at home. I kept following the spaces between the houses, where someday we hoped would be roads. Right now it was just ruts and grass and, occasionally, puddles to splash through.
That strange connection of ours was still working and I knew I had to turn left at this corner and then right at the second one after that. How, I couldn’t have even begun to explain, but I was learning to trust these feelings and they never seemed to steer me wrong.
We found him in a little dead-end street, if you could call anything in Mercy Hills a street compared to the ones in the city. He was surrounded by members of the Mercy Hills Security team, and they were surrounded by a bunch of Green Moon shifters. The young, the middle aged and healthy had all stayed in Green Moon to rebuild, but even in their sixties, a shifter could be a formidable opponent, and they had us outnumbered.
As we pulled up, I could hear the frustration and anger in their voices, feel it in the air. Their scents, carried to my nose by the breeze sneaking through the half-open window of the van, were sharp and rank with emotion.
Jason leaned forward between the two front seats. “That doesn’t look good,” he said in a low voice.
“No, it doesn’t,” Bax said. “How do we do this?”
I was less sure now that I could see what was going on. This wasn’t the minor scuffle that I’d been led to believe it was. It was serious. “How do you do it when you’re dealing with the alphas?”
Bax frowned. “I sort of…catch him…when he gets over-excited.”
“Catch him?” Jason asked, a thread of amusement in his voice, barely felt between the nervousness and apprehension.
