Page 11 of Mating the Omega
“And?”
Abel shook his head. “There’s something fucked up there. I did some unofficial digging through their servers—” He frowned at Mac’s grin. “I didn’t think I’d get the truth if I asked. And there was a boy born there nineteen years ago who was named Jason. And there is an omega notation next to his name. The records stop about eight months after he would have turned thirteen.” Abel led him out the door and they walked out to the truck before he spoke again. “If he ran, his family went with him. There’s no record of the parents applying for pack transfer, no record of them applying to live outside walls. Who’d take their omega child out into the world to live as a feral unless whatever they were running from was worse?”
“What did the pack say when you asked?” Mac got in on the driver’s side and started the engine.
Abel waited until he’d closed the door behind him before replying. “Not much. Mostly dodged the question. One of them tried to tell me he’d died.”
Mac snorted. “Looks pretty lively to me.”
A laugh escaped from Abel’s mouth before his usual serious expression could take over and squash it. “Yeah. Duke told me he gave you a good run.”
“Little shit.” But in a weird sort of way, Mac was almost proud of the little omega. He was smart, and feisty. “I almost missed him, up there in the tree. If he’d been a branch higher, I might never have seen him.” Maybe it would be good for Abel to have an omega. He was as adamant as Mac that he didn’t want that kind of relationship, but this didn’t seem like an ordinary omega. If Jason was living somewhere he felt secure, maybe he’d come down a bit less on the alpha side. He might even be nice. Maybe the mating would be different from an ordinary omega mating.
Mac ignored the hollow feeling the thought left in his chest. It would be selfish to deny his friend, who gave everything he had and was for the good of the pack. And the omega, when he wasn’t snarling and digging his heels in, was attractive.
But Mac sure wanted something like that too.
They drove a few minutes, each locked into their own thoughts. Mac pulled up at the garage where he kept his second car, the special one for when they needed to move something they didn’t want the humans to know about. It was beautiful, a luxury vehicle they often used when Abel had to leave the enclave for meetings or other business.
Mac locked the truck and gestured at Abel. “You sit in the back, like I’m driving you somewhere.”
“I have to run up to my office. The permit to go pick them up should be ready now.”
“You got official permission from their pack to take them?”
Abel snarled. “I bought permission for them to visit. We’ll have to work on permanent.”
Here was his chance. “If he was mated, his residency automatically transfers to here.”
“Don’t you start too. You’re beginning to sound like my mother. ‘When are you going to give me grandpups?’” he mimicked. “I don’t have the energy to deal with that kind of trauma, even if an omega mating was what I wanted.”
“He doesn’t seem much like a regular omega, except for us not wanting to hurt him. And what the fuck was that, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” Abel stared off in the distance. “Once we get him back, I’m going to do some more research into this True Omega thing.” He glanced over at Mac. “I know you hate digging through books, but I don’t want to spread this around until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“No, I get it. It’s going to be hard enough having a new omega around. At least we won’t have to worry about his heats until fall.”
“He said he has them twice. Why would he lie about that?”
“Have you ever heard of an omega that had spring and fall heats?”
“No, but again, why would he lie? And it’s not like heats are something people talk about.” Abel shook his head and raised a hand to stop the argument. “We can talk about this after. I’m going up to the office to pick up what we need. You get the car ready and bring it around to the front entrance.” His words hinted at his Alpha’s power, and Mac backed down, resolving to bring this up again later, when Abel was more relaxed. The aggression the omega was showing now was most likely from the stress and uncertainty. No one should be as scared of their pack as that omega was, and if hooking his friend up with the omega also gave his friend someone easy to come home to, so much the better.
While Abel fetched the paperwork they’d need to go pick up Jason’s father, Mac filled the car with gas, checked the fluids and the tires, looked in the trunk to be certain they had a spare and a working jack, and made sure the signal booster built into the car’s antenna was working properly in case they had to make a phone call. If they broke down on the road outside the enclave, it was long odds that they’d find a human to help them, so he tried to be prepared.
Abel was waiting at the door when Mac pulled up. He jumped in almost before the car came to a halt. “Do you have your tags?”
“We’ll have to run past the house to pick them up.”
“All right.”
Mac made a U-turn and headed out of the enclave’s downtown. “You know where you’re putting them yet?”
Abel shook his head. “They might have to go into bachelor housing. It’s that, or I can put them up in my spare room, but I don’t want to give him any ideas.”
“You’ve agreed to it, haven’t you?”
“No, I haven’t.” Abel half-turned in his seat, leaning his shoulder against the door. “I know you think I’ve got too much on my plate, and you’re right. Adding a mate and pups to that isn’t going to make things easier, it’s going to make them harder. I have enough decisions to make every day, without adding making decisions for my mate into the mix. And that one—” He shook his head and then leaned it back against the glass, staring up at the cloth ceiling of the car. “He’s no ordinary omega.”
