Page 1 of Omega's Flight
C H A P T E R 1
T uesday night was bath night in our home. It was the one day I left the power on long enough that we had hot water all the way into the evening, and everyone got a soak and a scrub. The rest of the week, I washed the pups in the sink with water I warmed in the sunshine and my mate, Degan, would use the last of the hot water left from a day of cooking and cleaning to wash himself.
As for me, I took what I could get, though sometimes it was cold. We weren't the wealthiest family in Jackson-Jellystone by a long shot, and turning off the electricity at night was one way I was able to keep our spending down. But tonight, once the pups were washed and in bed, I could have a bath, with real hot water. It was the high point of my week.
Except I could only have the tub to myself once I'd convinced the pups that they'd rather be elsewhere. Which, some days, took some doing. "Okay, Henry-pup, time to get out of the bath." I reached out for my youngest—my current youngest, anyway—and he held out his arms to me.
"Up!" he said and squealed as I lifted him out of the water. "Cold!" he complained and burrowed into my chest.
"Yes, well, it's winter. Midwinter Wolf will be coming soon." I dried him off and wrapped him up in a towel. "Go sit in the hallway, okay, while I get your sister out?"
He nodded and toddled off to sit against the wall like I'd spent so much time teaching him to do. He smiled and I blew him a kiss as I turned to reach for Ann, my oldest. I usually bathed these two together first, because unlike my middle pup, they stayed mostly clean during the day. Christina, or Pip as I liked to call her, was currently sitting on the back step, waiting for me to call her inside to try to scrape the grime off her.
I got Ann dried off and took the two of them into their bedroom to hunt for something for nighttime that still fit. They would get new pajamas from Midwinter Wolf, but that was still almost a week away and they'd grown out of the ones they'd gotten last year. And their replacements from this summer. It was getting harder and harder to keep them clothed, but it was a pup's job to eat and grow, and they took their job seriously.
As I herded them out to the kitchen to sit and have their snack, I automatically ran a hand down my flank, still sleek, no bulge showing yet from what would be our fourth pup. I wondered how Degan would react—I wasn't consistently fertile and Henry was still nursing occasionally. The chances of me becoming pregnant had been pretty small and it was an omega's duty to serve their alpha, especially when in heat.
Degan did enjoy those days and nights when we'd send the pups away to his parents and it would be just the two of us.
Truthfully, I enjoyed them too. He was different then, more like the steady, dependable alpha I'd been mated to, the man who'd swept me off my feet at home in Nevada Ashes. I wasn't sure what had happened since—life, I suspected—but I looked forward to those days when it was just us, like in the beginning. I felt like I could breathe then.
My middle pup and holy terror was not on the step where I'd left her. Was I surprised? Not in the least.
But at least she never went far. Today, she hadn't made it any more than ten or fifteen feet down the alley. She'd found a mudpuddle, also not a surprise.
"Come in, Pip. No, wait. I'm going to wash your feet off before you do." Degan and I had already had one fight this week about the pups tracking mud through the house; I didn't want to have another. He was so on edge lately, and I wondered if he and the other mechanics were getting along, or if one of the pack vehicles was being difficult to fix. I wished it was something I could help with, but alpha problems weren't an omega's business. It wasn't likely I knew anything that would help, regardless.
I poured water over her feet and we did a little dance to get most of the mud off them. The rest of her wasn't any better than her feet, but the bath would fix that.
She giggled as she did her little jig under the stream of water, then danced a couple of steps of "Alpha on the Hill", one of the children's pack dances I'd been teaching her. I'd learned it myself from Bax— it wasn't a dance we'd had in Nevada Ashes or here until our former Alpha's Mate had started teaching it to the pups.
I inspected her feet, making her giggle again. "Okay," I said solemnly, hiding my laughter. "You can go in. Don't run!" I shouted after her, but she was already halfway across the kitchen and was around the corner and into the bathroom before I'd even gotten the door closed. "Dammit," I muttered. My other two pups were playing on the floor by the kitchen table, waiting for me to make them something to eat before we had our stories and went to bed, but Pip was loose in the house and unsupervised—I needed to get her into the tub before she transferred all her mud to my walls. "You pups play for a minute and think about what you want for a snack," I told them as I hurried past.
"Crackers!" I heard Ann say, but nothing from Henry. He was a laid-back child, easily the quietest of my three. And Pip—I could already hear the splashing.
My stomach twisted at the thought of food and I rubbed at it as I turned the corner into the bathroom. This pup was trouble already, even before birth. I probably had another Pip on my hands.
Speaking of Pip...
"Pip! NO SPLASHING!" But it was too late—the floor was already covered in dirty clothes and getting-to-be-just-as-dirty water. "Shit," I muttered, careful to keep it low enough that my daughter didn't hear it. I gave her the look and bent to pick up her dirty clothes. At least they'd soaked up some of the water on the floor—it was a start on getting the dirt out of them.
I'd have to use my towel for the floor and wait until I could wash it again before I took a bath. With a sigh, I plucked it off its hook and dried the puddles in front of the tub, then spread it out to catch any new splashing on the part of my little wild child. "Where's the soap?"
"Here!" she crowed, and held it up, caught tightly between her two hands. "Watch!" She squeezed them together and the slippery bar shot straight up into the air, coming down like a rocket to splash in the water next to her.
I laughed; I couldn't help it. As much as she drove me crazy most of the time, she was an amazing pup, so full of energy and fun it was impossible not to smile when she was around. I didn't think there was anyone in the pack who didn't like her, even when they were being driven their own brand of crazy by her antics.
I'd read somewhere that pups in the middle of a family were ignored more than the oldest and the youngest—I didn't think that Pip had gotten the memo.
"Give me that!" I snatched for the soap, but she got there first and held it up above her head, as if I wasn't two feet taller than her anyway.
"I can do it," she said.
"I know you can," I told her. "But your brother and sister are out in the kitchen dying of hunger! You don't want them to die of hunger, do you? They need you to get washed at super-fast speed so I can feed you all and then tomorrow we can do it all over again!"
She grinned and giggled at me. "Look, Papa! I have a wiggly tooth too!" She pushed her tongue against her bottom teeth and I was surprised to see that she was right. Her sister, one year older, had a gap in her lower teeth where the first of her puppy teeth had fallen out, but Pip was only five. Apparently she was going to be precocious about losing her teeth as well as everything else.
"Wow! Okay, let's get you scrubbed." I snatched the soap from her and covered her in suds. We laughed and splashed, but I had one ear open to listen for trouble in the kitchen. I should have fed them before I let Pip into the house, but if Degan came home and found her sitting out on the step unsupervised, he'd be upset, worried about what the neighbors would say.
