Chapter 12 #2
I take it on speaker. "Yeah."
"It's me." He says it dry. He’s been in my employ too long for small talk. "The panel's back. Faster than I said—I flagged it. I'll email the full workup but I wanted you to have the headline tonight."
"Go on."
"The heart's real, and it's worse than the old prescription was treating. We'll manage that; the new drug's probably already helping. That's not why I'm calling." A pause, the shuffle of paper. "Your boy's an omega."
Something goes through me like a rail spike.
The word lands and my whole body answers it before my head does—heat up the back of my neck, hands locking down on the wheel, the road going strange and narrow in front of me.
Every piece of the last two weeks rearranges itself at once.
The pull in that apartment. The way he goes soft under my hand.
Sitting in a chair in the dark like a dog at a door because something in me would not leave the room.
Not instinct without a cause. Instinct with a cause.
It knew before I did.
"Say that again,” I murmur.
"He's an omega. Unmistakable—the markers aren't subtle once you're looking.
And he's been suppressed a long time. Years.
Since childhood, from the look of the labs—somebody's had him on heavy old-generation suppressants his whole life, the kind we stopped prescribing because of what they do to the—" a beat "—well.
To the heart, among other things. Which is almost certainly where a lot of the cardiac damage comes from.
You stack a decade of that on an omega constitution, and this is what you get.
They're delicate to begin with. He's had it harder than most."
I don't say anything. My jaw has gone tight enough to ache.
Starla.
She did this to him. Fed him those pills from the time he was a child and kept feeding them to him, probably knowing what they were doing to his heart, because a hidden omega was worth more to her than a healthy son.
She wrecked him on purpose and then left him behind for me to collect on.
That lands somewhere I wasn't expecting and sits there, hot.
“You there?” Doc asks.
I clear my throat. “Yeah. I’m here.”
"Here's the part you need to hear. He can't go back on the suppressants."
I shake my head once, my fingers tightening on the wheel."Put him on a different one."
"There isn't a different one. Not for that heart." Flat, like I've suggested something amateur. "The old generation is what wrecked him. The new generation would do it slower. That's the only difference."
Doesn’t leave much up for discussion. "And if he takes them anyway?”
"Then you'll bury him. Not this year, probably. But you'll bury him."
I let that sit. Outside the window the trees go by black on black. I rub my bottom lip, working through this information.
I took Sonny from that apartment to use him as leverage. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with this kid. Now I’ve got him on new heart pills, I’m promising to take care of him like he all of a sudden matters to me.
And worse? Maybe I’m just as bad as Starla because I want him back on suppressants ASAP. I want his true nature cooled off and pinned down.
At least while he’s close to me.
But that’s not possible if I want the kid to survive. “So what happens instead?"
"His biology does what it was always going to do." I hear paper shifting on his side. "Scent first. You'll notice it before he can hide it, if he's even trying to."
Yeah… I think we’re a little late for that. I’ve been pretending, lying to myself that when he walked into my room last night my mouth wasn’t instantly watering at the scent of him. I pinch the bridge of my nose.
"How long?"
"Given these numbers?" A pause I don't care for. "Soon. If it hasn't started already. I'd expect the first cycle any time."
Jesus Christ.
The first cycle.
Sonny’s going to go into heat.
"That's the medical picture," he says. "The rest of it isn't my department."
He makes a dry sound, almost a laugh, at his own joke, and then he's moving on, wrapping up. He mentions something about an email, something about the heart medication, and I say the right words back to him without really paying attention.
The call ends, the road hums, and I drive another quarter mile before I understand I need to stop.
I pull the car onto the shoulder. Put it in park. Sit there with the engine ticking and the dark pressing in on all four windows.
An omega.
I haven't been able to hear that word without thinking of her in twenty years. Tonight's no different.
Angela.
I haven't let myself think her name in a long time, but she comes anyway. She doesn't need to be summoned. That was always true of her.
Angela could walk into a cold room and it wasn't cold anymore—I told Sonny that last night, in the dark, easier to say than I expected, and it's the truest thing I know. She was warm the way I have never once been warm.
She was an omega and she was delicate the way they all are, the way the doctor said it tonight like it was nothing, they're delicate to begin with. It’s true of all omegas… maybe that’s why they’re so rare.
I knew omegas were often riddled with health issues when I married her and I told myself love was bigger than biology because I was young and I was arrogant and I hadn’t yet been shown the true consequences of the fate I was playing with.
We were… God, we were so fucking happy. She was… she is the best part of me. My guiding light. Angela was everything and I was so wrapped up in what we had that nothing else mattered.
She was mine. I’d claimed her and we bonded deeper than anything I’d felt in the natural world.
And then Angela got pregnant and we were overjoyed. She was so joyful.
I run my hands down my face just thinking about the light in her eyes when she realizes we had conceived.
But then the doctors got quiet—told us everything that could go wrong. Angela didn’t for a second doubt her decision to give me a family. And I told myself she was strong. She was strong. It didn't matter.
Calder took everything she had. Eight months of it, half of them flat on her back, a delivery I still won't describe to anyone. But she came out the other side of it. She held him and looked up at me and something in her face had gone permanently rearranged, and I thought, we got lucky.
And I thought… never again.