Chapter Five
Putting my foot in my mouth was my superpower.
I’d had Sage right where I wanted him and then of course I had to go and fuck it all up.
How difficult would it have been to say ‘I accept your apology and I am actually so relieved to hear that you were jealous’ instead of teasing him for his attraction to Serge as well as me?
Ugh.
Three days later and he was still avoiding me.
In addition to that, Brandt had taken to glowering darkly at me any time we crossed paths, which was an odd development.
Even when I first came to Shifters Sanctuary, I was under the impression that Sage hadn’t ever told his brothers what had caused our falling out.
But now…well, if Brandt’s death-stares were any indication, I suspected Sage might have said something about my less-than-stellar behavior.
“There’s an Unlocking party tomorrow,” Eric told me, making the same scrunched up, unimpressed face (which I liked to call his ‘constipated face’) he always did when the Unlocking events came up. “Are you and Sage still planning on observing for us?”
I was sitting in his little office in his original fertility clinic, mostly ignoring the conversation he and Sergio had been having over the new books Serge had brought to the pack.
I didn’t even know why I was there, to be honest, only that I had been going stir-crazy alone in the tiny house I shared with Sage.
“Hmm?” I asked, having barely processed the question.
Eric frowned, then rolled his eyes and repeated, “Are you and Sage still planning on observing an Unlocking party for our research notes?”
I shrugged. I had no idea what Sage wanted to do, and I wasn’t exactly at the top of the list of people he was talking to. “I’m still game,” I drawled, “whether Sage joins me or not.”
Eric’s gaze narrowed for a moment before he seemed to accept the answer as all the information he was going to get.
“Okay. Well, I think it’s best if you guys stock up on condoms to be safe.
And make sure you’re taking your birth control like clockwork.
I know you’re not planning on partaking in the, uh, party, but… ”
“Such a boy scout,” I teased gently, but before he could react, added, “Yes, Doctor Weldman, I will make sure we are as prepared as possible. Not that I imagine any dragon alphas might suddenly appear.”
“Unicorns are compatible mates for dragons,” he reminded me seriously, gesturing vaguely towards Serge, “and we’ve found two in such a short amount of time, anything is possible right now.”
He made a valid point. By way of acknowledgement, I smirked, “The Magic does seem to be having a field day in this little town of yours, doesn’t it?”
“Joke all you like,” Eric was at the end of his patience as he leaned back against his desk and folded his arms across his broad, muscular chest. He was the least omega omega I’d ever seen.
“But I’m just saying, with how unpredictable things have been —and with no way to know who, if anyone, attending the party is an alpha— if you don’t want to wind up accidentally bonded and pregnant, you’d be better off taking all the precautions possible.
” He licked his lips, then appeared chagrined.
“Unless you do want that. At which point, go nuts. Just…take notes on everything you see. We’re trying to streamline this whole process, remember? ”
“I remember,” I answered dutifully. “And no, my omega isn’t…” I rolled my wrist, searching for the right words to describe how broken I felt inside, “as active as others. I am not desperate to find an alpha and settle down.”
In fact, I didn’t want an alpha at all. I wanted another omega.
“That could be because you haven’t met a compatible mate yet, though,” Sergio smoothly interjected, making my gaze slide from Sage’s younger brother and across to him.
My stomach gave a funny little flip as he said the words ‘compatible mate’, and my traitorous brain recalled how good it had felt to be wrapped in his arms the other night.
Okay, so maybe I wanted another omega and a beta. Still no drive for an alpha at all.
“That’s always a possibility,” Eric agreed with Sergio while I fought to get my thoughts back under control.
Sage was jealous of us both, my traitorous brain reminded me. What if I could have both?
I wanted to smack myself upside the head.
I had ruined my chances with Sage the moment I had told him that I could never love him the way he needed me to.
That I was an omega and so was he. That we were not meant to be together.
And now I wanted to be with him and with a beta who was old enough to have fathered us both several times over?
What in the actual fuck was wrong with me?
Eric segued into the list of things he wanted Sage and I to try and observe at the party —such as scents, behaviors, and interactions with known shifters: basically anything which might give hints on which people had hidden or locked alpha sides, as well as post-Unlocking behaviors— and I nodded at what I hoped were appropriate intervals.
But I wasn’t focusing on Eric’s lecture, and not only because I believed it was a lost cause.
No; I was too busy thinking about Sage, and Sergio, and my defective omega side.
I hadn’t heard a peep from my inner dragon in so long, I wondered if he even still existed.
He had gone into hibernation in a fit of rage against my choice to reject Sage’s advances, heartbroken and pissed off with me.
Now, I desperately wished he would wake up and guide me, because I was feeling both stuck and torn in two very different directions.
Please, I begged him silently, I need your help.
As always, my dragon remained mute.
I had no idea what I could do to wake him at that point, but I was becoming desperate…and I was known to do very stupid things when I was desperate.
I just hoped that whatever stupid choices I made next, I wouldn’t completely destroy my chances to fix my friendship with Sage.
Even if I couldn’t have him as a lover, I didn’t want to lose my best friend permanently.
A century of silence had been hard enough to survive.
I didn’t think I could withstand a lifetime.
The Unlocking party was…interesting. The people who lived in Frat House, the large farmstead on the opposite side of the town from the Alpha’s house, were just as eclectic as the rest of the pack, even if they were human.
Or, rather, assumed human until proven otherwise.
But for these parties, they certainly seemed to live up to the house’s nickname.
The main living area was filled with people —humans and betas— dancing in darkness, all wearing masks and, if I wasn’t mistaken, scent blockers. That was an interesting choice.
“It’s almost as though they’re using these parties for anonymous orgies after all,” I murmured into Sage’s ear from where I stood at his side on the second story landing overlooking the main living area.
He shivered and I frowned. “I know we joked about it, but in practice it seems like a flawed plan.”
Sage’s Adam’s apple bobbed and he nodded, sharp eyes scanning the milling crowd below. “Especially with scent blockers being a controlled substance.” He turned to me, “How do you think they all managed to get their hands on it?”
“No idea,” I shrugged. “Perhaps there’s an enterprising amateur chemist in the pack?”
“That is a terrifying thought.”
“But less terrifying than the notion that our adversaries are supplying our pack with scent blockers.”
Sage’s eyes went wide. “You think the Moonmusic people would do that? Why?”
Moonmusic was the shifter organized religion which seemed more like a cult than anything genuinely spiritual. Their leader, a weasel beta by the name of Joe Morstein, was threatened by the reemergence of alphas and had already staged two attacks on Shifters Sanctuary.
Long story short, we assumed he was unhappy with the inherent power alphas had —both societally and magically— and he was also scrambling to keep droves of shifters nationwide in check so he could, via his religious sect, continue to collect monthly tithes from all the packs under his leadership.
After his second loss a couple of years earlier, he had changed tact.
Instead of launching physical attacks, he had amped up the anti-neo-shifter (as he referred to Shifters Sanctuary’s people) rhetoric and resorted to fear-mongering in his sermons and online rants.
He was fostering distrust and anger among those that followed him without question, and I suspected it was only a matter of time before the rising tension came to a head.
The idea that he —or a nearby pack who supported him— might be supplying our people with an elicit substance worried me terribly. After all, it wouldn’t be difficult to supply a few good batches to lull our people into a false sense of security and then supply them with something harmful instead.
I shuddered to think it. “History has proven that brainwashed people do a lot of terrible things when they are convinced it is for the right cause,” I mused, my own gaze drifting out over the people drinking and dancing below us.
More than half of them were human at this point; complete innocents in Morstein’s bid for control of shifterkind.
Of those humans, only a small percentage might turn out to be alphas, and the betas had never warranted a sniff of his attention prior to Beckett’s unexpected emergence as an alpha.
I didn’t want to think that he or his followers would be so cruel as to unleash biological warfare over people who might not even be a threat to him at all…
but I knew that was idealistic, wishful thinking on my part.
I bit back a snort at those thoughts.
Me? Idealistic? Since when?
Something inside me stirred, and I froze, the feeling almost foreign after a century of his silence. I waited to feel the familiar warmth of my dragon, but nothing else inside me changed. He was still muted, but hope was welling up inside my chest.
If idealistic was what he wanted, I would work on it.
“So, we’ve learned that these really are giant orgies,” Sage grimaced as another couple of masked men bumbled past us into a previously vacant bedroom stocked with condoms and eye masks which, we had realized, added to the anonymity thing. “And that everyone here is an idiot.”
I laughed and fanned myself, the warmth of the house having increased with the number of writhing bodies spread out through it.
It seemed to get worse after the spell casting which Sergio had performed over the room after spraying a wave of synthetic pheromones while Sage and I watched from a safe distance away.
Even in the darkness, it was something to behold.
The lust which had coursed through me at watching the shaman in his element, interacting with The Magic, seeing him powerful and brooding with concentration had almost knocked me off my feet. That probably contributed to the warmth I was feeling, too, to be honest.
He was a powerful silver fox (unicorn?) and I wanted him.
I couldn’t even muster guilt at also wanting the lean, fiery (no pun intended) dragon omega at my side, though that feeling had existed for a lot longer; I had just been too stubborn to acknowledge it when I’d had the chance.
Chuckling at Sage’s blunt, though astute, assessment, I added, “We also learned about the scent blockers. That is certainly something to bring up at the next town meeting.” I blew a huff of air out, aiming to channel it upwards by pouting out my bottom lip.
There was a lock of hair stubbornly plastered to my forehead which I was attempting to dislodge.
I scowled when it didn’t budge. “I understand the thrill of anonymity, but the risks are too great.”
“Especially if an omega uses them to slip in,” Sage agreed just as the moans and grunts of the couple in the bedroom behind us began, seemingly to punctuate his statement.
He scrunched up his nose and raised his voice even higher above the music and the sounds of very enthusiastic sex.
“Like, what if they get swept up with an unlocked alpha in synthetic rut? Yeah, there are condoms in the rooms, but everyone is also drinking and possibly high, so…”
I shuddered. The idea of becoming accidentally pregnant at one of these parties and not knowing which alpha I had mated with was a disturbing one.
Even as I had the thought, my omega stirred again, this time much more noticeably. Gasping, my hand flew to my sternum and tears sprung to my eyes.
I couldn’t even bring myself to be frustrated that he was reacting with yearning to the idea of mating in general, though. To the idea of being bred by a compatible alpha. It was never something that I thought I had wanted, but then, I had been in denial about many things in my lifetime.
“What’s wrong?” Sage demanded, suddenly in my personal bubble, his eyes full of concern as they gazed into mine. “Dex?”
Now I wanted to cry for an entirely new reason. I couldn’t recall the last time he had looked at me that way.
My omega made himself known again, internally roaring with delight.
Mate, the word rumbled through my head in an inner-voice that sounded like comfort and home. Mate, it repeated.
Unlike a century before, I didn’t refute the voice this time. I didn’t argue that two omegas couldn’t mate and breed. I was too surprised and elated to be feeling close to whole again, despite my instincts telling me that my omega wasn’t completely across the line yet.
“Dexter, I swear to the Gods, if you don’t tell me what’s wrong—”
“H-he’s awake,” I muttered in awe, more to myself than to answer Sage’s worried plea. “My omega. My dragon.” I blinked back tears of joy and relief, feeling them spill over my heated cheeks despite my efforts to restrain them. “He’s back.”