23 | Yaron
Shadow Keep
Twelve Ruby City refugees were gathered at that shit inn, all Alphas, all from different parts of Ruby City, mostly very young or very old, but some in between. A young girl with her grandparents were the only ones who knew one another. The rest arrived alone, separated from everything and everyone they knew. When I asked them how they managed to escape, their stories aligned and rang true.
They fled to the ports, which were under the control of the undead who — it is supposed, but not certain — must have burned the boats they arrived on, for there were none there. The refugees found only a single skipper at the southernmost edge of the port city, where only black market deals take place. I did not ask how they knew it was there and none offered to confess to it. That is fine. They are not to be condemned by my hand for their past actions, and with no more Ruby City Berserker to offend, their criminal records — their entire histories — have been erased clean on these shadowy shores. That they made it out at all is a gift to me.
Of the refugees who gathered — many more than twelve, or so they say — they piled as many onto the skipper as they could and set it asea, the rest of their families remaining behind in the city. The twelve then had no choice but to give their lives up to Zaoul. Zaoul treated them with grace, unusual for the turbulent sea, filled with creatures known to down ships much larger than that one.
They said they landed on a beach south of the ports and that some fisherwomen helped escort them to the inn. That they were likely illegally fishing off of the coast — fishermen and women aren’t permitted to fish without registering at the ports — explains why the kind-hearted women didn’t stick around to collect a reward and also explains Madame Zenobia’s insistence that she be compensated for housing them given that the fisherwomen didn’t.
Their stories aligned and yet…it was filled with coincidences. Zaoul is not known to be kind. And that they managed to escape the city at all, only Alphas among them, seems just as suspect. Yet I could not see signs of deceit in any of their faces, in any of their voices. They looked haggard, ragged clothes stained with signs of struggle, blood and salty sea water. No, they told truths.
I had two of my Riders escort them back to the keep, placed triple my reserve guard at the ports, released two patrol ships, sent additional letters to Hjiel and Gold City requesting a convening of the Berserkers of the South Island, and an additional two letters to Dark City.
The first, to assure that they reinforce their borders — they are now the next line of defense against the southern cities on the North Island and their plan to build a new port needs enacting now. We are cut off from one another without it.
The second, to request that they begin amassing their forces. They will need to enlist Glass Flats and the Rookery, at the very least, and take up arms to take back Ruby City. I fear that if Ruby City is not won back soon, then Gang Mountain will be bought like mercenaries by the Fates, thus tripling their army.
I fear for the people of Ruby City, the Alphas in particular. I fear that this entire time I’ve spent lusting after my Omega could have been spent convening the other cities to overthrow Mirage City and reinstate a ruling Berserker there, where there are now only witches and zombies.
I fear that even though I know better now and am filled with many regrets, my lust refuses to dissipate, even in small measure. Insanity reigns. Temptation lurks in every corner of my mind. Hunger clutches me like a monster in the night.
Returned to the castle, Kiandah safely in our room, a small horde of guards stationed at the entrance to our wing, her brother stationed outside of her door, I find Okayo in his clinic bent over some medicinal concoction, a pair of telescoping spectacles perched on the tip of his button nose. I slam the door shut behind me.
“What is wrong with me?”
Okayo lifts his head. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.” Irritation blots out my desire to grin. Okayo’s grin falls by consequence. He frowns. “You mean it? You’re unwell?”
“I’ve had an erection for two fucking days.”
Okayo looks down at my crotch. His eyes widen behind his glasses, the lenses already making his eyes as big as oranges. He looks absurd. “Oh.”
I run my fingers roughly through my hair, wanting to rip it all out. “I have felt lustful towards my Omega for days now, but in the past twelve hours, I’ve felt dangerously close to rut. Meanwhile, she doesn’t seem to be affected at all. I’m worried. The distraction makes me want to burn the whole damn city to the ground just to be done with it. The undead army feels like a nuisance, something in the way of what I want. My desire to vanquish the Fates is fueled entirely now by how annoyed I am that they are distracting my Omega from wanting to fuck me and I can’t fucking stand that.”
My hands are on the back of a chair covered in rather alarming-looking leather straps. A vision assaults me of Kiandah strapping me down in this chair and doing whatever the fuck she wants to me, and I feel precum pulse from the tip of my cock and wet the underside of my trousers.
I roar. I pick up the chair and throw it against the wall beside the door. When I turn around, Okayo’s got his glasses pushed up on the top of his head, making them look like futuristic horns, and his mouth hangs open in a soft O.
“Oh.” He swallows hard. “Well, then. It would seem that Horace was right. Horace, would you come out here?” he shouts to the hole in the wall behind him, a small opening covered by a faded crimson curtain.
“No, thank you,” comes Horace’s raspy reply from behind the veil.
I start at the sound of him. I hadn’t heard him until now. I can’t hear fucking anything over the sound of the rushing blood in my ears and roaring lust in my veins and I didn’t mean to disclose this weakness before anyone but Okayo. I’m fucking furious. More furious.
“Horace,” Okayo says, abandoning his instruments and turning to rip the curtain back. Horace is standing with his arms tucked into his chest, his black hair looking ragged and his round face more than a little rubicund. He’s trying to look anywhere but at me.
Okayo speaks to him like nothing’s amiss. “Tell Lord Yaron that thing you said you’d never dare tell him.” He waves at me spastically.
“Gods.” Horace releases a strangled yell. “Are you trying to get me killed?” His voice rises to a high-pitched squeak.
“Speak!” My voice shakes my entire body. A beaker falls from the shelf behind Horace’s head and shatters on the floor. No one reaches for a broom.
Horace takes a few tentative steps out of the closet, into the room’s bright torchlight, and clears his throat. “I…um…after…when I was first tending to the Omega after you brought her from the woods, I thought she smelled a little…”
“Smelled?”
“Her Omega scent was strange. It was…I could…” He glances at Okayo. “Please don’t make me say it…”
“Go on. It’s important. It’s also something I’ve never come across before.” He’s pulled a book of thick parchment paper out of a cabinet, and an ink pen forbidden in the Shadowlands. He should be using ink and a quill. “This is all quite fascinating. I’ll be able to write a strong dissertation on this. The Medical Guild of Gatamora will be thrilled with my findings. That is, if we’re ever able to reconvene.” His indolence makes me want to strangle him as he speaks so insolently about the end of the world, about the end of my sanity. “Go on, Horace. Tell him about the smell.”
“She smelled, my Lord…she um…she smelled of pre-heat.”
“Pre-heat?” I shake my head. “What the fuck are you on about?”
“It was a good scent. An enticing scent. I thought it was a lingering heat, but I… After speaking with…some of the other Alphas working in the castle…in the days after, they smelled it, too.”
Okayo chooses that moment to spare Horace from an early demise. “We have discussed it at great length with some of the keep staff as well as some of the Crimson Riders who knew Ugaros.You know, the one who tried to rape Kiandah?”
“Do not speak of the incident and do not speak his name,” I shout, wishing I hadn’t broken the chair because my fists long for something else to break.
Okayo simply scratches away in his book. I’m going to tear his arms off. “They said that while his behavior wasn’t entirely out of character for him, it was still bolder a move than any suspected he’d make. He is a Crimson Rider, after all, and even before you were aware of your reactions towards the Omega, many could see where you were headed and no one with an ounce of intelligence would have dared stand in your way…my Lord,” he tacks on absently. “However, given Kiandah’s state, it could trip even the marginally clueless into attempting an assault…”
“Her state. What state?”
“I have come to term it a heat stroke.” He looks triumphant. I’ve never hated him more.
“Kiandah is sick? She has heat stroke?”
“Well, more accurately, my Lord, you do. I found it rather suspicious that her heat only lasted two days. Two days is very short for an Omega, my Lord. The shortest known Omega heat previously recorded in the Shadowlands was four decades ago and that lasted three days. Two days is the shortest recorded heat in history. I recorded it myself and submitted such findings to the Medical Guild of Gatamora. My counterparts in the other cities were very surprised and searched their own records. None were able to find a heat shorter.
“I suspect that, given the circumstances surrounding her heat and the brutality her body endured…” I flinch as if struck, not by a hand, but by an anvil. “In order to protect herself and stay alive, her survival instinct repressed her heat. Repressed, my Lord, not killed. It is a very important distinction.” He waggles his pointer finger at me like a schoolteacher correcting a child. “It is my present theory that she has been in a constant, but very mild state of heat ever since you took her in Paradise Hole. Unsated, that energy has had nowhere to go. It seems that it is mild enough that she has been able to overlook it — or perhaps, the events of the days between have been high-stress enough for her self-preservation instincts to repress it entirely — but the Alphas in her vicinity do not seem to be able to.”
I growl. Okayo continues glibly, unconcerned for Horace’s life, apparently, or his own. “I theorize that her heat, subdued as it is, will need release. Perhaps, the draw it presents to other Alphas is an attempt to provoke a rut so as to draw a full heat from her in response.” He shrugs, slams his book shut and tucks it under his arm. “In either case, it would seem that your rut is imminent. I’d suggest being very careful around her, in the case that I’m wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“If you fall into rut and it doesn’t trigger her heat and she is unwilling, then you could kill her.”
“Unwilling,” I snarl, hating that I’m repeating his words like an imbecile. “She wouldn’t be unwilling.”
Okayo blinks at me like I’m every bit the imbecile I just supposed I was. How could I have so badly failed her in her first heat? Shame cuts through me.
“I didn’t mean sex, my Lord. I meant the bond. She didn’t complete her heat the first time because you didn’t bond her — she couldn’t. Her body couldn’t heal itself and was too weak to survive without a bond, should you have continued. Given your state and the behavior I’ve seen you exhibit towards her — not to mention the fact that you’ve said plainly that you plan to bond her — the resistance isn’t on your part. If she won’t accept your bond, then that’s another story. I don’t know of any unbonded Omega who’s ever survived a Berserker’s full rut. Will she?”
“Will she what?”
“Accept your bond, of course.”
“I…” I don’t answer. I don’t like the answers I come up with. Because there were rules for this. Rules like, Shadow Lords don’t take Omegas. Rules like, Omegas submit. But the rules of these Fallen Omegas are different. Kiandah. Echo, the Fallen Earth Omega… They aren’t saying yes like the other Omegas I’ve been introduced to. They’re saying no, writing conditions, drawing lines in the sand that we sad and sorry Berserkers cannot cross and do not want to. Not without permission.
I wish for the first time in my entire life that I’d been born the Berserker of a North Island city for no other reason than then, I could pick up a disgusting piece of technology — aphone — and call the Berserker of Dark City. We cannot place calls across Zaoul, even on the contraband satellite phones I’m certain I could source on the black markets. And there is no precedent for this situation with my Omega, except in the case of young Lord Dragnovic and his. The youngest Berserker among us, the little whelp, successfully bonded a Fallen Omega. He almost lost her, but he managed to gain her trust, her heart, her bond. I wish desperately that I could ask him what to do.
“I…” I falter. I feel a sudden surge of heat overwhelm my face. I start to sweat and rapidly rub at my hairline, fighting back feelings of longing and regret — along with the desire to rip off Horace’s face. “Yes. She will.” But only because I will explain to her the risks and she will feel sorry for me. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted to honor her. I think of the item I procured for her at the Night Market. I envision what it would be like to use it…
“Then your first problem is solved. Run to her now, beg for her bond, fall into rut and hope that she falls into heat.”
“If she doesn’t?”
“Pray that your bond is strong enough.”
“You are courting death.”
I notice Horace edge backwards into the closet, trying to push himself behind the parted curtain. Okayo meanwhile shrugs. “Then you won’t want to hear my greater concern.”
“Say it anyway. Gamble with your life.”
“My larger concern is that none of this matters. That you’ll fall into rut and regardless of whether she accepts your bond and whether it is enough, the Fates will take advantage of your distraction and while you’re in the middle of your rut, the city will fall to a zombie invasion.”
I turn my back on him and slam the door shut as I depart. He’s right, of course, but I don’t know what I can do about it except for vanquish the Fates, vanquish the undead, vanquish Trash City and do all of this quickly so that I can have Kiandah all to myself.
Until then, I have to stay away from her.
I think back to the dungeons I once placed Kiandah’s family in and laugh miserably, because my plans to stay away from her are not so dissimilar to spending my days in those dungeons. Either way, I die a slow, torturous death.