Chapter 9 - Rada #2
“Someone I used to know,” I admitted, but when I heard Dustin groan on his horse behind us, just downwind, I realized what I’d done. I needed to apply more of the scent-suppressing tincture when we dismounted. “Sorry. Just remembering my first kiss.”
I had to stop perfuming, so I focused on some other firsts for a while.
My first Alpha kill, when I was seven—or at least, I thought I was seven.
My first successful pickpocket, a few weeks later.
A half-goldani coin that had bought me a month in the storeroom of a brothel in the middle of winter, rather than on the street.
Good memories. They also kept my mind off the pain in my gut for the rest of the day.
Dustin’s voice roused me from a daydream about an indigo-skinned male who carried me in his tentacles to the bottom of the sea as the world around us glowed with liquid fire. “Warqueen, there’s the house now!”
Ahead, the trees were thinning, and I saw what he was pointing out.
It looked like a painting I’d seen once, a perfect, idyllic stone home with two chimneys and wide, mullioned glass windows along the front, four even jutting out from the pitched, slate-tiled roof.
The front yard was enclosed on three sides by stone walls as tall as I was and covered with late-blooming roses of every hue.
Red, pink, yellow, apricot, and even lavender petals caught on the breeze from the sea that I could smell as well, the sharp brine enticing.
“Young Ratter!” A greenish-silver-haired woman stood in the yard, Goran beside her. She murmured something to him, but her eyes were on me. “Girl!” she called out as Goran moved past her and into the house. “Don’t make the oldest woman in the world break her legs to welcome you.”
“Who is she?” Alexios murmured, dismounting almost stiffly while Dustin helped me down. “She looks frail, but she radiates power.”
“It’s the selkie queen from the Eastern Seas.” I broke into a jog, a smile to match hers widening. “Stellina? What are you doing here?”
“That’s Grandma Stellina to you, little spy.
” The small woman seemed to have shrunk since the last time I’d seen her, and her wrinkles had grown deeper and closer together.
It was fair, considering her age. From what I’d gathered, she was the oldest selkie in existence, at least a thousand years old.
She’d forgotten exactly, but she’d been alive when mermaids swam freely all over the world’s oceans and Omegas lived safely on land.
She had two much younger sons, but I’d only seen them once, a long time ago.
The younger one hadn’t spoken much to me, and the older one had insulted me.
I’d spent plenty of time with Stellina, though. She liked smutty stories about harems of monsters almost as much as I did.
She folded her wiry arms around me when I reached her, and I was glad for her wavy, thick hair. It helped to hide the tears that sprang up. I let myself rest in her embrace for a moment.
When I pulled back, her dark eyes flashed with shock, fixing on the nautilus shell pendant I wore. “Child, where did you get that?”
“I stole it from a pirate in a bar,” I replied, then blinked. That wasn’t true. “Maybe… I won it gambling?”
No. That was another lie. What in the hells was going on? My head ached suddenly.
“You told me you’d had it since you were a girl,” Alexios murmured, obviously eavesdropping.
“I did say that.” I rubbed at it, wondering why I couldn’t remember exactly where it came from. I hadn’t taken it off for years, not even in the bath. I reached behind me for the latch on the chain.
But even now, when I realized something was wrong, I couldn’t find the will to take it off.
It felt… wrong. I remembered the Mirrenese guards yanking it off my neck in Mirrenar, before my “trial.” Alexios had to have found it with the rest of my things.
But where had he found those? My cloak, and my boots.
I took a breath to ask, but he’d dropped back to give Dustin directions for unloading our mounts. I’d get the details later. There was no rush.
For some reason, when I focused on her again, Grandma Stellina was suppressing a smile, her lips even more wrinkled than usual. “How long do you think you can hide from your destiny, young Ratter?”
“As long as it takes,” I sassed and laid a kiss on her cheek.
“Now, I’m hungry enough to eat a shark—” I stopped speaking when a gorgeous, slender man appeared in the doorway behind her.
It was the younger of her sons, Lachlan.
His smile was radiant, though it was directed over his shoulder, and his dark hair was tipped with gold on the ends that glittered in the sunlight.
Wait. Some of the gold was… beads? Beads decorating braids, like a Starlakian mate. He was delicious. Down, girl, I mentally chided myself. Mission, not mated males. Not even ones that beautiful.
I lifted a hand to greet him, but froze when he reached back and yanked Goran through the too-low doorway behind him, both of them laughing when Goran knocked his head.
For a moment, I saw the sweet-natured, cheerful Alpha I’d fallen in love with all those years ago.
The one who’d written me love poetry I’d pretended to hate, but secretly treasured.
“Silly Warlord,” the man chuckled, then pulled Goran down by the end of his beard and tugged on one of his braids. “Still have the beads? Good thing, I’m not making you more if you lose those.”
Goran laughed, muttering, “Liar,” and wrapped his arm around the man’s shoulders, his face turning toward me. Assessing me, seeking my reaction.
The scent of salt and rosemary grew stronger for a moment as they approached. What in the hells… But I knew. This selkie had changed in a way I recognized, but didn’t believe possible.
His eyes met mine, and we both spoke the same word at the same time.
“Omega?”
Everything happened at once, too fast for me to understand what was going on.
My mouth went dry, like every drop of moisture in me had been sucked away. My heart pounded like the drums of war. My scent rushed out of me, acrid and thick. A threat.
A warning.
My vision blurred, and a bright screeching sound like a dragon challenging an enemy resonated behind my cheekbones. The Omega’s slender fingers tightened on Goran, drawing closer to him.
To my mate. He dared to touch… my mate.
I don’t fucking think so. My hand moved faster than the wind, the poisoned dart flying past Goran’s face as he leaned forward, his expression one of horror.
Grandma Stellina shouted, “No!” but the Omega selkie was already in the path of my dart.
At the last minute, a shadow moved across the frozen tableau, faster than thought, interposing itself between the dart and its target. The shadow crumpled to the ground.
“Kellin!” the Omega screamed, throwing himself down as well. Over the body of a second selkie, one I’d just killed.
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” I murmured a few moments later, staring down at the unconscious body of her eldest son on the dining table.
I ignored everyone around me, as well as the food that had been unceremoniously dumped on a side table, as we all waited to see if the antidote I’d given him had been enough. “I’m so sorry.”
“You will be if you’ve killed my child. Ratter, how could you?
Why?” Stellina had gone straight to a chest and unlocked it, pulling out a selkie skin.
When we’d first brought him in, he’d stopped breathing.
After she’d wrapped it around him, he’d started again, but the breaths were the gasping, erratic ones heard on deathbeds.
“I… I didn’t mean to.” It was a bullshit answer, and I deserved her glare.
“Yes, you meant to kill me,” Lachlan spat from the far wall. He’d been asked to stay away, and Goran stood in front of him, in case whatever demon that had possessed me to attack recurred.
The demon being my own Omega nature.
Goddess, I was a disaster. I’d always been possessive, but I’d never snapped like that before. And I knew better than to snarl like a dog with a bone over Goran. I’d given him up. He had a right to move on, even though it had shocked me to see him with another male.
I couldn’t lie to myself. Even if Goran had taken a new mate, I wouldn’t have gone half-feral just because he was a male.
More than a few of his warriors had found love with other men.
Goran’s easy acceptance of it was one of the things I’d admired about my former husband.
“Love is love, under the same moon and stars,” he’d said to two of his most capable warriors when he’d performed their marriage ceremony. I’d always felt the same.
No, I’d lost my mind seeing another Omega––a male Omega, the first I’d ever heard of––touching him. What had come over me? It had felt like possession, but…
I rubbed at the flare of heat in my abdomen. The pain had subsided for a moment, like it was satisfied with the violence. Had I been tainted, infected with some evil?
“It’s my fault,” Goran said, his voice raw, his claim ridiculous.
“Of course it wasn’t,” I replied, my hands on the pulse of the selkie’s left wrist. My own pulse was almost as frantic as the one I could feel there. “I did this. I’m only glad I didn’t kill your mate.”
Lachlan gasped. “His what?”
Goran stiffened and repeated in an odd tone, “My fault.”
On his other side, Alexios quietly inserted small silver needles just under the selkie’s skin.
He’d taken off Kellin’s shirt, and lean lines of muscle gleamed on his smooth, brown abdomen.
But what caught my eye were the dark red lines radiating from his mouth and the odd, pale shade his fingers were turning.
Stellina watched Alexios with approval, but when she turned to me, her voice was arctic. “This might be a time for you to call upon the Goddess, child.”