Chapter 13 #2
Auras were pretty mortal as far as I knew. I could just assess an alpha and omega on a more precise level than anyone else. Good for diagnosing issues and stability.
I glanced at the others.
Phantom helped me out. “Crescent has just arrived, and she was part of a… group called the Ascendants.”
Crescent…? I glanced at her, fitting the name to those wide, intense eyes made of colours I’d never seen before.
“A… group…?” I asked.
“Like a faith,” Crescent said.
I noticed from the corner of my eye, Sin mouthed the word ‘cult’.
I… okay.
Never been much into the religious stuff, but that was fine. I mean… especially if she thought I was special…
I glanced at the rest of my pack, taking them in one by one. I didn’t remember being told their names, but they came to me easily, surfacing from a million foggy memories.
They were creatures who had, until now, been composed of cores of energy bound to me in a bond that had been my only anchor to reality.
Now I was finally processing them in the flesh.
Sin had a strange aura for an omega, and crimson eyes as sharp as daggers.
That colour nagged at me, memories from my time before I’d been locked in this place—an alarm bell in nature.
A threat… But as hard as his edges were, it wasn’t the only side of him—there was another he offered to his pack.
I’d lived with him in the bond for long enough to know the part he tried to keep buried.
Flashes came back, some of the worst moments in that fire of madness. It had tried to consume me whole.
But he’d been there, not a flicker of resentment in those eyes as he’d held me against his chest, the faint vibration of his low rumbling purr the only thread stopping my mind from finally dissolving completely.
Then there was Karma and Phantom. With those two, much less painful memories surfaced. Karma flashed through a dozen different moments, and in them his eyes were wild as he launched at me, lips drawn in a snarl.
Exhilarating.
Rut cages and fight pits.
A pressure valve for aggression and madness.
Phantom, sometimes, too in Karma’s place.
But they were more than just fights; they were… I felt a smile cross my face as I realized what it had been.
For what… months… years?
I took a sip of my drink, catching Phantom’s eye before I asked, “Why, exactly, did you allow a feral alpha to keep pack lead all this time?”
Karma’s gaze snapped to me and Phantom’s expression soured, food pausing before his lips.
Sin chuckled, catching my smug expression.
“Thought it made you happy,” Phantom muttered. “We needed you to not be feral.”
My grin widened. “Uh huh.”
I didn’t say out loud the truth I’d pieced together from those cage fights: they hadn’t been able to take it off me.
“It looks like it worked,” Phantom added. “And just in time.”
“Just in time?” I asked.
“Appeal coming up,” Sin said.
Appeal…?
It took a moment for that word to form meaning, but then I blinked, surprised.
We might… get out soon—to the normal world outside?
As… a pack?
Phantom nodded. “It’s possible they let us out with one feral alpha, but only if we can prove you’re not a danger. And with Karma’s aura, too…”
I glanced between them. Phantom’s aura was fine, but Karma… his crackled in the air around him, erratic, unstable… I could always see it—it was the gift of my eyes. I could visualize auras, how unstable or sick they were.
Phantom was right. Karma’s wasn’t… well. He was like a bomb that might go off at any time.
Even as I watched, Karma’s aura waned in the air before shimmering around him, something deeply unsteady in it.
“But if it’s just one unstable alpha to manage…” Phantom said. “There’s no way we won't get out.”
He sounded a little less certain than the words let on.
“Assuming…” He exchanged a glance with Sin. “Well, assuming the Leo pack can get out. They’ve got an omega and an appeal a few days before ours. If they can leave, we should be fine.”
“Why does it matter if they get to their appeal?” I asked.
“No omega’s ever escaped this place before.”
Ah.
Guess they weren’t tossed down here the same way the rest of us were—no omegas were imprisoned in the Cimmerian Vaults above us. This place was built for alphas.
It left the question: were we going to get out at all?
But, it was still something I was working through. I had… a pack with two omegas…
How had I ended up with two omegas?
A low voice whispered in my mind, dragging up the few memories I did have. When you should have none…
My heart rate leaped as I absently lifted my hand, cupping the back of her neck. I drew my fingers across the open wound I'd just left, the bone-deep need to keep her near curdling with an age-old shame—something vile enough that there had been a time where I’d welcomed the silence and madness.
She glanced up, a piece of toast frozen between her lips as she caught my eye. She shuffled closer, swallowing the toast fast enough that it looked almost painful.
“You’re mad at me…” She whispered through watering eyes.
I…
Well, I wasn't anymore. The dark bond was locked in, as impossible as that was.
“No,” I told her.
What was even more strange was the bond on her neck, especially now I was looking at it closer.
It wasn’t just a bite to me, I could see a second layer to it.
Dark bonds, unlike other bond types, could be forced upon an omega without consent.
But I was a seer, and to me they looked different if they were forced as opposed to if the omega wanted the bond.
Forced bonds… They were poison.
I frowned, wondering where those images came from… Shadowy bites that leached darkness into the flesh around like an infected wound…
I had seen bites like that before, but Crescent’s was nothing like them. It was a dark bond, one that anyone could see from the shadowy tint to the bite mark, but it wasn’t poisoned.
And that meant… I thought back to the moment I’d done it. I’d tried to bond her normally first, but she’d rejected it.
“You wanted me to dark bond you?”
She nodded. “I had to explain to the others, too. But gold packs are dangerous. I might send you all into madness if you let me into a normal bond.” She trailed off, voice waning a little at the look that had crossed my face.
I tried to shake it free, opening my mouth, then closing it again.
“I want to know, how did the dark bond go through with a second omega in the pack?” Karma asked.
I frowned, that incongruity slamming into me like a sack of bricks.
It had been so driven by instinct the thought had never crossed my mind. But…
“Dark bonds can't be established in a pack with another omega…” the words came from him. A slice of cruelty and evil from a life that only visited me in fragments.
Sin was lifting his sleeve up, though, showing me the bite across his arm. Another mark from me, I realized, though I didn’t remember giving it.
I frowned and I stared at it.
If I’d thought poisoned dark bonds looked odd before, it was nothing to the crimson bite across Sin’s arm.
“What is that?” Crescent asked.
“No idea,” Sin replied.
I was just as confused. None of the three usual bond types went crimson like that.
More mysteries…
One omega who believed she was a curse, and another that might have one.
It took a while for me to drag my eyes away.
He was still in the bond. That’s what mattered.
“So, what's the plan?” I asked.