14. Blaze
Blaze
Pix is curled up in my arms, asleep. It’s been a little under forty-eight hours since Raven came out and provoked him into madness.
The spectacle had been what our alpha instincts had been screaming for, but we were too aware that he was not just a flight risk, but he’d also proven that he was willing and ready to use extreme violence.
But the way he clings to me…like he needs that gentleness, the firmness, he needs the unwavering, unconditional love.
I brush his hair back and lift my gaze as Merle walks in, but it’s not her. I consider her for a moment and notice the way she walks, it’s much looser, more confident, masculine.
“Jay?”
He glances at me and flops down on the bed on his back. “These camp bed things are kind of comfortable. I haven’t decided. I’ve certainly slept in worse.”
“Are you okay with everything that happened?”
“What happened?” he says, sitting up and looking shocked.
I don’t know how to answer that. I shift uncomfortably, trying to find the right words to explain the heat.
Jay throws himself back, laughing. “You should see your face.”
I glower. “Not funny.”
“Hilarious. You looked so panicked.”
“Explaining all the different ways I contorted your body and fucked it requires the right words.”
Jay screws his face up. “Okay, that was not cool.”
“Uh-huh. It’s not fun to torment your alphas, is it?”
Jay flops back again and wiggles. “On second thought, I do like them.”
“Are they okay?”
Jay rolls his head towards me and grins. “Yes. You did well. They are dick-matised.”
“Dick-matised?”
“Dick-matised. It’s apparently a thing and exactly what it sounds like. I personally can’t see it, but you know, whatever.”
Jay sits up and claps his hands. “Up,” he says loudly, startling Pix awake.
The omega rolls to his feet, ignoring the way I groan and protest.
“Jay?” he yawns and follows the alter out of the tent.
“What are we doing?”
“Gentle exercise,” the alter says with evil glee.
Pix grumbles. “You woke me up for gentle exercise?”
Jay adopts a yoga pose and starts slowly moving through the positions. Pix joins in, grumbling, but I can see him relaxing bit by bit. I make a note to go and kidnap a yoga instructor to teach me so I can play, too.
“What are you plotting?”
I bare my teeth at Sage. “How do you always know when I’m plotting?”
“Easy, you get this adorably creepy grin and this far-away look in your eyes.”
“I do not!”
“Okay, baby, you don’t. But I do love the smile that you don’t wear when you are not plotting evil things.”
We have a fire, and Roseland is sitting and cooking something that looks like meat.
“What is that?”
“That is rabbit,” Sage says proudly.
“Who caught it?”
“Rolly. He’s got this amazing arm and aim. It was impressive.”
I grunt and watch King drop a whole heap more wood near the fire.
“We need to dismantle the nest,” Sage says.
I glance at him. “Okay, but tomorrow. I want to study it.”
“Why?”
“I think there are probably some messages woven into the web, and I want to see what they are.”
It’s good everyone is doing what they need to do. This pack is a well-oiled machine. I’d thought we’d need to argue or fight over chores, but everyone pulls their own weight out here. Is it because of the omegas, the heat, or is it because we are out of the house? Vulnerable?
I go into my pack and dig out the chocolate I have stashed and wait until Jay comes close to me. I hold it out. He looks at the chocolate and then up at me.
“What’s this?”
“Chocolate, obviously.”
He looks back down at the bar and then up at me, quietly judging me until I start feeling uncomfortable. Until this blasted alter has me tongue-tied and wanting to apologise for I don’t even know what.
“Jay,” I growl in warning and thrust the bar into his chest before storming out of the clearing, following the molten maze of omega scent and woven passages through his web.
With each turn, I get further and further away from the anger and frustration that had me held hostage and fall further and further into the curiosity that is Pix’s mind.
Daega and Pix aren’t separate, not like the alters that exist within Merle Kestrel, but Daega and Pix are different sides of him, like masks he puts on and takes off.
Daega is the part of him he’s desperate to hide.
The side with wounds and pain, the one who has hope and plays with Sage’s bobblehead characters when he thinks no one is watching.
He’s the one who can’t walk away from Roseland, and the one who was so damn hurt over us trying to get him and Merle together.
His webs are chaotic and darker. Erratic but more beautiful.
It’s in Daega’s webs that most of Merle’s shiny bits of rubbish and metal have been added.
I find a rose woven into the web. A crown.
There’s a dagger that I attribute to Rolly, and a man in a billowing robe.
He built us into his web.
My heart clenches. I wonder if he even knows he did it?
But then you get further out, and the web gets lighter but sharper.
I find strands of fishing wire and metal threaded in.
Traps hidden and left to snare the unwary.
The webs become more formulaic, the pattern easier to spot, but it’s what you don’t see that is the danger.
Pix is the deadly side of our omega, the one who was honed in the abuse of his father, who learned at the feet of serial killers, who trained mercilessly with their children.
The one who shut out the rest of the world and decided everyone but the Sanderson clan wasn’t to be trusted.
He is a weapon, honed to the sharpest point. There’s no sign of emotions, no signs of the omega who spent a week in our arms. But it is just as beautiful as the inner webs.
I blow out a breath and continue walking through it, exploring and learning bits and pieces as I go.
The mystery of our male omega becomes clear, and I realise that Raven was right. He needed to have that control stripped away, to know he was safe.
I wonder if he’s ever shared a heat with someone before. From what I’m seeing, I’m thinking if he did, he killed them before the end.
And that’s the exact point, I realise with sudden and violent clarity.
Pix came into the heat knowing that he kills his partners.
He was fighting his instincts, fighting to keep us alive. He needed to feel safe, and we weren’t giving him that last little push to come back and stay among the living.
“Fascinating,” I murmur and turn, slowly making my way back.
There’s a creek not far from the camp, and as I’m walking past it, I stop, surprised to find Kestrel lying in the water, which is only about two or three inches deep.
I stand over her, my shadow falling across her face. She opens her eyes and stares up at me.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Blaze.”
“Is there any reason you are lying in the creek in all your clothes?”
She snorts. “There is.”
I wait. She doesn’t share it.
“Are you going to tell me?”
She huffs. “No.”
“Why?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“What is?”
She sits up and folds her legs under her and glares at me. “Sometimes, you all being male is absolutely the worst thing ever.”
“Okay.” I don’t like where this is going, but I sit on the bank where I can see her face.
“I was cleaning up the clearing because I want to practice some of those moves Pix said he would teach me. The ones where you disable someone with one blow to a nerve cluster.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I bent down to pick up a rock that was big enough that we could have rolled our ankle, and it slipped out.”
She mumbles the last bit and glares death at the canopy.
“Pardon?”
“It slipped out!”
I’m thinking of a snake, a lizard, a spider, something vicious.
“What did?”
“I queefed, okay!” she shouts. “It happens. I have a vagina, and you all pumped lots of air into me. Why is it okay to be like ‘Oh, that’s so sexy during sex’, but when I’m dressed, it’s suddenly assuming I just farted in King’s face?”
My cheeks ache. They ache so, so bad.
“It’s just not fair. Rolly was all like at the top of his lungs, ‘did you just fart in King’s face?
’ Which, of course, we said no, shaking our head because it was Merle who was fronting.
And Rolly laughs and says it louder. Which then alerts Pix, who says calmly that he heard it, too.
Yes, the consensus is that idiot creatures with dicks have decided that I farted because I don’t know my own body. ”
Fucking hell, please don’t let me laugh.
“So, Merle bails, and Raptor fronts, and she is bombarded with them laughing and talking about how serenely we doth let out our sweetly toots from our luscious assus, or so says that idiot Rolly. She swore at them all and kicked Pix.”
She lifts her eyes heavenward and clamps her jaw.
“What happened?” I manage to squeeze out.
“She queefed again.”
I splutter and finally tilt my head back and laugh. When I get control of myself, I wipe the tears away and find her glaring at me.
“Sorry.”
“You are not.”
“No, I’m not, but this is kind of funny.”
“Oh, yeah, totally funny.”
“So, how did you end up here?”
“Well, Raptor and Merle are sulking, Raven and Jay are flat out refusing, which leaves me. So, I came out, gave them a blistering lecture on female anatomy and promised that if they continued to embarrass us every time our body made strange sounds, they would lose access to touching said body and holes.”
She smiles smugly.
“Bet that shut them up real quick.”
“Damn straight, it did. Suddenly, it was ‘we’re sorry’ blah blah blah.”
Okay, I get it.
“But…how did you end up in the creek?”
She glowers at me. “I turned to walk away, and it happened again.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, hard. Really fucking hard.
“They couldn’t contain themselves, so rather than beat them all stupid, I’m lying in the creek and pretending I’m on a tropical island miles away with alphas who don’t mock my vagina gas.”
I grab her throat and slam her into the creek, following her down, growling.
“You were thinking of other alphas?”
“Is that all you got out of that whole story?” she shouts.
“No. You have vagina gas. I’d like to give you some more.”
She makes a sound like a cross between a growl and a snarl.
Before she can do anything else, I kiss her until she forgets she’s mad, until she’s naked and moaning under me. The cold water rushes around us. We roll until we’re both saturated, but neither of us care. It’s not comfortable, but that kind of makes it more exciting.
Fuck our other idiot alphas. Who cares about a bit of air? I do need to thank them though because to the victor come the spoils, and I just won this scrimmage.
And then she’s making noises, moaning and panting my name, and I forget about everything else but her and how good she feels as she shatters around me.