Chapter 1 – Billie #2
The rest of the clan fills the chamber. Cousins I haven't seen in years.
Aunts and uncles who survived long enough to retire.
Younger members still in training. And the gaps are a presence of their own.
Uncle Taylor, who went after a vampire nest in Lumus City and never reported back.
Cousin Marina, who took a mission in the Capital and vanished into that crystalline hell.
Aunt Sarah, who thought she could handle a werewolf pack on her own. She was wrong.
I should probably feel something about those empty spaces.
Instead, I feel nothing. Just hollow where the feeling should be. My mother took it all with her the night before my twelfth birthday. The tears, the grief, and all the most human parts of me, leaving only the hunter behind.
If I'm ever going to be fully human again, it starts with the Prince's death. And if that day never comes, at least I'll die as the weapon built for exactly that.
"Wilhelmina Moreau." The Shepherd's voice fills the chamber, echoing off the walls. "Step forward."
I grimace at the name. A tribute to my great-aunt, a hunter who died and took three members of Fae nobility with her. The name was bestowed at my birth and has barely been spoken since. I'll be glad to never hear it again after tonight.
I walk to the altar, heels echoing on the stone. The gown's train whispers behind me, and I can feel every eye in the chamber tracking my movement.
Twenty years of preparation for this moment.
"Tonight, we witness the unmasking of one of our finest." The Shepherd speaks the ritual words with confidence.
He's said them a hundred times before. "Wilhelmina has trained ceaselessly since childhood, mastered the art of every weapon, learned every technique her tutors had to offer.
She is ready and worthy to take her place among her ancestors. "
He lifts a crystal vial from the altar. The liquid inside is black as pitch, thick as blood. Poison. The kind that separates soul from body just long enough for the resonance inside to manifest visually. Supposedly painless.
I've heard the screams from previous ceremonies too well to believe that.
"Drink," he commands.
I take the vial without hesitation. The crystal, supposedly stolen from the Fae King's own banquet table, is cold against my palm. I tip it back and drain it in one swallow.
Copper and ash. Burns all the way down.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the world tilts sideways.
Pain sears through my chest. Something tears loose from deep inside my ribs, muscle, bone, and something buried beneath all of that. My soul, ripping free from the mortal shell. I can feel myself falling and also watch it happen from somewhere above, watch my body crumple to the stone floor.
The chamber fills with spectral smoke. Silver and blue, writhing with light. Everything I am, pulled out of my body and put on display.
This is where I find out what I'm made of.
The smoke swirls and forms shapes. I look for the sign of blood. For raw physical power. For death.
Instead I see myself surrounded by four figures. Two flicker between human and beast—shifters. The other two have that particular Fae quality, that too-perfect, unsettling beauty, even rendered in smoke and spectral light.
And above all of it, glowing like a brand burned into the air…
The omega symbol.
The mark of human cattle. The mortals whose very biology betrays their own kind, capable of bearing the spawn of the creatures who've subjugated us for centuries, of guaranteeing the continuation of the very bloodlines Seveline and every hunter after her spent their lives wiping from existence.
No. That's wrong. That can't be right.
The vision dissolves and I crash back into my body, water breaking against jagged rocks.
Pain everywhere. Blood in my mouth. The stone floor cold against my cheek. The gown twisted around my legs.
Silence. Complete, absolute silence.
Then the whispers start.
I push myself up on my elbows. The faces of my kin are frozen in disbelief. My father's jaw is locked tight, but I can see the horror in his eyes.
The shame.
The Shepherd stares down at me. When he speaks, his voice carries across the chamber like a funeral bell.
"Omega."
An accusation. Or a condemnation.
"No." It tears out of my throat raw and desperate. "That's impossible. Hunters aren't omegas. Our bloodlines are protected. We're bred to kill supernaturals, not—"
Not carry their children. Not be their fucking broodmares.
"The resonance doesn't lie." His voice has gone cold. "You are an omega, Wilhelmina Moreau. The vision showed your true nature. Four mates. Two shifters, two Fae."
Four mates.
A sick joke. I'm supposed to be a weapon. I'm supposed to avenge my mother. I'm supposed to kill Prince Corvinus, not… whatever the hell this is.
"This is wrong." I claw my way to my feet, the gown's weight fighting me. "Run the ritual again. The poison was tainted or the spell was corrupted or—"
"Enough." He raises one hand and my mouth shuts, not by choice. The command resonance in the Shepherd's voice just closes it. Another reminder of why he occupies his current position, and exactly how much power I don't have right now. "The ritual has spoken. You are an omega."
The whispers get louder. Shocked. Confused. The sound of a world, a life, rewriting itself around me.
The girl who was supposed to be the greatest hunter of her generation is instead its greatest liability.
Omegas don't hunt. Omegas get detected and extracted by the Fae the moment their resonance blooms. They are funneled into schools and colleges where they're trained and brainwashed for a destiny that runs in exact opposition to everything I am. Everything I've spent twenty years becoming.
"What do we do with her?" someone in the crowd demands. My aunt, I think. I can't make myself look.
The Shepherd considers me like I'm a particularly inconvenient problem. "She cannot roam free. Now that her resonance has been Unmasked, she is a threat to our very way of life. The Fae will sense what she is, eventually even through the wards. They will come for her."
"Then we hide her." My father speaks for the first time, his voice rough with something I haven't heard from him in eight years. "Keep her here, protected, until—"
"Until what, Rowan?" The Shepherd's tone sharpens. "Until her mates come calling? Until every supernatural in the territory catches her scent and decides our compound would make a fine target?" He shakes his head. "No. There is only one solution."
My blood turns cold.
I know that tone. I've heard it used on captured supernaturals. On compromised hunters. On anyone who becomes a problem.
"Take her to the underground cells outside the wards," the Shepherd commands. "She will remain there until we decide what to do with her."
The cells?
Where we keep supernaturals before execution. Where traitors rot until they stop making noise, and inconvenient problems simply disappear.
Two hunters step forward and take my arms. I could fight. Should fight. Twenty years of training is screaming at me to move, to strike, to show them that omega or not, I'm still dangerous.
But what's the point? Where would I go? My entire identity, my entire purpose, just got ripped out of my soul and replaced with something I neither understand nor want.
So I let them take my arms. I let them walk me away from the altar, away from my father who won't look at me, and the clan that no longer knows what to do with me.
As we pass through the crowd, I catch Vera's eye.
She looks sorry for me.
But when our eyes meet, she turns and looks away.
She's relieved it wasn't her.
She's already writing me off. I can see it. Already rewriting the last twenty years in her head. Maybe that's the smart play.
Maybe I'm already dead.