Chapter 2
Keld
Keld stared at his spreadsheet, wondering if he could get away with setting the whole desktop on fire.
“Thinking about arson again?” Zasia, a female Alpha in his department, had her pale blue-green arms propped on Keld’s cubicle wall.
“What gave it away?”
“You have an ‘arson’ face.”
Keld ground the heels of his palms into his eyes. “There’s something wrong in this damn spreadsheet and it’s fucking up all the calculations and I can’t find it.”
“Move.” Zasia shooed him away from the desk and leaned down to inspect his work. “Go stare at a tree outside for like five minutes. Your eyes are going to fall out of your skull.”
Keld stood and stretched. He had to maintain his terrestrial form at work because humans were weird about wearing clothes, but it had a tendency to make his spine ache.
“You’re a lifesaver Zas. I’ll be right back.”
She just flapped a hand at him.
Keld wound his way through the maze of cubicles, beelining for the main doors of Ikatere Desalination.
The finance department had plenty of windows and humidifiers, but it was no match for real sea air.
Puffy clouds passed overhead, blocking the sun at random intervals, and coasting on cool, spring air.
Keld willed his eyes to focus on a bulbous fihos tree whose deep purple leaves shivered in the wind.
“Keld?” A slender Alpha with bright red hair and vibrant scales was heading his way.
“Loriun.” Keld flared his facial fins at his boss in greeting. His brassy scales and bronzed-hued fins always felt a little dull in comparison to Loriun’s scarlet and teal. “How’s Beau feeling?”
Loriun Kolhn was the CEO of the desalination plant, and had been his boss for the past five years. He’d been matched with an Omega the year prior, then promptly got him pregnant. Keld had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t planned, but he couldn’t exactly ask his boss about it.
Loriun sighed. “Every time I try to ask him that question, he simply responds with ‘large’.”
Keld huffed a laugh. “He’s due this month, isn’t he? What are you doing here?”
“Yes, this month.” Loriun’s jaw tightened. “I will only be here for a short time. I was needed to deal with a client issue in person.”
“Ah. I heard about that.” An irate human governor who didn’t seem to understand how science worked. “Good luck.”
The other Alpha grimaced. “It appears I will need it.”
“You might want to…” Keld motioned at his own ear fins. “You know. I heard that guy isn’t a huge fan of the Mer.”
“Noivux’asi iaka,” Loriun muttered in Loaish.
The crimson fins that splayed from his ears began to shrink down toward his head.
The larger, colorful scales on his arms drew together, shifting the way they caught the light.
By the time he was done, he could nearly pass as a human, albeit an obscenely tall, vaguely sparkly human. “I appreciate the tip.”
When his boss had vanished through the doors, Keld resumed his intense staring contest with the fihos tree.
Just two more hours of work, then he could shed the day’s annoyances.
A text rattled his phone, announcing Zasia had fixed that damn spreadsheet.
Keld took one last gulp of ocean breeze, and pushed back through the glass doors.
“You swapped two numbers.” Zasia was still lounging in his chair. “You’re welcome.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled. “Thanks. Can I have my chair back?”
“You going to Siren after work?” she asked, ignoring his request entirely.
Siren’s Rest—Keld’s favorite place on the island. “Yep. You?
“Thinking about it.” Zasia eyed him. “But if you’re going, I’ll have competition.”
Keld snorted. “You’re a female Alpha. The people coming after you are totally different from the ones flocking to me.”
“True.” Zasia stood, stretching toned arms skyward. Her white blouse rose just enough to show off the silvery skin of her stomach.
Keld had met Zasia at Siren’s Rest. She was one of the few Mer that regularly made an appearance at the club. They’d made a big show trying to out-Alpha each other, and had been friends ever since. The humans and Omegas ate that shit up.
The folks that lined up to be choked and degraded by Zasia were mostly male Mer Omegas, ashamed of their heterogender desires.
Keld, on the other hand, tended to pull human Omegas of all genders.
His theory was that his relatively short height (for a Mer), and his stocky, well-muscled build appealed to human interests more so than Mer.
Not that he was complaining. Keld had learned an awful lot about human pleasure in his years at Siren’s Rest, and felt he was more prepared than most Alphas for his future human Omega.
“Zas?” he said suddenly.
“Mm?”
“You haven’t heard anything from the Mermate program have you?”
Zasia grimaced. “Only that I’m number forty-three in line.”
“Damn. I’m like thirty-five or something.”
“I blame the entire state of Florida.” Zasia rolled her eyes. “Maybe we should request a transfer to California. I heard they actually have a surplus of Omegas.”
Keld chuckled. “I bet California’s waiting list for transfer is even longer.”
Zasia groaned and made to return to her own desk. “See you at Siren.”
Keld fell into his chair. The Mer had only been permitted to take human mates for the past twenty-one years, and volunteers weren’t exactly clamoring to shack up with an amphibious alien.
Loriun was lucky when he met Beau. Jonathan, another Ikatere employee, was Beau’s dad’s neighbor’s dog’s cousin or something like that, and didn’t have any siblings. Keld had asked.
Keld stared, unseeing, at his monitor. On one hand, he was still reasonably young at twenty-nine, and didn’t need to be settling down right away.
On the other hand, his Alpha instincts were trumpeting at him to find an Omega.
He’d considered a Mer Omega, since he didn’t really want children, but all the time he’d spent in a human kink club had obviously affected his brain chemistry.
All he wanted was a soft, doe-eyed Omega man, naked and tied to a bedframe—Stop it. You are at work, you godless cretin.
Unfortunately, accounting was rarely capable of taking one’s mind off bringing an al dente noodle to the spaghetti house.
∞∞∞
Keld weaved through the small crowd mingling in the lounge of Siren’s Rest. He’d beaten Zasia through sheer disregard for speed limits, but she wouldn’t be far behind.
A few familiar faces smiled up at him in greeting—human Omegas, mostly.
Just ahead, the bar glowed in dim, yellow lighting, softening the walnut slabs that formed the bartop.
“Evening, Tuiket.” The weekday bartender was, oddly, a Mer Omega.
Oddly, because Mer were incapable of ingesting most human alcohol.
They went by the name Kir, “serenity” in Loaish.
Most people didn’t use their real names here.
As far as these people knew, Keld’s own name was Tuiket—the word for “gold.”
“How are things, Kir?” he asked, sliding onto a stool upholstered with red velvet. Matching curtains swung on either side of the shelves just behind the periwinkle-scaled bartender.
“Pretty quiet today,” they said, reaching for a glass. Their fingertips darkened to a dusty indigo. “Gose?”
Just the thought of salty, citrusy beer had him salivating. “Always.” To his left, a human tossed a shot of what smelled like rubbing alcohol into her mouth. Keld winced. If the smell alone burned his nose, he didn’t want to fathom what it would do to his throat.
“Hey, Kir? Tell me again why humans drink recreational poison?”
They smirked, sliding a coaster under his gose. “Technically, you’re also drinking recreational poison.”
“Low-content poison,” he corrected, taking a sip. The cool bubbles sent sparks of coriander and sea salt across his tongue.
A memory flickered in Keld’s mind. His mother, holding a filthy rag to her gills, the stench of tavra sap cloying in the air—he stomped the scene back down into the depths of his consciousness.
Somewhere behind him, Zasia’s ringing laughter announced her arrival.
She was already surrounded by all three male Mer he’d seen when he came in.
One offered her a leash, the other end clipped to a thick collar around his neck.
“Do you actually drink the human cocktails?” Keld asked, willing himself to remain in the present.
“I took a sip of a margarita once and nearly went belly up. Zero out of ten experience.”
Keld laughed as a soft hand touched his elbow.
“Tuiket? Are you free?” Big, blue eyes peered out from messy, brown hair.
“Hey, Dakota.” Keld’s hand acted on muscle memory, catching the Omega’s chin. “I’m free.”
Dakota’s breath came out in a shudder.
Keld dropped his voice. “Have you been a good little Omega?”