by Noah Harris
Omega Moon
A Gay Shifter MPREG
Noah Harris
Contents
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1. Fresh Hell
2. Bronze & Marshmallow
3. On the Shore
4. Me & The Moon
5. Flying Blind
6. Breathe
7. Brave
8. Brave
9. The Scar
10. Eclipse
11. Mine
12. The End of the World
13. Luna
Newsletter
Published by BUP LLC, 2018.
Copyright © 2018 by Noah Harris
All registered trademarks in this book are the property of their respective owners.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. All resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
This book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Please don't read if you are under eighteen.
All rights reserved.
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1
Fresh Hell
Julian
Sparks fly in the starlit blackness, with a smell like gunpowder. The cabin rocks hard left, slamming me against the bulkhead.
“That came out of nowhere! Not fair!”
There are so many lights, bells and alarms going off, I can’t think straight. I can only stare up through the windscreen at the moon. Bright Luna looming larger and larger, as my craft careens toward her.
“Space isn’t fair, cadet. Get control of yourself.”
He’s right, though I hate to admit it. I breathe, estimating how far it is before I hit the surface, wipe out and die. Not to mention I’d be scuttling billions of dollars of experimental, next-generation equipment into space.
“Checking thrusters...okay, one’s at half-power, so that’s not going to stabilize. Cutting all thrust on my mark.”
“Inertia’s going to…”
“I’m aware of that, Houston. I need to hear myself think. Mark.”
My dizzying path toward the moon continues, and it’s not slowing down. At least the instruments can lock onto her, now that I’m not shimmying all over the place.
Once during jetpack training, I lost one of my jets. Clogged by some kind of moondust. I went spinning like a gold winning, Olympic ice skater. I’d gotten sick, in 360 degree living color, and fell even lower on the Flight School social totem pole than I’d already been.
“Houston? Houston, do you read? My instruments are still not making sense. Confirm?”
Alden’s voice, usually smug and commanding, is conspicuously silent. Does he know my readouts are worthless? Is that the problem? Am I all on my own out here?
If so, then fine. I like it on my own.
“Cutting all comms, rerouting power to stabilizers. I can’t hear myself think.”
The cabin goes dark and quiet. Sweet with the sound of Alden Armstrong’s protests as I cut his microphone and just drift in silence. The moon is blindingly bright now, filling my visual display. I fish my sunglasses from a jumpsuit pocket, grinning into the camera with what I hope is sexy confidence, before attending to my broken readouts.
There’s no speed at which I could be travelling where those headings would make sense. I can see the moon, crowding me like a bully, but when I cut power, the craft is still saying I have miles to spare.
It would be just like Alden to let that go unremarked on. A short in the systems we both know by heart, and which just happen to be my main claim to competence, would be a prime way to kill me off. In five years of competition, he’s never been this vicious. I must really be crowding him.
That’s my last thought, right before I crash into the dust of the lunar surface. Cabin lights suddenly come back to life, whirling red to signal my death, with the klaxon sounding. After five years of test flights, that sound haunts my nightmares. It means more than death, it means failure.
It means going home in shame.
It’s customary to give a cadet a few minutes to catch his breath before opening the simulator, especially after a dramatic death like mine.
As we’ve gotten closer to this final week of Flight School, I’ve noticed more and more of my classmates taking full advantage of that time. After five years of sleeping, sweating, studying, swearing and training together, for eight hours a day, the last thing any of us wants is to fail, and then have to look each other in the eye.
But my mother always said, do the thing that scares you most. And right now, that’s coming out of the simulator smelling of fear and heat exhaustion, looking into the eyes of my nemesis Alden Armstrong and his band of Flight School toadies. So that’s exactly what I must do.
Putting all thoughts of failure out of my mind, trying to remind myself that one bad flight simulation isn’t the end of everything, I strip down to my shorts and tank-top, balling up the jumpsuit under my arm before exiting the simpod. I keep my mirrored shades on, however.
Alden and his lackeys are standing around, having dropped to the training theater floor from the gallery overhead in the time it took me to collect myself. Alden offers a toned arm to help me up, which I ignore, while behind my shades I take all of him in. Sneaking a glance at my enemy, as always.
Alden Armstrong is well over six feet tall, with the dark blue eyes and blond hair of a densely muscled Midwestern quarterback. He likes to skirt regulations by letting his stubble grow just enough to highlight his sharp jawline and high cheekbones, but he knows better than to let it show on inspection days.
It’s his only transgression as Flight School’s resident poster boy. Literally. His chiseled face is on our recruitment brochures this year. And while clean-shaven is technically the rule, it somehow makes him look even more the part. One lock of ash-blond hair is always dusting his crooked eyebrow, perfectly tousled. He wears whatever he can get away with to show off his bulky arms and shoulders. Not to mention the casual way his shirt always seems to ride up just enough to show his hip bones and a hint of six-pack, flexing under a perfectly even tan.
I’ve never been able to figure out if all the posturing is vanity, or extremely elaborate aggression. Maybe it’s both. If so, it certainly works. I can’t take my eyes off him whenever we’re in a room together, and neither can anybody else.
Alden Armstrong is the worst, and not just because the slightest mistake, this late in the game, could get me iced from the program altogether.
He’s the worst because he’s the best to come through the program in at least a decade, and he knows it. And because he’s beautiful, and he knows that too.
“Are we going to say that was fair?”
I hook-shot my damp jumpsuit into a locker-room bin, rubbing my dark-red Irish curls dry with a towel that also goes into the bin. Coming to Flight School I was shy about my body, but after five years of physical training to meet the elite standards of our superiors, I’ve learned to take some pleasure in it.
As it turns out, my milky-white skin dusted with freckles and the barely-there hair that roams across my chest and down my flat stomach, looks a good deal better with a heavy layer of muscle stretching and bunching beneath it.
Catching my body in the mirror as I strip,
I wonder what they’d say back home, if they could see me now. I push the thought away. I must really be on edge, letting my mind stray there.
“Space isn’t fair, cadet,” sneers Alden, peeling his own clothes off as the evening bell rings. We have thirty minutes before dinner with the senior officers, which means moving as fast as possible.
“At least tell me the scenario next time, cadet,” I emphasize. It always sounds so superior coming out of his mouth, even though we’re equals in practically every way; same exam scores, merits awarded, and flight hours logged. The only difference between us is his popularity, his born leadership, and all the human stuff that comes with being Alden Armstrong.
We’re both at the top of the class, fiercely competitive. But even if that weren’t the case, we still wouldn’t get along. As much as I try to limit the amount of time I spend guiltily ogling him, he spends twice the effort making it clear he wishes he didn’t have to deal with me at all.
“I was going to, actually, before you cut me off,” Alden sniffs, twisting the shower taps next to mine with an almost wounded air. I keep my eyes locked on the tiles, as the other guys break off into groups, sniggering and gossiping. I will not look, I tell myself. Not now that I have no sunglasses to hide my wandering eyes.
“Sorry about that,” I say, mocking him with false graciousness. “If only I’d known you had more wisdom to impart.”
Alden turns his back, letting the water run through his thick hair and down his wide, strong back. The golden hair of his chest and arms catches the light in a very distracting way, but nowhere so much as across his round, firm ass. Fuzzy like a peach, I think, before shutting my eyes to rinse my hair in turn. He sighs.
“These last test flights are about our comfort zone, Forrester. You’re a communications and software major. Telemetry, readings, instructions, that’s your focus. You don’t delegate, and you don’t stay in contact and that’ll kill you on a mission. Not to mention endangering your pilot, and anybody else you expect to be able to just read your mind.”
I’m surprised he’s put so much thought into it. I’m almost flattered, before I remind myself he’s the enemy. With every reason to want me to fail.
“Thanks for your concern,” I spit nastily. Perhaps too nastily, as it draws a glance from Alden I’d almost mistake for wounded pride.
“A good captain cares about the welfare of his crew. We’re here to learn leadership, Forrester. Not everything is about you.”
And with that, he shuts off the water and strides away. I don’t even bother looking away this time. When he’s angry, he stalks like a jungle cat and it’s a sight to behold.
I realize I’m holding my breath as he joins his minions at the double-doors, wrapping a towel around those hips. And as usual, he doesn’t bother to look back as he leaves.
Hands casually covering my stiffening length, willing it down, I grab a towel of my own. God, they’d love that. Dressed down, shamed, and fully erect in the men’s shower. Just like the jokes they make when they think I can’t hear.
If they only knew!
Starting my second year of high school, my father instituted a careful system of half-truths and contingencies around me. It’s common practice, but a hassle, which is why most of us stay on pack lands.
Any shifter like me, in boarding-school, would expect to have a personal “specialist” serving as their family doctor. There’d be monthly visits home for vague “family” reasons that always seem to fall right around the full moon, similarly vague “religious” out-clauses for anything else that might interfere or expose their secret. That’s standard.
At least, standard for those who weren’t born omega. For we lucky few, both the rules, and the dangers, multiply quickly. We’re taught being an omega is precious, but also dangerous. You can’t expect men to control themselves. Not just alphas, they say, not even just shifters.
Unluckily, we aren’t so rare back home. I was the fifth and last omega born in my year, and besides that I was the runt. Which meant more problems than my family, or our pack, were prepared to deal with.
If a pack has too many alphas, you can just foster them out to another pack. It keeps bloodlines strong and varied, it reflects well on the original pack and strengthens diplomatic ties that can last generations. It’s how we survive.
Too many omegas, on the other hand, is just a problem. We’re a drain on pack resources when we’re bearing children and, at least in my local pack, we’re not allowed to do much when we aren’t pregnant. Add to that the general chaos that thrives around unmated omegas, our scents driving alphas and others wild during our heats, and we’re not just useless. We’re a curse.
You can’t stay in the pack unmated, and there aren’t enough alphas to go around. So, if your family isn’t powerful enough to buy you a spot somewhere else, you’re pretty much doomed.
I always knew I was different from my brothers. I was fifteen when it all changed, at my first full moon run. Even if I’d been born the most prized omega the world had ever known, there were already four others who came before me.
Cousins, nephews, and more distant kin, all deemed lucky, no matter how desperate their situations turned out to be. We’re taught even the worst alpha is still an alpha. The other omegas had already scraped the very bottom of the barrel, most of them when they were still youths. And here I was, an old maid at fifteen, with no backup plan.
“It’s not like we ever thought he’d be an alpha,” my parents would say when they thought they were alone. “But nobody expected this,” like I was a mistake. Which, of course, I was.
Even in Roseland, one of the more prosperous Texas packs, I would still end up cleaning houses for the alphas and well-mated omegas. Or if not that, using my omega ability to dazzle and confuse the minds of men to make my living in other, more dangerous ways.
And while there was a thrilling aspect to those sordid tales, servicing alpha after alpha in the dead of night, running loose over the hills every full moon looking for unattached males to quench my thirst, I knew that was a fantasy at best. The reality would be sad, painful, and probably short lived.
I need romance, true love. I need a place to belong, or nothing at all. It’s just the way I’m wired. Yet another misfortune in life, accumulated from the start, like a snowball rolling downhill.
I’d read somewhere that back in olden times the first-born son was the heir, the second a scholar, and the third a knight. The heir, the spare, and the surplus. Knighthood sounded good to me.
I was met with a token amount of protest at first, but eventually my exhausted pack and family gave in. They admitted my plan to pass myself off in the human world and make my own way, would at least solve their problems.
If I were found out I’d be disowned, keeping us shifters in the shadows. But I didn’t plan on being found out. And besides, I already felt disowned and abandoned.
I got the requisite letters of recommendation from highly placed shifters and allies, homeschool credits validated by another cabal of shifter authorities, and with my science scores, I was able to enter Flight School. By my sixteenth birthday I was emancipated, effectively an orphan. America was my family and my pack, and space my destination.
And now, after five years in Flight School alongside Alden Armstrong and his beautiful, cruel buddies, I’m coming to the end of that story and the beginning of another.
Hot frustrating days, sweating in the simulator. Hot frustrating nights surrounded by the scents and sounds of the healthiest men the United States has to offer, all in their prime.
All of it about to come to an end. One way or the other.
The worst part is that Alden Armstrong is right. About basically everything, all the time, but especially about this. He does know my blind spots, better than I do, and that’s because he’s exceptionally good at his own chosen path. He was born to command his own ship. Practically bred for it.
Picture me, at the tail end of a remarkable run as a prodigy, the youngest doctorate ev
er admitted to the program, leading my squad in every subject. And in this final year, this golden god Alden Armstrong suddenly focuses on bringing me down at any price. Or at least that’s how it feels. It’s ugly, unexpected, and most of all annoying
It never occurred to me this final year would be a marathon. I couldn’t have imagined our simmering competition would boil over right at the end. Just when most of us are dead-eyed zombies, stumbling toward graduation with eyes barely open.
Maybe it took him the full five years to consider me a threat, which is offensive enough. Or maybe he’s just been working his way through all of us, a quiet sociopath. Dropping bodies until only he and I remain. There’s something slightly sexy about that possibility, but only slightly.
Early on, day one in fact, we were assigned to bunk together. I rushed into the barracks the second the doors opened that morning. I put away my scant belongings in the standard-issue locker, and made my bed with meticulous, sharp corners. I propped a photo of my pack against the lamp and sat in the exact center of the bed, excited and a little nervous to meet my first bunkmate at Flight School.
I smelled him before I saw him. For omegas, it’s a matter of survival to know everything we can about the men we come into contact with. For a brief second, I thought I smelled alpha. That deep, heavy musk like a moan, and the sharper notes that betray their constant vigilance, that assertive alertness that almost smells like anger.
No, no, no, I thought, eyes squeezed tight, hoping against hope that after all this effort I wouldn’t suddenly have to worry about an alpha in our midst. But my inner wolf remained strangely dormant as he came closer, body burning hot and strong in my senses.
