Omega Reimagined volume 2

by Tanya Chris

  For now, I threw it over my shoulder and meandered my way into the center of town where vendors were replenishing their stock and socializing with each other in between the morning and noontime rushes. No one paid me any attention as I walked between them.

  There were more Southern Pack wolves up here than I’d first realized. All the packs were represented, but the foreigners were largely southern or western, and I could guess why. Those were the packs omegas fled from, and this was one of the safest places they could end up. But it wasn’t just omegas. I’d seen plenty of betas with non-Northern Pack markings, and then there was Shade. An alpha like myself, but still a refugee.

  I could stay here. I knew what Tarek was offering—not just a bed for a night or two, but his home and maybe his life. As I wandered through the center of the square and then across it, heading for the grove where we’d run yesterday, I imagined what that life would be like. I didn’t have to imagine it very hard. Lars and Shade had shown it to me.

  I could be waiting for Tarek when he got home. I could even have dinner ready. Since moving out of my parents’ den, I’d been living primarily on raw meat and bar food. I’d never learned to cook, because alphas didn’t cook. They mated with someone who cooked for them. And yet, I’d always known that wasn’t going to happen. You’d think at some point I’d have picked up at least some basic culinary skills, but oh no. Alphas didn’t cook.

  I could hear Carmen laughing at me, repeating my words back to me in a mocking voice. Alphas don’t cook. I’d bet all my worldly possessions Carmen didn’t cook either. And Shade did. He wasn’t good at it, but he wasn’t waiting around for an omega to do it for him either. And there was no reason Shade couldn’t be good at it. No reason I couldn’t be. I was an alpha, after all. I could do anything.

  With that in mind, I shifted into wolf form and chased rabbits through the birch grove. It was such a beautiful place, the trunks as tall and elegant as cathedral spires. A few leaves had started to fall. They floated down like golden stars, one at a time in lazy circles, bright against the heavy grey of the sky.

  Northern Pack rabbits were white, their fur as snowy and soft as Tarek’s. I almost felt bad catching them, they were so pretty. Fast, too. Or maybe my brighter coloring gave them an edge in spotting me, because my first attempts were poor, but I eventually caught enough to feed the two of us dinner. I shifted back into human form and used my teeth and claws to clean them so they wouldn’t bleed all over my bag, then went back to the market.

  My father had made a good rabbit stew, full of potatoes and carrots and probably spices of some sort. Since I wasn’t sure whether Tarek owned any spices, I picked up a few at random. Cinnamon, which smelled delicious, and turmeric, which smelled sharp. They were both a nice shade of orangish brown, so I figured they’d go well with each other and with the carrots.

  Laden with my purchases and a bag full of rabbit carcasses, I let myself into Tarek’s cottage. He was going to be pleased, I told myself as I set a pot of water to boiling. I chopped everything into bite-sized pieces and threw it into the merrily bubbling pot, then sacked out on the recliner by the big bay window. It was barely midday, which meant Tarek wouldn’t be home for hours. Plenty of time for a nap.

  Chapter 13

  Tarek caught me sleeping in his giant recliner, which was better padded than anything I’d sat on in Northern Pack territory so far. Someone must’ve dragged it all the way up here from human territory. He kissed me awake, and for a moment everything felt right, like I’d woken up exactly where I belonged. Then he lifted his nose with a suspicious sniff and asked, “What’s that smell?”

  Dinner! I dashed over to the stove and found the pot boiling furiously, only an inch or so of liquid left in the bottom. Out of the thin orange broth rose a pyramid of meat and vegetables, like a towering pile of refuse.

  “You cooked?” Tarek peered into the pot over my shoulder, no doubt coming to the same conclusion I was. I’d made more of a mess than a meal. I popped one of the pieces of rabbit into my mouth and found it bland and chewy, while the carrot I tried to fish out lost all form entirely, melting into a sludge that added to the orange-ness of the liquid at the bottom.

  Tarek took a spoonful of the broth and immediately spat it out. “That’s, um, a lot of flavor.”

  I sampled the broth and was just as quick to spit it out. “Maybe I shouldn’t have used so much of those spices.”

  “How much did you put in?”

  “All of it?” I held up the brown paper packet the turmeric had come in. It was only a few cubic inches in volume, barely big enough to fit a rabbit foot.

  “Hm.” Tarek peered down at the mess of flavorless meat and overcooked vegetables in their spicy orange bath. “I think we can salvage it.” He poured out the liquid, rinsed the solids in a colander, then stirred everything together until the vegetables made a sort of paste in which blobs of grey meat floated. It was… not good. Apparently cinnamon and turmeric didn’t mix well despite being similar in color. Who knew.

  “Good thing we’re wolves,” he said as we faced each other across the table, grimly forcing down my failure of a dinner. “Calories are calories.”

  Poor rabbits. They deserved better. But Tarek was right. This was nutrition, even though it tasted alternately bland and overwhelmingly spicy and was almost too tough for human teeth to chew.

  “I’ve never cooked anything before,” I admitted as I choked down another mouthful.

  “I’m getting that sense.”

  “I can do better.” I was only living with Tarek temporarily, but I would need to eat my whole life. I could cook for myself back in Four Forks. As long as no one knew about it.

  Fuck that was ridiculous. Supposedly alphas had all the freedom, but here I was sweating over the possibility of getting caught making myself a meal.

  “Don’t think I don’t appreciate the effort,” Tarek said as he rose to pour us both a glass of wine, which could only help. “Coming home to you find you waiting for me, and then realizing you’d made me dinner? It was really sweet.” He leaned down to kiss me before going back to his chair. “I’ll happily eat anything you make.”

  I swiped a chunk of rabbit through a slurry of carrots. Statements like that made me remember I didn’t have any reason to still be here, other than that hearing Prince Devin was supposedly setting up, which I really needed to cancel.

  “Maybe Shade can give me some tips.” I’d laughed along with Lars at Shade’s cooking last night, but it was ten times better than this. “If my phone had service, I could look up some recipes, watch some videos.”

  “You could check out our library.”

  “Library?”

  “Yeah, it’s this place where they have books and things. You borrow them and—”

  “I know what a library is.” I’d just never been in one.

  “Oh, well, it’s a new concept here. We just got our first one last year. It’s run by a couple of the most adorable omegas you’ll ever meet.”

  “I don’t want to meet an omega,” I said sulkily. Tarek was just taunting me now.

  “I didn’t mean it that way. First of all, I’m not trying to palm you off on anyone else, okay? I’m really happy you’re here with me, in case I’m not making that clear. And second, they’re not in the market for alphas. They’re already mated. To each other.”

  I almost choked on the hard lump of rabbit I’d been chewing. “Two omegas?”

  “Yep. When Head Alpha Marta made it legal for women to mate with women, she didn’t stop there. According to current law, any citizen of the Northern Pack can mate with any other citizen, so long as they’re both of age and they enter into the union of their own free will. Makes you think, doesn’t it?” He winked at me.

  “Are Shade and Lars mated?” If so, then alpha/alpha matings didn’t take right, never mind what the law said. Shade and Lars smelled like two wolves who lived in the same home, but they didn’t smell mated.

  Tarek shook his head. “They could b
e, but they aren’t. They both like to fuck around too much—Shade, especially. So I guess they decided a mating bond wasn’t right for them. It’s their choice, of course.

  Hm. Well. That was alphas for you. “Did Shade fuck you?” I asked, annoyed by the idea.

  “No one fucks me.” Tarek leaned back in his seat and contemplated me over the rim of his wine glass. “But I’ve fucked around with him. And also with Lars. And all three of us together. Hot.”

  It was sort of hot. In theory. If Tarek wasn’t one of the wolves involved and the other two weren’t people I’d actually met. I scowled at him, and he laughed.

  “I love that you’re jealous. It gives me hope.”

  “I’m not jealous.” I went back to sopping up carrot sludge, making a point of avoiding Tarek’s knowing eyes, but the unadorned walls of his home didn’t give me much else to look at. There was the recliner where I’d spent most of the afternoon and a door that led to the bedroom where I’d done some things I didn’t like to think about too closely. That was about it. Eventually my gaze settled back on Tarek. He was the prettiest thing in these four walls.

  “Are there any alphas mated to each other?”

  “Not yet. We’d be the first. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

  There it was. Said out loud. Too much for me. It wasn’t feasible, wasn’t even worth considering. I shook my head.

  “Think about it, Donovan. I’ve never met anyone I was so compatible with.” He reached for my hand and I let him take it, even though there was nothing sexual going on right now.

  “We may be compatible sexually”—which made me squirrelly just thinking about it—“but outside of the bedroom, we have very different ideas about how wolves should behave and how a pack should be run. You can’t just keep refusing to talk about it.”

  Tarek frowned at me, but he didn’t let go of my hand. “I was hoping you were starting to come around. You’ve been here long enough to see what North Leland is like. Do you really still have such a negative view of us and our ways?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, just like I didn’t have an answer for any of this. These were all new questions. “It’s not natural. Omegas mating omegas. Women mating women. It can’t be right.”

  “What makes you draw the line in those particular spots? Male alphas have been claiming male omegas since the beginning of time.”

  “Male alphas will fuck anything.”

  “Will they?” he challenged.

  “Most of them,” I clarified. We both knew I was an outlier. I withdrew my hand from his.

  “You have a preference,” he said, looking down at his hand as if he missed mine in it. “What makes you think other people don’t? Alphas, betas, omegas, men, women, humans, shifters. Everyone has a preference. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re like Shade and will fuck anything, but all you have to do is pursue your own preference and leave other people alone. Maybe they’ll leave you alone in return.”

  “It’s a matter of reproduction, Tarek. Women are the only ones who can bear pups. As a species, we need to ensure women mate with men, especially the omegas.” Female omegas were particularly fertile, thanks to their heat cycles. They were made to be bred.

  “Women can bear pups. Doesn’t mean they have to. It’s not like we’ve got a shortage of shifters. I was one of twelve myself. How many siblings do you have?”

  Plenty. My family was a big one, and ours wasn’t the only big one. Populations had been increasing at a steady rate ever since the packs stopped fighting amongst themselves. Shifters were hard to kill, and big litters weren’t uncommon.

  So, okay, maybe survival of the species wasn’t a legitimate reason to decide who mated with whom. And now that I thought about it, the word preference seriously underplayed how deep my sexuality was ingrained in me. It wasn’t like rabbit versus deer—where either could keep me fed. I didn’t just prefer alphas. It was alphas or nothing. And look at what Carmen had done—risked her life to avoid being forced into a claiming she didn’t want.

  Forced.

  According to Southern Pack law, Carmen’s father had the legal right to force her into a claim of his choosing. Before I’d come to North Leland, I’d believed he had the moral right too. I’d believed what my culture had told me: that once she got settled down, she’d be happy. That her reluctance stemmed from nothing worse than a case of nerves. That omegas needed protection and guidance. And that it was our collective responsibility to give it to them.

  I could see now that some of that might not be true. If Carmen felt about alphas the way I did—or rather, felt the opposite way about alphas than I did—she wouldn’t have been happy in the mating her father had arranged. But she would’ve been safe.

  Freedom of choice was a lofty concept, but I was a practical guy living in a practical world. My job had taken me to some of the most sordid places on earth for what I could only describe as rescue missions. I’d freed omegas from omega houses where their bodies were being sold to one alpha after another. I’d fished them out of bars where they went to drown their sorrows when the alphas who promised to claim them didn’t follow through. I’d liberated them from dens where gangs of rogue alphas kept them stashed away as communal property.

  I explained all that to Tarek, citing examples out of my experience, trying to get him to see that I hadn’t been a kidnapper or an abuser. I’d been a hero. I’d never taken any omega anywhere against their will. They were happy to be saved. Or at least resigned to it.

  “The world isn’t a safe place for omegas to be on their own,” I said in summary.

  “You say that like it’s an immutable fact. The world isn’t a safe place for omegas because we’ve made it unsafe. It’s not the omegas whose behavior needs to change. Listen, I don’t expect you to do a one-eighty overnight, but if you keep an open mind and stick around, it’ll happen in time. I came from the Hinterlands myself. You know where that is?”

  “Up north.” According to Carmen, that was where Tarek got his lighter-than-blond coloring from, but I didn’t know much about it beyond that.

  “Way up north,” he agreed. “Like go-walk-off-the-end-of-the-earth-and-keep-going north. Whatever they told you in the Southern Pack about how things ought to be, I heard it too. I came to North Leland because I wanted to escape from that dogma.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  I inclined my head to the side, considering him. “For all I know, you’re like Shade. Maybe you don’t have a preference.”

  “I have a preference.” He fixed me with a steady gaze. “It’s not as strong as yours, I’ll admit. One of those omegas who runs the library? He was a willing little thing before he found his mate. Shade and I used to tag team him when he went into heat, and it was a wild time. But I never offered to claim him.”

  “You gave him your knot, I’ll bet.”

  “When he was in heat, I did. He needed it, and Shade was there watching me, which added a little something to the equation. But even so I had to work for it. I don’t have to work to get a knot when I fuck you, Donovan. I don’t think I could prevent it if I tried. I do have a preference, and you’re it. I wish you’d think about staying. For me?”

  He reclaimed the hand I’d wrenched from him. I looked down at where we were joined, at our twined fingers resting next to an orange-and-grey plate full of my first attempt at domesticity. Holding hands was as intimate and unexpected as being tied to him last night had been, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to accept affection the way he offered it—casually and completely. As though I deserved it.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning, I made my way over to the library, which was down the street from the restaurant where Donovan took me to dinner that first night. The neighborhood was rattier by day, with a sense that it’d been abandoned and was only slowly being brought back to life. The library was adorable—freshly scrubbed and planted all around with beds that still sported a few flowers despite the plummetin
g temperature—but the buildings on either side of it were boarded over.

  One of the shuttered buildings was built like a mini version of the palace, all in white stone with three wide steps running the length of it as they rose in mocking majesty to a structure that was either laughable in its self-importance or was laughing at something else. There were no signs to indicate what it’d once been, but what it was now was closed.

  I directed my attention to the library. Not only was it open, but the welcome aroma of coffee drifted out from it, luring me into a space about the size of a box car. A counter made of river stones graced the end of the room closest to me, and a wide window stretched over it, letting in what little sun had made an appearance today. Behind the bar an omega monkeyed with a huge metal contraption I recognized as an espresso machine.

  “I don’t understand why we need such a complicated coffee maker,” the omega complained to someone I couldn’t see as he poked a button like he expected it to detonate an explosive. “Coffee is coffee.”

  “It is not,” I corrected as I stepped inside.

  The omega startled at my words, showing signs of being alarmed at finding an alpha directly in front of him, but he visibly pulled himself together and lifted his chin to me.

  “Welcome to our library. How can I help you?”

  “Can you make me an espresso?” One of the downsides to spending time in human territory was that you learned the difference between coffee and coffee. Just try to get a decent cup of coffee in wolf territory.

  “I don’t even know what espresso is.” He gave the machine a sulk that made me wonder if this was the omega Tarek had been talking about last night, the one he’d knotted. He was from the Hinterlands, just like Tarek, and even someone with no sexual interest in omegas at all could see he was gorgeous. His hair circled him like a cloud, fluffier than Tarek’s heavy silk but just as shiny.