I Am The Alpha (34 page)

At the moment I was much more concerned with the pleasure I could bring to my mate and myself than I was with Pack politics and lessons. I was happy, and they could wait for just a little while.

Epilogue

Remus

Omega. He made me an Omega. A wolf without a Pack. I was alone. Truly alone for the first time in my life. A life far longer than my appearance suggested. I didn’t look much older now than I had when William was bitten by my father back in the sixties.

How long could I live if a Hunter didn’t catch up to me? How long would I live if I didn’t die in an accident? Centuries. I had centuries of being alone ahead of me. Centuries of isolation with no Pack, and no family and no brother to stave off the madness that had taken Romulus.

So I did what I was told, since I had nothing else to do. I ran.

Highway 101 stretched for more than one thousand five hundred miles from Tumwater, Washington, and ended at the East Los Angeles Interchange. Right then, Los Angeles sounded like a good idea. William was right, I didn’t like it, but he was. I couldn’t stay with the Pack that had been my home, my family, for my entire life. My twin was dead at my brother’s hands.

My head almost spun from the insanity that had become my life. I hadn’t even had enough time to empty or list the apartment Romulus and I had shared in the city before I’d needed to leave. I had just enough time to Pack a small bag with a few changes of clothes and a few personal effects that I really didn’t want to lose. Then I was on the road.

My heart burned in my chest almost as fiercely as the brand on my skin. The cool fall air did little to help the burning sensation as it flowed past me. I needed to get out of Washington. For a while if not permanently.

There are few things I truly enjoyed in the world. Sex was one, violence another; when it was deserved. Romulus enjoyed violence for the sake of violence, and that was part of what got him killed. I loved my twin. He was my blood, my other half, but he was dangerous, broken… crazy. My hands tightened on the grips and the roar beneath me surged louder for a moment before I forced myself to relax.

I had never been without a Pack. I had never been without my own kind around me and I could find more, true; but I was marked. I was an Omega. I would never be welcomed by another Pack. It was rare that an outsider was welcomed into a Pack, even without the stigma of my new status hanging over me.

I flicked the turn signal with my thumb and pushed against the bar, leaning the huge Harley into a gentle course correction until I had slid across the freeway and into the far left lane.

Ahead I saw a sign indicating that I was entering Oregon State, just as the sun began to near the horizon.

There you go William
,
I thought.
Out of the territory before sundown, as promised.
Behind me, the men that had been assigned to follow me and ensure that I left, pulled off the road and disappeared and I returned my focus to the front as I gunned the throttle and roared off into the gathering dusk.

I wondered how far I could run. How fast I could go. How much time would it take for this Omega to run from his past? And for an Omega, was there even truly a future to run to?

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Prologue

Hunter

Sharp grinding pain caused my eyes to water. My left leg and wing were useless to me. I was trapped. Unable to do anything for myself, too weak to make anything other than a piteous call that would likely go unheeded.

I closed my eyes and lay still and waited for death. Thousands of years of living and this is how I would go. In the middle of a stretch of asphalt, the cold rain pattering down on me while heartless humans passed me by in their nice warm cars, tsking under their breath at the poor bundle of floundering feathers in the road.

Idiot.

I was an idiot, pure and simple.

I wailed my frustration as my heart pounded against my delicate ribs. Each beat sending a fresh lance of pain through my broken wing, a sympathetic sharp pang echoing in my leg.

Who would have thought I would die like this? It was shameful. Ridiculous even.

A sharp sound, footsteps, I swiveled my head to take in a pair of worn, brown work boots jogging across the highway. Gentle hands in thick leather closed around me and I screeched. In as much pain as I was in, I couldn’t help it. I was turned and as I was I looked into the most beautiful eyes, deep and soulful, the color of the sea meeting a storm swept horizon. They were surrounded by pale milky skin and wisps of hair I swore was spun copper.

For a moment I thought it may be Bébinn, come to fetch me to Annwn, but the pain she wrought when she plucked me from the grit of the modern highway told me otherwise. I fought her, I couldn’t help myself, but she took me from the road and got into a vehicle and that was all I could remember for some time…

Chapter 1

Jessamine

“You name this one yet?” Charlie asked me, and I shook my head.

The Barred Owl had been under my care for a couple of months, his left wing and left leg had been broken, thankfully both had been simple fractures. He was on the mend and due for release as soon as I could get his atrophied muscles built back up.

I couldn’t bear to name him, it wasn’t so simple… he wasn’t like the other owls under my care. He was different somehow. Big for a Barred Owl for one, and the way he watched me move through the old barn we used as an Aerie, well it bespoke an intelligence far beyond any ordinary owl.

No, I just couldn’t name this one.

“Well now, maybe that just means you’re finally growing up Jessamine!” He winked at me and I gave an indelicate snort, wrinkling my nose in distaste, I shook my head violently, strawberry blonde bangs flopping into my eyes, pony tail dragging against the rugged green canvas material of my Carhartt jacket.

“N…n…n…n…nnnnever!” My stutter was horrible but I forced the word out through it anyways. Most of the time I chose to remain silent. I carried a notepad and pen on a string around my neck for when communication was absolutely required.

Charlie had fashioned a cover out of leather so that I could replace the note pad in it whenever I needed to. He’d spent so much time on it. Tooling a Barn Owl into its medium brown leather surface by hand. The loop that held the pen was sturdy and once he’d gifted it to me, I’d worn it every day since.

That had been when I was eighteen, it was a parting gift when I’d gone off to veterinary college. I’d lived here with my aunt and uncle, well my mom’s aunt and uncle, she didn’t have any siblings, since I was seven. Charlie was as old as my aunt and uncle who had recently retired to Arizona and a warmer climate. Not Charlie though. Nope, he would live and die around these parts and his tribe. The Quilleute of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

I went around the large open interior of the old barn, cleaning cages, feeding my charges and checking on the newer birds. I worked full time at a veterinary hospital in Port Angeles about thirty minutes from my aunt and uncle’s property.

It was my property now, for all intents and purposes, just not in name. They wanted it to be, but I had refused such a generous gift. They had it in their wills it would go to me, but even then, I’m not sure if I would be ready to really own it, even though I had been operating it for years.

Moonchild Owl’s Haven started when I was nine, with a sick Spotted Owl my uncle and I had found while mushroom hunting. We had no idea what we were doing, but we couldn’t just leave the poor thing. So we took it to the vet, and insisted on learning.

A local bird sanctuary, The Northwest Raptor and Wildlife center took us on as volunteers. We had done things almost all wrong with the Spotted Owl, who by the grace of some higher power and Jaye Moore, the director of the Raptor Center, had lived. Despite having bungled the initial care of Hootie back then, I had fallen in love with the cause almost instantly and my uncle and I had been willing pupils under Jaye. We had learned everything there was to learn about caring for all types of birds from her, but for me, it had always been about the owls. I’m not sure why.

When I was thirteen, my uncle and I applied for the necessary permits to become a wildlife rehabilitation facility. My uncle and I had spent every summer renovating the old barn on the property, from the age of nine to thirteen, to get it ready to house any injured owls. We won the permits and had rehabilitated quite a few owls from then until now. Only three in that time had become fixtures. Their injuries necessitating a permanent residency under my care.

I went to the back wall of the barn and looked up at the almost life sized tree artfully burned into its raw wood surface. Leaves bearing the burned in name of every owl we had ever helped hung on brass hooks from the many branches. It was a project my uncle and I had started from day one.

“What’re you going to put on his tag if you don’t name him?” Charlie asked as I looked over the tree. I shrugged my shoulder and turned, he was watching the bird with a curious look on his face, the bird though; he was watching me.

He was more brown than white, his patterning dappled and streaked in such a way as to remind me of the light falling through the trees. His beak was the color of bone, not yellow like a lot of the Barred Owls around. His eyes though, they were limpid pools of darkness, large and oddly expressive, and followed me as a man’s would. Drinking me in as I moved about the barn. There was something there, something I couldn’t place, but he, he was like no other owl; be it Barred, Barn, Spotted or any other species I had housed under my roof.

“Odd feller ain’tcha?” Charlie asked absently. The bird turned and looked Charlie in the eye and Charlie shuddered as if he’d gotten a sudden chill. I clapped twice and Charlie looked at me.

Throughout my childhood, Charlie, my Uncle and I had developed a series of hand signals for me to let them know what I was up to. My Aunt had never grasped it, but it was like our own sign language. I signed out that I was cleaning up and calling it a day out here and that he should do the same.

I had never bothered learning ASL, American Sign Language, what was the point out here where my world was as small as it was? Where no one else spoke it? I didn’t venture to the city very often and my note pad and pointing sufficed more often than not.

Was I lonely?

Yes, sometimes, but that was my lot in life. Besides, I had Charlie, and my owls. They were like my feathered children and I loved each one, choosing a name, growing attached and crying with a sense of loss at every release. Some would call me masochistic, and to some degree I suppose that was true, but you can’t do what I do and not feel. That would simply be barbaric.

I stopped in front of my unnamed Barred Owl’s cage, Charlie ducked out of the barn and into the ever present light drizzle outside. I considered the owl who cooed softly at me, another odd occurrence. I sighed and looked around to make sure that Charlie was good and gone from hearing range.

“W-what’s your n-n-n-n-ame fella?” I asked softly.

When it was just me and the owls, away from human judgment, my stutter was much less. Psychogenic they called it, as opposed to neurogenic. It meant that there was nothing neurologically wrong with me or my brain to cause the stutter. No, mine was all in my head on a psychological level due to trauma. Not something I liked to think about or talk about.

The owl cocked its head almost all the way ‘round upside down, like they do sometimes, and considered me. It gave a familiar broken call and I smiled. That was where my initial love of owls had come from.