Page 7 of Alpha's Magic

Leo

I lay insensible for one whole day and night. I woke up to two realizations—one was that I had not turned back into a monster overnight. I was still human, thank the gods!

My second realization was that I was still badly in need of a bath. That is, if my nose was to be believed. When I could even smell myself, that was surely a bad sign. I still must have been traumatized, because I had a hard time thinking at all. The “something” I’d been dreading finally had a face and a form and it was terrible.

Grimora, my only friend and companion, the man who had been like a father to me was dead, and I was all alone.

But there was something more. This wasn’t simple body odor from being dirty that I was smelling. I was in heat, and added to the grief I felt, my poor body was overcome and overloaded with trauma and stress. It was only my second time in heat, and it had come on me during the night with a vengeance.

I was burning up and had sweat literally rolling off my body. My entire body ached and cramped, and yet I was still filled with that awful longing for…something. I didn’t even know what it was that I needed, but it made me restless like it had the last time and left me feeling needy and itchy all over, like I was wearing a prickly woolen suit.

Grimora had told me a long time ago that he strongly suspected I could be an omega. I didn’t question how he came to this realization—he just knew things. But when I reached puberty and my voice deepened and still nothing happened, he’d hoped he could be wrong or that the curse the evil bitch had put on me had changed everything about me, even my basic body chemistry.

Apparently not.

I was twenty when I had my first one, which was incredibly late. Most omegas were around fifteen when they had their first and having a first heat at sixteen or even occasionally seventeen was also fairly common. However, Grimora told me that later and later heats had been happening a lot in recent times with omegas, though no one knew why. He received his information about the outside world in mysterious ways that I never really questioned, because he was so often right about everything. I just believed or took for granted everything he said was true. It was happening at the same time as new omegas being born, which was also getting to be pretty uncommon in our world, so it could have been that our world was changing and evolving. No one really knew.

But that meant that when an omega was found, Alphas would line up to have them and often entire packs of four or five or more took possession of one omega when he or she hit puberty. Sometimes they treated them very well. But what usually happened was that they’d work that poor, hapless omega to the bone and keep their belly full of their babies until they died or went crazy. Our world wasn’t a hospitable place for an omega in any way, shape or form.

And the problem was that omegas were often all-too-willing victims. When the heat cycle came fully on, omegas not only welcomed all comers—if those comers were Alphas—but they’d literally chase after an Alpha and beg them to mount them and fill them with their knots. It was called a heat frenzy and according to Grimora, it was a real and dangerous thing. Omegas in heat needed to be isolated and cared for until the heat frenzy subsided, or it could literally mean their deaths.

Yet here I was, all alone in a world that had only ever been extremely hostile to me, to say the least even without the added burden of being an omega. It was a world that hated me, and yet it was all I’d ever known. I was in a really bad spot, and I had no idea what to do except do as I always had—just keep going and trying to survive. For now, anyway. I could hide, though, deep in the darkest recesses of the cave until the heat went away again. It was an instinct I’d had from the first time I was brought here as a child. I used to lie in the dark and hide for days at a time back then, crying for my father and my amal, the ones who used to care for me. Grimora tried one potion after another to soothe me and try to heal me, but the witch’s curse had been far too powerful. There had been nothing he could do to break the curse.

Now, not knowing what else to do, I gathered up some food and water and retreated to the back of the cave, where it was the darkest. I had furs back there to keep off the chill, and I could bury myself in them and wait for my heat to go away, which last time had taken about a week.

I crawled under my furs, in so much pain I couldn’t even think straight. I wished hard for Grimora and thought of how kind he’d always been to me and how very much I’d miss him. I finally cried myself to sleep and dreamed of a huge wave rolling in from the sea to swallow me whole.

****

Asher

We’d rode out early that next morning. By this time, it had been six days since Rozamond’s death, though it hardly seemed so long. It took time to bury a queen, it seemed. I was anxious to get to this cave with Lex, straighten out this thing with Banshira and then head back home to Morovia.

We finally left as the sun came up, heading in a northwesterly direction toward the coast. We rode hard but it still took one whole day and night and most of the next day to get to the area by the Lumian Sea known as Banshira’s Cave. We were so close by the time darkness began to fall that we’d decided to keep going, unable to bear another cold night on the ground by a campfire. We ruefully admitted to each other that we were getting soft and too used to warm beds and comfortable surroundings. We used the full moon to guide us as we navigated the trails after darkness fell, hoping to find shelter with Grimora when we arrived.

This was a wild and sparsely populated area of Igella, known for its rocky shoreline. The wind blew all the time, it seemed, and the cave itself was located in the only section that had a somewhat decent place for a ship to drop anchor, as it was in an isolated cove and far from any villages. Thus, it had long been a perfect spot for pirates to stop and take on fresh water and firewood. It was hard to imagine having fires on ships, but the northern Lumian Sea was freezing cold and inhospitable, as was its coastline. The pirates also like a hot meal, I suppose. Fires burned constantly in the galleys of ships that crossed these waters and in the stone-masonry stoves inside the rooms onboard. Ships needed huge supplies of wood to keep them going.

Speaking of fires, we would need a roaring campfire that night after we arrived, if we couldn’t find any shelter, and that wasn’t looking promising. Once the moon had hidden itself behind the clouds, we had very little light to find our way, and the temperature had been steadily dropping as we neared the sea. We found a break from the wind by a huge fallen tree by the trail and made our beds beside it. Using magic, we made our fire as high and hot as we could, though we didn’t normally use magic for such trivial things. All bets were off on this cold and windy night, however.

By the time we’d first heard the waves crashing on the rocks, we’d become aware of a cold and steady wind as we approached the coast. We’d had to pull our fur-lined capes with the hoods out of our packs and wrap up in them. By the time we made our camp, got the horses settled and the fire going, we were both worn out and shivering. We spent a cold night huddling close to the fire, and we vowed to find the cave in the morning and not spend another night like this.

The cave was supposed to be a readily recognized landmark here, so we were expecting to find it easily once the sun came up. We were hoping that Grimora might give us shelter, which would give us a chance to question him about the destruction of the village and the rumors that had been flying about that ever since. If he refused—well, we might just have to insist.

We didn’t really think Grimora was guilty, but the situation for him and the unfortunate person he cared for was becoming more and more dangerous with each passing day. I hoped that villagers hadn’t already marched on his cave with their makeshift weapons and torches. Fear of demons and monsters had kept them away so far—or so we hoped—and we wanted it to remain that way.

By the time the sun came out at last, we were up and ready to find the cave. The sun’s light was weak and thin. The wind hadn’t laid by much, and we were anxious to find Grimora and get out of what felt like a gale blowing up. Lex found a trail that led us toward the sound of crashing waves and close to the huge cliffside where the cave was supposed to be. We dismounted to lead our mounts and soon, we saw the remains of a huge fire someone had built on the beach, just out of reach of the waves at high tide. We looked at each other uneasily, because it looked like a funeral pyre.

We approached it carefully and saw skeletal remains in the rubble of ash and wood. Most people don’t realize that after a body is burned, there will still be most of an entire skeleton left behind. Bones won’t burn during the cremation process, though they became very brittle and fragile. Someone would have to break those bones and crush them down afterward in order to fit them into a vessel or to be able to scatter the ashes.

Wondering whose remains these were and what exactly had happened here, we both drew our swords and began to scan the area for anyone who might be watching us. We neither saw nor heard anyone, but we did find some tracks leading off the beach and heading toward the cliff. The person had not been wearing shoes. We turned toward the cliff above us and could just make out the cave entrance high overhead.

“We have to go up there,” I said, and Lex nodded. With Lex again leading the way, and both of us leading our horses, we found the trail that led to the top of the cliff and began to climb. There wasn’t enough room to ride up, but the horses managed the climb well, even as the clouds that had been threatening finally opened up and the rain poured down on top of us. The wind off the ocean picked up, trying to blow us off the trail, but we kept going until we made it to the top. I’d hoped someone would hear us coming, but it was probably impossible over the noise of the storm, and nobody showed their face.

The air was filled with the noise of the waves crashing below and the cries of the sea gulls overhead, along with the sound of the hard rain pounding down. When we finally reached the entrance to the cave, which must have been twenty feet high and perhaps ten feet wide, Lex called out into the dark.

“Grimora! Banshira! Come out. We mean you no harm, but we need to come inside and talk to you.”

Silence was our only reply. He called out again. “Stand back! We’re coming in!” With swords still drawn, we began to slowly enter the mouth of the cave. It was big enough inside to give shelter to the horses, so we tethered them there and made our way farther inside where we could see that after the wide entryway, the space narrowed quickly to a kind of short tunnel or passage, maybe five and a half feet high and about ten feet long.

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