Page 4 of Feral Omega

I'll die first. Even if I have to do it by inches.

One finger at a time.

Chapter

Two

THANE

"That fucking freak is gonna get us all killed, Thane!"

Whiskey's voice echoes through the Chateau as we settle back in from our latest mission. Blood is still dripping from his broken nose.

He's the one who first coined that term. The Chateau. Makes it sound like we live somewhere nice and not a crumbling collection of outbuildings nestled in the mountains on the edge of the Wastelands. Guess it's better than when Plague used to call it Misfit Manor.

Whiskey is our resident comic relief, and as the youngest member of the Ghosts—our pack bonded in blood and brotherhood—he's usually the more laid back out of the five of us. He isn't jaded yet.

But he's in rare form today, and I can't say I blame him.

He's shed the latest mask he took from the battlefield as a tasteless trophy, revealing the shiner that's beginning to form over one of his light brown eyes. His swollen and bloody broken nose is the only thing about his face that isn’t obnoxiously symmetrical. Even his short yet somehow still messy brown hair has streaks of blood in it.

Not from the mission itself, but the fallout of our latest victory.

I'm not sure if he needed to take his damn shirt off. His mask, sure. But his shirt? He's always been proud of his abs, even though his are the least visible out of the group. The missions over the past few months have been relatively easy, and there's been an abundance of unusually greasy food he doesn't bother rationing. Sometimes I think rationing goes against his morals.

Actually, it's probably the only moral he has.

Plague, our resident medic, steps forward. "Sit down and let me snap that nose back into place," he says, his voice stern despite being muffled by his mask. "Unless, of course, you enjoy looking like a Picasso painting."

Plague looks nothing like a real doctor, at least not one you'd want to visit, and his bedside manner isn't any better. But he's the closest thing to it out here in the wastes. His namesake, a black leather plague doctor's mask sloped down beneath a black hood that fades into the same Kevlar-and-leather tactical gear all five of us wear, conceals long black hair and a pale face with angular features that don't make him look any less foreboding.

Other than Wraith, Plague is the only one in our pack who wears his mask even when we're off mission. But it's not for the same reason as my brother, the only one of us who really has a reason to wear one outside of uniform.

Plague is just terrified of contamination.

Not death, though. I've seen him staring down the barrel of an enemy gun without so much as breaking a sweat.

Just contamination.

Valek chuckles darkly from the corner. He usually wears an executioner-style hood over a featureless brown leather mask with two holes for eyes that reveal nothing but shadows underneath. Right now, it's sitting in his lap, leaving his unnecessarily chiseled face uncovered.

"Let it heal broken," he says in his thick Vrissian accent. He gives Plague a wolfishly wry grin and scratches at the light scrape of blond stubble on his jawline that matches the hair falling into his pale blue eyes. "Our pretty boy from across the pond needs to be taken down a few pegs."

"Fuck off, Valek," Whiskey spits back. "You know I'm right. You all do. And you won't be laughing when it's you on the other end of Wraith's nuclear meltdown next time."

I sigh. Wraith, my brother in all but blood, the wild card in our lethal deck. His episodes are becoming more frequent, more uncontrollable. In my mind's eye, I can still see the carnage he left in his wake today, the terror in the eyes of our enemies as he tore through them like the devil unleashed.

It's nothing new. His uncanny ability to kill is the very the reason my father spared his life so many years ago. But like the atomic bombs that destroyed everything beyond the carefully protected boundaries of Reinmich, he's a remarkably effective weapon whose impact is difficult to control.

To me, he's more than a weapon. He's family.

But to the others…

"He wasn't trying to hurt you," I say, launching into damage control once more. Lately, I feel more like Wraith's personal PR assistant than the leader of the most lethal and sought-after spec-ops team in the Council's command. "If he was, you'd be dead."

"Is that supposed to fucking make me feel better?" Whiskey cries, his voice nasal from all the blood bubbling in his nostrils.

"I don't give a shit how you feel," I growl. "You know better than to get in his way when he's like that."

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