Page 22 of The Feisty Omega

I screwed up my nose. “Sort of? My family is, but I’m sleeping in the dorm.” Well, hopefully not all the time, but I didn’t tell them that.

The two shifters exchanged glances again.

“What?” I said.

One of them, the younger one, a shifter with red hair and freckles scattered across his nose, repositioned himself, his shorts scratching noisily on the tree roots.

Finally, he blurted out, “Um… we heard some of the guys talking last year about… something happened at the Christmas lunch you came to… and, you’re back again this year, and um, we were wondering if, um, maybe Mar was, ah, sort of planning ahead…” he finished in a rush. His freckles all but disappeared under the wash of pink that rushed across his face.

Wow!It didn’t take much to start rumors circulating in a wolf-pack. Just a strip of venison.

I needed to shut this down, and fast.

“Nothing’s happening,” I told them, a smile on my face though inside I was raging. “There might have been a bit of a misunderstanding, but there’s definitely nothing…” my hand flapped around in a weird vague sort of gesture, “likethatgoing on.”

“Oh, cool,” the ginger-haired guy nodded, looking relieved. “Pity though. You’re fun. Might liven things up a bit around here.”

“Oh? What? It’s boring here? I can’t imagine that.” I hoped I kept the wistfulness out of my voice. I kind of wished I lived in a pack, now that I’d experienced some time in one. Besides, Tal was in this pack.

“But hey, don’t the ados hang out with you guys sometimes? When I left, you were all playing together.”

“Yeah, sometimes,” the other shifter, a skinny guy with blond hair, joined the conversation. “But Mar keeps telling them not to, and it just gets awkward.” He shrugged.

“Tal got into a fight with Mar over it,” added the ginger guy.

“Yeah, like a real one. Fists and all. Thought they were gonna shift and take it to the next level, but then Alpha came and shut it down. But now, they only play with us when Alpha’s not here to back Mar up.”

“Where’s Tal now?” I asked, bending down and flicking some imaginary dirt off my shorts. I held my breath, pulse thrumming in my neck. My hair, longer this year, brushed over my face.

“He and his friends have been out all day,” one of the boys said.

“They went shopping.”

“No, they didn’t. Alpha sent them off to do something this morning. I think they had to go into the next town.”

“All of them?” My eyebrows displayed my surprise. It would be odd to send all the older boys on an errand the day before Christmas, but it would explain why I hadn’t seen any of Tal’s friends hanging about. They used to spend an awful lot of time loitering under this very tree, but not one of them had been around since I arrived.

“Yeah, think so. Except for Mar. He was the one that came and told them to go.”

Interesting.

“Okay guys, well I’m supposed to be at dinner right now, so I‘m outta here.”

“ ‘Kay, Irian. Catch you later, maybe?”

“For sure,” I threw the words over my shoulder as I headed up to the main pack house, dragging my toes as I went.

Chapter 11

TAL

I didn’t know why we’d been sent on this stupid errand. On Christmas Eve, of all times. What was so important it couldn’t wait until after Christmas? Nothing. I wanted to be at home, watching in case we had, um, any visitors for the holidays. Like we did last year. Okay, I finally admitted to myself, I was hoping Irian would turn up again, but it’d been so long since we’d seen each other, or spoken, that I didn’t really know whether the tether that had seemed to bind us last year would be enough to bring him back.

It was in the Goddess’ hands.

Darkness had already wrapped itself around the compound by the time the boys and I got back. A few doorways and windows cast a golden glow outside. Colored lights twinkled in the windows of all the houses, and someone had even put tiny colored sparkle lights around the trunk of our tree in the center of the yard.

Luke went off to tell Alpha the result of our trip, and the rest of us scattered towards the comfort of our respective homes.

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