Page 5 of Fever

Leah keeps walking until she reaches the fence. Is she going to pedal to work? Deyo tilts his head to the side, and both ears drop down. Even the hound is confused. But not Leah. She’s out on the street and pedaling. So be it. I get into the pod and fire it up. The hologram stays blank. I command it again. Nope. The gate must’ve pulsed, and the tech went out. It’s been happening lately. The gate turns on and off, and Raven is pissed he can’t impose Silence at will. This random pulsing is a bad thing. I told them it would be, but Arkin wouldn’t listen, and here we are with no mapping system and random power outages.

Seeing as I haven’t yet figured out how Dreikx powers this pod during Silence, I take off on foot and catch up with her on the bike. She gives me a side-eye and pedals faster. I laugh and jog along. Leah pumps her long legs, spinning those wheels as fast as she can. I pick up my pace. We race through her district. Sweat breaks out on her forehead, she’s breathing hard, and I’m laughing. Finally, she slows down, then stops.

Next to her, I smile.

The corner of her mouth lifts, but she suppresses laughter.

Deyo joins us because, of course, the hound ran along. He looks even more confused, his head bobbing between us.

Leah says nothing. She gets off the bicycle and leans it against the fence, then crouches and looks for something.

I whistle.

The Horde member who quietly patrols the area walks out of someone’s backyard but doesn’t approach. He knows better. I’ve staked my claim on this Omega, and so Serpent help any male who dares approach while I’m still courting her.

“Can you take this bike back to 3469 4th Street,” I tell him. It’s not a question, and he knows it.

The Alpha nods.

Leah puts the bike’s chain lock back under the seat and, without a word, mounts Deyo. She just resigned herself to her fate. That’s right, I want to say, but I’m not going anywhere. On Deyo, I settle right behind her, then put my hand over her soon-to-be-full belly and pull her to me some more. My cock twitches, and in case she fails to notice my impressive length, I wiggle.

Leah shakes her head and clicks her tongue.

Deyo moves.

She’s training him like a horse, and her mother feeds him human leftovers. My fierce hound is now domesticated. As am I, apparently, because Leah “holds the reins” and maneuvers Deyo using her feet. Deyo doesn’t need maneuvering. In fact, hounds are trained to sense the routes and find the best and fastest way to get there. I’m feeling pretty useless and abandoned by my own animal until I feel Leah shifting in her seat, her legs twitching, presumably to tell Deyo to take a right toward wherever her work needs to take her this morning. Leah plans parties, and she travels to different sites. I never know where work will take her, and it makes me crazy.

Deyo breaks out in a sprint and enters the Stronghold pedestrian district. Leah shouts at him, cursing. Behind her, I’m as annoyed as she is. Deyo must’ve heard the Alpha hound’s call, and he’s reporting to the Stronghold, the last place I want to be right now at eight in the morning, arriving on a hound with an Omega.

Deyo slips through the gate and enters the Stronghold’s courtyard, where the Alpha hound, Junior, awaits. Deyo stops before him and growls, also annoyed that Junior has cut us off on our way to Leah’s work. I dismount and take Leah with me. With Alpha pheromones in the air, I sense lots of tension, as well as aggression. Seer’s snarl rings across the space. A unit of Collectors is already moving toward us. They’re the cockblockers of the bunch, not letting any of us near Omegas unless the Omega is accepting mates while in heat. Though I can use them around Leah now.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell Leah and round the space gate, which has grown to over twenty feet and taken up a wider perimeter. In fact, if it keeps growing, we’ll have to shut it down—if we can—or destroy the courtyard’s structures just to make room for the gate’s growth. It’s becoming a living thing, feeding on its own energy. It used to be a translucent air disturbance, but now it’s denser, taking on a milky-white appearance. Like fog, but with a swirling white center vacuuming up and recycling the energy.

As I gawk at Seer stuck inside the swirling mist and unable to cross into the yard, I nearly run into Raven.

“Your presence honors me,” Raven deadpans, eyes on Seer.

Dreikx joins us, says nothing, but his expression tells me everything.

A. Sometime during the night, the gate has expanded.

B. He’s gloating because we’ve been right all along when we warned Arkin not to mess with Silence. But for Arkin, the end justifies the means. He broke the Betaren project. Something had to give, though, and it’s the gate’s controls. We controlled it as best we could. Now we have to fight to regain control.

“I can explain,” I tell Dreikx.

Dreikx slams his crystal controller against my chest and walks away.

I catch the thing before it shatters and stare at the tendrils of light playing inside the crystal. It’s a bit chaotic, more chaotic than I anticipated. My crystal is clearer.

“The Omega can stay at the Stronghold,” Raven says.

He knows I can’t focus on the gate. Fuck, every Alpha knows that when chasing after an Omega, our brains lock on target and the rest of the world can go fuck off and die. “She won’t come, and that’s my fucking problem.”

“Make her stay, because you can’t leave the gate unattended.”

“Gaio is trained.”

Raven rattles a warning. “The second-in-command is not the Guardian Alpha. This is a job I can’t afford a substitute for.”

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