Page 6 of Unruly Omega

“Knock it off, Zeph. Hey,” I called out. “You’re safe here. Let us help you.”

Another growl but this time guttural, right from the center of his chest. A warning for me to stay back. In my experience, when these fugitives appeared, backing down was the last thing we needed to do.

“Locke, try your alpha power.” Markus walked up. He hadn’t shifted with us, so it took him a few minutes longer to get here. When I didn’t respond, he continued, “No one’s talking about your role in this community, but you are an alpha, and you have the power to command him. We need him to shift so we know what’s going on.”

I let my bear come forward, only in my consciousness. “Shift. Now.”

Nothing.

“I command you to shift.” I pushed more power into my voice.

“He’s not responding, man. We don’t know how long he’s been like this. He’s got crazy eyes.”

“Funny,” I snapped. Rob didn’t say much but when he did, it usually was snarky. Some would say rude. It was me. I said rude. “That’s what we said about you when you barreled in, trying to kill all of us.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “All right. What doyousuggest, alpha?”

Rude.

I stepped toward the bear with no fear in my heart. There was something about him. I wanted to care for him. Keep him. Interesting. I hated the words that were about to come out of my mouth. “We need to dart him. As much as we hate it. It’s the only way to save him.”

“I’m on it.”

The bear crumpled to the ground, one of our darts in his neck. His blue eyes lulled back in his head and his breaths slowed.

“All right, everyone. Let’s get him to the holding cell.”

Chapter Six

Kellan

I lay with my eyes squeezed closed, determined not to wake up and confirm that everything that happened in the last twenty-four hours or so was a dream or that I’d somehow been caught again. I’d dreamed a lot, at first, after they took me. Still an adolescent, I’d been separated from my den and everyone I knew with no explanation.

Having been warned not to go anywhere off our lands by myself, I didn’t listen at all to those older and wiser than me. The elders said we’d be snapped up and hauled away by some sort of bogeymen. Taken to a place where we’d wish we were never even born. No details beyond that, which made my friends and I believe it was just a scare tactic to keep us in line. To be fair to my youthful self, I had not actually planned to be alone that day. Two of my pals and I had planned to hike to town for an afternoon spent eating junk food and maybe bowling. We’d never tried that before, but it sounded vaguely interesting. Or we might have done something entirely different. At that age, we were nothing if not flexible about our free time.

But Abe and Joe were both wrangled into extra Saturday chores. They sassed their alpha dad once too often, apparently. And since I hadn’t sassed anyone, that day at least, I was left with nothing to do and a plan in place. One I never should have attempted on my own.

But I didn’t know that then. Just thought my overprotective parents and the others were bossy and treating us like babies. Besides, what could happen in broad daylight? Our lands were only a couple of miles from town, and the humans there knew us all and had never been rude or anything. Did they know we were shifters? No. To our knowledge, they were all under theimpression we were some kind of farming commune. And we let them think that.

It made for a decent relationship. Our products were featured at the local farmer’s market. Our craftspeople sold their items online and via some of the stores in town. We patronized them as well. All good.

So, when a car pulled over to the side of the highway and offered me a ride to town, I got in. The driver was someone I knew, at least on sight. He’d bought tomatoes from me at our stand just the week before.

“I need to make a quick stop on the way,” he told me. “Just take a minute.”

A minute of his time to deliver me into the hands of evil and imprisonment. Years of mine to get out. If I had…

Okay, I’d lay here long enough, wondering if I was still in that cell or if I truly had escaped. My bear led with his nose, though, sniffing the air before opening our eyes. If there was any sign we were not at the lab, it was the fact I was in bear form. They could have done something to get me to shift, but they hadn’t done that in years.

And even though my bear was doing the sniffing, through his snout, I could smell the cleanliness of the room, the lack of fear lying heavy in the air. No medicinal odor to speak of. And another odor, sandalwood and lime was the closest I could come to it, a scent that relaxed some of the tension at my core.

Eyes open, I took in my surroundings. The room was not much bigger than the cell we’d occupied at the lab, but my initial fears of having either been recaptured or never left at all did not return. There was no furniture, just a padded floor and walls, like I’d seen once in a movie about an old-time asylum. The labs had no padding. If you went crazy and wanted to bang your head or any part of your body into the solid steel walls, floor, and ceiling, nobody stopped you. Here, although it wasn’t a bed, I layon the first comfortable surface I’d had the pleasure to feel in years. The outline of a door and the window it held took up part of one wall, also padded, and I wondered who had taken me now and what they wanted with me.

Not the lab…but who?

And what was that delicious smell?

We paced back and forth. Four steps one way, six the other, a very small, very secure room. A water fountain bubbled in the corner, next to a shiny tin pail of fresh fruit and nuts. The bear was working his way through the snacks when the door slid to the side and a man came in. The scent of sandalwood and lime preceded him. He’d been there when I was captured by these people. Or not captured.

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