Page 47 of Harvest Moon

The answering machine interrupted me and asked if I wanted to delete the message and start again.

That was an awful lot of work, and I didn’t want to say things twice, so I hung up and called again.

This second time, I got the machine too.

“Sorry about the double message. I wanted to make sure I said that I do—I do want to talk. To you. So call me back if you want to. I’ll be free whenever. I, uh, hope you’re enjoying the apples.”

When I hung up again, I could only hope that between the two messages, Alexis would get the point. He’d always been good at picking out what I meant, even when I didn’t always know myself.

But he didn’t call me back right away, or even that night, and by the time I was up in my room alone, I was getting antsy for the sound of his voice.

For the first time ever, I opened my laptop and went to check out his podcast,Omega and the Great Outdoors.

I’d always thought of that as his space, somewhere that wasn’t meant for me. Wasn’t meant for alphas, at least.

But when he talked about the hiking trails he’d explored and all that, his ideas didn’t feel small or narrow. They felt big enough to encompass the whole wild he explored, and his voice was full of pleasure at all the things he’d seen.

That night, I hardly slept, going back years, listening to all the adventures Alexis had had while I was gone.

There was so much he’d been a part of, so many things we hadn’t shared. And maybe, if I could get my head out of my ass and start telling him the truth, we could begin to fix that.

If it wasn’t too late, anyway.

27

Alexis

It was the Condition.

Well, Linden didn’t say it in so many words, but it was obvious. Half the problem with the damnedConditionwas that they couldn’t properly diagnose it. The symptoms were so varied on different omegas that half the time it seemed like a guess.

And over the last twenty years it had become the first, most obvious guess every time an omega got sick.

Every time I’d felt sick as a kid, my mother had babied me and worried that I had the dreaded “it,” even though she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—define what the hell “it” was. Admittedly, werewolves getting sick was rare, so it hadn’t come up often, but it wasn’t something that would ever leave me—that look of terror on my mother’s face. She was a woman given to drama and high emotion, but the time I got food poisoning on a field trip to Washington DC as a kid, she had been convinced I was going to die.

Even my father had been pale and shaken for days, and he was one of those robust, smiling men who always took everything in stride.

It was with that, my parents’ fear, that I sat next to Claudia in the Grovetown clinic.

Birch was even worse, clinging to her arm as though afraid someone would take her away from him.

“Rest,” Alpha Grove was saying. He hid it better than my parents had, but there was fear in his eyes too. “I’m not kidding about this, Claudia. I know you, and I know you’re passionate about your job. I love you for it. But right now, we’re talking about actual, complete rest.”

Without a thought, I reached over to the pile of clothes on the chair next to me, into the front pocket of Claud’s jeans. Pulling her phone out, I held the power button on the side.

“I’ll keep this in my room,” I informed everyone as I hit the power down button and watched the screen go dark.

Claudia glared at me like I was the worst kind of traitor. “Not fair. Maybe I want to talk to someone.”

“This is why you brought me here,” I pointed out. “And up till now I’ve been letting things slide, because you seemed to be okay. But we’re not screwing around with this anymore.”

Birch nodded, squeezing her hand. “The pack can handle their own drama for a while. Your life is more important than a few months of work. Our life.” He clenched his jaw and looked at the alpha. “What if—” He cut a glance to Claudia, swallowed hard, shook his head, and started again. “Is this only happening because of the baby?”

Alpha Grove winced, and there was a moment of silence before he answered. “It’s hard to say for sure, Birch. We do know that oftentimes, the Condition is tied to pregnancy. But there’s no certainty in anything to do with it. That’s not the only time it affects adults.”

“But it’s possible. She might be sick because—”

Claudia didn’t bother with a nice subtle finger to the lips. Not my cousin. She put her whole hand over her husband’s mouth. “Stop that bullshit. I need you to hold this together, Birch. If something happens to me, I need you to not blame this baby for—”

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