Page 15 of The First Omega Made
“I cannot keep secrets from Vil.” Noel didn’t blink, eyes boring into me.
“Then keep it from Shafa at least. Please.” I tried to give Noel my most desperate look, but it didn’t make his expression budge.
“Doc is completing his change and needs you to sit with him. I need say nothing more.” Noel glanced between us, expression cold and unreadable—none of the venom that the alpha had.
I nodded, and Noel handed me the last vial. “It is my dearest wish that your journey to become a space lizard goes well.”
As I drew the last syringe from Doc, he barked out a shaking laugh before Noel took the waste and left without a further word.
Doc rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling above, eyes unblinking. Color flooded his irises, that beautiful green. That stayed the same, at least. His sclera? Nah. Black claimed them like oil crawling over water.
“Will it hurt?” A tear trailed his cheek, and I couldn’t help reaching for it. I wanted to cry, too. I brought the drop to my own eye to rest it there. Still, that tingle of connection remained.
“Doesn’t it always?”
He closed his eyes and nodded, but there was little I could do for him but wrap us in blankets and hold him. By the end of it, he’d be strong enough to handle himself.
And by the end of it, I’d have to let him go.
“Can you take my body? If you need?”
I shook my head and held him tighter. “Infecting a Naleucian would destroy me.”
The reason our species warred. I’d burrow in and we’d both die. But we kept finding hosts to attack. Always had.
Never again.
Chapter Seven
Shafa
The only interesting things on the entire ship that I’d been permitted to see thus far had been an incomplete omega with a delicious scent and an emotionally stunted gene bomb. All stiff limbs and vacant expression. How his mate stood the male was beyond me. He was for making more Naleucian soldiers, infecting others with our blood—not breeding.
Though, I’d been interested in seeing their progeny. Who knew? If it were beta or omega, I might wait for them to mature to see their potential. The more Naleucians, the better, after all.
I lay in wait on a mildly comfortable bed for what felt like many sleep rotations. Thehybreedknown as Vil—the chimera of alpha and beta—spoke with me often. The gene bomb tried to, but I couldn’t get over the fact that he was basically a petri dish. Allowing him to live was cruel and a reminder that no matter what they’d said in Paradise, they were living, thinking, feeling omegas.
They’d used and harvested from him with his brain still intact—barbarians. Vil assured me they no longer did, though. Not without appropriate medical steps and pain management. If I’d cared about the male, that might have assuaged some of my vitriol, but it didn’t. I cared about the potential eggs he could have had harvested from him if he wasn’t claimed so selfishly.
“Who named your mate?” I barked the question out of my window, brow furrowed.
“He named himself.” Vil sat somewhere else in the ship in a great chair, eyes focused elsewhere. I’d been granted visibility of him via a screen in my room that the ship’s intelligence system linked us with.
“What did his patrons call him?” Calling them his patrons tasted foul on my tongue. They were his keepers. They held no patronal role toward the hatchling.
“Hatchling.” Vil’s expression remained terse, concentration still elsewhere. “Don’t you name yourselves?”
“Mm. No. Naleucians are named upon being taken by their alpha and beta paters. I am Shafa, named for a type of shrubbery common in Paradise.”
“Paradise…this is your planet, yes?” Not even a flicker of a glance in my direction, not that I could well tell. Alpha eyes being black and all.
“Paradise… There is translation error. Merriel, please do not translate the name of the planet.” I’d learned to parse through the common tongue they spoke. The language-learning software they had showed me a fairly easy to understand language. I’d tried my hand at parsing words and sentences in their language often. Merriel corrected me sometimes, making it that much easier. “Lissotritonaleu.”
Vil paused his work, brow creasing only slightly. “Yeah, just calling it Paradise.”
His mate, sitting on the floor beside him, muttered something. “Space paradise.”
Perhaps sentient was too kind a word for the creature.
