Page 16 of Eternal

No. She was being silly and distracted herself by looking at them. They were the definition of pure male gods, and she would always have a hard time believing that they seemed to want her. Her, of all people.

A whisper echoed in her head, and it came from the darkness she had brought back with her from the haunted forest.

She was going to hurt them, the voice said. But her reply was firm. She would never hurt them. She loved them and would die for them. That was something she never had to worry about doing.

After lingering kisses goodbye to her, Farren took a short nap and then another soak in a bath infused with a special blend of bath salts Rhiannon had given her to ease the tenderness between her legs. She then went in search of coffee and cookies, dressed in a loose-fitting sundress.

Her gaze fell onto a gold gift box lying not inconspicuously on the kitchen countertop.

With a soft smile on her face, she attacked the ribbons decorating the package. The card that lay inside the box had her heart racing as she read the simple words.

For you.

Your alphas.

She lifted the book from the velvet setting and gasped at its beauty. That the book was ancient but held an almost magical timelessness between the hardcovers overwhelmed her.

It was merely titledThe Origin, and the flood of emotion that engulfed her surprised her.

Afraid of damaging the delicate though seemingly proud volume of script, Farren carried it back with her to the bedroom. She carefully slid into the bed and placed it on her lap, slowly flipped over the cover, and sucked in another huge breath.

The Origin

First edition: Created at the dawn of time.

As if the time in her own universe had stood still, she read each word of the opus with bated breath until she ran her fingers over the embossed lettering on the page.

The Omega Origin

While she had been intrigued by the story of Zadimus of Goian and how the mad king’s daughter, together with a witch and a wolf, had defeated him and created in the process a species of wolf-shifters, there was something about reading the next part of the story that made her heart thud.

The Omega Origin.

She might not be considered a purebreed by other shifters, but with everything that had happened—meeting the alpha twins, falling in love with them, being marked by them, undertaking a deadly seeding ceremony that would now with all certainty see her able to fall pregnant and grow their baby pups inside her—all doubt of their existence, of the changes she had undergone, had been vanquished.

The men she loved were also wolves. And because of a serum injected into her by her scientist father, she had become an omega, incapable of shifting, yes, but she was no longer just a human female. She was… something; and if they had labeled her as an omega, she would wear the title with unwavering pride from now on.

The method of her becoming an omega had been extremely unconventional but somehow the story of how the omega originated spoke to her on a more intimate level. That if she read between the lines, she would discover how she herself came to be.

Her father’s serum, what her scientific mind had accepted as a formula of blood and tissue, surely somehow also had elements of alchemy in it, because scientific evidence could explain only so much and no more. Surely the rest could only be explained with magic?

She tucked her legs beneath her, pulled the blanket a little tighter around her, and soon became engrossed in reading the account ofThe Omega Origin…

“Once upon a time, in a land of beauty and death, there lived a wolf who answered to the name of Wulfric. He was a young fearsome wolf of great mane and was regarded as very handsome and sought after by the female alphas of the pack, for the very reasons of his fierce beauty and arresting intelligence.

It was said that Wulfric, intrigued and fascinated by the scent he discovered on the clothes of the beautiful witch who sprang on their pack, one night by surprise and with magic, had slowed his prowess. Some say the only reason he had been captured was that he had been distracted by that curious scent on the witch that he couldn’t identify and didn’t belong to the witch herself.

Chained and dragged across the floor of the wilderness by a series of a hundred men, he had been whipped across his back with rope that had been dipped in raw cayenne, creating an agonizing sting the instant his flesh was split open. And whenever he dug his mighty paws into the earth and refused to move, all hundred men would shower him with their whips at once.

He was taken into the civilian part of the Goian Forest, to the tiny abode of the witch herself.

There he was further tormented with an array of spells and potions that fogged his mind and caused him to have a complete lack of control of all his faculties. He was restrained near the hearth of a simmering fire and, whenever thoughts of maiming the witch with his fangs or ending her life by puncturing her veins entered a tiny portion of lucidity in his brain, the witch would cast another spell and feed him another potion to keep him contained.

Still, that scent she had carried on her clothes, the one he knew innately didn’t belong to her, skirted his mind and let in sliversof light in the darkness he’d been relegated to by the witch.

And then he had seen her.

The human girl. Her mane was the color of sunlight and as wispy as the wings of a butterfly, her eyes pools of soft moonlight. She was the owner of the scent that had kept him alive and his complete mental shutdown at bay.

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