Page 55 of Stray Omega

CHAPTER 20: EMBLA

Over the following days and weeks, Embla gradually settled into her new life in the Zone. She stayed with her three alphas in their den, which was a rundown two-story building near the very edge of the city. Most nights if it wasn’t raining they would camp out on the roof, building a fire for warmth and for cooking and sleeping underneath the stars. The other rooms were used mostly for storage as well as a shelter for the dogs.

And Embla was excited to discover that there were not just three dogs, as she had previously thought. In addition to Smoke, Shadow, and Ghost, there was also a reddish male dog named Fang and a female with a blonde coat named Luna. The reason they had stayed behind on the last excursion was that Luna was very pregnant, and Fang had stayed behind to protect her.

Luna looked as if she was ready to have her puppies any day now. Just like the other dogs, she had taken an immediate liking to Embla, who spent a lot of time looking after her, making sure she had plenty of food and water as well as comfortable bedding to sleep on.

Embla probably would have spent all of her time with the dogs if she could, but there were many other things to attend to.

Ark wanted to prepare Embla for her new life here in the city. On that first evening, following the incident with the Council, he took her to a bathing house with hot springs and cleaned her even more thoroughly than before.

Afterward, Lero’s went through her hair with a metal comb, working free all the knots and tangles. Whenever the teeth of the comb snagged on a clump of matted hair, it tugged painfully at Embla’s scalp, and she yelped in pain, but Leros purred to soothe her, and he did his best not to hurt her. In the end, the ordeal of combing was worth it. Embla enjoyed how smooth her hair felt and the way it hung loose and bouncy around her shoulders. The alphas enjoyed it too, frequently petting it and running their fingers through the golden strands.

Well, at least Ark and Leros did. Orwen…he was another story.

He was aloof and grumpy as ever. However, when he discovered that Embla had some interest in crafting, he did take advantage of her curiosity to teach her how to make simple items, such as knapping stones to make knife blades and speartips, or using rawhide cord to stitch up pieces of leather for carrying sacks. Mostly he just criticized Embla’s little mistakes, but that only served to make her try harder to improve her skills.

And most important, there were her language lessons. These were conducted in a rather haphazard way by her alphas. But every day, Hines would visit as well, and she provided more structured lessons. Embla struggled a lot with the finer points of grammar, but she picked up new vocabulary very quickly, and she remembered many words that she had known before but had forgotten.

Soon, she was speaking all the time.

But her heart was still filled with an uneasy sensation that this place was not her home, and she would never truly belong here.

***

One night, about two weeks after her arrival, Embla startled awake in the middle of the night. As usual, she had been dreaming about dogs, and one of the dogs had spoken to her in the voice of Leros.

“Wake up…Embla, wake up…”

And when she had woken up, she discovered that Leros really had been speaking to her, and his voice had penetrated her dream. He was whispering to her gently. His warm, soft lips and hard piercing brushed deliciously against the shell of her ear. All the fear instantly left her.

Embla blinked her sleepy eyes. They were out on the roof where they usually slept in dry weather. The moon was sliver-thin, a silver eyelash in the dark, and the Milky Way arced across the sky like a river of twinkling jewels.

“Leros?” Embla whispered back. Ark and Orwen were still snoring, and she didn’t want to wake them.

Her eyes gradually adjusted, and she saw the dog Smoke standing nearby in the dark.

“It’s Luna,” Leros told her. “Come on!”

Was something wrong with the female dog? Embla hoped not.

The omega quickly crawled out from beneath her layers of warm coverings and followed Leros. The young alpha had prepared a torch, which he lit on the coals of the campfire nearby on the roof. Then he led the way down the stairs into the buildings lower floors.

The dogs were kept on the ground floor. The other three males were gathered protectively around Luna’s bedding, and Smoke trotted across the floor to join them. Luna, meanwhile, was lying in her bedding, which she had scraped and arranged into a nest. She was whining faintly.

“Luna hurt?” Embla asked worriedly.

Leros shook his head. “She’s okay. But she’s whelping.”

“Helping?”

“Whelping.” Leros made a gesture with his hand, and Embla understood—the little dogs inside Luna’s belly were going to come out between her legs. Embla had seen it happen once before, back when she was a captive of the Farlanders, but she had not learned the word.

“Whelping,” she repeated, committing the word to memory.

Leros set the torch into a holder on the wall, and then he and Embla knelt by Luna’s whelping nest. At their approach, Luna raised her head to look at them and wagged her tail weakly. Embla gently petted her head.

“Good girl,” she whispered, mimicking the phrase she’d often heard the alphas use. The female dog gave her hand a friendly lick.

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