by Aiden Bates
The packs found the hunters because, as Blake had said they would, they made a mistake. While they were smart enough not to all settle down in a town as small as Silver Bay, the hunters who had followed Darren and Blake north settled most of their number in Duluth, waiting there as reinforcements began to arrive. They’d thought the size of the city would keep them safe, but they hadn’t counted on Larentia’s network of shifters and informants, one member of which had overheard plans being made and carried the news to her Alpha. Her pack captured two of the hunters and called a council meeting.
Last time, Darren thought, staring down into the pot of soup he was stirring, the wait had almost been easy. He had known that Blake would be okay. They’d had time then. Now, the hunters were there. Were close enough to reach out and take. Close enough to reach out and touch them in return.
Before, when Darren had grown twitchy with nerves, Grey had soothed him, steady voice talking about growing up with Blake on the lake shore, about some cooking fact that was completely unrelated to anything they were actually cooking. But this time, Nicholas was at the council meeting too, and though Grey tried to be calm, Darren sometimes looked up and caught him staring into the distance, white-faced. They were all restless, moving back and forth between projects, toying for a moment with something before setting it aside again. Even Blake’s mother, who had insisted that Darren call her mom, seemed nervous.
Only Morgan, the pack Alpha’s lean, hazel-eyed omega, didn’t look at all ruffled by the news that the council had two hunters in their possession. But Darren thought you must have to be unshakable to be the pack Alpha’s mate. Must have to be strong. And Morgan was old blood too, from a pack line that went back centuries. His father had been pack Alpha. Nicholas, Darren learned, was his nephew.
When the door opened at last, Darren nearly tripped over his own feet in his rush to get out into the main room. Blake was standing there, looking tired a little pale, his jaw tight, but when he saw Darren he smiled, wrapping him up tight in a hug. Darren clung to his Alpha, lifting his head to look up into grey eyes.
“What happened?”
He could see that Grey was asking Nicholas the same question, getting an answer in whispers. Blake glanced at his father, then back at Darren.
“We found out a few things,” he said finally, loud enough that everyone could hear. “They have half a dozen men in Duluth and Superior, and another three here in Silver Bay. It shouldn’t be too hard to find them, as long as we move quickly. They kept mentioning more reinforcements, dozens of men, but Raul and Larentia said those seemed like pretty desperate claims, and I think they’re right. I think what they have is what they could get.” He managed a tired smile. “Like Larentia said. They’re cowards. They know we have a dozen and more packs up here, and they’d be starting an all-out war if they came after us in numbers big enough to post a threat to more than a few of the outlying groups.”
“And if there are reinforcements,” Nicholas said, his arm still around Grey’s shoulders. “When they hear the rest have disappeared they’re likely to take a step or two back and reevaluate their choices.”
It should have been a relief to hear the words, but Darren could only think that it meant there were more hunters to find. And what if someone got hurt? What if Blake got hurt? He sat through dinner in near silence, picking at his food until Blake told him to eat for the baby’s sake if not for his own. When he’d choked down enough to be polite, and a few more bites to please his mate, Blake took him home.
“What is it?” he asked as the truck pulled out of the driveway.
Darren looked down at his hands resting in his lap and tugged at his lower lip with his teeth. “I’m worried,” he said quietly. “What if something goes wrong?”
Blake’s hand reached across the seat and settled on his leg.
“Nothing is going to go wrong, sweetheart. It’s going to be okay. We’ll get rid of them, and there will be nothing to worry about.”
Later, with Blake curled around him in bed, Darren tried to believe that, but it didn’t chase away the nerves that twisted his stomach.
Chapter Ten
Silver Bay was not a big town. Blake had grown up in it, knew every building, every inch of the shoreline. He knew, too, the people who had lived there since he was a kid. Finding the intruders should have been easier. And if they had followed him, they knew who he was, and that should have made it even easier. He should have been able to see them watching him. Should have smelled their scents again and again on the wind. But he didn’t. And he began to wonder, after a few days, if they had been lied to. Maybe there weren’t hunters in Silver Bay at all.
He almost believed it. It would have been easy so easy to pretend that nothing was wrong, to go back to trusting that the world around them was safe. Then a wolf turned up dead in the Cloquet Valley.
The Cloquet was Kurt’s territory. Smart of them, Blake thought as he turned his pickup onto the backroad that would take them to the house where the council was held. Clever to go after the smallest pack. Had they known, or simply guessed that the Rollins wolves would be the most vulnerable?
He’d refused to leave Darren behind this time, hadn’t been able to turn down those big brown eyes when his omega begged Blake to let him come. So now Darren sat pale and silent in the cab beside him, and Blake wrapped an arm around him and led him into the old cabin, ignoring the looks he got from some of the others. He wasn’t the only one who had brought a family member. Kurt’s son Gavin, looking as white as Darren did behind his lifted chin and steady gaze, was seated at his father’s side.
The dead wolf’s name was Liam, and the hunter who shot him had died almost before lowered his gun. A shot of opportunity more than planning, Blake decided when he heard the story. The hunter had simply been in the right place at the right time to see Liam shift, and had been too young or too cocky to know what he was getting himself into.
After that, things happened fast.
Kurt no longer refused to ally with the rest of them. Whatever sour feelings he had about Blake’s lack of interest in Gavin, he’d put them aside for the sake of ending the threat. What there was left of it, at least. In Duluth Larentia’s pack had taken another little group of hunters, and these had been only too eager to give up their leader in exchange for a ticket out of town. Kurt would have had them done away with all the same, but Larentia was more fair, and she saw them over the border of her territory, with a promise that if she ever saw their faces again she wouldn’t play nice. Their leader wasn’t so easy to sway, or so lucky.
There were only two left, then, but these were in Silver Bay, and Blake slept every night without Darren by his side, called in sick to work and wouldn’t let his mate out of his sight. One way or another, it had to end. Two weeks later, it did.
Chapter Eleven
Darren leaned his head against Blake’s shoulder, looking out over the lake, the light of the moon reflected in the water. It was nearly full again. He wondered if this time they would be allowed to go out running in the woods. With the hunters so near, the monthly celebration had been canceled, and they’d spent the night instead in their home. Not that Darren was complaining about a night spent in his mate’s arms, and under his mate’s hands, but it would have been nice, he thought a little wistfully, to have been able to go out and run.
The bullet hit the sliding door and shattered it. Blake was up almost before Darren realized what had happened, lifting him over the shards of glass and into the house, already hitting speed dial on his phone with one hand as he set Darren on his feet in the kitchen.
“Get down,” he ordered. “Low as you can.”
Darren, obedient to the Alpha’s growl in his mate’s voice, had dropped to his stomach on the soft carpet and laid there with his heart beating fast in his chest and his breath coming in little gasps. He could see, in the dim light, Blake’s silhouette against the pale kitchen wall. His mate strained forward like he wanted to shift, wanted to go after the shooter himself
, but it would leave Darren alone in the house. And so they were there together in the living room when they heard the sudden sounds – snarls and gunshots exploding from the grove of pines to the left of the house. Darren shook, and Blake laid down over him, arms guarding his head, the warm weight of him pressing Darren down against the carpet.
“Breathe for me, sweetheart,” he was saying. “It will all be over soon.”
It was only minutes, but it seemed to stretch on forever. Then the night fell silent, and Darren tried to remember how to make air fill his lungs. It was harder than he had thought it would be.
“It’s over,” a low voice said from the doorway.
Blake’s uncle flipped on the light, and Blake stood, holding out a hand to Darren to help him to his feet.
“We got them?” he asked.
“We got them,” the Alpha confirmed. He was wearing only a pair of jeans, and there was blood on his shoulder, but it didn’t look like his own. “One of Raul’s wolves got shot,” he said somberly. “But the rest came out okay. And both the hunters are dealt with.
It was over. Darren looked up at his mate. Blake wasn’t smiling, but he pulled Darren close with an arm around his shoulders, and Darren felt the tension slide out of him.
It was really over.
Epilogue
It was strange, Darren thought on a day three months later, how quickly the interrupted peace of a small town could be mended. But then, most of the locals had not known what happened. To him, it almost seemed like a dream, sometimes. He had tried and failed to reconcile that night and the ones before it with the ones that came after – slow and quiet. Nothing more exciting than the slow shift of the seasons and the full moon runs in the woods.
Now, snow had settled over the landscape. In the endless white, Darren felt strangely safe. Winter in Minnesota was not like winter in Iowa had been for him. It was muffled. Full of long nights in Blake’s arms and days spent reading or cooking or watching TV in the quiet. It was, Darren thought, perfect.
The timer went off, and as he bent to pull the pan from the oven, careful of his ever-expanding belly, he heard the front door click open. When he turned, hot food set carefully on the stove, Blake was in the kitchen doorway, watching him with the slow, fond smile that Darren had noticed was kept just for him.
“Smells good,” Blake said, smile widening.
Darren could see the teasing in that grin, but he didn’t dignify it with a response. Whatever horrendous culinary mistakes he had made in previous months (and there were many) he was pretty sure he had the hang of it now, so his mate could just shut up.
Warm arms wrapped around him, and a body molded itself to his back, Blake’s chin settling down on his shoulder.
“Couldn’t wait to get home to you,” he said against Darren’s ear. “Tell me dinner can keep?”
Darren looked down at the shepherd’s pie still steaming in its pan, and reached over it to hit the button that would turn the oven off.
“Dinner can keep,” he said.
Blake’s arms gathered him up and Darren, laughing, let himself be carried away to bed. It was funny, he thought as they crossed the threshold of the bedroom, how things could suddenly be perfect. Or maybe, he was just lucky after all.
Omega Soaring
Omega Awakening Book 3
Preston Walker / Aiden Bates
© 2015
Disclaimer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.
This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18)
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One
The log house on the shore of Lake Superior bustled with activity. Darren Marrock ducked under the arm of his brother-in-law, warning the rest back as he opened the oven to pull the pan of fresh bread from its heat. He set it carefully on the cooling rack out of the way of the activity, stepping out of the way as Grey moved past again, carrying a lidded platter. Steam escaped, filling the room with the smell of roast venison, and Darren’s stomach growled. It had been a long time since lunch.
From the living room, he could hear the low voices of the Alphas and their guests, chatting quietly to each other while the children played. He could hear them too, the little boy babble and the soft sound of occasional giggles, and he smiled as he pulled the water pitcher from under the counter and began filling it to take out to the table. Just a few more minutes and they’d be set up.
In the two years since he had moved to Silver Bay, Darren had been introduced to members of a dozen different packs from the area. A few of them had been less than thrilled with his presence. Less than thrilled, really, with his mating to his Alpha, who was the nephew of the Silver Bay pack Alpha. They’d expected him to mate with someone of his own status, someone from his home state, and when he’d come back with an omega he’d met at a Walmart in Iowa, they’d felt cheated. It hadn’t helped that mating Darren without introducing him to his family had broken pack protocol, which Darren hadn’t even known he was a wolf until Blake had triggered his first heat.
Darren hadn’t been able to remember his own pack. His parents had died when he was a child, murdered by hunters, and the head injury he’d suffered in the attack had taken his memory. Until he met Blake, he’d thought they were killed in a car accident, but the scar on his face had proven otherwise. Shifters didn’t scar unless they were cut with silver.
Lately, the packs that had felt like he wasn’t good enough for Blake had been coming around, the way Blake had assured him they would. They’d warmed to him much faster after the birth of his son, even the packs that had suffered losses when the hunters who had kept tabs on Darren–kept him alive as bait to try and catch the wolves who eventually adopted him into their pack–had attacked. The hunters had been driven out with the help of the Duluth and Superior packs. Since then, life had been quiet. The Alpha of the Rollins pack still seemed to think of him as an interloper, but even his son, who had been one of the leading candidates for Blake’s mate, was kind to Darren on the rare occasions that their paths crossed.
Tonight, the dinner guests were members of a pack from much farther away. The Waterbury pack was based in southern Wisconsin, near the Black River National Forest, but they were looking into moving north. Hunters had been encroaching on their territory, and they were vulnerable so far from a larger pack. Blake’s uncle Gerard, the pack Alpha, had invited them to stay in Silver Bay while they explored the region.
Darren laid the last slices of the bread on a plate, and carried it out to the dining room table. The others were out there already, laying out the silverware and putting the last touches on the meal.
“Dinner’s ready!” Morgan called toward the living room.
There was an immediate rustle of people moving, and a moment later Blake was standing in the doorway with Alexander on his hip, stealing a brief, chaste kiss as he stepped around Darren to go to his seat. Darren settled into the chair beside him, their son in a high chair between. On his other side was Grey, his mate Nicholas one seat down, and their own son, Channing, seated similarly t
o Alex.
The others were taking their seats too, Morgan at his mate’s left hand, beside Blake. Blake’s father usually sat on his brother’s right, but the seat of honor had been given to the leader of the visiting wolves, the Waterbury Alpha’s beta sister. She was a few years younger than Gerard, in her early forties, perhaps. With her was her Alpha cousin.
When they were all seated, the pack Alpha made introductions.
“Lydia, Daniel, I would like you to meet my family.” He went around the table, sharing names and the relationship of each person. “And this is Darren,” he said lastly. “My nephew’s mate, and their son Alexander.”
Darren looked up from making sure Alex didn’t throw any food on his in-law’s carpet and gave them a shy smile, dropping his gaze again quickly. He’d slowly gotten over the fear that he wasn’t good enough for his Alpha, but the confidence to meet a stranger’s look and hold it was something he was still working on.
“Darren,” Lydia said, slowly.
There was something in her voice that made him look up.
“Yes,” the Alpha said. “Darren. He and my nephew have been mated for a little more than two years now. They were married last winter.”
It was still new enough that Darren glanced down at the gold band on his finger, a smile curving his lips.
“You look very much like someone I used to know,” Lydia said, and Darren looked up again, his smile gone.
“I’m sorry?”
She was staring at him, her brown eyes narrowed, eyebrows drawn together. Her head was tipped slightly to one side, like she was trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
“What pack do you come from?”
Darren’s stomach twisted, and he glanced up at his mate, who gave him a barely perceptible nod. He still didn’t like telling people he didn’t know his pack or where Blake had found him.