Omega's Run

by A. J. Downey

  It was customary to give a team a day or two of R and R after a hunt. Especially one as intensive as the one it took to track Remus Reese down. We’d been on his trail for months. Why the rush to get us back out there? Let alone for such a low level target?

  My team was well beyond checking out rumors. Way past looking into a ‘potential’ rogue somewhere. We didn’t do soft targets like that anymore. Hadn’t in a long time. So why now?

  No. Mathias was up to something, and I wanted to know what.

  I turned off the water and dried my hands. I didn’t bother cleaning up the hot water seeping across the polished cement floor. It was only water and would take care of its self. Instead, filled with equal amounts purpose and dread, I stalked down the corridor and to my quarters.

  My need for sleep hadn’t diminished despite my determination and the plan I’d formulated. I needed rest. I needed a full eight hours of sleep. I would need to be cunning and alert for what I’d decided to do. I would need to stay one step ahead of the master of the game if I were going to go through with it.

  ‘If,’ there was no if. I was going to and there would be no going back. I needed to know what was going on. I needed to know exactly why my brother was dead and the key to that knowledge lay in the mongrel in the cage downstairs. I needed to know what Mathias wanted from him and the only way to find that out was to defy Mathias and stick around.

  I closed my eyes and let myself into my small cell, sending up a little prayer to my brother.

  I’ll find out just what the fuck is going on, James. I promise. Just do me a favor? Watch my ass, okay?

  Chapter 9

  Remus

  It wasn’t enough food. Not by a long shot, but it calmed the ache in my belly by just enough that it curbed the growing hunger that had nothing to do with food. Since then, no one had returned to my cell. No one looked in the window except the guards every fifteen minutes. I knew it was fifteen minutes because one of them was wearing a watch with a second hand and it was quiet enough otherwise that I could keep count by listening to the ticking.

  Three hours had passed since she brought the food and left. A dozen checks between now and then… Three long, solid, hours of no contact or interaction with anyone. Of nothing but the inside of my stone room and metal cell to look at. I didn’t mind much though. I liked my solitude. The conditions could’ve been better but I couldn’t complain. I mean I could, but what would be the point? Especially when there wasn’t a single person that would give a flying fuck about it. So I sat there, quietly, and considered the series of events that led me to where I was.

  I was laying on the floor, in the center of my empty cage, with my eyes closed when I noticed him. I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there and the fact that I didn’t notice him come in honestly scared the shit out of me in a way I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before. Not once in my unnaturally long life.

  “Are you just going to stand there all day, or was there something you actually wanted to talk about?” I asked after another several minutes of silence. “I mean, I know I’m pretty, but I never thought I was your type, Mathias.”

  “Your sense of humor was moderately charming, even a touch endearing when we first met, Remus,” he said with an exaggerated sigh. “It has long since lost it’s... patina of novelty. I have grown tired of it and would rather speak plainly, if you feel yourself capable of it?”

  “I am capable of things that you would find yourself unable to believe, old man,” I growled quietly and finally opened my eyes. I sat up to find him standing calmly, arms clasped behind his back at parade rest, which was per usual for him. It was the same stance he had held the night we first met. When Romulus and I reached out to him to help remove our father as Alpha.

  “Such disgust on your face when you look at me,” he said and I snarled at him. “For one that came to me seeking help in murdering his own father...” he shook his head in a mocking display of disappointment.

  “You kill our kind with impunity. I would have preferred not to take my father’s life but it was the only way to remove him as Alpha while preserving his dignity… his legacy, at face value anyways.”

  “Dignity?” Mathias seemed startled. “You can’t kill a person, even one such as your kind, and leave them with their dignity. Death and dignity don’t go hand in hand.”

  “There’s no way to remove an Alpha from position without killing them. And if I challenged him, I would have had to tell the pack about the trouble he was causing. My father was pack Alpha for centuries. He was loved and respected. I wanted him to die with that respect still intact.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t yell, or rage, as much as I dearly wanted to. I had learned enough about Mathias Young that such displays of emotion were only going to make things worse with him. I wondered how his daughter, Chloe, ever survived long enough to eventually bind herself to my little brother. She was a rather emotional creature the last I remembered. But then again, she had been through quite a bit in a relatively short amount of time.

  “That makes you better?” he sneered. “That makes you not a beast killing his own family? Because you wanted to preserve his dignity and honor? Some false legacy that was purely a flight of fancy?” Mathias scoffed before continuing. “Wouldn’t giving him the chance to face you or your brother in battle be more dignifying than getting strangled in his own home by a hunter that you let into the house? Don’t you remember, Dog? You contacted me.

  “You told me that he needed to be removed. You made promises in return for my help, then you failed to deliver. You or your brother were supposed to be the next Alpha of your pack and you were supposed to give me some of the... less reputable members in return.”

  “Why?” I demanded. I hadn’t asked before because I hadn’t intended to go through with our part of the agreement. I had no intentions of handing over any of my people to him and the rest of his butchers. “Why would you want some of my kind anyways? Just so you could kill us? I mean, what other possible reason could you have?”

  He gave me a long look, steel grey eyes piercing like knives, before he finally spoke again. “My reasons are my own, and you would have been better off if you or Romulus had become Alpha and kept your part of the bargain. If you had simply given me a few here and there, the rest of your people would have been spared.” He said the word ‘people’ as if it left a nasty taste in his mouth. “Now I’ll simply have to do what I should have done years ago… when I first discovered that your pack was residing in Washington. I’ll simply have to wipe them all out. Take the ones I want instead.”

  I was frozen in place, fixed by the words now resonating inside my head like an echo through a dark cavern. Years? He had known about us for years? Why hadn’t the hunters come in force? Why hadn’t they picked us off a long time ago? What had kept them waiting for so damn long?

  “How did you find us?” I asked, scarcely able to believe what I was hearing.

  “How did you think your father managed to keep such a large territory for so long?” He shot back. “Did you really think that your pack was so feared that others wouldn’t try to encroach?

  “Washington is a great territory the perfect location for your kind to hide in. There are many places in this country that have such remote wooded areas, but the others are all fiercely fought over. Areas of Colorado, Utah, and Montana wage a constant war to defend their borders. Bloody battles are fought to take and to keep those territories. Your pack hasn’t been involved in many of those battles to protect your borders, now have they?” His tone was mocking and I felt as if I had been hit over the head.

  “The Nevada Pack,” I muttered, thinking of what Cruz had said back in Chicago.

  “Father stopped protecting our borders a long time ago, didn’t he?” I demanded, suddenly furious. “He let you guys patrol around our territory and do the hunting for him. That way the pack was protected, and you got to pick off wolf-kind for your own purposes.”

  He nodded, a slow grin stealing acro
ss his lips.

  “Ahhhh, finally. Understanding dawns like the morning sun over the horizon,” he mocked. “It took you long enough. I’m really rather disappointed in you, Remus. You were supposed to be the clever one.”

  “I couldn’t care less, Mathias. You’ve got some explaining to do. Why would you want to attack my pack now after protecting it for who knows how long?”

  “The arrangement I had with your father, Declan, was no longer adequate.” He shrugged and started pacing back and forth on the other side of the bars, just out of reach of my long arms.

  “When I first entered into the arrangement with Declan, the Northwest pack was attacked fairly frequently. There was a steady stream of new specimens for me to work with. But over the last few years, the other packs learned the futility of even attempting to encroach into the Washington Territory. My men did their jobs a little too well it seems. The rest of the packs of you rabid dogs were too scared to even try to go near Washington. I found my need for new specimens severely outweighed the supply available, things needed to change.”

  “You sick fucking bastard,” I snarled. “You contacted Romulus. Didn’t you? I always thought he found you somehow but no, it was the other way around, wasn’t it? You reached out to him. You got in touch with him and offered to help remove our father as Alpha.” It was suddenly so painfully clear. The Hangman was well known for never leaving evidence behind except the damage to whatever body he’d dropped. He should never have left his weapon when he’d killed our father.

  “Why did you leave the garrote?” I asked suddenly, and he blinked owlishly. “There’s no reason to do that unless you’re trying to draw attention to yourself. We knew it was going to be you. We arranged for you to meet with our father under a pretense of peace. No one else in the pack knew but us. So leaving your weapon... that was only to draw attention. Wasn’t it?” I frowned, turning over his actions in my mind. “You wanted to draw William’s attention. You wanted to force a fight for Alpha figuring we would kill him and eliminate that potential threat.”

  He shook his head and I frowned again. “Your brother is little threat. Simply a minor roadblock in the grand scheme of things.”

  “If it wasn’t about removing William from the table...” I felt feverish. My mind whirling faster than ever, struggling to piece together the puzzle that was Mathias Young. I considered what I knew about him. What the pack knew, and what I had discovered since first meeting him. Cold blooded was an apt description for the old man. Cold, methodical, precise, and manipulative. Manipulative to the nth degree. There hadn’t been a scale invented to measure the level of manipulative villainous shit this man was into…

  “Chloe,” I blurted out before I could stop myself, just as the thought occurred to me. The fucked up horror of it blossoming in my mind, flickering to life like a tongue of flame licking at the edges of dry paper, ready to consume everything else.

  “You’re doing something down here, capturing wolf-kind instead of killing them, but even you have to answer to someone. Even you have superiors. They don’t know what you’re doing, do they? And you were counting on William kidnapping your daughter. In fact you wanted him to kill her so you could garner sympathy from your superiors.”

  He didn’t move. He didn’t blink or shift his weight. His breathing remained exactly the same. But somehow I knew I had hit the nail on the head. His lack of a response, his total stillness was telling in and of itself.

  “You are some piece of work,” I breathed, shaking my head in shock. “You would sacrifice your own daughter just to advance whatever fucking agenda it is that you’ve got going on? You sick fuck!”

  Alright, I’ll admit that I lost my temper a bit there. I surged forward rolling to my feet and lunging across the cell to hit the bars with a loud crash. A moment later the door burst open and the guards rushed in, rifles aimed at me but they didn’t fire as Mathias calmly held up a hand toward them.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you!?” I roared and shook the gate as hard as I could. The metal creaked and groaned under the force and the guards shifted nervously.

  “You call me a fucking animal but you would just throw her to the unknown like that? Like any other pawn on your fucking chess board!”

  He took a step forward, his face showing nothing and just as I reached through the bars to try to grab him the pain hit me again. My body stiffened and jerked and I hit the ground muscles locking in spasm, uncontrollable, and I went down like a felled tree.

  My teeth ground together and I pissed myself as I lost all control over my body. Pain screamed through my injured leg and I was pretty sure that the half-assed healed wound in it tore open during the spastic seizure created by the two leads buried in my chest. Mathias held a professional grade Taser, likely with some modifications to it, in his hand. He held down the trigger, pumping who knew how many volts of electricity through my body for what felt like hours rather than mere seconds.

  When he finally let up, all I could do was lie there and twitch, glaring at him with an impotent rage that stoked the fires of the beast within me. The wolf didn’t like not being able to sink its teeth into our tormentor, and I agreed with it whole heartedly.

  Since my banishment from the pack, I had survived only because I didn’t have anything better to do really. However, as of that moment, I found a new reason to survive. I vowed to myself that one day, one day soon, if I could help it, I would tear Mathias Young’s throat out with my own teeth – human or wolf, it didn’t matter so much right then. I’d take either, so long as I got it done. This fucker needed to die. For father, for Rom, for William and even for little Chloe, but especially for me.

  “Glare all you like, Kid,” he rumbled in that deep basso voice of his. Forget that I was at least a century older than he was.

  “You’re caught. And you’re not getting out of here. I have plans for you. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been trying to capture a Blood Born with your level of control? You’re right. Things haven’t gone exactly according to plan, but I can say that this might be even better in serving my cause.”

  He leaned down until he was crouching close to the bars on the other side of the cage. So close, I could have easily killed him, but when I tried to move he pulled the trigger on the Taser again and sent a surge of agony running through my body that left sparkles flitting through my vision and put me in a state of barely hanging on to consciousness.

  “You’re right, Chloe was never supposed to survive,” he whispered. “You fucking dogs can’t even kill one little bitch right. I shouldn’t have expected anything more from a useless fucking animal like your lunatic brother. He was much more open to the idea of being the new Alpha and letting me take the weaker members of your pack for my experiments. Now, with William as the Alpha, I will have to take different measures when it comes to finding new test subjects. You, hmm, you are just the beginning.”

  I snarled and tried to say something but I must have bitten my tongue when I was spazzing because all that happened was some blood leaked from my mouth. I wasn’t able to get out anything more than a garbled gurgling sound before he smiled brightly at me and pulled the trigger on the Taser again.

  This time he didn’t let up until I blacked out.

  ***

  I jerked awake, my eyes snapping open only for me to groan and close them again against the bright, searing light that beamed down on me from overhead. I felt cold metal around my chest, arms, waist, and across my thighs and ankles. I was strapped down pretty solid… not that I wouldn’t be able to tear my way free. Few were the restraints truly capable of holding me if I didn’t want to be held.

  “Before you decide to tear yourself loose from there, I would like to warn you; any attempt to do so will end badly for you.”

  “Why is that?” I asked of the disembodied voice.

  “Because, you’re wearing a collar that will deliver a rather hefty electrical charge, should the man across the room over there press the button on the remote he’s
holding. I’ve told him to go ahead and hold the button down for as long as he likes if you so much as even twitch.”

  As soon as she said something about it I realized I could feel the collar around my neck. Thick and bulky, a metal contact, warm from my body heat, resting just over the pulse point in my neck. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if the dude sent a jolt through there. Even my healing might not be up to the job to fix that much juice to the brain.

  I squinted my eyes and turned my head, just about the only part of me that I could actually move, to look at the bitch standing next to me. She was kinda hot, honestly. Tall, leggy, blonde; wearing a smart blouse and one of those business type skirts that made a guy want to bend her over the nearest desk. She wore the smart little secretary’s number up under a white coat, like the kind doctors and scientists wear.

  “Ya know,” I muttered hoarsely and paused for a moment to clear my throat. “I always did kind of have a medical fetish. Be gentle Doc, I bruise easy.” She smiled and laughed, a deep throaty kind of laugh that made you unable to think of much else but sex.

  “Mathias did warn me that you had an... unconventional sense of humor,” she said. “But, strangely appropriate in this case, I guess you could say.”

  “Why for, Doc? You gonna wrap those pretty lips of yours around my cock?”

  She shook her head, a mocking rendition of a regretful expression on her face.

  “Oh no,” she said. “As fine a physical specimen as you may be, I won’t be personally acquiring your semen.”

  I blinked. Really not the answer I was expecting to hear. Semen? What the fuck was going on. I lifted my head as best I could and looked around the room. It looked like your average medical suite at just about any hospital. In the corner was the guard she’d mentioned, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest and in his hand, a slim silver remote control. He looked extremely bored with the entire goings on.