“There, there, I’m here,” I murmured, lifting Noah out of the battered cradle and up to my shoulder. “Oh, you smell. Someone needs a change, doesn’t he?” I couldn’t help the smile that curved my lips. I might have hated my mate, but I loved my babies. “Let’s get you cleaned up and then we’ll see if you’re hungry.” I took Noah out into the screened-in back porch where we lived, and laid him on the slab of foam that I now used for a bed. Beatrice played in her corner, fenced in behind her plastic baby gate. She seemed content to bash her wooden blocks together, then pile them up and knock them down. I was grateful that she was a self-possessed little thing and good at entertaining herself, or I might have been in trouble. Two half-wild pups and a month-old-baby were enough. I didn’t need an adventurous toddler as well.
I unpinned the diaper, using the cloth to clean the poo off little Noah’s bum, then rolled it up and stashed it with the rest in a nearby garbage bag. I’d have to get them washed tonight—I was running low, and they were starting to smell, which would create problems with the Alpha’s mate. Noah squealed when I sprayed him with soapy water from a bottle I kept at the head of his bed, then giggled some more while I wiped away the mess that the diaper hadn’t picked up. I checked Noah’s omega line to make sure it wasn’t getting inflamed, and then gave him a last spray, this time with pure water to wash away the soap residue.
With that, and a new diaper, Noah was ready for the world. I laid him on my shoulder and cooed at him some more because it made him laugh, then went to check on Beatrice. She grinned up at me, her two front teeth peeking shyly out from her gums. It wouldn’t be long now before she’d be able to chew her own food, which would make less work for me. Though I supposed I had little Noah here to take up that slack. I bounced the baby, then picked up Beatrice’s stuffed rabbit and shook it at her. She laughed and reached for it, shoving its tail into her mouth and waving her other arm until her ragged pile of blocks tumbled to the floor again.
“Oops!” I said, and helped her pile them up again. She knocked them over and looked up at me expectantly. “Oh, no!” I cried. “All fall down!” She giggled and began chewing on her rabbit again.
“Baxter!” Miranda stood in the doorway. “We had an agreement.”
I bowed my head. “I’m sorry. The baby woke up and then he needed to be changed. I was just going back in to finish.”
“You were playing with your pups.” She sniffed derisively. “You’ll have time to play when you’ve done your chores.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and stepped out of Beatrice’s play area. Miranda followed me into the kitchen, watching closely as I tucked the baby back into the cradle and dragged it over by the sink. If I didn’t, Noah would fuss, and the Alpha would stomp into the room yelling, and then both babies would be crying.
Noah squawked a bit at being put down, but settled as soon as I got a foot under the cradle’s rocker and started it swaying back and forth.
I could see my two older pups out the kitchen window, playing in fur-form. Fan, bigger than his sister, jumped on her, pinning her to the ground with his greater weight. I watched for a moment, but when Fan started chewing on his little sister’s ear, I rapped on the window and shook my head at the young shifter. Fan let go of Teca’s ear and ran off to grab a stick and savage it furiously.
I watched for another few minutes, my hands working away at the last of the dishes automatically. As I scrubbed at the bottom of a pot, working at what seemed like years’ worth of burnt food, I wondered if things might have been different if Fan had been given a different name, and how much influence the names actually had on a child’s personality. Fan seemed to take his name’s meaning—lethal—as seriously as if it was a label that had been pinned on him.
These past five months had been hard on him. Going from Alpha’s son to the local orphan, and from being well-to-do in the pack to having nothing—I don’t know if he was picking up on my frustration, or if it was his own that he took out on the other pups. But I was beginning to dread the knocks on the door, the parents coming to complain about Fan biting their little one, or breaking things of theirs. Stealing, destroying. It never seemed to end. I felt like a failure, because what little time I had left, between keeping house for the Alpha and the odds and ends of cleaning a few neighbors hired me for out of pity, had to be split between the four of them. More often than not, the only time I had to spend with him was when I was dealing with his misbehavior, and that wasn’t helping things either.
Which meant that now I had an aggressive little alpha wolf on my hands, and I had no idea what to do about it or if it was already too late, but the future I saw for Fan if I didn’t figure something out scared me.
CHAPTER SIX
Finally, a few minutes of peace and quiet.
Abel, Alpha of the Mercy Hills Pack, settled down onto his favorite sheltered bench, the one hidden in a small patch of shrubs in the corner of the L-shaped building that held both the pack’s administration and Abel’s own company, GoodDog Software. He pulled out his phone and loaded his mostly finished Alpha Hunt game.
With the practiced ease of the man who’d designed it, he started moving through the levels, watching for anything that didn’t work right, that did something it shouldn’t. He made it all the way up to the twenty-first level before his little wolf icon balked at a door it should have been able to pass through, and he pulled out a notepad to record where the problem had happened.
“Abel!” Mac’s voice echoed off the walls surrounding him.
Abel winced and wondered what crime he’d committed that he couldn’t escape his responsibilities for even half an hour. That was all he wanted—thirty minutes to sit someplace and play a game. It wasn’t like it was even entirely not work related—it was his own bloody game, that he’d made, and was hoping to start selling. They needed to come up with the money to pay for Jason somehow, and it was the only thing he had anywhere near ready to go.
With a sigh, he shut the game down and put his phone away. “Hey, Mac.” He moved over to make room for his friend on the bench beside him. “What’s up?”
“Jason and I have been talking—”
Abel held a hand up to stop him. “What crazy plan does he have now?”
Mac frowned at him. “He’s trying.” The bruising around his eye, left over from when the Montana Border shifters had rammed their car a week ago, had seeped down onto his cheekbone, staining the skin an unappetizing greenish-brown. But that had been the worst of his injuries. Duke had taken the brunt of it all, with a broken wrist and a spectacular black eye in the fight afterward. Abel himself had caught a fist or two, which had left him with a thigh that still ached where Orvin had kicked him, and what Jason cheekily said would be a ‘rakishly sexy’ scar over one eye.
Abel closed his eyes and tilted his head back to catch the beams of sun slipping between the leaves of the shrubs. With his eyes closed, he didn’t have to see the leaves changing color, didn’t have to look at the weight of his responsibilities, didn’t have to watch his friend grasping at straw after straw, desperate to keep his mate. “What’s he want to do now?”
Mac shifted beside him, the heavy canvas of his jacket scraping across the wood of the bench. “He wants to try the solar collectors on the greenhouses and see if he can grow crops during the winter. He says there’s two of them that shouldn’t be too hard to heat.”
“That will hardly touch it. And he’s just barely had a baby. Who’s going to look after Macy? She too young to go to the daycare yet.” Abel opened his eyes and looked at his friend.
Mac shrugged. “Jason’s dad. He’ll move back in, we can coordinate her care between the three of us. Jason says she can come to the greenhouse with him anyway.” Mac rubbed at the back of his neck. “I was thinking I could work outside walls too. There’s got to be some manual labor jobs somewhere.”
“And still cover our security? And help raise your child? Don’t tell me you won’t be out in those greenhouses all winter too if I give Ja
son the go-ahead. No, that’s not workable either.”
“Well then what the fuck are we going to do? I can’t lose him.”
Abel sat up and gave up on his alone time. “I’m working on it. I just don’t have any time.”
Mac propped his elbows on his knees and let his head droop. “He’s so happy to be here, but there’s the shadow of that money hanging over him. He thinks I don’t notice.”
Abel put a hand on his friend’s back and rested his forehead against Mac’s shoulder. “I’ll figure it out. You go back and enjoy that daughter of yours.”
Mac sat up and leaned against the back of the bench, his face tipped back into a sunbeam. “Jason wants you to come for supper. Friday night. Six o’clock.”
It was a good thing that Mac’s eyes were closed because he couldn’t have missed the you’ve got to be kidding me expression on Abel’s face. The word, “No,” danced on the tip of his tongue, but something stopped him. An evening spent in the company of Mac’s omega mate, with his eerie ability to calm and soothe, might be just what he needed to shake a solution to this problem loose in his brain. “Yeah, okay. I’ll be there. Should I bring anything?” As soon as he said the words, the world seemed brighter.
Mac laughed and stood up. “Nope. He’s got the whole thing planned down to the tiniest detail. You have to come—I made a deal with him. He stays in bed until Friday, and I talk you into taking a bit of time to spend with your friends.” He clapped Abel on the back of the shoulder. “Just be prepared to be wrapped around the fingers of the prettiest little alpha pup you’ve ever met. Uncle Abel.”
Abel got to his feet. “I’m looking forward to it.” Yeah, he needed some down time. An evening spent with Mac’s family would be good for him.
They parted, Mac back to his second job harvesting in the gardens, Abel into the building, to his office and the stacks of problems that never seemed to end.
“Hey, Louise, how’s the rest of my morning looking?” he asked as he walked through his secretary’s office.
“There’s a phone call from the Department about new forms for travel, and another from a different branch about the request you put in to extend the enclave to the east. And then there’s a conference call with Twilco’s IT department. Apparently they broke the inventory software again and he’s raging. And then—”
He held up a hand to stop her there. “I think that’s enough. Put Francis on the software problem—she’s the least likely of any of us to say something we’ll regret later. Let me get my coat hung up and we can start with the forms and move on from there.” He opened the door to his office and stepped inside, thinking furiously. That land to the east of the enclave walls—he’d bought it with the first of the big payments he and his—at that time—tiny software company had earned, for that same piece of inventory software that was going to send his blood pressure through the ceiling if Francis couldn’t talk them through a fix. It had always been his intention, tentatively approved by the department, to have that land incorporated into the enclave and extend the walls to make more space for the pack. Shifters weren’t meant to be crammed into apartment buildings and dormitories, even if it was the only way to keep a roof over everyone’s head and still have the space they needed to run in wolf form. And he was lucky—most packs weren’t as well off as his. Mercy Hills had had three strong Alphas before him, with goals and plans. If they hadn’t, they’d be in the same situation as many of the other packs.
Selling the land was an option. It wouldn’t bring in much, but he’d been in the habit of putting money aside as a security measure and, while he didn’t have anything near to what they needed, the two funds together brought them a little closer.
He cast a frustrated glance at his cell phone. If he could find the time to get that game finished, this whole issue could simply vanish. Maybe. Until then… He picked up the handset of the land line. “Louise, I’m ready to talk to them about the travel forms.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Alpha’s household had been fed, and I’d finished cleaning up the kitchen afterward. Now I had a free couple of hours to play with my pups and get the diapers washed. I piled the bag into my laundry basket and set it by the stroller, then collected Beatrice from her play area and strapped her in.
I opened the door that led from the porch to the back yard. “Fan! Teca! I’m going!” I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them, out of sight behind the trees. There were a few other pups out there too, some barking, some yelling as they played. While Patrick had been alive, my pups had had lots of friends. Now that I was simply an unmated omega, they were down to the three or four lowest status families in the place.
Another thing I wanted to change.
“Pups! Now! Don’t make me come out there.”
I didn’t want another mate, but it was a foregone conclusion that as an omega—with no property rights, no legal rights—I needed a mate to have the opportunity to raise my pups the way they should be raised. And for them, I’d submit to anything.
I was just about to yell for the pups again when Fan and Teca pelted around the clump of shrubs they’d been playing behind. Teca ran full tilt, her little human legs a blur of almost-clumsy waddling. Fan was in wolf form. He raced circles around her, then jumped up and knocked her down before tearing off for the house.
“Fan!” I shouted, and ran out to comfort a now crying Teca. Fan yipped and stayed just out of reach, his ears and tail angled aggressively. I picked up my daughter and set her on my hip. “Go inside and change, Fan. And put clothes on.”
Fan took off in the other direction, but I’d been expecting it. As the pup ran past me, I grabbed him by the ruff and picked him up. “No. We’re going to do laundry. And you’re coming with us.” I almost wished Fan was old enough to leave on his own, but he’d already proved that he wasn’t capable of behaving when there wasn’t an adult around. Even when there was, he couldn’t always be trusted. If this didn’t stop, I figured he’d either be the most hated Alpha of all time, or he’d end up being brutish muscle for one. Fan’s personality didn’t leave much room for compromise. And I was essentially running two households, and the time he needed from me inevitably got swallowed up in chores. If his life was ruined, it would be my fault. Maybe I should talk to Roland about trying other packs to see if I could entice a nice shifter elsewhere.
Inside, I got everyone ready to go—Fan and Teca clean and dressed, Beatrice changed—another diaper for the laundromat—and the baby tucked into my sling. I’d planned to get a new one for this pup, since Patrick had shown no sign of losing interest in keeping me pregnant. This one had seen better days, but it still worked. And it left my hands free for other work, or to keep up with my older pups.
I had them all lined up at the door, and was doing a last check to see what else I had that could be washed, when Miranda came into the porch without so much as a courtesy knock. “You’re going out?”
“Laundry, and the pups are going to Story Time. Did you have anything you wanted washed?” I hated that she just walked through my space like I didn’t matter, hated that subtle confirmation of my lack of status, lack of personhood. It had made me much more careful about being dressed at all times. Not that shifters were particularly body shy, but I didn’t like the way she looked at me, either, those few times she’d caught me less than fully clothed.
“We have a guest coming Tuesday evening, a pack trained doctor from Maine. He’s considering setting up a practice here. We want to impress him, so you’ll need to make some nice finger foods to have on hand.” She eyed me greedily, and I had an uneasy suspicion there was more to this story than I’d yet been told. I was also reminded that it wasn’t just alpha males that could get a pup on an omega. Alpha females had been known to as well, though no one seemed to be able to explain how it happened, and rumors always floated around about the omega afterward.
I dropped my eyes to avoid that uncomfortable stare. “I can stop at the library on the way back to look up some recipes
.” Everyone knew that my cooking skills were woefully underdeveloped for an omega, although Patrick had taught me pretty quickly to at least not burn things. I’d never been interested in it and I was just stubborn enough that they couldn’t make the lessons stick. The same with sewing—my seams were always crooked, and I never seemed to manage a proper fit for anything. And of course, I’d been either pregnant or nursing since I was sixteen. Who had time to learn anything when they were elbow deep in spit-up and diapers?
“Yes,” she said. “That would be a good idea. Don’t worry about supplies—whatever you need, I’ll make sure you have it.” She gave me another one of those uncomfortable looks. “Well, get going! You have to be back here for lunch.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
A doctor. The pack needed a doctor. We had someone who acted as a sort of nurse/medic, but they had no real training—just read a lot of books. There was a clinic that accepted shifters, but it was an hour’s drive away, and sometimes getting a permit to travel could be difficult. I’d been there shortly after Teca was born, when I’d developed an inflammation along my Omega line. But if someone was truly ill and needed immediate attention—well, they usually died.
Case in point: Patrick.
Though I still thought—despite everything—that was a blessing in disguise.
Abel's Omega(Gay Paranomal MM Mpreg Romance) (Mercy Hills Pack Book 2) Page 3