“Sure thing,” said Justine.
“I am not here to look for a mate, even if there is an entire camp of alphas just a short paddle across the lake from here.”
“About a mile and half,” advised Justine, before quickly adding, “and right you are.”
“And no matter how incredibly sexy and delicious-smelling Hottie McHot Alpha happens to be, I am under no circumstances in the least at all attracted to him. Period. The end.”
Justine didn’t chime in, and when I looked at her, she was looking behind me.
At the door.
Which was no longer spilling light into the showers, most likely because someone was standing in it.
And seeing as this was me, I had a good idea who it was.
“I brought back your runaway canoe. Again,” said Zachary Ito, all smooth cinnamon and cream.
“Thank you,” said Justine cheerfully. “I don’t know how those keep getting loose.”
I didn’t turn around. Mostly because my face was in complete flames.
“Nice to see you again,” said Zachary. Light flooded the showers once more as he moved away from the door, probably to go back to his alpha kingdom across the water.
“So that went well,” said Justine cheerfully.
“I’m going to drown myself in the lake,” I said firmly.
“He was totally checking out your butt,” said Justine.
I didn’t realize then what a good ally Justine was going to be. I thought at most, she’d be useful – for one thing, I know she told the rest of the counselors my story, because I could see them relax around me. I wasn’t an unknown entity any longer. The pity wore off after a day or so – you can’t pity someone who’s willing to shimmy up the flagpole to untangle the flags right before a storm. Which I did. Twice.
After that stunt, I was one of the gang. As much as I could be, anyway. There were two of us who were new counselors that summer, but I was the youngest, and the only omega on staff. I should have anticipated that there’d be some kind of hazing ritual.
I just didn’t expect it to come in the form it did.
What can I say? I’m an idiot.
Chapter Two
Zachary
There’s this moment at the beginning of every summer when everything is perfect.
It’s the crunch of wheels on the gravel road as the first campers arrive. It’s the eager brightness of the counselors, still full of hope and excitement and forgetting that they’re about to spend their summer struggling to keep younger, vaguely more immature alphas in line. It’s the warmth of the early summer sun on my face coupled with the last of cool spring breezes in my hair.
It's the nervous anticipation of watching teenagers fumble through neutral spaces as they both refrain and attempt to mark new territories, stumble as they make new friends and enemies, and somehow, without ever really realizing it, take on their first steps to becoming responsible alphas.
I can see the entire summer stretch out before us. Full of energy and adventure and learning and probably an emergency trip to the ER with a broken bone. Well, it’s a camp of prepubescent alphas. There’ll probably be at least three trips, and that’s just in the first three weeks.
I like to think of myself as an optimist, generally speaking. I’m also a realist.
“Mr. Ito! Mr. Ito!”
My biggest problem with the first day of camp is the parents. I like the kids. Hell, if I didn’t like kids, I wouldn’t have become a camp director. The parents, on the other hand….
“Mr. Ito, I have a question.”
I readied my smile and turned to the mother of one of my campers. Mothers are the worst. Omega or beta, they all believe that their children are both perfect little angels. They also believe their angels are susceptible to the least temptation.
“I just wanted to ask about the camp on the other side of the lake?”
Temptation, in this case, being Camp Lake Omega.
I stifled the sigh and smiled at her. “It’s perfectly fine, Mrs. Ruiz. I assure you. The campers over there have no interest in coming over here, and we keep the campers here so busy that they can’t think of anything but their own beds when the sun goes down. We’ve never had a problem in the three years since we’ve been open with kids crossing from one camp to the next.”
“But…” Her hands fluttered with her worry. “There’s a dance, isn’t there? At the end of the session?”
“Yes. Highly supervised – and we guard the doors. None of the kids are allowed out until the dance is over, so there’s no chance of anyone sneaking off alone. Mrs. Ruiz”—I rested my hand on her shoulder—“don’t worry about Arturio. He’ll have the time of his life.”
I don’t know if it was my words or my touch, but I could see Mrs. Ruiz was reassured.
“Thank you, Mr. Ito. It’s just I worry – he’s so young.”
“Of course. We’ll take good care of him,” I assured her, patting her shoulder again before turning away.
My hand was tingling. I could already feel the lazy, drowsy feeling that followed contact with an omega. It wouldn’t send me into a pheromone-haze – Mrs. Ruiz was bonded, after all – but it’d make it increasingly difficult to concentrate, something I needed to be able to do on the first day of camp. I opened and closed my fist, trying to shake the pins-and-needles, and at the same time pinched my arm, digging my nails deep into my skin.
Bad time to lose it, Zach. Pull yourself together.
“Hey, Zach!” called Reba Sanchez, my second-in-command. She was a few years younger than I was, dark hair and light tan skin, and had the strength of character of about twenty alphas distilled into one small Latina package. “Need your help with Dragon Cabin.”
Just the distraction I needed. I headed over to the cabin. It was in rough shape: the green paint from the previous year was peeling, there were a couple of loose boards on the steps leading up to the cabin, and the front door might have had a run-in with a bear at some point during the winter. I knew from my pre-camp check that the cots inside were all in good shape, though the floor needed a thorough scrub. The campers would spend the first day or so fixing up their cabins the way they wanted – doing all the work themselves, as a team-bonding experience. Most alphas are solitary by nature, but society demanded we work together. Setting up their cabins was a way to get them used to the idea of teamwork and cooperation, and 99% of the time, it worked.
“What’s the problem, Reba?” I asked. Most of the time, cabin-problems the first day were because parents didn’t like the looks of the run-down buildings. Once I’d explained the idea to them, though, they were usually right on board.
This didn’t look like that. Behind Reba stood one set of harried-looking parents, one really upset new camper, and one completely disgruntled older sibling.
“I want to be a dragon!” wailed the younger kid, which explained matters instantly.
I was particularly proud of the way the cabins at Camp Alpha-by-the-Lake were organized. I had about dozen cabins, each one named after a mythical or actual beast considered to be a powerful animal. Dragons, Lions, Wolves – you get the idea. When campers came in, they stayed in a specific cabin arranged by ages. Every year that they returned, they returned to that same cabin, with the same fellow campers. We never split up cabins, and unless a new kid of the same age group came in later, we didn’t make a habit of adding campers in later years. The kids ended up forming pseudo-family units, a little like miniature packs, which reinforced the idea of teamwork.
But now in the third year of camp, we’d started running into a new problem: younger siblings who’d heard about the glories of their older sibling’s cabins… and weren’t allowed in.
“He’s a Wolf,” Reba whispered to me. I nodded shortly and knelt down to talk to the kid.
“What’s your name?”
“Tristan.”
“Tris, I agree. Dragons are pretty awesome. Wings and scales and fire-breathing—”
Tristan was perking up, a
utomatically responding to me being on the same page. “And they can fly!”
“That’s pretty good too. But I can’t break the rules of the camp, not even for you.”
Tristan deflated a bit. “But you’re the director.”
I saw his parents stiffen out of the corner of my eyes – not such a strange response when their alpha youngster was deliberately challenging a grown alpha.
Me, though? I was impressed. He was a smart kid. Most new kids didn’t even know who I was, much less try to stand up to me. After all, I was the Alpha in charge of the camp – it was my territory. Tristan might have been an alpha, but he was a baby alpha in unfamiliar territory. By talking back to me, he was effectively challenging my word, which in the real world could have gotten him a smack. Or worse.
“But they’re still rules. I can’t break them without consequences, either – and a consequence of breaking one rule is that it makes it easier to break the next. What if the next rule I broke was something that wasn’t to your advantage? What if the next rule was something that could get you or a lot of other campers hurt?”
Tristan wrinkled his nose. I already knew he was smart; I wanted to see if he would go to the next logical point.
“You wouldn’t do that, though,” he said. I could hear the worry in his tone. “I mean – this is just a little thing.”
“So are a lot of things, until they’re not. If I put you in Dragon Cabin, it’d create a lot of resentment among your brother and his friends. They’ve been together for two years. They rely on me to keep their unit together.
“You, though – there’s a place for you already, over in Wolf Cabin. See?”
I pointed over to Wolf Cabin, already prepped for my newest and youngest campers. We’d done some work on it, to make fixing it up less onerous. The wooden beams had been stripped of their paint – we’d buy whatever color the campers determined they wanted. The windows were newly installed, but dusty and in need of a scrub. Inside, it was clean as a whistle – but none of the cots had been assembled, and all the mattresses were in a pile next to the wall.
There were a couple of kids sitting outside of it already, excitedly talking as they inspected the cabin, peering in the windows, tapping on the wooden beams. None of them would be allowed in until everyone had arrived.
“Oh,” said Tristan. I could tell by the way that he said it that Wolf Cabin, with kids closer to his own age, and already looking as if it would require less work, appealed.
Hey, ten-year-olds are not stupid.
“Better hurry,” I said mildly. “You have to tell me by dinner what color you want to paint the cabin, and last I heard, they were going with black.”
“Ugh, no,” groaned Tristan. He took off at a run.
Tristan’s mother heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she said. “We tried to warn him that he wasn’t going to be in Dragon Cabin—”
“It’s okay, I get it,” I assured her, already itching to be away.
“He’ll be all right,” Tristan’s dad added. “I’m sure Mr. Ito will keep an eye on the situation.”
I nodded – not because I thought Tristan would need it, but because I thought his parents might. “He shouldn’t have any trouble settling in – it’s easier to form a close tie when you’re Tristan’s age than when you’re mine.”
It was one of the big reasons why I kept the kids together through their camp experience – I didn’t want them to take the friendships and alliances they’d formed lightly, and I wanted them to experience what it was like to keep a connection with someone, year after year.
The bonds of friendship they’d form with each other were a little bit like the bond they’d form with an omega someday. They’d trust each other through thick and thin, learn to lean on each other when necessary, and most importantly, they’d learn how to communicate instead of relying on alpha instinct alone.
And if that bled into the bond they’d form as adults with their mates one day… all the better.
Tristan’s dad chuckled. “That’s the truth. Come on, Mary, let’s say our goodbyes and head out.”
As much as I’d been itching to get away before, I stuck around to watch them walk to Tristan’s new cabin. He was already in the thick of things there – only one more kid to show up and then they’d be let in, and they were all chomping at the bit already. Tristan’s inclusion didn’t seem any more stilted for his initial hesitation, either, which was good to see.
But really, I wasn’t thinking about Tristan. I was thinking about his parents, walking hand in hand to their younger child. They’d say goodbye, and climb back into their car for the long drive back to the city. Companionable conversation, a bit shy at first for being by themselves, without their offspring – maybe some gentle laughter when they realized they’re not dependent on fast food for dinner. A quiet meal somewhere with tablecloths. And then home, where they wouldn’t mind the silence, because they’d have the next two months all to themselves.
“Makes you kind of regret life choices, don’t it?” said Reba, coming up alongside me.
“No,” I said gruffly as I turned to my second-in-command. “Don’t you have cabins to check in?”
“Phoenix cabin wants to use glitter paint this year.”
I stared at her. “Are you serious?”
“Actually, I think it could be kind of cool,” said Reba. “Red glitter paint for the wings and the lower half of the cabin. Like they’re being reborn from fire, you know?”
“No.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Do you have any idea how much glitter paint costs?”
“Do you?”
“It sure as hell can’t be cheap. They can have red. Plain, ordinary red.”
“Can you at least buy a tube of glitter, maybe they can mix it in?”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
“I think that’s exactly the way it works.”
The only thing to do with Reba when she took the campers’ side was to ignore her. That wasn’t to say I ignored everything the campers wanted – just the truly ridiculous things.
Glitter paint was probably not all that ridiculous. One cabin the year before had wanted chalkboard paint. I’d refused, but I might let Phoenix have their glitter. It depended on the price tag.
(And if it was too much – a bucket of glitter probably wasn’t that bad.)
“Mr. Ito!”
The questions and problems never really ended on the first day of camp.
“Lin, hello,” I said, surprised that Lin would have any questions for me at all. He was a young man, third-generation Chinese, handsome and slight of build, but very strong from lifting weights and wrestling during the school year. I liked Lin; at sixteen years old, he was one of my oldest campers, and this would be his last year of camp. I’d already decided to ask him back in a few years to be a junior counselor.
I figured I knew what he wanted. He was also one of my Phoenixes.
“If it’s about the glitter paint, Lin, no promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you, but no. I just wanted a quick word about the end-of-session dance – will that really be the only contact between this camp and Camp Lake Omega?”
It wasn’t the question that took me by surprise – it was the disappointment I heard.
Then again – Lin was sixteen. Alphas didn’t typically enter the bonding pools until they were a little bit older, but omegas his age were already entering the bonding pool to look for mates. Meeting someone had to be on the top of his mind.
“It’s meant to be, yes,” I answered. “But you’ve been here before, you know that.”
“There was a rumor, last year,” said Lin, his cheeks flushing. “The oldest cabins said—”
I shook my head. “I heard that rumor, too. Nothing to it. Sorry if it convinced you to come back under false pretenses.”
Lin laughed. “No, sir. Lake Omega or not, I want to be here. It’s just that my little sister, it’s her first year over
there, I wanted to know if I’d get a chance to see her before the dance.”
I hadn’t been too thrilled at the idea of the youngest omega campers attending the dance, when we’d first done it the year before. But it seemed to work out all right – and kids that young had different priorities than the older set. Mostly they sat at the tables and played board games with each other, while the oldest tried to figure out how to work in a few kisses without us adults catching them.
“Nope, you’ll have to wait for the dance.”
Lin nodded – like I said, he was a good kid. “Have you ever been over there, sir? My parents dropped me off first, so I’m not even sure what it looks like. You know we don’t get much of a look at it, when we go over for the dance.”
“It’s nice. A lot like here, but the cabins aren’t as interesting.”
Lin chuckled. “And all of the counselors are betas, right?”
“That’s right,” I confirmed. “There’s a few omegas who come in to help serve up meals, or teach specific things, but otherwise, everyone’s a beta.”
For some reason, I thought of the new kid – Jim. But he was a beta, of course he was. Camp Lake Omega had a strict no-alpha policy when it came to counselors or any other adult in charge, and good reason for it, too, one that no one could possibly question. There was just too much chance of impropriety for an alpha to be in care of a bunch of young, impressionable omegas – the oldest of whom were old enough to go into estrus and therefore be bonded to an alpha for the rest of their lives.
Which was why he couldn’t be an omega, either. Omegas had their first estrus – when their bodies craved sexual release, preferably at the hands of an alpha – around the age of sixteen or seventeen. After that, they usually didn’t wait more than a couple of years to bond to an alpha, the process of creating a biological link through sexual intercourse that would tie the two together more thoroughly than a beta’s marriage contract ever could.
Camp Lake Omega Page 2