A Season of War: M/M Wolf Shifter Mpreg Paranormal Romance (The Last Omega Book 3)

by Apollo Surge

  "I could take the morning one," Alicia offered. "If you can help me brush up on the information."

  "I could do the midday one, probably," Serena said thoughtfully. "If I can work the evening shift at the store."

  "Sawyer could take the kids in the afternoon," Alicia suggested, and Sawyer sat up so fast he banged his knee on the underside of the table.

  "What, why me?" he asked, swearing and clutching his leg.

  "You need to stay on low impact jobs while you're dealing with your 'omega fever' anyway," she said, giving him a significant look. "This way you can still help out without having to do as much heavy lifting."

  "I'm not really a kid person," Sawyer said, fumbling for an excuse. "And I don't really know anything about the Fae-"

  "You did great with the kids earlier today," Elliot pointed out with a smile.

  "And you've got more in-person experience with the Fae than any of us," Alicia pointed out. "We can teach you the rest. You just need to follow the lesson plan."

  Sawyer made a worried noise.

  "Couldn't I take one of the adult classes?" he asked. "The kids are the ones who really need to know this stuff, they're at the most risk. You shouldn't be making the person with the least experience responsible for them."

  "I think they might listen better to you, honestly." Alicia shrugged. "Apparently all the kids are talking about how you 'kicked the fairy king's ass.' They think you're some kind of fairy Terminator now."

  Sawyer sank into his chair, a hand over his face, as everyone at the table shared a good chuckle at that.

  "I was just trying to make them feel safer," Sawyer muttered. "They need to feel like someone's protecting them."

  "All the more reason you should be the one teaching them," Elliot declared, and from the size of his grin Sawyer was certain he was imagining Rockwellian family shit again. "I'll talk with Cuvier about it tomorrow."

  ***

  A few days later Sawyer was pacing outside of the cabin where most of the children were staying, clutching the notes Serena had given him and feeling woefully unprepared. Serena had given him the most concise breakdown she could, and he'd sat in on her midday class with the adults, but he still didn't feel like he knew any of this shit remotely well enough to be teaching it to kids.

  The couple who were doing most of the babysitting had set up a playpen for the really small kids and arranged the older ones on the grass, six-year-olds up front to thirteen-year-olds at the back.

  "Thank you so much for doing this," one of the couple (Casey the Australian gator, Sawyer was fairly certain) smiled at him gratefully as her husband finished getting the kids settled down. "We didn't get to go to the earlier classes, what with watching the sprogs. I think knowing a little more about the pixie bastards will make us all feel a little safer."

  "That's what I'm hoping," Sawyer said, trying to sound more confident then he felt. "But, uh, I've never taught kids before, so if I'm doing something wrong just... throw a rock at me or something."

  Casey laughed brightly.

  "And here I was just going to use tomatoes!" she said. "I'm sure you'll be fine. Liam and I manage most of the kid's homeschooling back in the swamp. You can't do a worse job than us, I figure."

  It was thin encouragement, but Sawyer would take what he could get. Casey and Liam took a seat on either side of the kids, the better to keep an eye on all of them. A three year old with hair like corn silk who Sawyer assumed was Ruby climbed into Liam's lap immediately.

  "All right," Sawyer said, clearing his throat to get the kid's attention. "Let's get started."

  He glanced at his notes for the first lesson, only to see several of the kid's hands shoot up.

  "Uh, I wasn't really taking questions." Sawyer shook his head and pointed to one of the kids with her hand up, an eight year old with curly dark hair that stuck out like a halo around her head. "Yeah?"

  "Did you really kill the king of the fairies?" she asked. "Is that why they're mad?"

  "No," Sawyer said quickly. "To either of those things."

  "But Rita said you did!" the girl insisted, pointing at the scruffy girl he'd talked to yesterday. "She said you told her and Mike you killed the fairy king!"

  "I fought the leader of the Wild Hunt," Sawyer said, emphasizing each word. "I didn't kill anyone. And the Erlking isn't the king of all fairies. They're just sometimes in charge of all the Wild Fae, that's all."

  "So then he's attacking us for revenge, right?" another kid said.

  "No!" Sawyer said loudly. "No, absolutely not. The Erlking is trapped under the mountain now and can't do shit- I mean, uh, can't do anything. And the Wild Fae don't follow anyone when the Erlking isn't around, they just do their own thing."

  "Then why did they take our swamp?"

  "And Uncle Robert and my cousin Gale?"

  Sawyer took a deep breath. This was already harder than he'd hoped it would be.

  "That wasn't the Wild Fae," he tried to explain. "That was- Okay, so, basically, there's three kinds of Fae. Wild Fae are like, nature spirits and little gnomes that live in your house and clean things sometimes. The ones that are causing us trouble are the other two kinds, the Court Fae."

  "But why?" It was Rita who spoke up this time. "What did we do?"

  Sawyer sighed and ran a hand through his hair, trying to figure out how to answer that.

  "We didn't do anything," he finally said. "It's not about us. We don't really know why they're taking shifters, but it's probably to do with the war."

  "The one in the Middle East?" one of the older kids blurted out.

  "What?" Sawyer's nose scrunched in confusion and he shook his head. "No. The Courts, Summer and Winter, are at war. They have been since like, the beginning of time."

  "Why?" the eight year old with the fluffy hair asked again.

  Sawyer just had to stare for a moment, stumped.

  "You know," he said, hands on his hips. "I really don't know. Uh, I'll ask Serena and get back to you on that. It doesn't really matter."

  "Which one's the bad guy?" someone shouted.

  "Winter, obviously," Rita scoffed. "Haven't you ever read a book? Winter is always the bad guy."

  "Neither of them is the bad guy," Sawyer interrupted. "Or, like, both of them are."

  "But then who do we want to win?" Mike asked with a befuddled expression.

  "No one," Sawyer said. "We don't want either of them to win. If either of them wins it'll probably be the end of the world."

  Judging by the burst of worried talking and shouted questions that had been the wrong thing to say.

  "All right, all right, everyone settle down," Liam shouted, over the hubbub, holding Ruby on his hip as he and Casey stood up to reassert control over the kids. "The world isn't ending any time soon. So just settle down and let Mr. Wolf give his lesson."

  "Right," Sawyer said, flustered, as the kids quieted down again, most of them still looking at him in obvious worry. "Okay, so first we're going to talk about fairy traps and how to avoid them. Then we're going to go over some different kinds of Fae- Yeah, Rita?"

  "Tell us how you beat the fairy king," she said, putting her hand down. "The Earl-whatever."

  Sawyer held up his notes hopelessly. "That's not really in the lesson..."

  "How about he'll tell you the story after the lesson?" Casey suggested. "If you're all well behaved and listen closely, he can tell us how he beat the Erlking at the end."

  There was a chorus of groans from the kids, but at least no more hands went into the air as Sawyer started on the lesson again.

  "Okay, so, who knows how to recognize a fairy ring?" he began.

  He spent the next half hour talking about stone circles and fairy feasts until he was blue in the face, unsure how much, if any of it, was getting through. Serena had peppered the lesson plan with fairy tales and fables that featured the kind of traps he was discussing, and Sawyer hoped having them in a narrative context might help them retain something at least. Most of their faces looked
pretty blank.

  When the six-year-olds started getting restless, Casey called for a break. Sawyer sat down to read over his notes again while the kids ran around for fifteen minutes or so and Casey and Liam handed out snacks. He eyed the so called snacks with an uneasy guilt. It was bulk store brand juice boxes and foil wrapped potatoes that had been baking in the embers of a camp fire most of the day. The kids weren't thrilled. Sawyer got the impression that they were used to a diet of mostly fish and weren't loving the new starch-heavy menu. Jacob had been doing his best to come up with affordable options for feeding so many people, and it came down to being primarily rice, beans, cornmeal and potatoes. Not exactly healthy. And they were barely managing that right now. The general store brought in enough money to keep the farm afloat normally and with the garden they were comfortable. But they didn't have remotely the resources to support this many people.

  He shook off his worries and refocused on his notes, only for Rita and Mike to sit down on either side of him with their snacks.

  "So have you met any other fairies besides the king?" Mike asked immediately.

  "A couple," Sawyer admitted reluctantly.

  "Were they evil?" Mike asked.

  "Uh, some of them were pretty bad," Sawyer said. "But evil is kind of subjective."

  "What does subjective mean?"

  Sawyer stared into the distance for a moment, then shook his head.

  "I just mean that the fae don't do good and evil like we do," he tried to explain. "They're too complicated."

  "Tell me about it," Rita scoffed. "You said crossing running water would make some of them leave you alone, but then some of them live in running water, and some of them don't live in it, but if you mess with it they get mad!"

  "That's not really what I meant," Sawyer said, trying to find the right words. "I mean like, they don't really choose to do good things or bad things. They have rules, and they have to follow them, the same way we have to breathe. Some of them have different rules and some of them that have the same rules might just have different personalities, so they decide to follow the rules in different ways."

  "But that doesn't make sense," Rita said, exasperated.

  "That's just cause I'm shit at- I mean, I'm not a very good teacher," Sawyer said with a sigh. "It makes sense when it's explained right. Like, okay, say your mom tells you that you can't eat the cookies she made, right? And you have to follow that rule or your mom will be pissed off and take your Xbox or something."

  "We don't have an Xbox," Mike interrupted. "We only just got wifi in the swamp last year. Electricity is hard because the generators make bad smells and bad noise ripples in the water."

  "What's something you have that's really important that your mom might take if she was mad at you?" Sawyer said with an impatient huff. "No, don't answer that. It doesn't matter. Just- So you have to follow the rule, all right? And Mike follows the rule by leaving the cookies alone. But Rita follows the rule by throwing the cookies out the window like Frisbees."

  Rita burst out laughing.

  "See, she technically followed the rule, right?" Sawyer tried to explain. "Because she didn't 'eat' the cookies. According to the rule, she could do anything to the cookies except eat them."

  "Her mom would still be crazy mad though," Mike pointed out.

  Sawyer shrugged.

  "Yeah, but that's because we're people and not fairies. To a fairy, she didn't do anything wrong because she was still following the rule. Where it gets dangerous is when they expect humans to follow their rules too, and we don't. Because we didn't know them or because we were confused or because we couldn't possibly do what they wanted us to- It doesn't matter. If we break the rule, the fairies think we're bad, and to them that means it's okay to do whatever they want to punish us. And if they want something from you, they'll even try to trick you into breaking a rule on purpose so that they're allowed to punish you. It doesn't help that a lot of the Court Fae don't really think of humans and shifters as 'people' to begin with. Like, if an ant bit you, even if it was only a little bite that didn't really hurt you, you wouldn't feel bad about killing them and maybe wrecking their whole ant hill, right? That's what we are to a lot of fairies. Ants, or maybe small animals. We're just so different from them that the things they use to define a 'person' don't really match up with ours."

  Mike and Rita stared at him blankly for a long minute.

  "I still don't get it," Rita said, and flopped back into the grass.

  "I think I kind of do," Mike said, turning his juice box around in his hands. "I guess that means we couldn't really just, talk to them, and ask them to stop, could we?"

  "I don't know," Sawyer said with a sigh. "Probably not. The Council could, maybe. They convinced them to stay off shifter territory a long time ago. But I don't know how. And they're a lot more powerful than we are."

  "What's going to happen to us?" Rita asked, still laying on her back, looking up at the sky. "Are we just going to be here forever?"

  "That's not so bad," Mike said with a small shrug, glancing at Sawyer.

  "I don't want to live in a stinky tent for the rest of my life," Rita said. "Or in that stupid cabin with a ton of other kids! Last night Benji farted in his sleep RIGHT next to my face! I almost threw up!"

  Mike giggled but Sawyer gave her a sympathetic nod.

  "Whatever happens with the Fae," he said. "We're going to figure out a better living situation for everybody. Elliot and a bunch of the adults are fixing up the barn right now. And once things are more settled and the grownups can get jobs the food situation will get better too."

  "But we'll still have to stay inside the stupid wards, right?" Rita said, sitting up on her hands. "Like, forever! What are we going to do on the full moon?"

  Sawyer's stomach clenched at the thought. He hadn't considered that at all yet.

  "We'll figure something out," he assured them. Liam and Casey were rounding everyone up again. "Just stay safe and be patient for now, all right?"

  Rita shook her head and got to her feet, heading back to the others without responding. Mike got up to go after her, but paused to look back at Sawyer.

  "I'm really glad you're protecting us," he said, or blurted out, really, then hurried off without looking back. Sawyer got to his feet as well, dusted the grass off his pants, and got back to teaching.

  "Okay, so, now we're going to talk about how to recognize some kinds of fae. Serena thought we should start with a couple of the Wild Fae that live on the mountain normally..."

  Sawyer knew this was the really important part, so he took his time making sure the kids all understood how to tell the leshy from a tree spirit and how to avoid upsetting either thing, and the difference between the domovoi that supposedly lived in the house and the haltija that allegedly guarded the barn.

  He paused however as he reached the section on the bjergfolk.

  "Oh, hey," he said, surprised. "I've met this one."

  "Really?" one of the kids said excitedly. "Did you fight it?"

  "No," Sawyer said with a small laugh. "No, he was really helpful actually."

  He cleared his throat to read from Serena's notes.

  "Mountain spirits, rock fairies, or bjergfolk are generally benevolent- uh, that means nice- benevolent guardians of nature. Mountains generally have at least one, but they can also be attached to rocky outcrops, caves, standing stones, or other stone structures of natural significance- Whatever that means." He shrugged, putting the notes away. "Basically, they're usually safe. They protect the mountain and the people that they think belong on it. If you're disrespectful to the mountain or they feel like you're trespassing they could be dangerous, but ours at least usually wants to help the people who live here. I mean, he won't do it for free and he'll probably try to trick you into giving him more than you should- the first time I met him I had something he really wanted and he tried to convince me that he could help me get rid of it, like he was doing me a favor. He's still a fairy, basically. But overall he's okay.
I call him Jagger."

  The kids clearly didn't get the joke, but were excited anyway.

  "I need to go see him again soon actually," Sawyer said thoughtfully, remembering his promise.

  "Why?" One of the kids asked. "Is he going to help you stop the bad fairies?"

  "Actually, he did help me get away from some of the bad ones," Sawyer said. "And I promised him a reward. And it really isn't a good idea to keep a fairy waiting on a reward."

  "What's he look like?"

  "Well, you can see the picture here-"

  "No, what does YOURS look like?"

  "Uhh, like an ugly little old man made of rock."

  "Could you fight him?"

  "I don't think that would be a good idea, considering he's kind of in charge of the whole mountain, magically speaking."

  "But could you?"

  "I did threaten to eat him once and he seemed to take it seriously so, yeah, I guess."

  "Are you going to tell us about fighting the fairy king now?" Mike asked, talking over several other kids shouting questions. Sawyer looked down at his notes. There wasn't much else after the mountain spirit. They weren't going to start talking about Court Fae until next time. He sighed.

  "Yeah, fine."

  He sat down on the grass and everyone, including Liam and Casey, moved closer, clearly much more intrigued by this than the lesson.

  "So, uh, once upon a time," he started a bit stiffly. "There was this thing called the Wild Hunt, and the Erlking was the leader of the hunt. Uh, some people actually think wolf shifters came from the hunt, or that's where we go when we die or something. Anyway, when the Erlking went hunting, all the Wild Fae around would have to join him. Humans that got in his path might end up hunted, or turned into wolves to hunt with him. But mostly he was hunting this magic golden deer all the time. In order for the hunt to end, he had to catch it, and then he'd go back under the mountain. But the deer would always be born again, and another hunt would start."

  "So when did you fight him?" Rita asked impatiently.

  "Did you save the deer?" asked Mike.

  "I'm getting to that," Sawyer said. "You have to understand why I fought him first."