“So…how do you think I can help you?” I said, much more gently now.
“I’m an omega mated to a beta,” she said, her fingers scratching restively at Blue’s chest, the beta holding her tighter. “We want to have a family, form our own pack. But there’s literally no one who will talk to us about this.”
She pulled away from Blue’s chest then, just enough to look back at me.
“You’ve seen how people respond, how Eloise responded. She’s bad, but my family are worse. They see our marks…” Her fingers reached up, tracing the shape she’d left on Blue’s skin, and he shivered in response, then took her hand and kissed her fingers.
“They just laugh at us when we try and talk about it,” Blue said, to Janine, not me. “Neen’s been kicked out of her pack until she ‘comes around.’ Eloise has told me my services are no longer required as pack enforcer. No one talks to us or is willing to even countenance that what this is, is real.”
How?I wondered right then. I’d spent about thirty seconds in their company, and I could see the evidence as clear as day. I could smell it, feel it. Blue felt…subtly wrong to me, like I didn’t want to get too close or something. Not because he was a bad guy or anything, just that he was…taken. Something about him saidno, no, no, inside my head, like a subtle warning.
“And no one is willing to talk to you about potential pregnancy?” I asked with a frown.
“Omegas bear alphas,” Janine said in a way that told me she knew those words by rote. “It’s why…” She straightened, then kissed Blue’s cheek, but when his arms tightened around her, she climbed free of them. She sat down in her own chair, facing me now, that same steady gaze back. “It’s why the Vanguard boys offered to act as surrogates initially. We discussed whether or not they could trigger a heat in me, whether or not artificial insemination might be needed.”
She stopped right then, eyes widening as my claws formed, making yet another mess of my desk. I stared at her hard, Blue getting to his feet and putting himself between his mate and me.
“They couldn’t,” he said bluntly. “They wanted to help, but they couldn’t, because in trying to help us, it all became clear. If they could accept that Neen and I were mates, destined to be together, despite me being a beta and her an omega, well…”
He smiled then, just a little, then shook his head slowly.
“Then five alphas mating a beta didn’t seem like such a stretch,” I finished for him hollowly.
Chapter 42
I promised them nothing, because in good conscience, I couldn’t. I knew fuck all about omega fertility, the process all shrouded in mystery, and that was now a way more pressing area of research for me. I did scribble down as many notes as I could, getting as comprehensive as possible a background on each one of them. There was nothing in their family histories that suggested anything different about them, no weak expression of their designation. Blue was big, but Dad had been as well, as were many betas. I doubted I’d find any significant latency in his background, but I explained I’d look into it. Janine was obviously all omega, and that pricked at me a little. I could see why Eloise had fixated on her, chosen her, and refused to see Janine as anything other than her sons’ mate. If Janine wasn’t pushing them away, looking like she did, Eloise saw that she had exactly what she wanted, right there within reach. All she had to do was…
The two of them blinked when I let out a growl, Janine jumping slightly as my pencil snapped in my hand. I raised a shaking hand to my forehead, saw that my claws were out again, felt the prickle of my fur against my skin.
“I’m sorry…” I forced out. “I…”
“You shouldn’t be here.” Janine chanced sitting forward, staring at me with eyes as soft as a cashmere blanket. “Excuse me for saying this, but you look like shit.” I gave a hysterical little snort at that. “And so do they.”
That had my eyes locking with hers, with Blue’s, like the answers I needed could be found there, but of course, they couldn’t be. No one else would have the right answers, not them, not anyone here, not Eloise or the boys’ dads. They’d always said they did, but that didn’t make it true, did it?
Evidence, I’d said.I’m sick of words, of people telling me what they think. I want to know.
But the thing was, no one could give me that evidence, because I had all I needed inside me. If I thought back to the pack, to us, to the way we’d lived before the parents came blundering in, it was all there.
Sunlit days of lying in the grass in a big puppy pile. Skimming rocks across the surface of the lake. Piling on top of each other in the pool, forcing someone’s head under the water, only to cop a nose full of harshly chlorinated water yourself. Running wild like young animals do, just for the sheer fucking pleasure of it. Laughing, spinning, shrieking, climbing, loving…
“Stick with the boys,”Dad had said as he gasped his last breath, because that was what he’d wanted me to remember before he went.“They’ll always look after you.”
And they fucking did, every damn day, despite my protests and attempts to keep them at arm’s length, right up until our parents had stepped in and forced us apart.
I don’t care how old you are, you’re never really an adult until that moment when you question the shit your parents lumped on you in a messy pile of well-meant intentions, worries, dreams, dictates, and just plain desperation that you make it through childhood OK. When you realise that at least some of what they put on you doesn’t belong there, even if they meant well.
“You’re right,” I said, nodding to Janine and Blue. “This is important, and I promise to look further into what you’ve told me.” I smiled weakly then. “If there’s a medical way to help you form the pack of your dreams, we’ll find it, I promise, but right now—”
“Right now, you have to fight for your pack,” Janine said with a nod of her head. “You have to take them back, because they need you to do that more than anything else in the world right now. If you’ll forgive me, I’ve got some advice about how to go about that.”
I emergedout of my office in a rush, striding down the hall, not looking where I was going, and managing to blunder straight into Windsor.
“Riley!” he said, catching me adeptly and then holding me steady. He stared into my eyes, peering at my face as if seeing me for the first time, and a shiver went through me as a result. I glanced surreptitiously down at my hands, balling them when I found them reassuringly human, but for how long? “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
“Robert, I can’t—”
“Riley, I know what’s going on.” It felt like someone had upended a bucket of ice water all over me then, my eyes finding his as I went perfectly still. “You are such a driven, hard-working, and dedicated scientist, I cannot fault your work ethic one bit. You show initiative and pursue a project from all angles, often delivering results even I would never have expected, and if I dare doubt you, your documentation and supporting evidence is all there, to give credence to your hypothesis, but, Riley…”