Omega's Run (33 page)

Shit. He had a point.

“You know what? Let me try Macy first instead.”

“Macy? She won’t talk to anybody.”

“Gotta try all avenues before admitting defeat,” I declared and got up.

“What, you’re going to find her now?”

“No, I was going to take a shower, see if you wanted to fuck me from behind while I was in there, because that sounds really hot right about now, then I was going to find some clothes;
then
go talk to her.”

“God I love that you’re a planner and, might I add, a mighty fine plan it is.” He slapped my ass, leaving a stinging hand print and I threw a half assed punch which he backed away from, letting it whizz past him.

“Oh so it’s like that, huh?” he demanded grinning, and lunged.

We ended up fucking on the cement floor before we even made it out into the hallway. God I loved that we could play rough like that.

I showered, dressed and kissed my lover deeply before slipping off his lap and going off in search of Macy. I found her on this rampart looking part of the building, outside looking over the dirt road leading down to it. It was like some kind of modern day concrete castle in the middle of the woods. Not a half bad defensible position either.

“Hey,” I greeted her, “Got a question for you.”

“You can ask, but my answer will probably, most likely, be ‘fuck off’ if it’s about Evan again. I’m getting kind of sick of the lectures about how I look at him.” She made a face.

“Fuck ‘em, I said with a shrug,” and her eyebrows went up.

“What did you want to ask?” she asked gently.

“It might be a bit personal, for different reasons, but are you Moon Forged or whatever?”

She made another face, “What’s that?” she asked.

“Did you start off as human only to be turned into what we are?”

She nodded, and pushed her hair back out of her face and behind her ears.

“Yeah, why? What’s the alternative?”

“You know the big fucker?”

“The one you’re constantly fucking since you woke up?”

I shrugged that off. One, it was true, and two; I’d been asking some pretty personal and rude questions pretty blithely at this point.

“Yeah, that guy,” I said grinning.

“Kind of hard not to notice,” she said dryly. I liked her sarcasm. She and I would get along fine, probably after we whooped each other’s asses at some point.

“Yeah, well he was born this way. Blood Born they call it.”

“Good to know,” she uttered and looked like she was actually processing the information.

“So, you’re Moon Forged.”

“Guess so.”

“Great, next question,” she rolled her cognac eyes.

“Sorry, only one per night,” she said and turned back to the view into the trees.

“Yeah, well I’m asking anyways, and I kind of need to know the answer because I’m not particularly looking forward to dying.”

She turned back around sharply, “What the fuck are you talking about? In case you haven’t noticed, what we are, are pretty indestructible except for that allergy we all seem to share.”

“What’s it feel like to change?” I demanded, “We only get to live if we make it through the first one and I have some inside information that says I might be fucked when it comes to that. I kind of don’t like to be told what to do.”

“Me either,” she grated and sighed.

We stared at each other for a long time and finally she sighed, “Okay, come here and stand. Close your eyes.”

I arched an eyebrow and didn’t move at first, a teasing smile curving my lips; she laughed and shook her head. She was a pretty girl when she smiled. She needed to do it more often.

“You want to know or not? I’m gonna try and show you, now c’mere.”

I did as she asked and she stood with me, shoulder to shoulder looking out into the woods.

“Okay, now close your eyes.”

I did.

“It’s like an echo, of the woods, of the nature around you. That feeling you get when you’re walking through the trees by yourself. Tranquil like. That’s when the wolf shows up. You know? Like in real life, you look and it’s just suddenly there and you freeze because you don’t want to scare it off, but you don’t want to run and have it chase you either.” We stood there in the dark and quiet, and just as the feeling she’d described began to take hold, she spoke and it seemed, for lack of a better understanding of it, to scare off my wolf. I cursed silently in my head and tried to recapture the feeling in my dream as she went on.

“Before those assclown’s caught me and dragged me off to that godforsaken place, I was almost happy to be what I am…”

“Watch it, Sister,” I uttered, “I used to
be
one of those assclowns, as you so succinctly put it.”

I had my eyes closed, questing for that feeling, concentrating so hard I didn’t see it, feel it, or hear it coming. Her fist crashed into the side of my face and my ear started to ring as I went skidding across the deck.

My shoulders hit the low cement wall first, slowing me down, but once they met, my head whipped back and cracked painfully a split second later. White starbursts went off behind my eyes and I squeezed them shut, shaking my head and groping at the ground to push to my feet.

Macy snarled and my vision came back just in time to watch her hands shift into claws.

“You don’t want to do this,” I warned, my feet underneath me, even as my wolf rose inside me to meet the threat.

“You bitch!” she cried and lunged, untrained, uncoordinated;
shit
this wasn’t going to be any kind of fight at all.

I sidestepped neatly and brought my knee up, kicking out and catching her right in the gut with a perfectly executed side snap kick. She reacted predictably, her arms going to her gut and doubling over, collapsing to her knees.

“Was, Macy,
was.
Operative word, Girl! Now fucking focus if you’re going to come at me.”

She got up and snarled, eyes bleeding to wolf, hands elongating. I stood my ground and felt my own wolf rise up to meet me.

I’ve got this.
I told it, and I got the distinct impression that it agreed, though this wasn’t the point of this exercise, was it?

I swore up and down I heard my twin in that moment,
“Let it happen, Ava.”

I closed my eyes and let Macy do her thing for a second as she dropped to all fours, bones sliding and popping pretty quickly, all things considered. I felt it in my face first, my front teeth and sinuses giving a throbbing ache as teeth elongated and began to change. She snarled and my eyes snapped open in time for her to make another lunge. I
moved
with super human speed and slashed out with fingers gone twice as long as they had been before.

She howled out in pain and dropped again as I gouged bloody furrows in her side. The door to the patio burst open and Evan, Chloe and Remus piled onto the balcony.

“Ava?” Remus growled.

“Stay out of it, Macy and I are having a difference of opinion. It’s not my goal to hurt her.” The words came out of my mouth accented and slurred around unfamiliar working mouth bits. I couldn’t be sure any of them understood me.

Macy staggered to her misshapen feet, “Do you know what you monsters
did to me
in there!?” she screamed.

“Nothing good, but it wasn’t me,” I admitted.

She came at me again and I leapt up, and back, falling into a crouch onto the wide stone railing. I held my position, even as more bones slid beneath my skin. It was starting to hurt, and I got the impression my wolf was yelping in pain.

“Let it happen, Ava!” Remus cried, while Chloe was trying to talk Macy out of having another go at me. She swung and I took a chance, leaping back, off the porch to shouts as the rest of them rushed forward to see what’d become of me.

I landed on both feet and absorbed some of the shock of the jump by bending my knees before
going
to my knees and letting the wolf have free reign. It hurt a lot less the second I gave in and I thought real hard,
we have
got
to come to some kind of agreement on who’s in the driver’s seat during a fight.

I stood, trembling on four legs instead of two and shook like a dog coming out of a bath. My paws…
holy fuck!
My
paws
were stuck in my shirt as Remus made a heavy landing beside me.

“Easy, Ava, let me get you out,” he used his very human hands, complete with opposable thumbs, to untangle me from the remnants of my clothes. I whined, ears flat to my skull and he grinned.

“Fuck if you don’t impress me more every day,” he murmured sounding more shocked than I had ever heard him. He stood, and jerked his head for me to follow and broke into an easy lope away from the riotous voices, tangled on the balcony up behind us.

I was in agreement, and loped off into the woods behind him. Fuck the mess I’d caused for a minute. I needed to
run.

Chapter 29

Remus

She changed without going through the full moon first.
She changed without going through the full moon first!

I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. It was impossible. It was
supposed
to be impossible. In a touch over two hundred years I had never once seen it or heard of it. I ran toward the woods, letting my mind spin as it would with Ava trotting along calmly beside me. Just inside the trees I stopped and shrugged off my cut. Hanging it from a tree branch I slipped out of my pants and tossed them over the branch as well, turning to find Ava sitting on her haunches nearby, staring at me intently.

“Here we go,” I said with a smile and triggered the change into my wolf form.

I shrank as I changed, fur growing from my skin as my bones and organs shifted and rearranged themselves. My knees cracked and bent the wrong way as my hands and feet shrank into paws and my spine elongated into a tail. My face pushed out into a snout and my ears slid up my head, becoming pointed, to finish my transformation.

As soon I finished it happened. Like it always did. Every time. Every damned time I went full wolf it happened. A twitching, itching, burning somewhere between my fur and my skin; it wasn’t really painful, more like the pins and needles you get when your foot falls asleep but over my entire body all at once. I yipped and dropped to the ground, rolling back and forth on my back, trying to satisfy the maddening itch.

When it finally faded I rolled onto my stomach, attempting to look as dignified as I possibly could despite the fact that I knew I had just been acting like a puppy. Pretty sure I failed entirely based on the huge canine grin Ava was flashing in my direction.

Yeah, yeah, keep laughing,
I said in that strange non-verbal way of speaking that wolf-kind had.
Come on, I want to run.
I surged forward and nipped at her flanks, jumping back as she spun to try to catch me, and took off running as hard as I could.

She barely paused before she gave chase, paws drumming across the rich loam beneath us as we sped through the brush, leaping rocks and streams and chasing each other around the woods like a couple of juveniles. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time. We ran for nearly an hour, keeping to within the general area of the bunker, but taking the time to enjoy ourselves.

The thing that amazed me, again, was her discipline. New wolves, when they change for the first time are constantly distracted by scents, sights, and sounds that they’d never been able to detect when they were human. In the days that Ava had been recovering, after William bit her, my brother and I had taken some time to talk and catch up on what had been going on in each other’s lives. He told me about the first time he went running with Chloe and how he’d had to keep getting her attention because she would constantly find herself distracted by every scent, game trail, and gopher den, that they came across.

Not Ava. She was trying to catch me and nothing would deter her from that. Her focus and ability to block out the sudden flood of new sensory information was astounding.

Eventually I shifted back to human, coming to a stop in a clearing a good minute ahead of her and turned to look back the way I’d come. I didn’t see her. I waited a minute, figuring she was just following my scent when a twig snapped behind me and I turned, spinning fast on one foot, just in time to catch a glimpse of Ava in midair, flying at me. She was human once again and when she hit me she twisted strangely, some kind of maneuver I’ve never encountered.

Suddenly the ground was above my head and I had a momentary sensation of weightlessness before I slammed back into the earth with a punishing degree of force.

“Ha!” She bellowed and I gasped in a breath for a second before I looked up to find her standing next to me, hands on her hips and looking incredibly sexy.

“Don’t think you’ve won already, Pup,” I growled and my leg kicked out, knocking her feet out from under her. She yelped as she fell and I surged forward, colliding with her in midair with enough force that if she’d still been human I might have done some damage.

As it was, she shrugged off the hit and rolled with it. We hit the dirt and tumbled for a moment, rolling along the ground. I was on top, then she was, then me again. I came up above her again and the breath suddenly rushed out of my lungs as she planted her heel in my gut and kicked,
hard
. I had that flying feeling again as I was thrown back through the air and grunted when my back collided painfully with the trunk of a large evergreen.

Pine needles rained down around me and I looked up just in time to catch sight of Ava sprinting toward me, a broad grin on her lips and that sharp look in her eye. I sidestepped just in time, grabbed her arm and twisted it around behind her. I planted my left hand in the center of her back and pushed until she was pressed against the trunk, held there by my grip. She gasped and pulled, attempting to free her wrist but I had a solid grip on her. Even her new strength wouldn’t break that hold.

“Quit fucking playing around,” she growled. “You can do better than that.”

“You mean like this?” I asked and pressed against her, pinning her to the tree with my body. The hard length of my dick slid along the crack of her ass for a second. I pulled back, letting go of her hand so she could reach down and grab ahold of me. With one hand stroking me she arched her back, lifting her ass and guiding me to her entrance.