Omega's Run (2 page)

He fell to his knees and just as he opened his mouth to scream I shoved the tattered stump of his own arm into it, effectively gagging him. He fell over and lay on the ground, shock setting in as he bled out across the shitty carpet and I turned to look at the whore. Splattered in her pimp’s blood and staring at me with a wide eyed look of vacant terror on her face.

“No one will believe you,” I told her smirking. I shot a little salute in her direction, holding two fingers to my temple before I grabbed my bag and walked out the door.

My bike was parked at the far end of the lot and I quickly stowed my shit, lashing it to the rear carrier with a set of bungee cords. I shrugged into my jacket, ignoring the way it brushed against the Greek letter Omega that was burned into my chest, a parting gift from William.

The bike roared to life, engine rumbling and throbbing beneath me. I pulled on my helmet, heeled up the kickstand and roared off into the night, humming a cheerful little ditty to myself as the miles fell away under my wheels. It was time to head north.

Chapter 2

Ava

I watched the television as I slid bullets into a fresh magazine. The volume was off, but I didn’t need to hear. The room was awash in the alternating flashing red and blue lights from emergency vehicles on the local eleven o’clock news. A pretty reporter, mixed race, spoke into the microphone, lips moving with a sense of urgency as the black closed captioning boxes scrolled up from the bottom of the screen, the white type rolling along to fill them.

Words like ‘brutal attack’, ‘several men’, ‘blunt force trauma’ and ‘no eye witnesses’ flitted along before new ones appeared in their place. It was the same story everywhere we’d been.

I’d nearly had him in St. Louis. Missed him by an hour in Huntsville. Fucker moved around a lot, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Scum of the earth? Yeah. But they were still worth more than his sorry carcass. I slid the magazine home and pulled back the slide, jacking a round into the chamber. I moved with the practiced ease and precision that all Crusaders were trained with and it felt good. Calm, and full of assurance. I popped the magazine back out of my weapon and topped it off before sliding it back home with a satisfying click.

He wouldn’t be getting away this time. Failure wasn’t an option. I slid my weapon, a Glock 23 with an attached tactical light, into the holster along the outside of my thigh. The attack on the news was just outside New Orleans. I’d been here a couple of days already on the hunt. If he was willing to draw this kind of heat from the mundane authorities then he was moving on, and if he was moving on, then so was I. I picked up my riding jacket. A Joe Rocket with Kevlar lining and slipped it on, zipping it midway up my chest.

A final check of my riding boots and I snatched up my knapsack and helmet, heading for the door. I made sure my credentials as a licensed bounty hunter hung in plain sight from the bead chain around my neck. Made the gun, not so much less
noticeable
, but more understood.

It really
was
my day job. When I wasn’t hunting one of
them
, I spent my time getting paid tracking down your good ‘ol, garden variety, human criminals. It kept me sharp for the hunts that mattered. The hunts like this one.

I checked out of the roadside motel and pulled on my riding gloves before I mounted my bike. She was a satiny black Buell Lightning and had never let me down. I had a guess as to which highway he would have taken out of the area. I put my helmet on and fired my baby up, pulling out of the lot smoothly, leaning into the turn that would take me out and toward the highway.

If my calculations were right, if I had gleaned his pattern correctly, he would head north again. I made to follow.

I’ll get him, James. I promise.
I thought to my brother, the familiar fractured ache of his loss giving a dull throb in the center of my heart. He’d gone down in a hunt last year, and it
still
felt like just yesterday.

I was well rested, I was primed and I would ride all night and into the next day to close the gap between me and my quarry. Remy Dulcet didn’t know it yet, but he’d met his match with Ava Martine. I would catch him, it was only a matter of time and time, for him, was growing really fucking short.

Chapter 3

Remus

New Orleans to Chicago. I jumped onto the I-55 north, transferred onto the 57 north, and managed a ride that was just shy of a thousand miles in a little more than a day. I stopped as little as possible and didn’t feel too bad for it afterward. A normal human would have fallen asleep at the handlebars or would have been in so much pain from the ride that they barely would have been able to move.

I checked into a motel near the Loop in downtown Chicago and crashed for a couple hours before I got up and headed out. Even I could admit that I had spent long enough wandering like a lost puppy. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t have anywhere to go since I was made Omega, and for the past six months I had done nothing but wander the country, fucking and fighting whenever the opportunity for either presented itself.

It was time to stop wandering and figure out a plan. I had centuries ahead of me if a Hunter didn’t get me first, and I couldn’t spend the next few hundred years just doing the same nothing.

Less than three blocks from my motel was a seedy dive bar. One of those hole-in-the-wall type of places that seem to crop up in every town in every country in the world, no matter the population. Live in a small town in the middle of nowhere? There’s a seedy dive bar somewhere. Just the way of the world.

This particular dive, while still maintaining the sterling reputation of dives everywhere, at least sported nine foot pool tables instead of those crappy coin operated ones you’ll see in most bars. And this bar also had something else. A regular that I was particularly interested in speaking to.

It’d taken me two months to track the fucker down. Four months after my banishment, I woke up one morning in an alley in Los Angeles with a hangover the likes of which I had rarely experienced. That was when I decided that I needed to do something and not just wander around aimlessly. I may not have a pack anymore, but I at least still had a will to live.

I pushed open the glass door and entered a dim, smoke filled, interior. I wrinkled my nose in disgust before I could even think to hide my reaction. A wolf-kind’s sense of smell was considerably stronger than a human’s and even a human non-smoker would have been sent packing from this place by the rank odor.

Chicago had joined the rest of the country in instituting a smoking ban inside public buildings and businesses. Of course some places, like this dump, either chose to ignore such things or managed to get themselves grandfathered in as a private establishment or club as an end run around the new law. I found myself wishing that the man I was searching for had more of a tendency for frequenting a less,
fragrant
, bar.

There was little that I could do about the situation though. Beggars can’t be choosers. So, I pushed down the urge to vomit and took shallow breaths through my mouth, tugging at the hem of the plain t-shirt I had thrown on beneath my jacket. I hated wearing shirts. Some might call it vain, an excuse to show off the muscles I had put a great deal of work into building. In truth, I simply didn’t like being constricted and the garment was nothing more than a hindrance if I needed to change in a hurry. It made me uncomfortable. But even dives still required their patrons to be fully dressed. No shirt, no shoes, no service… so I was forced to stick to the inane conventions created by a human society that I didn’t belong to in any way shape or form. A society I had never even been a part of having been born this way, rather than Moon Forged.

I’d stopped just inside the door and though it was glass, it was almost completely obscured, inside and out, with stickers and posters of various kinds and for various things. Skate logos, bands, book stores, bumper stickers with sarcastic sentences scrawled across them in spidery script and garish colors. You name it, it was plastered to it; so much so that when the door had closed, very little light filtered in from the outside, despite being just before sunset. Not that it mattered much, my eyes adjusted quickly to the dimly lit interior.

The man I was looking for was already here at a billiard table near the back of the hazy room. He had his back to me, but I couldn’t mistake that slight frame for anyone other than Cruz. Jeremiah Cruz was the Alpha of the Chicago pack. They held the whole city and had done so for a good thirty or forty years. They didn’t have the kind of territory that my former pack held, but they had plenty for a pack of six to be dealing with and Cruz was the man to thank for their success.

“Remus Reese,” he said as I walked up behind him. “I’d recognize that smell anywhere. What brings you into my territory?”

“It’s Remy,” I rumbled, startled to hear the name I had been given at my birth. I hadn’t heard it in half a year. “Remy Dulcet. I’m not here to hunt, or out for your territory, Cruz,” I assured him. “I just want to talk.”

“Yeah? About what?” He leaned over the table, lining up a shot. With a smooth motion of his arm he sent the cue ball rolling across the table to sink the seven ball into the far corner pocket.

“I find myself in a difficult situation… I need a pack.”

Cruz shot up from the table and turned to face me, his eyebrows already reaching for his hairline as he gave me a wide eyed expression of pure shock.

“Remus Reese, the golden boy of the Pacific Northwest was driven from his pack?” he asked incredulously. “What in the hell happened up there?”

“It’s a long story that I played too much of a role in for my liking.”

His eyes narrowed and I could tell I was losing him.

“You come to me, looking to join with my pack because you heard we took an Omega in a while back, didn’t you? Well, just because we did it once, doesn’t mean we’ll do it again, especially if you won’t tell me what got you the boot in your ass in the first place.”

He was right, as much as I hated to admit it. He had no reason to believe anything of me and if I didn’t come clean there was no chance at all he would even consider letting me join with his pack.

So I laid it out for him. The pack dying, falling apart under my father’s flawed leadership. He had once been a great Alpha, but time had whittled away at his sense and he began making stupid decisions. Decisions that would have destroyed the pack if he had been allowed to continue as its Alpha.

Over an hour later we were sitting at the bar, beers in hands as I finished my tale. I’d spared no detail in the telling either, figuring if I wanted a shot at this, I’d better go for broke.

“So William branded me Omega after he killed Rom and his mate destroyed Lucinda. The fucking cunt deserved, it she was the biggest cunt in the pack.” I’d actually been pretty fucking proud of little Chloe for pulling that one off. You’d probably never hear me say it out loud though.

Cruz nodded and chugged down some more of his beer, signaling the bartender with his free hand for another as he drained the last of it. He slammed down the glass and turned to me.

“I’ll agree with you there. We’ve been hearing rumors about the Pacific Northwest pack out here for a while. A few locals even kicked around the idea of trying to horn in on your guys’ territory.”

I cocked my head to the side slightly at that, giving him a questioning look. “And what stopped them?”

“You and your whack job of a brother. May he rest in peace,” he added the last almost as an afterthought while a guilty look stole across his face. I waved it away. Romulus really had been off his nut so I couldn’t blame Cruz for what amounted to a reasonable reaction.

“Also, your numbers up there.” Cruz continued, “There aren’t very many packs that stand the remotest possible chance of going up against your people. If they tried to get into your territory you guys would just roll right over ‘em, like the Nevada pack you all disappeared a few years back.”

That
certainly got my attention. I’d had no knowledge that a pack from Nevada had attempted to break into our territory. If that were true, and the pack wasn’t responsible for defending our borders against them, then what’d really happened? Yet another secret father had kept.

I shunted that machination aside, returning my focus to Cruz as he picked up his fresh beer and continued talking.

“Based on what you’re saying, I’ll agree. Your old man needed to go. But to bring the
Hunters
into it? To bring the Hangman
himself
into it? You realize he’s one of the highest ranked members in the states right? Got some contacts in New York that’ve speculated he might even run the entire damned western hemisphere of their organization… and you picked
him
to get involved?”

He shook his head in disbelief, “Man, that’s a degree of poor decision making so bad that I’m not even certain they’ve invented a scale to measure it yet. If it was just getting rid of your Alpha, that’s one thing. I can see that, I can understand that, could possibly even forgive the patricide aspect to it. But getting the Hunters involved with it is going beyond the pale, Son. I can’t let you join our pack with that kind of a stigma hangin’ over you. The rest of ‘em will always be wondering when you’ll bring the hunters to our door next. It would never work. I’d be fighting off challenges for my title every full and probably every new moon too.”

My fingers tightened around the handle on my beer mug. I was grateful that I hadn’t been holding the glass by the body or it might have shattered in my grip. As it was, the cracking sound of the thick handle fracturing under my fingers warned me early enough, that I made myself let go before anything shattered or broke completely.

It had been a long shot, honestly. But I’d had to give it a try, and I couldn’t blame him. Jeremiah was a good Alpha. He protected his people and he protected their territory. We talked for a few minutes longer but after he finished his beer he clapped me on the shoulder, a gesture that did nothing to ease the pain in my chest and left me there. Still, as alone as I’d ever felt before, it was worse now that the last chance I could think of had walked away and left me in the dirt once again.