• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But there was still plenty of other stuff to cover, thanks to the shit storm they were all in. “What did you tell your parents?” Qhuinn asked.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

In spite of the exhaustion that was dragging at him, he shook his head. “Tell me.”

“You don’t—”

“You tell me . . . or I’m going to get up and start doing fucking Pilates.”

“Whatever. You’ve always said that was for pansies.”

“Fine. Jujitsu. Talk before I pass out, would you?”

Blay took a Corona out of the little fridge. “My parents guessed it was us coming in. They’re just back from the glymera’s big party. So Lash’s folks must be finding out now.”

Fuck. “You tell them . . . about me?”

“Yeah, and they want you to stay.” The beer made a gasping sound as Blay opened it. “We’re just not going to say anything to anybody. There’ll be speculation about where you’ve gone, but it’s not like the glymera’s going to do a house search for you, and our doggen are discreet.”

“I’m only staying today.”

“Look, my parents love you, and they’re not going to toss you out on your ass. They know what Lash was like, and they also know your parents.” Blay stopped there, but the tone he’d used added a lot of adjectives to the words.

Prejudicial, judgmental, cruel . . .

“I’m no one’s burden.” Qhuinn glowered. “Not yours. Not anyone’s.”

“It’s not a burden, though.” Blay’s eyes dropped to the floor. “I just have my parents and me. Who do you think I’d go to if something bad happened? John and you are all I have in this world apart from my mom and dad. The two of you are my family.”

“Blay, I’m going to jail.”

“We don’t have any jails, so you’re going to need a place to be under house arrest in.”

“And you don’t think that’ll be public record? You don’t think I’ll have to disclose where I stay?”

Blay swallowed half his beer, got out his phone, and started texting. “Listen, can you stop playing spot-the-obstacle? We’re going to have enough problems of our own without you pulling more out of your ass. We’ll figure a way for you to stay here, okay?”

There was a beep.

“See? John agrees.” Blay flashed the screen, which read, GREAT IDEA on it, then polished off his beer with the satisfied expression of a male who had sorted out both his basement and his garage. “This is all going to be fine.”

Qhuinn eyed his friend through lids that had become heavy as tile roofs. “Yeah.”

As he passed out, his last thought was that, sure, things were going to work out . . . just not how Blay had it planned.

Chapter Twenty-two

LASH, son of the Omega, was reborn on a scream that ripped out of his throat.

In confused madness, he returned to the world as he had come into it twenty-five years before: naked and gasping and bloodied, only this time his body was that of a full-grown male, not an infant.

His quick moment of conscious awareness passed fast, and then he was in agony, his veins filled with acid, every inch of him corroding from the inside out. He put his hands on his stomach, jacked over to the side, and threw up black bile onto a worn wooden floor. Too consumed by the retching, he didn’t bother to wonder where he was or what had happened or why he was voiding stuff that looked like old crankcase oil.

In the midst of the swirling disorientation and the crippling heaves and a blind panic he couldn’t control, a savior reached out to him. A hand smoothed down his back and stroked him over and over again, the warm palm falling into a rhythm that slowed his racing heart and calmed his head and eased his stomach. When he could, he rolled onto his back again.

In the midst of a blurry visual field, a black translucent figure came into focus. Its face was ethereal, a vision of male beauty in the bloom of its early twenties, but the malevolence behind the shadowy eyes made the visage horrible.

The Omega. It had to be the Omega.

This was the Evil his religion and folklore and training had described.

Lash started to scream again, but the shadowed hand reached out to him and gently touched his arm. He calmed.

Home, Lash thought. I am