2. Axel

Ignitas. I was somewhere called Ignitas, in a body I didn"t recognize, in a classroom where a wizened lizard with a shock of silver hair described our dynamics like a wolf pack. Merritt, the guy"s name was. Everyone here had strange names, where before, I was the weirdo.

So far, Merritt had taught me I was an alpha. That weirdo I"d met the first day, Tuft, was an omega. The priestess was one of a handful of females, and most of our kind were beta males who couldn"t reproduce.

It didn"t make any fucking sense. I was supposed to be back on Earth getting fitted for my wedding tux. My fiancée, Rosanna and I were getting married in two weeks. One moment, I was in the dressing room at the rental place. The next, I was standing naked in a field with a bunch of bipedal lizards with stripes, tails, and claws like mine.

I was straight! Rosanna was pregnant, for fuck"s sake! Now, Merritt was telling me I should be attracted to omegas instead of the priestess, and that I should get my omega pregnant as quickly as possible to further our race. Kobolds had neared extinction after a dragon like the one we"d seen the day we arrived had attacked the village and nearly wiped them all out.

I was supposed to believe I had been a kobold my entire life. I"d been sent to earth to live as a changeling when I was a baby, and I"d been returned early, no thanks to the dragon.

"What about my fiancée on Earth?" I asked when we finally got a chance to ask questions in class.

"He won"t remember you," he said.

"She"s pregnant!" I said. "What do you mean, she won"t remember me?"

"She"s …" he sighed. "Take a break for a moment, everyone."

The teacher approached me as the rest of the class shuffled out into the hallway. "You"re Axel, right?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Call me Merritt." He smiled, showing most of his sharp teeth. "Axel, the child can"t be yours. We can"t reproduce with humans."

"What?" If he was implying what I assumed, I was about to be furious on Rosanna"s behalf. Ain"t no way she cheated on me.

"It"s unusual for alphas to be bisexual."

Oh. He meant me, that I couldn"t have gotten it up. Now I was even more enraged! "I"m straight."

"Straight." There was no heat in his words, which only made me angrier. He was treating me like an interesting science experiment. "Even more unusual. You had sex?"

"Often," I groused. I wasn"t trying to brag, but this wasn"t a one-off thing. "We lived together. We weren"t trying to get pregnant, but we"d always planned to get married."

Well. I hadn"t wanted to get married. I would have been content to live with her without all the pomp and circumstance, but then she got pregnant, and I agreed to give her and the baby my name.

"We can"t," Merritt said slowly, "reproduce with humans. It"s impossible. Our genes are too different from theirs."

"Life finds a way!" I quoted my favorite movie.

"I"ll have our Earth team look into it," Merritt said. "In the meantime, you should spend some time with your omega and see if you change your mind about being straight."

After twenty-four years, I highly doubted it. I didn"t want to spend time with that weirdo, either, though he had been friendly and cheerful.

My fiancée and I had gotten along so well because we were both miserable. She worked the early morning drive-through window at the bank where I had to pick up our cash drawers each day before we opened. We saw each other when we weren"t at our best. After a particularly rude customer had set her off, I asked her on a date to cheer her up. She agreed, stating anyone who had seen her at her worst should get to know her at her best. The rest was history, as they say.

I loved her. At least, I thought I did. We hadn"t been happy together for the last three months before she got pregnant, but we were going through a slump. She was unhappy with her job, same as me, and sometimes we got on each other"s nerves.

I didn"t take the pregnancy news well, either. We"d always used condoms. I thought neither of us wanted children, but when she found out she was pregnant, everything changed. She wanted this baby, and I was going to be a great dad.

Except now, I was a monster with pointy ears, sharp projectiles coming out of my elbows, sharp claws on my hands and feet, an elongated snout that barely looked human, and vertical slits in my eyes. I liked my bright yellow hair and stripes of yellow scales that reminded me of a tiger, but I didn"t know what to think about my tail.

Even my cock was different. It was longer, thicker, and capable of knotting during sex.

I didn"t want to think about sex. Everyone here kept telling me I belonged with the omega I met shortly after I arrived. I"d never been remotely attracted to men, especially not men who wore bow ties and suspenders. He looked ridiculous and gay enough to be a one-kobold pride parade. How was I supposed to want him?

Not that there was anything wrong with being gay. Just, after twenty-four years, I was pretty sure I was not gay, or bisexual, or whatever.

I had been pretty certain I was human, too. Look how that turned out.

Priestess Alma entered the classroom as some of my classmates filed back inside. Our class was comprised of the twenty-somethings who still had tails.

She surprised me when she stopped at my desk. "Please come see me after class." She dropped a bit of cloth on the desktop. It looked like a handkerchief, or a pocket square for a jacket.

"Sure." I leaned forward over the desk, the kind with a platform to rest your elbow and not much more. The cloth smelled … alluring. I leaned over it and sniffed again, filling my nose with the tantalizing scent. Wow. Whatever that was, I wanted more of it, and so did my cock.

That was weird. I"d never been aroused by a scent before. Sure, sometimes the smell of condoms and lubricant made me hard when I wasn"t quite ready yet, but that was because I associated the sharp fragrance with sex.

Fuck. Was that how I"d gotten Rosanna pregnant? Maybe I had knotted her and broke the condom!

No. She would have complained about that. She already swore my cock was too big. It was even bigger now. Like my cock would be the only thing turning her off if she saw me now. I was a fucking monster!

As I sat through the rest of the afternoon class, my mind wandered. My classmates all talked about what they"d left behind on Earth, and I thought through the possibilities of what Merritt had told me.

I"d thought Rosanna was true to me. Sure, she"d fooled around before we got together, but once she moved in with me, we swore to be exclusive.

Now, I wasn"t so sure. Her best friend was always hanging around. James. I hated the guy. He grated on my last nerve. He took her out to the movies or dancing on the weekends I had to work. They went barhopping until the bars closed. I never expected Rosanna to be the girl who stayed home reading books, but something about her friendship with James always put me on edge.

When Merritt dismissed class, I grabbed the piece of cloth Priestess Alma had left for me and held it to my snout. Damn. I couldn"t explain the effect it had on me. I"d never wanted anyone like this, not even Rosanna. She was the furthest thing from my mind as I entered the priestess"s classroom.

One of her students was talking to her at her desk, so I held back by the whiteboard and waited. She motioned me forward, and I caught a whiff of a similar scent, but not the same, from her student. I brought the cloth to my nose again.

"What is this?" I asked.

"That"s the scent of your omega. I borrowed one of his pocket squares to see how you would react. Merritt says you"re straight."

"Yes, Ma"am."

"Where did you grow up, dear?"

"Burnsville, Texas."

"Small town?"

I nodded.

"What did you do for a living?"

"I worked retail. Sporting goods."

She nodded. "You never questioned your sexuality?"

"Why would I? Girls were constantly throwing themselves at me." Boys too, if I were honest, and yeah, maybe I noticed, but I never acted on it. "Is that part of being an alpha? Everyone wants you?"

She laughed. "Not necessarily. It"s usually only your fated mate, your omega, who wants you." She wrapped my fingers around the pocket square. "His name is Tuft."

"I know. We met."

"He would like to get to know you before hormones and mating rituals take over."

"Like a courtship?"

"Yes, exactly like a courtship."

The old-fashioned word seemed bigger and more formal than dating back on Earth. I was somewhere between overwhelmed and terrified of it. "How long before I can tell him I"m not interested?"

She blinked her wide amber eyes. "If that"s still how you feel when your tail falls off, I suppose there"s nothing we can do about it. It"s just …" she sighed.

"Is he dying of cancer or something?"

"What? No. We don"t get cancer." She laughed. "We don"t succumb to most human diseases, though we did run the risk of making ourselves sick when we had to stay underground to raise our young. You"ll be able to raise yours in the cabin we"ve assigned to you. Once your courtship is complete, Tuft will move into the cabin with you to nest and raise your hatchlings."

"Nest?" More and more, I was beginning to think I was a character in my favorite movie, except I wasn"t a cool paleontologist. I was one of the dinosaurs.

"You"ll learn more about being an alpha in Merritt"s classes, but by now you must know we lay eggs."

"Yes, Ma"am." It had been a hard sell, but Merritt had convinced me I was part kobold and part human, and the kobold parts took over when mating.

"That"s all I"ll say about it, then." She sighed. "Be careful with him. Tuft hasn"t had an easy go of it. Promise me you"ll at least try to like him."

I glanced down at the yellow pocket square in my hand, but I couldn"t keep the concerned wrinkle from my brow. "What"s wrong with him?"

"A bit of impatience and a strong desire to please anyone and everyone who comes along."

"Including me?" I asked. I didn"t trust suck-ups. Never had.

"You"re his alpha. He would want to please you, even if that wasn"t his personality."

I snorted. "Fat chance he can please me. I"ll let him down easy," I promised.

She must have given up on me from the way she sighed. "Do you know your way to the alpha gym?"

"Yes." My class and I had lifted weights this morning to test our newfound strength.

"I"ll have him meet you there for lunch tomorrow. You can let him down easy then."

I regretted my words the moment she threw them back at me. The scent of his pocket square haunted me all the way through the halls. I swore I could smell him outside, and again when I reached my cabin.

As one of the older alphas who had returned from Earth after the changeling circle was broken, I was given an available cabin outside the fortress. Most were occupied by adult alphas still looking for their mates.

My little cabin was cozy for one person. I doubted it was big enough for two, let alone a family. Merritt had said there might be construction work for me once they started building new cabins for families. It would be something for me to do after I"d finished kobold alpha training, at least.

In the confines of my tiny bathroom, standing naked in front of my mirror, I wanted to watch how the pocket square"s aroma affected me. I inhaled deeply and let it wash over me. Yeah. It was like that. My cock was hard already, and I hadn"t even touched it.

I had been attracted to Rosanna. I"d asked her out, after all. I"d initiated our first kiss. I"d asked her to move in with me. Ours wasn"t a one-sided relationship. The sex had always been a delicate dance, since I was so much bigger than her five-foot petite frame, but it had been enjoyable.

I sniffed the pocket square again and drooled. I had never felt desire on this basic level before. I didn"t care who this omega was or what he looked like. I wanted to fuck him senseless.

Mindful of my claws, I first palmed my cock. Then, I gripped it, careful to dig the points of my claws into my thumb so they wouldn"t cut me. My grip was almost too tight, but I didn"t care. I needed to come.

My hand flew on my cock in a rhythm faster than I could have moved as a human. I imagined a hole slick for me, deep moans in my ear, and the cutest snout pressing into my neck, biting down where it met my shoulder, connecting him to me forever. I decorated the mirror with a sticky white mess, but it wasn"t enough. I was still hard.

I needed more. Needed him.

Nothing had scared me so much in my life.