Chapter One Bastian

Even in the middle of the night, during a thunderstorm, this gods-forsaken corner of Raksim was too bloody warm. You'd think that torrents of rain would provide some relief from the heat, but you would be wrong. The only thing that seemed to happen when it rained was an increase of humidity so steep, I wanted to shed my skin like a layer of clothing.

My ancestors were from a country supposedly even warmer than this, and yet I seemed to be the only one suffering. My lanky packmate Cantor was as pale as ever, with no rosy tint to his face, which shone in the dim spell-light like a wayward moon. I'd bet a round of ale that it was only rain dripping down his face, and not sweat or gods-damned tears.

Not that I can really tell in this weather, and in the dark. I can barely see anything at all, let alone the fine nuances of my packmate's features.

Of course, if Cantor was having any profound emotions like, say, excitement over finding a track for us to follow, I would know about it. Cantor is the only one in the pack who doesn't shield his bond to the rest of us. We all know how he's feeling most of the time.

Right now he's not particularly happy.

"See anything?" I called out to him anyway, because I'm the social one of our pack and the sound of my own voice comforts me. My stoic packmate only grunted a negative, barely discernible over the steady thrum of rain and the raging river, then stomped back through the mud to check our horses.

Again.

He's my best friend, and doesn't have a featherweight of malice in his entire body, but even he has limits. Drowning under a raging fit of a storm, trudging through the remains of a flash flood and several mudslides, and all after several days of very little sleep, seems to be a limit.

It's almost dawn for the gods' sake.

Our horses were tethered beyond the edges of the mudslide we were currently wading through, so that their legs didn't get weighed down by the sticky sludge. They were starting to shy at shadows, even with Cantor babying them. I couldn't exactly blame them. My mare didn't like the pouring rain any more than I did. Even more than I wanted to get myself to an inn, I desperately wanted to get her to a nice, dry stable.

Sweat dripped into my eyes along with the rainwater- and no doubt those tears of frustration as well- as I searched the mud for tracks. We'd been chasing these bandits for days now.

We thought we'd lost them as they crossed the border into Lutin. Given the status of our pack, we couldn't exactly chase them into foreign lands, so Davos made the call to camp out in the middle of nowhere and ‘patrol' until we were sure they had left and weren't coming back.

The cunning bastards snuck past us last night. Not only that, but they hit several isolated farmhouses this morning, right under our noses, and probably in preparation for the storm that's hitting my last nerve right now.

That's when Davos, our packleader, really got a wasp in his cloak. As if he wasn't usually bad enough.

My skin chafed under my leather gear. Leather and candles of rain are not a good combination. When was the last time I got to take it off? I couldn't even remember.

I trained with the rest of the pack- mostly because Lynter would never allow me to shirk- but we all knew I wasn't a soldier.

Which might have been part of why I was suffering so much in this heat. Of all my packmates, I definitely had the most natural padding.

I still looked damn good, so it didn't worry me much, except when we were running around the edges of swamp country. My whole pack would envy me though, when we finally got to go home to the mountains and they had to suffer through the snow and chill.

"Arrgh, why are we still out here ?"

I was tempted to throw down my helmet for emphasis but since I was standing in the middle of a field of mud that didn't seem like a smart idea. Cantor, having made sure the horses were still alive and not about to run over a cliff to get away from this insanity, patted me sympathetically on the arm.

"Davos just had to be an anal bastard," I muttered. It's very hard to throw a decent tantrum in front of Cantor. He's just too nice.

"There's no omega," I continued to complain. "This search is pointless. We could ride out the storm at the inn and follow them when it's over."

"We don't know that," Cantor said, quietly. "We have to make sure."

My sweet packmate. Always defending his packlead. He didn't mind if Davos made us follow every godsdamned lead, no matter how brutal the weather, or how unlikely we were to find any mythical lost omegas.

I should be keeping my eye out for unicorns while we were at it.

We'd already compensated the farms. No one was killed by the bandits. It was just a bit of food stolen, and whatever they had taken from travelers when they had set up on our lands in the first place. Davos had acted as if their sudden change to petty food theft made everything all the more suspicious, which made me want to roll my eyes.

"I'm just as keen about chasing down bandits as the next alpha, but come on. This is ridiculous ," I said, knowing my voice was bitter and not caring. "He's chasing a fantasy. They didn't hit and run because they have an omega. They did it because they know we're chasing them through this storm like idiots."

"It's not idiotic," Cantor said. "If there is an omega and we don't catch them…"

"I was the one who talked to the farmholders," I said, as we both continued slogging through the mud, searching it for tracks. We stayed a few paces apart to cover more ground. "They always tell tales about omegas, especially this close to the border with Lutin." Shaking my head, I sighed as yet more water streamed into my eyes.

"It's usually just a pretty beta or alpha girl who took up with the wrong crowd." I shrugged, even knowing Cantor probably couldn't see the gesture in the dim light. His forest green magic mixed with my own orange spell-lights made for a weird combination and we were keeping it low in an effort to be discreet.

Although they had to be extremely stupid bandits if they were also out here, slogging through mud for no reason.

"Maybe the bandits didn't rob them at all. Maybe those peasants were taking advantage of our presence to claim they were robbed and get a bit of extra money out of Davos."

Guilt stabbed at me even as I said it. We hadn't seen the bandits cross back over our border, but Sinclair said he'd found evidence of their passing by, and he would know. Somehow that sneaky mage always knows everything. It's his talent.

And besides, my own talent is talking to people, and those men and women were definitely robbed by bandits. The farmers had been telling the truth– at least, the truth as they saw it. One of the young men had even been injured in the attacks.

However, all of that didn't mean they knew an omega from a beta. They'd probably never seen or smelled an omega in their lives.

In Raksim, the moment an omega hits his or her second puberty and reveals their designation they're immediately sent to the king. That's if they're not snatched up and bonded to a random passing alpha pack illegally. Omegas are precious, and any pack would give their eye teeth to have one. Unfortunately for the omega, it's a first come, first served kind of situation when it comes to bonding, so they don't often get the luxury of choosing a pack for themselves.

That kind of snatch and grab has been going on for generations. Which means, of course, that almost no omegas are ever born out here in the backwaters of the kingdom anymore. Or even in the cities, for that matter. I might not be a farmer, but even I know that if you remove all the black sheep pretty soon your flock will only have white lambs, and the black ones will be gone forever.

Davos seemed to think the bandits had picked up an omega in Lutin when they crossed the border, but that wretched country treated their omegas even worse than we did. There's just no way there was a random omega just sitting there, waiting to be grabbed.

After talking to the farmers, we'd tracked the bandits all afternoon, until the storm hit around sunset and the trail became confused. Lynter was our best tracker and between him and Sinclair they'd decided that at least some of the bandits had been pushed into the flooding river by a mudslide. Unfortunately, mudslides tend to do things like wipe out tracks, so Davos then decided the best thing to do was to wander blindly up and down both sides of the river in pairs until we found something.

And of course, since we were the ones in charge, we couldn't possibly expect our servants or soldiers to do the dirty work for us. Not if there was an omega involved.

No, we got the honor. We got the privilege. We got the…

I was on the verge of roaring with frustration, when I spotted them.

Footprints.

Godsdammit.

My first, shameful inclination was to ignore them. If they hadn't been so obviously fresh I might have been truly tempted to do so.

Unfortunately, they were crisp and barely touched by the rain. Only wicks old.

I stared at them, trying to make sense of whoever made them. A boot print, and half of a bare footprint. The boot was large enough to be male. Not huge though, so probably a beta. Alphas were, on average, much taller and heavier than betas and anyway, from their scents, all the bandits were betas.

It was smeared, as if the beta who made it was dragging his feet. Tired, perhaps, or injured.

The bare foot, however, was small and the print was shallow, as if the stepper was light on their feet.

Probably too light to be a man, particularly one in armor.

Possibly even too light to be a beta. A child, maybe?

I refused to consider the other option. Omegas were the smallest designation, but it was definitely not an omega.

Anyway, I'm not a tracker, any more than I'm a soldier. For all I knew the one wearing boots was an omega and the other one was a seven foot tall alpha.

Why was it bare? I stared at the mark. The pits left by the toes were already half-full with water. No one should be wandering around barefoot in this disgusting sludge. I felt revolted enough having my boots touch it, let alone my bare skin.

"Bloody God's knot," I muttered. There weren't many reasons for a small woman or a very unfortunate child to be wandering around in this storm, especially barefoot, but the most obvious one had already sprung to mind.

This probably wasn't a girl out to get her jollies by slumming it with some bandits. This was a captive, who might have managed to outlive most of her captors, but was still wandering around a fresh, dangerous mudslide in a thunderstorm, with someone who was wearing boots was right behind her.

Omega or not, I couldn't leave an escapee at the mercy of a bunch of violent thieves. They had almost killed one of the young farmers when they stole provisions. Knocked him over the head, and then stabbed him for no reason after he was already down. We knew there were at least six of them, if not more. If she had survived the mudslide, it was likely one or more of the bandits had as well, and they had either recaptured her or were about to.

I only hoped she was a recent acquisition, and not someone they had been dragging around the whole time we'd been chasing them. For her sake, as well as theirs, since our pack wasn't exactly inclined to mercy for rapists. Bandits might be stealing for any number of reasons and justice demanded we figure them out and proceed accordingly. Rapists only ever had one reason, and as far as I was concerned, there was only one solution as well.

My poor horse was going to have to wait for her stable.