This time I put more Alpha in my voice than I’d ever used, and the girl fell to her knees with a pitiful whine. Beckett gave me a scolding look, before walking over to squat down in front of her. She lashed out with her human hands, and I wondered if she even had a Beast form. Surely if she had, she’d have turned by now, right?
Beckett held up his hands. “Easy now, Kitten.”
I laughed. “Kitten?”
He shrugged. “She’s tiny, angry, and hisses. I think it’s fitting.” He looked at the girl. “Hey, kid. Do you have a name?”
More garbled words.
“You think she’s, you know, not all there? In the head?”
I wasn’t sure she understood my words, but she must have understood my tone, because she hissed at me again.
Beckett watched her, his head tilted to the side. “I don’t think so? I think…” He frowned. “Name?” He pointed to himself. “Beckett.” Then he pointed to me. “Corvin.” Then he pointed back to the girl.
She said something in a mumbling slur, and Beckett shook his head. “I think she’s saying ‘girl.’ In Latin.”
“Her name is Girl? And why the hell do you speak Latin? Who the fuck speaks Latin?” I didn’t need to see Beckett’s face to know he was rolling his eyes. “Fine, so she doesn’t speak English, but she speaks Latin. A dead, ancient language. How does that make... Holy shit.”
Beckett looked up at me, his eyes wide. “Lorso.”
“Lorso.”
The girl stopped her struggle at the name. Oh god. I began to hyperventilate on the inside, despite the fact I was trying my best to be a calm Alpha on the outside. “Wasn’t it said that he lived on the border?”
Beckett shrugged. “I thought he was dead. Or like, a rumor.”
Lorso was the last of the old, old guard. The ones who remembered a time when the Manix thrived and we had wars with Lycanthropes over some bullshit. When we were stronger than we were now. He’d had both a female and male Omega. Legend had it that Lorso’s Omega female had been the last one in existence.
When his Omegas died of old age, Lorso had withdrawn from society to die right along with them, and the Legion Generals had let him, happily. His power was too great, and he had no desire to be Alpha General. But if he had, he could have taken it easily.
No one had seen him in decades, and honestly, I’d thought he was just an urban legend by this stage, pulled out by old-timers at Pack gatherings so they could lament how far our species had fallen with the introduction of human blood into our gene pool, blah blah.
I stared at Beckett. “Tell her to take us home, in Latin. Otherwise we’re gonna have to take her back to Maxton.”
He winced, and I got it. She was a half-blood, and a female. The Legion didn’t give a shit what happened to half-bloods, and the Alpha General strongly believed in survival of the fittest. If she couldn’t hold her own in the Legion group homes for half-bloods, she’d be fucked. We’d recently seen the older kids kick the shit out of one of the new half-bloods, who’d been unfortunate enough to appear in town in his teen years. Beckett and I had been about to go kick some ass when Gatlin and Finlo stepped in. Gatlin was the Alpha General’s kid, but if anyone hated the Alpha General more than me and Beckett, it was Gatlin and Finlo.
Nah, we couldn’t take her back to Maxton.
Beckett said something in Latin, and the girl cocked her head to the side. “Don’t think she understands, Beck.”
“I said I knew Latin, not that I could speak it, Corvin,” Beckett said in his pissy voice.
Eventually, either he got the pronunciation right or she finally understood, because she froze and looked at us warily. Or more specifically, me.
I raised my hands. “I mean you no harm,” I told her softly, and then I thrummed deep in my chest. Her eyes went wide, her pupils blowing out. Aw, yeah. I’d been working on my thrum.
Either she’d decided she liked us or she just didn’t know any better, because she stood and pointed back into the trees. She gave me another wide-eyed look, and started to jog out of the clearing along an animal trail.
We followed along behind her. After about twenty minutes, we were nearing the edge of Pack grounds, and I was beginning to wonder if we were jogging into a trap. But just as I was about to grab Beckett and head back, we found ourselves in front of a tiny shack. It was little more than a rough-hewn shelter, though now we were this close, I could see a small amount of smoke from a chimney.
The girl pushed through the door and basically chirped something to whoever was inside. There was no doubt that this was her home. We stepped cautiously in behind her, and there was a deep growl from the darkness that made every hair on my body stand on end. The smell of Manix and Alpha permeated every inch of this cabin.
“Lorso? Um, we mean no harm? We come in peace.”
“Seriously, Corvin? He’s not a fucking alien,” Beckett hissed, while the girl bustled around the one tiny room.
“In,” came the grunted command, and Alpha or not, I obeyed. Beckett and I stood in the middle of the room, and that’s when we saw Lorso.
