Arch is still out flying while Theo and I comb files of the one hundred human women we’ll get to choose from. I sigh and Theo looks up. His grey hair is in a bun, but he keeps running his hand through it.
“What is it, Ben?” he asks lightly.
I look away. I still hate how easily my bonded can read me. We’ve been a chime, a group of bonded alphas, for the last decade though, and they’ve had plenty of time to learn my tells.
I shake my wings out. “I think we have sorted out the women who will not be suitable based on their questionnaires and background files. That leaves this group.” I gesture to the third screen where approximately twenty files are open.
Theo nods, not questioning my silent refusal to speak my mind. He looks out the open balcony, the tiniest hint of orange on the horizon. “It’s getting late. Wanna play before we have to crash?”
I bite back a smile and shake my head. “Not tonight. I want to get some sleep.”
The Granite team has been working on minimizing our need to be in our stone-forms for over a decade. Every year or so, they come out with a new vaccine that tweaks our DNA. The last two injections have stopped us from turning to stone at all.
Stone time left us incredibly vulnerable. Now that the sun doesn’t force us to turn into silent, still watchers all day, we are nearly unstoppable. We still sleep pretty hard from sun-up until early afternoon, but it’s miles above where we were at only ten years ago.
I’m a lead on the Limestone team. We’ve been working on Project Selene for some time. It was originally started to find out why humans reacted so strongly to our seed. However, we quickly found that our species were able to interbreed. And it had likely been happening for centuries. We informed our superiors; such a startling discovery required a change in our tactics. While we may be losing our omegas, if we can interbreed with humans, our species will survive.
We were no longer attempting to hunt the humans into submission. Now, we were hunting them foroursurvival.
Not the humans knew that. No, if word of our decline got out, they might rally a new resistance.
Stubborn fuckers. Haven’t enough of them died?
I stand, stretching and fighting down a yawn. Theo must be tired too as he’s rubbing one of his small horns. He’s the only one of the three of us with them.Gives him a devil-may-care look. I straighten my linen breeches, the only clothes I have on at the moment. “C’mon. Bed. We need to have our wits about us at the choosing this evening.”
Theo stands and he folds one of his misty-grey wings over my shoulder. He lets his claw on the lower joint dig playfully into my skin.
“Nope, you brat. Go to your own bed.” I smile as I say it though, and he huffs in annoyance, removing his wing and muttering something about needing more affectionate bond mates who’ll take care of his hard cock.
Chapter Three
Fern
Fuck my entire life. My eyes flit over the screen again, rereading the secure message that just came in.
This cannot be happening.
The last sentence runs through my head. “Remember that your approval is signed and sealed within the Department of Gargoyle Relations, per Section Twelve, subset B ‘wherein entry to the bridal selection is considered fully legal and binding given the human’s continued residence within the New United States’.”
Just as my mind starts to unfog and I realize I need to get the hell out of here, I hear the autolocks on my house engage.
Fuck. Goddamn government control of electronics.
I try to focus on my breath, struggling to calm down.Fuck this, I think, as I stand and head to the cabinet to grab a bottle of wine. My eyes land on the two bottles at the back of the cabinet.Fuck, I’ll lose six months of work.I grab them and open the window angrily.I cannot believe I’ll lose these weapons, I think as I pour them out into the dry grass.
That done, I pick up the wine again, pulling straight from the bottle. As I wipe my mouth, my eyes catch on the photograph of my parents, hanging framed on the wall.
How can I submit to this? Hatred fills me. These bastards killed my parents. Now I’m expected to let them rut me like beasts?
No. I will never submit.I bring the wine bottle with me as I sit in front of my screens and start encrypting some messages.Lora’s first, I think,she needs as much information as I can pass on. Then Raquel and Noah.
I look at the time. I have seven hours.
Chapter Four
Theodore
I’m so damned excited I sleep restlessly. I wake with an aching cock and I consider how, not even twenty-four hours from now, I’ll be dipping it inside a hot human cunt. I wonder if their anatomy is similar to what our females have.
