Chapter 1
Grayson
Frog legs? Again? Grayson’s last meal in his hometown was the epitome of redneck delicacy. How fitting.
“What’s that sour look for?” his mother snapped. “Too good for frog legs, Mr. College Degree?” Decades of misplaced rage hung in thick lines from his mother’s face. Her hair, wispy and graying, was scraped back into an old, tortoiseshell claw clip.
“No!” he said hastily. “I was… worrying about the chemicals in the water. I heard they make the frogs gay.”
“Not in Mineral Bluff, they don’t. That’s some city bullshit.” His mother gave the plate a dark look. “Go wash up, boy. And call your brothers in.”
Boy.As if he wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old, adult man. Admittedly, he’d been forced to return home after completing his nursing degree and training, but only after six glorious years of relative freedom from his family. And, assuming all went as planned, he’d be free again in just a few, short hours.
Grayson stepped out onto the decaying back porch and yelled, “Jameson! Dawson! Food!” That third part was what sent his younger brothers scurrying from the copse of trees behindthe old house. Two perfectly normal, all-American boys—the antithesis of Grayson himself.
His parents knew their precious firstborn son was an Omega from day one. Yet, years of practice in the art of denial created the perfect environment for his parents to simply say, “No.” And that was that.
Grayson himself didn’t even know he was an Omega growing up. Not until the heat cycles came. In the most humiliating night of his life, Grayson had been forced to stumble from his dorm and drive himself to the emergency room. It was a form of torture he’d never had to endure until that night. Some overworked ER nurse was forced to gently explain to him that he was an Omega and had entered his first heat.
“Did Ma cook them frogs we caught?” Dawson demanded. He was the youngest, at only fourteen. His long, lanky build was just like Grayson’s. They even shared the same pale blond hair and skin that was eighty-six percent obscured by freckles.
“ ‘Course she did,” twenty-year-old Jameson said with a shove. “We didn’t do all that work for nothin’! Pa home yet?” he asked Grayson.
“Nah. Probably at the bar right about now.”
Jameson rolled his eyes and started pushing Dawson toward the spigot at the side of their ramshackle family home. Grayson opted to wash up at the bathroom sink, like a normal person. Part of him was grateful for the years he spent acting in front of his family. His whole town, actually. It made it easier to conceal the frantic thudding of his heart behind his thin chest.
In just a few hours, he would be sneaking out of this musty old hellhole for the last time. With that thought spinning on repeat in his head, Grayson smiled his way through dinner, doing his best to still the trembling in his fingers.
He barely registered when his brothers started deriding the Mer, scoffing at the “alien overlords” and proclaiming distrust of their technology. Their mother was quick to join in, though she, too, had never known life before the Mer.
It had been fifty-one years since the Mer fell from the heavens and plunged into Earth’s oceans. The changes were slow—a steady rise in sea levels, a strange increase in babies born intersex. Then, the Mer emerged from the depths.
The invaders deflected bullets with terrifying ease, and eventually, humanity gave up the fight. As time passed, human Omegas became fully established as a secondary gender—though only a fraction of the population had been affected.
The Mer, on the other hand, consisted exclusively of Alphas and Omegas. In Grayson’s miniscule town, and at his little community college, he’d never had the chance to encounter a Mer, whether Alpha or Omega. Anti-Mer factions claimed Alphas were violent, aggressive creatures, while the Omegas were weak and sickly.
A shred of these rumors were true. It was the whole reason the Mer had abandoned Usoi, their home planet. Radiation ravaged the planet’s waters, and destroyed fragments of the Mer genome. It had left their Omegas nearly incapable of producing healthy eggs, and brought the species to the brink of extinction. That was, until they found Earth, and its population of intelligent beings capable of live birth.
“Right, Gray?” Jameson was staring over at him, mouth twisted into a furious frown.
“Oh, yeah, you’re absolutely right.” Grayson shoveled the last of his dinner into his mouth. “I gotta get to bed if I’m waking up at 4:30 to head out deer hunting.”
His mother gave him a curt nod. “You better bag somethin’ this time, boy. Don’t go wastin’ our bullets. Pleased to see you tryin’ to do somethin’ useful for once.”
Grayson mumbled a vague agreement and fled the dining room. His duffel bag was mostly packed already. He’d already gathered up his secret items, like facial cleanser and sunscreen. All he needed now were the few outfits that didn’t involve camouflage.
No one could accuse him of not playing his part well. Sure, the neighbors whispered about his disinterest in dating, and his parents repeatedly nagged him to bulk up, but no one hurled gay slurs at him, and his status as an Omega was collecting dust in the attic. The thought of existing somewhere he could simplybewas both intoxicating and petrifying.
Out in the hallway, Grayson could hear the sounds of his brothers and mother shuffling off to their respective rooms. Jameson and Dawson would probably be up past midnight playing Call of Duty, but that also meant they wouldn’t hear him leave.
Grayson’s wiry frame was wound tight with apprehension. The car would arrive at the end of the road at 1 a.m., and he’d be free. Grayson had considered leaving a note, but figured his family wouldn’t care either way. The old analog alarm clock ticked under orange lamp light, edging its way to the final hour. About ten minutes before one, Grayson couldn’t take it any longer. He seized the worn handles of his duffel bag and slipped from his bedroom.
The house was dark, lit only by a sliver of crescent moon. The aging wood floor creaked like gunfire with each tentative step he took. He cringed at a low squeak from the screen door as he lefthis childhood home for the last time. In the distance, a set of tail lights glowed from the end of the road.
Grayson’s heart was thundering in his throat. He was really doing it, he was really going to be—
“Where th’hell’re you goin’, boy?”
