Page 1 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Chapter 1

Wren

61 Days to Go

The bus smells like feet and burned coffee. I have been on it for four hours longer than the website promised. Somewhere around hour six, I stopped being angry about that and started being angry about everything else instead, which is a real skill I didn’t know I had until today.

“Hollow Creek,” the driver calls out, like it’s a punchline. “Last stop.”

Of course, it’s the last stop. Of course, this town is so far off the map that the bus company considers it a terminus rather than a destination. I heave my bag into the aisle and it catches on someone’s armrest. I mutter something that isn’t quite an apology, and then I’m standing on a cobblestone sidewalk. The sun has gone down and the air smells like woodsmoke and apples. Every lamppost has a little cluster of fairy lights wound around it like the whole town is perpetually forty-eight hours from a Hallmark movie shoot.

I hate it a little bit on principle. I’m too tired not to.

Main Street is doing its best impression of a postcard with striped awnings, a hardware store with a fading sign, and a church with a steeple that’s crooked in a way that’s clearly beloved rather than embarrassing. I walk through the middle of it dragging my suitcase with a busted wheel, feeling like the one modern intrusion in a diorama. A couple of people look up as I pass. One woman stops sweeping her porch to watch me go by, broom motionless, like I’m a parade.

I don’t stop to explain myself. I don’t even know how I’d explain myself. Hi, I’m here because my grandmother, who I met maybe six times in my life, left me a farm in a will I didn’t know existed until three weeks ago, and I have approximately no plan beyond survive until I can sell it. That doesn’t fit on a doormat.

The farmhouse is a mile and a half out of town, which nobody mentioned, so by the time I turn up the gravel drive I am sweating through my coat despite the cold. My phone is at eleven percent and the flashlight function is eating what’s left of it like it’s starving.

The house looks worse in the dark than it probably does in daylight, which is saying something, because when I look at the photos the lawyer sent me it already looked like something out of a horror movie establishing shot. Peeling white paint. A porch that sags in the middle like it’s tired too. A wind chime that isn’t chiming so much as clattering aggressively.

The key is under the third flowerpot from the left, exactly where the lawyer’s email said it would be. I stand there for a second with it in my hand, thinking about how my grandmother hid a key under a flowerpot for decades in a town where nobody locks anything, and I never once visited long enough to know that about her.

Inside, it’s worse. Dust sheets lay over the furniture like the entire house is playing dead. The air is stale and cold in that specific way that means the heat’s been off for longer than a few days. I find the fridge on autopilot, some animal part of my brain hoping for food, but it’s empty except for a box of baking soda and something in a jar that I decide not to identify.

I stand in the kitchen in my coat, in the dark, in a stranger’s house that is apparently now my house, and I think, with real clarity: I am not doing this tonight.

So I don’t. I turn around, and I walk back into town.

My hunger leads the way to the only place still open. A pub. Close enough.

It has a hand-lettered sign—The Hollow Spoon—hanging from a wrought iron bracket, and cheerful light spilling out from windows fogged at the edges. When I push through the door, the noise hits me like a wave. Laughter, someone playing a lively tune on a fiddle in the corner, the clatter of glasses, and under it all, beer and something roasting that makes my stomach cramp with how hungry I am.

Every single head does not turn to look at me, which is a small mercy, but enough of them do that I sense it like a temperature change.

I find a stool at the bar and drop onto it like I’m shedding a hundred pounds. The woman behind the bar is somewhere north of sixty, silver hair in a braid, forearms like she’s spent her whole life hauling kegs, which she probably has.

“You look like you walked here from the bus stop,” she says, already reaching for a glass.

“I kind of did.”

“Nobody told you Hank stopped running the shuttle?”

“Nobody told me there was a Hank. Or a shuttle.”

She laughs heartily and slides a glass of water in front of me before I’ve asked for anything. “Dot,” she says, by way of introduction. “What’s your poison, and what’s your name, in whichever order you want to answer those.”

“Wren,” I say. “And whatever’s easiest.”

“Everything’s easy.” She’s already turning to the taps. “You’re the Calloway girl.”

It’s not a question. I stare at her. “How do you already—”

“Small town, honey. Your grandmother’s lawyer had lunch here Tuesday and didn’t so much as try to be subtle about it.” She sets a cider in front of me, the good kind, cloudy and gold, with a cinnamon stick balanced across the rim like a tiny drawbridge. “On the house. Everybody around here loved Eleanor. We’ve been wondering when you’d turn up.”

I don’t know what to do with loved Eleanor, so I drink the cider instead. It’s very good. It’s dangerously good, warm and sharp and a little too easy to drink like it’s nothing. I can’t forget that I am extremely hungry and haven’t eaten anything more substantial than a vending machine granola bar since a rest stop outside of Whoknowsville.

“Do you have any food?” I manage.