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Prologue
Freya - 10 Years Ago
Waveslappedgentlyatthe shoreline, the tide sliding closer to our picnic blanket with every half hour. We’d set up out of range; the tide would go back down before it reached us. After years of sitting on this beach, in my sister’s favourite spot, we’d learned the hard way how far back we had to be. A patch of sand cleared of the sharp rocks dotting the rest of the shoreline was empty for us every day we came out to the ocean.
My mom held a phone out in front of our small group, grinning widely when Maisie’s face appeared on the screen. Our video call was grainy, and the wind pulled away the sound before I heard what was being said half the time. Maisie missed the beach, though, so mom brought the beach to her. “Darling! How’s the Omega Sanctuary? Have you been proposed to yet?” she asked, wrapping her free arm around my shoulders and pulling me close.
The smile that teased the edges of my lips was smaller, there and gone in a second. My smirk replaced the tiny grin. “It must be weird, having our parents obsessed with your sex life,” I said.
Maisie laughed, but my father flicked the back of my head with his finger. “There’s no need to be crude, Freya.”
“I’m right.”
Shrugging, I watched a seagull soar down with a shriek to grab a crab from the sand. No one else in my family enjoyed observing the circle of life. They thought it was sad when creatures died. In my mind, death was the way of the world. Predators won. Prey lost. Our society was the same. Mom would ban me from the computer if she figured out I was on supernatural news forums at fourteen. Her and dad avoided negativity like the plague. I doubted they were aware that Omegas were going missing at an alarming rate, and Alphas were more entitled and violent with every generation.
If Maisie hadn’t made it to the Sanctuary when she revealed, she would have vanished within a week to gods knew where.
My distracted brain caught up to the conversation when I caught a flash of anguish on my sister’s face. “No one else is courting me,” she explained. “Only… only the one.”
“Is he an asshole?”
The cuss word earned me another flick on the back of the head. My antics made Maisie laugh again, which was what mattered. “Sorry dad, but yeah. I’d use that word to describe him.”
I noted she didn’t actually use the word. Nineteen years old, thousands of kilometres away in some undisclosed location, and my older sister was still the goodie two shoes of the family. “Tell him to f—” Dad reached around and placed a hand over my mouth before I cursed. Mom chuckled.
“You’re too young to curse,” he said. “Use a different word.”
He released my mouth and I rolled my eyes. “Tell him to bugger off. Gods, I sound like grandpa.”
“That’s because your grandpa is polite enough to not use foul language,” Mom said. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate if you sound more like him the next time we visit.”
I would never be as perfect as Maisie, so I’d given up on trying to impress my extended family members. I wasn’t jealous of her likability and how easily she could be the perfect daughter. My place as the black sheep — or rather, the silver sheep because of my uncommonly coloured hair — was more comfortable. No one had expectations of me and I didn’t have to be nice. I’d helped Maisie out plenty of times when she’d been too nice to say no to someone when she should have, and I’d spoken for her in groups since we were children. Our pair was perfectly matched.
Sadly, since she’d revealed, we were separated. At least until she could find a suitable Alpha or pack to claim her. Our parents were hoping she’d marry some European prince, but she’d told me all she wanted was a man who would be a wonderful father. Someone who would let her come back here, to the East Coast where we’d lived our whole lives, and raise a family.
It was quaint, but very Maisie. Personally, I couldn’t imagine kids or a husband. Or the annoyance of being an Omega. If I was lucky, I would reveal as an Alpha, even though female Alphas were rare, but more likely I’d stay a Beta.
The conversation had moved on without me again, my family used to my constant zoning in and out. “What about the lovely man you mentioned last week?” Dad asked. Our side of the screen was tiny in the bottom corner, but with his hair curled and flapping oddly in the wind it was easy to spot. “The fae noble from Apilion. Have you gone on that date?”
She grimaced. “No, he cancelled.”
“Why would anyone cancel a date with you?” I asked.
She was little miss perfect, after all. Polite, kind, gorgeous. Her hair was the same colour as our parents’, a honey golden brown, and curled in naturally perfect beach swept waves. The strands didn’t hang flat and tangled when wet like mine did. Maisie had inherited the nymph genes a lot more than I had. I’d taken to the witch side of myself more. Her eyes were a blue-purple that shone in the dark when she took on her water form, wide and innocent alongside her freckled cheeks. My eyes were purple, but more red-purple. Yet another trait that set me apart from the family.
“Duke Cunning told him not to take me out, so he stepped back from the arrangement.”
Both my parents stiffened, Mom’s arm falling from my shoulders as she reached out to steady her shaky grip on the phone. “Oh, that’s a shame,” she said.
Neither one of them continued. I’d heard about Duke Cunning on previous calls and my sister didn’t like him one bit. But clearly he mattered more than I’d thought, if he was able to sabotage Maisie’s other potential suitors. He had to lose interest, eventually.
Then again, she’d been at the Omega Sanctuary for six months, and had told us about him on her first phone call.
“Has he done that a lot?” I asked.
“No, no. Not often.”
She didn’t look at the camera, her gaze darting off to the side. When she called us it was at a monitored phone in what they called the lounge, a vast, high-ceilinged room with a variety of plush chairs and soft pillows and blankets. Gauzy curtains closed off each set of chairs when someone was using them, and she had a pale blue curtain pulled around her now. Maisie had nothing of interest to look at off in the distance.
