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Apparently he wasn’t the only one chasing after the Duffy woman.
Was it the other two alphas who had done Blaylocke in? Had they killed the woman too? Bartram needed to inspect further.
As he was circling the kill zone, he picked up another scent. One that he’d not smelled before. It didn’t belong to the alphas or their horses. It smelled like…
Like a wolf… onlydifferent.
The area around the dead man had been swept free of tracks by the wings of the feasting harpies, but when Bartram circled wider, he found some clues. The prints of horseshoes and boot soles in different sizes. And something else.
Pawprints.
Based on the shape, they belonged to a wolf, but it must have been one hell of a big wolf. Nearly as big as a bear from the looks of it.
Bartram recalled what that dumbass Whittaker had said last night in Flarity’s office. He’d claimed he and Guthrie had encountered an oversized red wolf near the Duffy ranch. At the time, Bartram had assumed the two cowboys were just telling tall tales. Now he was inclined to believe them.
He followed the wolf tracks in the direction of the boulders. There were occasional flecks of blood too. Bartram stooped and sniffed the ground. Some of the blood was Blaylocke’s, but some of it belonged to the wolf.
So, the animal had been hurt.
Not badly, though. Just a scratch.
Bartram followed the tracks around the boulders and out into the desert. His right hand rested on the handle of the pistol at his hip.
After about a hundred paces, he halted. The blood flecks were gone. So were the pawprints. They had morphed into the shape of very large human feet.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Bartram grunted.
He spit another stream of tobacco juice onto the ground.
CHAPTER 14
Shannon Duffy sat back on her bed roll, an old Navajo blanket which her father had brought home following one of his many journeys, and she watched the night descend over the desert. After many hours of traveling, she and her two alpha companions had finally decided to stop and rest for the night. Their camp was in the middle of a wide, yawning valley between a pair of parallel plateaus. Shannon recognized the valley from her father’s map.
They were on the right track.
After some discussion, they’d decided against building a campfire. There was fuel to be had—mesquite and greasewood—but the light from a fire would make them far too visible from afar, and it was better not to call attention to themselves. The region was home to Apaches, who were not always friendly, as well as bandits, who never were. And then there were the non-human beings who populated the region: snakemen, centaurs, and wolves.
Because there was no fire, they had to settle for a cold, dry dinner of jerky and hardtack. That was okay. Shannon wasn’t particularly hungry. Even though several hours had elapsed since the incident at the boulders, the events and images were still fresh enough in her mind to effectively dull her appetite.
As she looked up at the darkening sky, it occurred to her that it had only been one day since she’d ridden into Lamentation looking for help. It seemed like much longer than that. A great deal had happened since then.
A man had died. A bad man, but a man nonetheless. Yet that wasn’t the main thing bothering Shannon tonight.
The man had seen her sign.
During that brief interval between ripping her sleeve and getting killed by the wolf, the man who called himself Blaylocke had seen what she really was—an omega. Aside from her father and Dr. Widdershins, no man had ever been privy to that information, and it scared the hell out of her.
Omegas were considered to be the lowest form of life in western society, lower than hucows, lower even than regular cattle. It had to do with the way omegas went into heat, and the effect their heat would have on any alphas who happened to be nearby.
Alphas were a different story. For the most part, beta humans didn’t care for alphas. They tolerated them because they had to, but they didn’t like them. Alphas were viewed as beasts, governed by instinct and prone to sudden violence.
The presence of an omega in heat only made alphas more volatile. Stories were told of entire towns which had been leveled by alphas competing over a heat-stricken omega.
Such stories were probably exaggerated, of course, but only a little.
The solution was that any female who presented as an omega at puberty had to be placed into mateship with one or more alphas as quickly as possible, before the onset of her first heat, which usually happened around the age of eighteen. She would effectively be stripped of her rights as a human, including the right to own property. Her alpha mates would have complete ownership of her, and they would dominate her however they saw fit. It was the thing Shannon feared more than anything else.
And now, here she was, alone in the desert with not one but two mateless alphas. She should have felt terrified, vulnerable.
