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All of them stopped and looked back and forth at each other. “No,” one of them replied. “What is it?”
“I could have sworn…it smells like ripe, delicious strawberries. Surely you smell it?”
That’s when one of the others—and I saw to my horror that he was wearing a thin silver circlet around his forehead, which meant he must be royalty—laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “There will be plenty of omegas at my party tonight, Wyatt. No need to start imagining them now.”
They all teased him as I shrank back against the trunk and tried not to make a sound. I hid in my tree until they rode away, but I never forgot the strange mixture of longing and fear they all made me feel—especially the one who said he smelled strawberries.
On the day Rudmilla found me in my closet, she made me a tincture of Chamomile and Valerian, with a hint of Passionflower, which seemed appropriate as she took her time to explain to me the complicated relationships between Alphas and omegas. She told me to drink the tincture down to calm myself and tucked me back in bed with a hot water bottle for the painful cramps I was feeling.
That was probably the first time I actually realized I was an omega and that I was made for an Alpha. My aunt, who was a beta, warned me that once my “heats” began in earnest, I couldn’t leave the house for the entire length of it, for fear some Alpha might come across me, or that I might go after some poor, unsuspecting Alpha and chase after him.
I was horrified.
Not only by the idea that I might break out of my aunt and uncle’s house and roam the countryside like a rabid wolf, searching for and assaulting every unknown and unsuspecting Alpha I came across, though it did sound a bit absurd. But I hated the idea that I myself had to stay inside to avoid their attentions too. She told me that if they came across me, they might decide they wanted me as their own and take me away to live with them, forcing one pregnancy after another on me, until I was a dried-up husk, or until I wound up like my poor mother. She said there was little choice for me in life but to find a lusty Alpha or perhaps a pack of them to accommodate me. Unless…
I seized on that one word like a life preserver thrown to a drowning sailor and told her I’d do anything to avoid this fate that was surely worse than death. She only needed to tell me what to do.
“I know of a witch,” she said. “A fearsome creature, who practices the…dark arts.” She whispered those last two words, breaking off and looking around herself to see if she were being overheard. It sent a chill down my spine.
“Our good Queen Rozamond, who distrusts all magic, but most especially the dark variety, has searched for her for many years, but the witch Barbarosa Lagoon hides from her in the Black Peat Swamp, an area that covers twenty hectares, and where people hardly dare to go. It’s said she can cast a spell on an omega that can stop their heats and provide them with a potion to make them appear to be only betas, thus escaping the attention of all Alphas, so they can live a normal life. She could give you that potion to stop yours, and then no one would know what you truly are.”
“Oh Aunt, do you think she would?”
“All we can do is try to convince her to help. You must ask her yourself, but I’ll go with you to the edges of the Peat Swamp, and Sir Roscoe will give you the gold she’ll require as payment if she decides to help you. But you must do everything she says, or else you could make your plight a hundred times worse.”
We traveled there about ten days later, when the worst of my heat was over. It was a long, two-day drive from my aunt’s home to the deep, dark, mysterious forest, far from any towns.
“In there,” Rudmilla told me, late in the afternoon of the second day, when the driver pulled on the reins to stop the carriage. She was pointing at a path that led into the Black Peat Swamp.
All around us were tall Cypress trees that seemed to lean over and listen to us as we sat there in her carriage, as if curious about what we were doing there at all. They were draped in gray, hanging moss that drooped off the tree limbs like an old woman’s lacy shawl. The leaves on the trees sighed and whispered to each other like old women, too, in the cool, evening breeze.
“Stay on the trail, my dear,” my aunt cautioned me, “and don’t step off it or you might sink into a bog and never be seen again. Walk for at least an hour before you stop. She’ll know you’re there from the moment you set foot on the path, and if she decides to help you, she’ll come to you then. But if she hasn’t come by morning, then turn around and come back. On no account must you stay any longer.”
I nodded. Trembling a little at the idea of spending the night alone in such a mysterious forest, I got out of it and took a few steps down the path. I was almost immediately confronted by a sign stuck in the ground that proclaimed,
Keep Out—Nothing Here is Worth Your Life
Well, the sign convinced me, for sure. I turned right back around the moment I saw it, but my aunt saw me and leaned out the window of the carriage. She shook her head and waved her hanky at me.
“No, no, go back in, dear. It’s nothing. Barbarosa Lagoon just doesn’t like company and tries to discourage it. But I really think she’ll see you. Just go down that trail. I’ll be here waiting for you.”
I sighed and turned around.
I walked for at least an hour in that gloom, with strange sounds coming from all around me. Even though I was frightened, I kept going a little more after that, just to make sure I’d come far enough. Then I sat down on an old log by the path to wait.
The swamp was probably the scariest, most haunted place I’d ever seen. The old trees by the path were tall and spindly, rising up out of the swamp with bark that oozed and dripped, making them look as if they were weeping—or bleeding. The sky was dark overhead, and the air tasted of blood.
I tried my best to peer through the mists, but they were ghostly and dense, revealing nothing. It was almost dark when I saw the witch’s stooped figure hobbling out of the fog and down the path toward me. She was dressed all in rusty black, and she smelled strongly of mildew and pine. There was a slight underlying odor that was hot and peppery and burned my nose a little. Trembling, I got to my feet and swept her a bow.
“Good evening, Mistress,” I said. “If your name is Barbarosa Lagoon, I’ve come to see if I could get your help. I’ve brought this sack of gold as payment.”
“Well, don’t you have pretty manners, boy?” she replied in a scratchy old voice. “Show me your gold.”
I opened the small sack to show her, and she peered over into it at the bright, yellow coins inside.
She grunted and drew out a small bottle about the size of my aunt’s cough remedies, tucked inside her voluminous sleeve. “I know what you desire,” she said, “and this is the potion. But you should be careful what you wish for. The things we think we might desire are not always what we really need.” I nodded, wide-eyed but happy as I turned to go. She stopped me.
“Take just one drop or two of the potion every day. So long as you do, you’ll appear to be a beta and be safe from the heat cycle and from all Alphas. You still have to be careful and wash the scent away, because the secretions will never stop, but just slow down. Don’t miss a day or it could come back tenfold. Only a drop or two, mind you! Any more might kill you outright or …it might just change the course of your entire life forever!”
