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Armies traveled on their feet, and as with any march, this was a slow one. Wagons containing stores and supplies trailed along behind, and many of the officers rode back frequently, trying to either encourage or bully the foot soldiers into compliance. I ?had noticed some of my trainees near the back of the line and rode over often to check on them. Though I might as well face the truth that I’d really been looking out for only one of them in particular.
Darcy Vandercliff was in the back of the march, looking hotter, more tired and messier than usual, trudging along like his pretty little feet hurt. I wondered if he was wearing socks—leave it to him to not have any clean ones left in his pack and be racking up blisters on top of blisters—and then I wondered why I was even wondering, damn it. He was a grown man, despite his looks, and he should have sense enough to take care of himself.
I told myself he was just another beta, an indifferent soldier at best and terrible at obeying orders. I’d done the best I could to prepare him and that had to be an end to it.
I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t.
As I watched him, feeling resentful about how damned beautiful he was, he tossed a wayward, golden curl from his forehead and wiped sweat from his brow, leaving a muddy streak. He looked hot and bad-tempered, and of course, he was marching out of step with everyone else, being slightly behind the cadence being called out by one of the sergeants. Even Anders, the other fuck-up on our training roster and the bane of Brandon’s existence, was managing to march properly. But it was that, along with the way Darcy looked, that made him stand out from the other soldiers like a sore thumb—like a single red rose in a vase full of daisies. Or was it the other way around? How had I not noticed before how badly he fit in with everyone else?
Or had I noticed on many occasions and simply chalked it up to an overactive imagination? Just like all the times I’d noticed the pungent omega scent that surrounded him—the one that made me want to pick him up and run off in a dark corner somewhere to hide him from all other Alphas and growl over him. The one that made me want to leap off my horse, take him to the ground and have my way with him right there in front of everybody.
If it were possible for someone to smell like a color, he did. He was the succulent red of ripe strawberries, freshly picked off the vine in summer. And like a fresh berry, he carried that smell around with him, sun-bright and honey sweet.
Damn it, as impossible as it was, I had the deep suspicion that he could possibly be an omega, and if that were true, I didn’t know how he could possibly have fooled all of us until now. I also didn’t know how I was the only one who seemed to notice and how the hell any of the other Alphas could possibly have missed the way he smelled. I had to assume it was because it was fucking impossible, that was how.
It simply couldn’t be. So if it were such an impossibility, why couldn’t I get the idea out of my head?
He would have had to pass numerous physical examinations to become a soldier in the Imperial Army, and I had to assume he’d passed each one with flying colors. I’d checked his file and found nothing out of the ordinary. Each and every test had confirmed him to be a beta, and I had checked. None of the doctors noticed anything out of the ordinary about him. Everything, in fact, was perfectly normal for a young beta male. Yet somehow, here he was—and a big part of me was convinced he wasn’t a beta at all.
If I was right, then he was somehow suppressing his heat cycle, and not just with pills. I was familiar with that method, but even between heats, an omega who was taking pills as heat suppressants still had active pheromones. Not enough to make Alphas go after them constantly. Or at least not necessarily, but we could still smell them and were always aware of their presence. In Darcy’s case, I seemed to be theonlyAlpha who noticed, and the only Alpha of all the other officers who seemed to find him the least bit out of the ordinary. Oh, the others noticed his looks and admitted that he was extremely handsome and therefore tempting, but nothing else. I’d spoken to Brandon about it at length, and he told me I had to be imagining things. It just wasn’t possible.
But I was very familiar with omegas, having lived with one of them for several months in close quarters—yet so had Brandon, for that matter. Rory had lived with us at Lex’s lodge for a long while before he was arrested by the queen, so we knew about omegas.
Brandon said, however, that Darcy was simply a small and really good-looking beta—not all that unusual. He was nothing more or less, he said, and he’d noticed no strange odors around him. Why couldn’t I believe him?
Rory, the omega who was the mate of my best friend and closest cousin, was a beautiful young man, an omega who was also unpredictable and magical. His magic had shown itself mostly in healing or in protecting himself or his loved ones. And he’d proven he was very powerful, indeed. Was it possible that Darcy had some magic of his own and was protecting himself with some kind of spell? If so, then why wasn’tIunder that spell? Why did I seem to be the only exception?
It didn’t make sense. Rory was nothing at all like Darcy, and yet, there was something about Darcy that reminded me strongly of my cousin’s omega. To an Alpha, omega slick was like catnip. It made us chase after the omega and compelled us to make him ours. To betas or other omegas, the odor was strong and musky and not altogether agreeable. And when an omega was in heat, the entire time their slick was pouring from their little asses, they had to pad their clothing to keep it from running down their legs. They craved being filled by the nearest Alpha’s knot almost twenty-four hours a day. We had to make a nest for our omegas, somewhere soft and warm and dark where they felt safe. Then we had to spend all our time with them in that nest when their heats hit. Not that it was any kind of hardship to have sex and give them our knots, so we’d often be tied up with our omegas all day long. It was what most of us dreamed of.
But if a responsible Alpha didn’t take charge of their omegas and give them his knot, they might literally allow themselves to be fucked to death by any and every Alpha they could find. They’d literally be in pain and had been known to roam the roads, begging for help.
It goes without saying that I would have noticed extreme symptoms like those if they’d been present. Besides, omegas weren’t exactly the brightest stars in the sky. They needed someone to care for them and the idea of an omega fending for himself all this time, joining the army and going to war? It was simply unthinkable. I had to be mistaken. I had to be. And yet… I couldn’t convince myself that I was, and my feelings of lust for Darcy were growing worse every time I was near him.
Touching my horse’s flanks with my spurs, I urged him back to the front of the column. He was my own horse, and I had brought him with me from home, as Brandon had brought his. Midnight was a beautiful animal, smart and spirited. I gave him the name because he was solid black, with the only patch of white on him a long, wide blaze that went down his nose.
We’d been marching alongside a stream for most of the day, as it wound its serpentine way through the countryside, but the main trail had veered slightly away from it, and it was now perhaps a half kilometer away. Midnight scented the water and I saw his ears perk up. It would soon be time to make camp for the night, so we needed to move off the main trail and back closer to the stream. It would provide the water the men and the horses needed. Besides, it would be safer to get off the busiest part of the road that led through the territory we were in now, so close to the border. The fast-running, deep stream at our backs would help prevent any raiders from sneaking up on us. I spoke to the captain, and he agreed, asking me to help him start the men toward it so we could make camp.
I made up my mind to find Darcy that evening and corner him. The march would be over soon, so I needed him to answer my questions. I intended to ask him some hard ones when I did. And I would get the answers, no matter what it took. Things simply couldn’t keep on the way they were, and I’d make sure he knew that.
Chapter Four
Darcy
It was late afternoon before the sergeants started us moving west, toward the setting sun and the stream we had followed for the better part of the day. The larger tents had all been taken by the time we reached the wagons, so Anders and I pitched what some called a “dog tent,” which was a practical, quick way to get at least some shelter from the heavy dew overnight. Each of us had been issued two blankets apiece, so we made the tents by using one of our blankets, which was about a meter and a half square and modified with a row of buttons and buttonholes on three sides. Two men, in this case Anders and I, pitched together by buttoning our blankets together and getting two sticks with a crotch at one end and one to go across at the top and then placing our “tent” cloth over it and pinning it down tight. To protect us from the damp ground, we put down another blanket for our “floor,” and we used the last one to cover us—a stout wool blanket kept the chill off. By that time, we had gotten to the point where we could put it up in under ten minutes and then fall down in it to sleep. It helped that we were pretty exhausted.
We’d stopped early, so when we finished putting together the tent, we went in search of food. We had been marching near the back of the regiment, so we’d been close to the food wagon. Yet men were already lined up waiting outside while the cooks got their fires going and hauled out the black pots where they sometimes made stews or big pots of beans, flavored with chunks of salt pork. Beans were in store for us that night, it seemed, along with hard bread we could dip in our bowls to soften up and plenty of hot coffee. It was plain fare, but welcome after the long day of marching. I ate a big bowl of beans and managed to get a little of the salt pork in my bowl.
When we’d first started out, I’d simply fallen in bed right after we ate, but as the days passed, I knew I couldn’t put off washing any longer. I had to visit the stream after I ate. The slick that seeped out of me was much reduced because of the witch’s spell, but it was still there, enough to dampen my underpants if I didn’t wear a rolled-up cloth pad. I’d brought what I thought would be plenty of those along with me, but I’d been too tired on those first days to wash them out and had thrown the last of them away because of the strong smell. I had no choice tonight but to bathe and try to wash out the ones I had left. I could at least rinse them in the stream and hope they’d be mostly dry by morning. I dug out my little towel, which was thin, but better than nothing, and my small bar of soap and headed down to the stream.
When I reached it, I saw that the water was fast moving and looked deep in places, which I didn’t like, because I’d never really learned to swim. I could dog paddle a bit, but I’d never been around much fast-running rivers or creeks—only the small ponds around my aunt and uncle’s estate.
I found at least a dozen or more men had made it there before me, some collecting water in buckets. Others were splashing around in the stream or washing clothes like I needed to do, and a few were just soaking their tired feet after the long day’s march. I didn’t really want to undress in front of them. Even after the months I’d spent with the other men, with communal showering being the only option, I still had a lingering omega-like shyness around other men when I was naked. I sat down on the bank, pulled off my boots and dangled my feet in the icy water, like I saw some of the others doing, and it felt amazingly good. After a while, as the sun began to go down in the western sky, and the cool, nighttime breeze began to pick up, most of the soldiers began to drift back toward the tents and warm campfires. But I knew I had to brave the cold water soon despite the cooling temperatures and get back to my own fire before nightfall, or at least I wanted to, anyway. I’d been hearing the distant barks and howls of coyotes for a while now, as they prowled around the outskirts of camp, probably attracted by the smell of the cooked food.
When I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer, I got to my feet, took off my shirt and began to ease off my trousers. It was then I heard a familiar voice call out to me. “Finally decide to get in the water, Vandercliff? I thought maybe you’d nodded off sitting there so long.”
I whirled around, startled and clutching my pants to my chest. I was shocked to see Alpha Wyatt leaning against a nearby tree overlooking the stream. He looked worn out and dusty from the trail he’d been riding on all day. He needed a shave, and his dark hair was tousled as if he’d been running his hand through it. But he looked so bold and handsome there in the twilight, so much like a knight of old that he appeared like something out of a dream or a poem I read once about a lady who lived under a witch’s curse. She looked out of her window one day and saw a man riding down from a nearby shining castle. As he rode toward her, through the “purple night, below the starry clusters bright,” she fell in love with him because of the way he looked, citing his “broad clear brow” and his “coal-black curls.”
That poem reminded me of Wyatt, although I seem to remember it didn’t end well for the lady. I had a bad feeling that this encounter wouldn’t end well for me tonight either.
