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It wouldn’t be, if it weren’t for the sounds…no, not sounds.Voices.
I whimper and Adam’s arms tighten around me, surprising me. He hasn’t shifted out of his Berserker yet and part of me thought that the forest witch was stating redundancies because Adam was already dead, but turns out he’s fighting from his immobile state just as hard as I am.We’re not so different.
“Berserker Dragnovic!” Smashing feet on the forest floor approach.
I whimper again, but Adam releases a roar — a pained roar that makes my chest burn and my muscles contract. Hearing him suffer makes me want to fight harder, but he holds me down.
“Dragnovic!”
“Berserker!”
A family of deer scampers across the clearing in front of me, moving so silently and swiftly I jolt. Blinking, I almost miss them. But how could I? They’re allwhite. Never seen a white deer before.
A beat passes, then the stomping gets louder. More of a crashing, really. And then faces.Alphafaces. I shiver and recoil into the heat of Adam’s body. He starts to move — tries, but fails. He releases a pained sound again and the faces turn towards us. Six of them, and these are very muchalive. Welcome to my nightmare.
My eyes close and I try to bury myself deeper into his bloody, furry body. I’m terrified, but Fear isn’t responding in the way she’s supposed to. She’s still frowning at me from the trees I didn’t topple.
“Jesus fuck!” one of the Alphas — a younger-looking guy with dark brown skin and lean muscles stacked on top of an obscenely tall frame — shouts. “Dragnovic!” He starts running first and the two Alpha females in the group move in line behind him, their hands on their weapons.
“Form a perimeter!” the blonde Alpha female with the heavy braid shouts.
“We need a stretcher. Fuck…” The only man who doesn’t obey the blonde is a redhead with pale, clear skin. Instead of running to form a perimeter, he drops to his knees in front of us and covers his nose with his hand. “Fuck! Alphas, mask up. He found his Omega and her scent is strong, even beneath the blood.”
He pulls a red bandana out of the back pocket of his black jeans and ties it around his narrow nose and wide mouth before reaching forward to touch me. His hands come near me, but Adam’s massive paw closes around his wrist.
“Fuck! Berserker, you’re alive. Can you change back to your Alpha form? I won’t be able to work on you like this and we sure as shit can’t carry your ass.”
“I think if he could do that, he’d have done it by now,” I hear myself croak.
The sound of my voice comes as a surprise to all of us. The redhead curses again. “Fuck. Omega, how did this happen?”
“Dead army.”
“What?”
“That doesn’t matter,” the blonde says as she approaches, a piece of torn fabric wrapped around the bottom half of her face. She’s got blood on her arms, scratches, too. It makes me wonder what kind of trouble they encountered in Paradise Hole trying to get to their Berserker. That they tried at all surprises me. I’d have thought that a pack of Alphas would be too eager to fill the vacuum.
“What can we do in lieu of a stretcher? Sierra, you got that axe? Good. Start taking down trees — any that are left…”
“Whiskey, Sierra — hold up. I don’t think you need to do that,” the young Alpha says. He bends down and picks up a vine — vines woven together to form a hammock large enough to fit a Berserker beast.
And me, too, if there’s space.And I did that.
“Where’d that come from, Vi?” The woman called Whiskey says. They all look around, the ones I can see, but I don’t bother to offer an explanation. “Fuck it. Who cares. Let’s go.”
Do I want to go? My heart starts to pound. No, I don’t want to go. But I definitely don’t want to stay.
“You think the Omega did that? Looks too perfect for it to be made by nature,” Vi says.
“Musta,” Whiskey answers.
It’s weird hearing them all talk in that strange Dark City accent. All except the dark-haired woman — Sierra — who speaks like she’s from one of the southern cities, Shadowlands or Gold City, maybe, but not so far south as Hjiel.
“Adam,” I croak in a terrified whisper.
He moves, shifting, becoming even bigger. The Alphas complain about it, bickering among each other in a way I’ve never heard before, except for once…back at Grasslands, way, way back. One of my earliest memories. I met siblings. True siblings. They bickered like this. I left for Prayersville shortly after meeting them. I wonder what happened to them.
Despite their bickering, the Alphas still load him onto the vine stretcher I created in my subconscious and they load me up with him because he doesn’t let me go. He doesn’t let anyone touch me. He just clutches me to his chest like a kid holding a teddy and that’s alright with me. Fear follows as they carry us through the woods, but only at a distance.
