Page 54 of Marked Omega

I give her a smile.

“Thanks Hannah,” I say. “I’m so lucky to have found a friend like you here. I don’t know how I’d be able to deal without you.”

She grins.

“All right, all right,” she says. “Time to get out of this water. It’s making you all mushy. Come on.”

CHAPTER 19: LILY

Addom said that there was much to prepare, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way. Hannah and I just spend the whole day relaxing in the baths, getting out for a while whenever we start to become too pruny. At one point, Kadmon and one of Hannah’s Alphas bring us a tray of fruit to eat. I practically feel like an aristocrat in the upper level of the city hive with servants to wait on me hand and foot.

It’s nice and relaxing and talking with Hannah. In fact, for a little while, I even forget my apprehension about what’s coming.

But eventually, the day comes to an end, and the bath house darkens as the sun goes down outside the narrow, fogged windows.

“It’s almost time,” Hannah says. “You need to get dried off.”

She brings me a towel from a cabinet by the wall.

“Hannah,” I ask. “Will there be other people there? Like…watching?”

She nods, and a blush fills her cheeks. I remember that she just went through this process relatively recently.

“There will be,” she says. “The claiming has been announced throughout the community, and everyone of age is welcome to attend.”

She ruffles her own hair with a towel.

“Considering that you’re an outsider, you can probably count on a large audience.” Her blush darkens. “At least, that was the case for me.”

There are a million questions running through my mind, but I don’t even know where to begin, so I don’t bother to ask. Whatever happens happens. There’s no backing out now.

“So, um…” I glance around the dimming bath hall. “Is there like…something I’m supposed to wear?”

Hannah shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “No clothes.”

Okay. So it’s going to be that kind of ritual.

A few minutes later another omega arrives to inform us that they are ready for me. Hannah and the other omega take my hands and lead me upstairs and down a series of broad corridors. At last we pass through a set of double doors of elaborately carved wood.

The room on the other side is a large rectangular ballroom with galleries running around the sides and an upper balcony. The floor is covered with a deep green carpet of live moss, and a few faerie rings of mushrooms have sprouted. In the center there is a low circular dais, also covered in moss and ringed with burning candles.

The light from the flickering flames only push the darkness back as far as the edge of the galleries, and even the high ceilings are mostly lost in the shadows, though I can see the twinkle of glass chandeliers overhead, and a flash of green curling vines.

I have never seen anything like this in the city hives, though I have heard talk of such spectacular architecture in the upper levels. But those rooms would be new and well maintained by laborers and servants. They would have glossy, pristine floors and working electricity.

This room, on the other hand, is undergoing the gradual process of reclamation by nature. And that gives it an eerie beauty beyond anything crafted by mortal hands.

The ballroom seems to be silent at first, but soon I realize that is not the case, just as no place is ever truly silent. As we approach the dais in the middle, my ears pick up the rustle of furs and impatient shuffle of feet. Someone coughs in the wings.

That’s when I see them. There must be dozens of them.

No. Hundreds.

They are dark forms, little more than silhouettes occupying the archways of the outer galleries and lining the bannister of the upper balcony. Alphas and omegas. Their mirrored eyes send back the candlelight in a greenish glow like the eyes of wolves.

Goosebumps flare on my flesh.