Taz threw her head back and laughed, the other women quickly joining her. “Sweetheart, Rex has been called much worse in his almost thirty years than a cad.”
“Asshole,” Wren provided gleefully. “Jerk, motherfucker, demon, playboy, bitch, and my personal favorite little dipshit,” she counted the words off on her fingers.
My head spun from the level of profanity leaving her mouth so nonchalantly. I had only heard half of them before and I was trying my hardest to keep up.
“Say what you want, when you want to, lovely,” Legs said to me. “These alphas’ll railroad you if you don’t. It’s a new world out there, Juneau, and in most people’s opinions, omegas are equal in our society.”
“Really?” I asked, thinking about the pamphlets that were probably still crammed into my nest at Wilde Manor. A hundred years was a long time, but could so much have changed for the better?
Taz grinned, linking her arm through mine and pulling me toward the door. “Stick with us, kid, we’ll show you the ropes of the twenty-first century and teach you a couple new profanities in the process!”
Chapter Eight
Rainfellfromtheheavy gray sky above. It splattered across my skin as I inhaled the scent of it deep into my lungs. There was nothing better than rainfall to clear away the cobwebs in my mind, and luckily March had some of the best storms of the year.
When I was small, I used to stand in the rain with my parents while they fiddled with their tracking machines. By the time I turned ten, I’d seen every kind of storm there was. Tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, lightning storms, and any kind of severe weather you could think of.
My parents were storm chasers, obsessed with loading us up into my dad’s bright blue pickup and driving across the country to find the next big storm. They had been born and raised on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, but instead of sticking around like most of their friends had, their obsession with weather had made it hard for them to settle and put down roots.
Once, when we were visiting the reservation during the summer, I’d asked my grandmother why we never stayed longer than a few days. That time we had only arrived the night before and it was clear, even at nine-years-old, that my mom and dad were already itching to be out on the road again.
My grandmother had turned to me with a patient smile.
“Tayen,” she said, placing a wrinkled hand on my cheek. “Some people are born with restless spirits. Your mama’s one of those people, and it’s what made her love your daddy so much.”
“What kind of spirit do I have?” I had asked her, full of childish curiosity.
My grandmother chuckled, giving my cheek a soft pat. “Only time will tell, my boy.”
Then it was time for us to leave again. We traveled for years until it became clear that I’d need more schooling than what my mom could do on the road. So, we stopped where we landed next: Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
I started middle school terrified of making friends, but then I met Rex and he pulled me out of my shell. He introduced me to the equally shy Podcast and the slightly nutty Bat. They pulled me out of my awkward shell and for the first time I had a group of friends that meant the world to me.
I actually started to spend more time at the bar where the MC ran most of their operations than at the apartment my parents rented. They didn’t mind, though, I think they were relieved to start going on longer trips away from home, knowing I’d be taken care of. After I graduated from high school, my parents asked if I wanted to go with them on the road again and I had declined. I had finally found my pack.
So they left on the road again. I spoke to them on the phone every couple of weeks. Last I checked they were chasing twisters in Oklahoma.
After we graduated, Rex and Bat needed me to stick around to look out for Podcast. They’d decided to go into the military to avoid Orpheus’s increasingly volatile attitude. He had already been acting like he was the Prez even though Apollo was very much still alive at the time. The guy had a chip on his shoulder when it came to Rex and had made it known.
I loved riding on my motorcycle with the guys, but I had never been sold on the ‘brotherhood’ of the MC. It just seemed like a shitty excuse to bully people they perceived as weak.
I would have left when they did, but Podcast had needed me then. When I met him he was a beta, and to top it off he couldn’t talk. A beta like him would have been put on the lowest rung of the hierarchy without alphas to back him up. He also refused to leave the home that he’d grown up in, so I stayed with him.
The sky overhead rumbled with thunder and I tilted my chin up just in time to see a streak of lightning cut the sky in half. I sighed, letting my eyes flutter closed again as the rain hammered into my neck and shoulders. I loved the feeling of it and how it calmed the constant buzzing in my head.
The only thing that even came close to a good storm was opening my bike up on a long, straight road and seeing how far I could push the engine with the wind in my hair. I wondered how it would feel to ride my motorcycle through a crashing thunderstorm, but Doc had told me that if the storm didn’t kill me, that he would if I ever tried it.
I felt Podcast before I felt him tap on my shoulder. He was standing next to me in the adorable yellow raincoat that I’d given him for Christmas. My omega did not like being soaked and cold, but he still tried to stand out in the rain with me whenever he could. He called it ‘bonding,’ though I was pretty sure our best bonding occurred when I was knotted deep inside of him.
‘Family meeting in the living room,’he signed before turning and heading back into the house, his matching yellow rain boots splashing in a puddle as he climbed the steps and disappeared inside.
Bat was standing by the door as I slopped up the steps. A pigeon was perched on his shoulder and he was softly cooing to it as he watched my approach.
“Doc is going to be pissed if you bring Judy Garland inside,” I told him as I pulled the screen door open and stepped inside.
Bat snorted and came inside anyway. “I figure he’ll be too busy yelling at you for tracking puddles through the house to care about Judy. Didn’t he tell you to leave a towel by the door when you do your rain thing?”
“I forgot.” I shrugged and yanked some paper towels off of the roll, trying in vain to squeeze the excess water out of my long hair. In retrospect, it was probably a terrible idea to go outside wearing a pair of oversized sweatpants and t-shirt. They felt like deadweights on my shoulders and hips as I stood in the kitchen.
