Chapter One
“You’re an omega, Dex.” My younger brother, Eric, sounded on the verge of throttling my closest friend. He raked his fingers through his unruly blond hair as he tried to explain, “You’ve got the birthmark and all. I highly doubt you have a hidden alpha side.”
Instead of explaining his true reasons for wanting to attend an Unlocking party, which I assumed were purely sex-related, Dexter gestured lazily across the table towards my older brother, Brandt. “His alpha was a whole different breed and designation, and he still magically transitioned into an alpha.”
“Micah didn’t have a mark, though,” Eric argued back, referring to Brandt’s alpha. “Neither did Beck, Rex, or Brandi.Youdo.”
I was still trying to wrap my head around the logic behind any of it, if I was being completely honest. The alphas who had thought themselves human made sense to me in a roundabout way. But throwing Micah into the mix had changed everything we (okay, Eric) had hypothesized about.
Micah had been born to shifter parents. He was unmarked —born without a birthmark distinguishing him as anomega or, though they’d been thought extinct until recently, an alpha— just like any other beta, and he had grown up as such. He was a horse shifter and, as far as I knew, had never had reason to question whether he was anything different. But, to cut a long story short, he and Brandt met, mated, and bonded, and suddenly Micah was an alpha…and a unicorn.
Aunicorn. A freakingwingedunicorn.
Until I’d been sent on a fact-finding mission, I hadn’t known they were real. (And, no; the irony of adragonnot believing in unicorns wasn’t lost on me.)
With Micah’s unexpected alpha tossed into the mix, and my older brother pregnant for a second time, this time with boys, there was a sliver of hope for our all-male subspecies after all. But it also raised a whole slew of extra questions and possibilities for shifters in general. Questions which the two successful Unlocking parties we had thrown so far had yet to answer.
“I still think we should attend one of those Unlocking parties,” Dexter drawled. “Why let all the betas and humans have all the fun?”
I sighed, regretting coming up with the concept of mass Unlocking events. It had taken six months and a lot of trial and error —none of which I had been privy to, seeing the science gene in our family skipped me completely— before my brothers and our unicorn shaman, Sergio, nailed down the correct combination of synthetic pheromones and spell crafting to remove the mystical block over a potential alpha’s abilities and designation.
After that, Brandt and Eric were run off their feet with half the town clamoring to see if they had an alpha sideto unleash. So, I suggested adapting the pheromones and magic to assist larger groups at once.
Eric hated the idea, but with the influx of visitors and an increasingly agitated pack full of shifters at his door day and night, he eventually agreed to try it.
And so the Unlocking parties came to be.
The thing about the whole Unlocking process, though, was that it threw every emerging alpha into a rut-like state as soon as the spell was cast. One of the first new alphas to go through the trial, a hedgehog shifter named Mark, said it was kind of like being high, drunk, and horny all at once…and that he didn’t really recall much of his forced rut at all after the fact. It wasn’t until the lust had passed and he had slept the experience off that he was able to shift.
Thankfully, his Unlocking had taken place under controlled circumstances, without any omegas nearby. The poor guy had only had his hand to sate his desperate need to fuck and knot something, and he had ridden the desperation out in a locked, dragon-guarded room. Fortunately for him, it passed within a handful of hours; something Eric assumed was due to the synthetic pheromones wearing off. But Unlocking a bunch of alphas en masse meant we couldn’t really contain them all.
Hence the parties, which were basically orgies once the spell and pheromones kicked in. Andthatwas why I regretted coming up with the idea.
Dex had been desperate to attend one of the events ever since their creation. Luckily (or, from his perspective, unluckily), our Pack Alpha, Beckett, declared that only potential alphas, human men and beta males could attend the parties.
“Until we can trust that the synthetic ruts don’t compromise an alpha’s ability to control themselves around potential mates, it’ll be safer for omegas and women to stay away,” he had said.
I agreed with him. Dex, on the other hand, did not.
My best friend was an acquired taste. I mean, there was a reason we stopped speaking for a hundred years or so. Dex loved to push buttons. He was a pain in the ass. And, having grown up together, he knew exactly how to get a rise out of me. But having him back in my life only made me realize just how much I’d missed him.
Except for during moments like this one.
I watched Eric groan and pinch the bridge of his nose.
Eric was usually the most patient of we three Weldman brothers, but he was also incredibly passionate about trying to save dragonkind. Being an all-male subspecies with only omegas remaining was incredibly depressing, seeing as we were basically just dying off one by one.
Which brought me right back to the topic at hand.
Brandt winced and shifted in his seat, rubbing at his comically large belly. He was having twins, and we were all surprised that he had made it almost to full term this time. He had barely made it to thirty-two weeks with his triplets, my nieces. But this time around, only carrying two babies, he’d made it further. Of course, it would be just his luck that the one weekend Micah was out of town would be the time Brandt went into labor.
At least he had a large support system here. We all did.
“You good?” I asked him. “We’re close to the clinic if you need to go pop a couple more niblings out for me.”
He rolled his dark eyes. “I am fine. These boys are just running out of room in there.”
I bypassed the opportunity to crack a joke about how large his belly was. I didn’t think he would appreciate it.
