Page 24 of His Unicorn Alpha (Shifters Sanctuary #3)

“ A ww, I don’t think ours were ever this small,” Ollie cooed down at Rita, rocking her in his arms.

Beck and Sandy had asked if they could throw us a ‘Welcome Home’ party in lieu of the baby shower we had never had (or wanted), and neither Brandt nor I could bear to say no to our pack.

“Remember the colic,” Beck said, “and focus on how hard the potty training is.” He shot me a pleading look. “Tell him how hard newborns are. Please?”

Beside me, Brandt snorted. “Our faithful leader is afraid of children.”

“No,” Beck corrected him primly, throwing his shoulders back and raising his chin, “I am afraid of going all the way back to sleepless nights and diaper explosions.”

“But look at her,” Ollie snuggled into Beck’s side and lifted Rita higher. She snuffled in her sleep and curled further into his hold. “Isn’t she precious?”

Beck’s expression softened and he nodded. “She is. All three of them are. Really. But we have our hands full with the twins, don’t we?”

Ollie pouted and sighed as he looked back down at my baby, crooking his index finger on his free hand before running it over her soft cheek. “I just miss this feeling, you know? Rory and Duke are three now, and they’re getting so big and independent…”

“Independent?” Beck repeated incredulously, but he was smiling. “Did you miss the part where we are still trying to potty train them? Or where they still wake up and call out for us right when we’re trying to enjoy some alone time ?”

I had to smother a laugh as I leaned in to Brandt’s side, murmuring, “Five bucks says he caves soon.”

Brandt nodded.

Beck chuckled. “You know I can hear you.”

“And you’re not denying it,” Sandy cut in, wandering over with Lucia cradled in the crook of her elbow. “I think our house could definitely use the pitter patter of more baby feet. It’s been kind of boring since Brandi moved in with Lena.”

“Maybe you should be voluntold to babysit more often,” Beck argued. “Rory and Duke love their Aunt Sandy.”

“Oh, it really is such a pity that I have to travel back to New York to work so often,” Sandy widened her eyes with faux innocence. “You know I would love to look after the little monsters —I mean, sweethearts— more.”

Beck’s chuckle turned into a laugh as he shook his head. “You just said we should have more, but agree that the first two are too much to handle sometimes.”

“Maybe they need siblings to entertain them? Little buddies to love on?” Sandy suggested, and I knew her well enough to understand that she was just trying to stir Beck up. They had been foster siblings, after all. We all knew she didn’t actually think ‘as entertainment for older kids’ was a valid reason for Beck to have more children.

“Micah and Brandt have just made three little buddies for them to play with,” Beck argued back. “And the bonus there is that we don’t have to deal with the not fun side of their babies.” He shrugged at me and Brandt. “No offence to your girls.”

“Dude, I’ve babysat your hellhounds,” I replied with a smirk. “I’m aware of the not fun side of kids.”

“Where are the twins, anyway?” Brandt looked around our living room cautiously.

“Lena and Brandi are babysitting so we can visit you guys without distraction,” Ollie answered. “It is nice to have a break.”

I shook my head at Beck when he opened his mouth, probably with the intention of using Ollie’s enjoyment of some kid-free time as proof that they shouldn’t give in to his cluckiness. Even I knew that would land him in the dog house. Wolf house? Whatever.

“Well, that’s nice of them,” Sandy ran her hand through her purple pixie cut and grinned at Beck. “You’ll have to thank them for sparing Micah and Brandt’s house from certain destruction.”

“Okay, stop, they’re not that bad,” Beck grumbled, taking the bait.

Sandy winked at Ollie, before saying, “Then there’s no reason not to give in and have another one, right? Look at how sweet this baby is…”

“I hate you all,” Beck sighed, but he couldn’t hide his amusement.

I sat back and hugged Brandt closer, enjoying how right this felt. Being with my pack, seeing them welcome and faun over my babies, snuggling with my mate…I could hardly imagine what life had been like before I gave into the instinct to return to Shifters Sanctuary.

And, despite the pack’s unrelenting vigilance against newcomers or passers-through the town, nothing scary or dramatic had happened since I had been there. Beck and Rex still spoke in low tones about the Moonmusic organization and their leader’s ongoing campaign against us and ‘our kind’, but there hadn’t been any attacks or kidnap attempts. Not since prior to Beck and Ollie’s wedding, anyway.

When I mentioned as much to Beck, though, after the party had died down and he and I were seated on my back porch, each nursing a beer, he shook his head. “The rumblings and dissent are definitely still escalating,” he told me. “One of the frat house guys,” —he explained, referencing the large homestead housing people who had come to Shifters Sanctuary in the hopes they might be potential alphas themselves— “Matthew, is like a hacker or something. I didn’t ask many questions about that. But we pay him to trawl the web and keep an eye on everything Morstein is up to…and we know he’s keeping a close eye on us. Every time a new alpha pops up, he panics.”

“But I’ve been here for months now and nothing’s happened.”

“Well, he’s aware we have three dragons and that even bringing rocket launchers—yeah, I know, that sounds farfetched, but it doesn’t make it any less true,” he cut himself off at my wide-eyed stare. “Even bringing them didn’t work in his favor. So now he’s trying to convince his following that he’s still got all the power and that we are the freaks.”

“And the old-school packs really don’t see how much better off they’d be without him? Like…what, exactly, do they get out of handing over their tithes and following his arbitrary rules?”

Beck shrugged. “Who the fuck knows? Ollie says that his pack firmly believe that their life is better because that’s all they’ve ever known. Day agreed that his old pack didn’t trust anyone who wanted an external education…and why would they? Leaders like that Morstein guy are scared of their followers having critical thinking skills, or of seeing how different things could be if they tried things another way. A way that doesn’t financially and socially benefit him.”

“That’s why he’s scared of you. Of this pack. Because you’re — we’re — proving that it can be done.”

“Yeah. Of course, we have three centuries-old dragons with deep pockets which makes it easier, too,” Beck sighed, “but it can be done. Look at your old pack: they’re not Moonmusic fanatics.”

“True.” I thought of the pack I had grown up in back in California. “But we also were heavily influenced by human communities, I guess. Morstein and his crew are all about keeping shifter society insular”

“Yeah, so they can control it. If we all had packs like this one —or like your family's pack— where everyone is treated equally regardless of their secondary designation, or of their shifted species, and where town councils get to vote for what’s best for the pack…that takes away the ultimate control. Morstein and his cronies don't want to give up that kind of power. And he’s probably afraid that we, as alphas, outrank him in his system, too.”

“And we can’t, like, use that against him? We can’t use the alpha powers and rank or whatever to stop him?”

“That’s what I personally think he’s most afraid of. That’s why he wants to end us. Right now, he’s still trying to convince his followers that we’re not true alphas because we weren't born alphas. That because those of us he knows about grew up human , and that our human-influenced way of life is a threat to theirs. He has stopped trying to nab one of us for now, but that only makes me think he’d rather eradicate us at this point.”

My stomach turned. “Eradicate?”

The word made me think of horrible historic events, both in human history and shifter history. Once upon a time, humans had hunted shifters into what they thought was extinction because they were threatened by our existence. Then they had turned on themselves, also driven by power and greed and fearmongering.

“Which is why we can’t let our guards down. Especially while we still don’t know how to determine who has an alpha side locked away behind a human or beta facade.”

Years earlier, I never would have imagined my completely human roommate, a man who suffered from anxiety and claustrophobia when he was in too-large a crowd, would be an alpha. But now, hearing him speak so passionately about protecting a species he had never even known he was a part of, was humbling. Beck might have been uncomfortable accepting his role as pack Alpha, but he was born to lead. This conversation completely cemented that for me.

“I think Sage and Dex might be getting closer to finding more answers. Brandt was helping Eric go over some pictures from old journals a little while back…before the girls were born, I mean. But he said something the other day about Dex emailing more through from…wherever the hell he’s traveled to now.”

“Yeah, Eric’s keeping me informed on that. We’ll see what the new translations bring.”

In the end, while the translations were a bust, the entire person Sage and Dex brought back to the pack was not.

At first glance, he seemed to be an older man, possibly in his sixties or early seventies, with a thick head of silver hair and a perfectly trimmed matching beard. But his scent reminded me of my girls, and he was in fantastic physical shape for a man of his apparent age. He was tall and long-limbed, kind of lanky like me, but seemed to exude the same sort of grace as Brandt, rather than my clumsiness.

Still, it blew me away when Brandt stiffened at my side and scented the air, murmuring, “Another unicorn.”

I hadn’t put two and two together until that moment.

“Micah,” Dex smirked at me as he led the man further into the meeting room in Beck’s house (a room which would always make me smile when I considered what Brandt and I had done there), “please allow me to introduce you to Sergio.”

I rose from my seat to shake Sergio’s hand, the hairs on the back of my neck spiking as I felt a trickle of recognition somewhere in the back of my brain. But that was weird, because I had never met this man before.

“You know what’s fascinating about Sergio?” Dexter continued blithely, with that irritatingly smug tone of his. I kept my eyes on the pale blue pair in front of me, though, unable to look away. “Sergio,” Dex answered himself, “spent a great deal of time in California roughly thirty-something years ago.”

My heart rate increased and my mouth went dry.

“And Sergio,” Dexter was on a roll, “just so happens to be one of the last true magic wielders on earth, don’t you, Surge?”

Releasing the man’s hand, I took a step backwards, right into Brandt’s warm, steadying embrace.

“Dex,” Sage sighed, “we talked about this…”

“I apologize,” Sergio finally spoke, preventing Dexter from defending his actions. The older man hadn’t taken his eyes off me, either, but his expression was carefully blank. He made me uneasy, but that was probably because I was ninety-nine percent sure this was the shaman my mother had visited in order to get pregnant. This was my biological father. “I never intended to cause a scene.”

He seemed genuine enough, and his surprisingly American accented voice was low and calming.

“Dexter caused the scene, not you,” Damon muttered from further down the table.

Dexter sighed. “Who invited the kitty cat anyway? Shouldn’t you be playing receptionist at Eric’s clinic?”

“Eric and Brandt are both here,” Sage cut in, sounding surprisingly irritated with his best friend. “And Rex is his mate. Being one of only a few bonded pairs, it makes sense for them to be here.”

“Welcome to bedlam,” I offered the newcomer, my momentary shock rendering me numb as the others bickered around me. In that moment, I tried to remind myself that I still thought of my parents as my parents. Even if this guy was responsible for half of my genetic makeup, he wasn’t anything to me but a stranger who had helped my parents out. Trying not to give the troublemaking dragon the satisfaction of watching me freak out, I forced a weak smile. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Brandt squeezed my hip and offered his own greeting, then suggested we all take our seats. I leaned into the reassurance he sent through the bond. I would process this latest mindfuck later. In private. Potentially over a Facetime call with my parents.

Dexter pouted as he took one beside Sergio, with Eric rolling his eyes and taking the seat next to me and across the table from both of them. Beck sat at the head of the long, timber table, tugging Ollie into his lap. Brandi and Lena were further down the table, across from Damon and Rex.

Because we had been told this meeting was important, most of the kids were being taken care of by other pack members — people Beck and Ollie had vouched for, though Ollie had winced and muttered something about Jazz giving the twins too much sugar. Brandt and I had our babies with us, though. They were sleeping in their strollers by the window at our backs, and they’d only need to be fed and changed when they woke up. (Unlike Beck’s kids, who would probably attempt to scale the curtains in their boredom.)

“So,” Beck clapped his hands together and looked towards Eric for guidance, “where do we begin?”