Page 27 of His Unicorn Alpha (Shifters Sanctuary #3)

Chapter One - Sage

“ Y ou’re an omega, Dex.” My younger brother, Eric, sounded on the verge of throttling my closest friend. He raked his fingers through his unruly blonde 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. You do.”

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 —that was, born without a birthmark distinguishing him as an omega 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.

A freaking unicorn .

Until I’d been sent on a fact-finding mission, I hadn’t known they were real. (And, yes, the irony of a dragon not 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 as I missed the science gene in our family— 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 side to unleash. So, I suggested adapting the pheromones and spell 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. And that was 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. His argument was that, until we could trust that the synthetic ruts didn’t compromise an alpha’s ability to control themselves around potential mates, it would be safer for omegas and women to stay away. 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 had made me realize just how much I 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.

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 had made it further. Of course, it would be just his luck that the one weekend his alpha was out of town would be the time he went into labor. At least he had a large support system here. We all did.

“You good?” I asked Brandt. “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.

“All the more reason for them to come out and meet their favorite uncle,” I grinned, ignoring Eric’s pointed throat clearing.

“Uncle Beck will be their favorite,” Beck argued from his place at the head of the table. While our Pack Alpha was a wolf shifter and wasn't related to any of us by blood, he was one of Micah's best friends and the closest thing Brandt's alpha had to a brother.

“Aren’t you afraid of infants, Alpha?” Dex taunted him before I could come up with my own rebuke.

The handsome man in charge of leading our pack huffed and crossed his arms over his chest, dipping his stubbled chin in near petulance. “I’m not afraid of babies,” he took the bait, even as Eric, Brandt and I all shook our heads. “Just because Ollie and I are waiting for Rory and Duke to be…”

“Less evil?” Dex offered, as Beck seemed to struggle for the right words to describe his rambunctious children.

Beck narrowed his eyes. “More independent.”

“Good luck with that,” Dex stretched his hand out in front of him, idly inspecting his perfectly manicured nails. He was such a brat, but I couldn't help how funny I found him sometimes.

“Anyway,” Brandt interrupted, wincing again, “I hate to admit it, but I do think Dexter may be onto something.”

In his seat across from me, Dex visibly brightened. “You do?”

“I do. We need to study the effects of the forced ruts more than we have, and we really should be taking more samples for our research to compare genetic makeup now that we have a much larger data pool to work with.”

Dexter slumped in his seat and pouted, a lock of his blonde hair falling into his eyes. He made no move to brush it away. My fingers itched. “I wanted to go for the orgies.”

“That’s not a surprise,” Eric rolled his eyes. “But Brandt’s right. We really should be trying to understand why these people have hidden alpha sides, and whether there is a test we can run to determine who does and doesn’t, rather than playing the hit-and-miss game of seeing who is affected by the pheromones and spells during the parties.”

“Plus,” Beck added, leaning forward over the glossy timber surface of the boardroom table, “with our pack producing so many alphas all of a sudden, we’re definitely in the Moonmusic peoples’ crosshairs more than ever. It would be nice to have more of a game plan than just unleashing a bunch of alphas for the hell of it.”

“It’s not really for the hell of it,” Eric argued. “We’re restoring magical balance and trying to save a few subspecies on the verge of extinction.”

“Yeah, well, Morstein isn’t going to see it that way,” Beck told him. “The existence of one alpha was a threat to his whole cult-y system. Suddenly, there are at least…what? Twelve out there now?”

“Morstein?” Dex butted in before Eric could reply to Beck, sounding uncharacteristically serious all of a sudden. “The weasel who tried to kidnap your children?” There was a growl to his accented voice which was kind of sexy.

No, brain. Stop that.

“The one and the same,” Beck nodded. “He’s been quiet the past couple of years, but I’m sure that with us suddenly having a magical way to unleash more alphas, and word spreading about it, he’s going to feel more threatened than ever by our existence.”

Moonmusic was the organization masquerading as a shifter religion, and they were the reason many packs were still treating omegas as little more than property. They had set themselves up with betas in power, seeing as alphas had all but gone extinct before Beckett had accidentally unlocked his own alpha side.

The Moonmusic organization’s leader, Joe Morstein, had made his stance on Shifters Sanctuary very clear. We were an aberration: a threat to what he called the ‘real’ way of shifter life. The fact that he was losing control of the people he had convinced to send him tithes and fund his cushy lifestyle was the actual threat.

Even though I hadn’t met him, I hated him on principal. People like him had destroyed things for shifters far more than the humans who'd run us all into hiding a couple of hundred years ago had. Not that shifters were in hiding anymore. But that was beside the point. The point was, Morstein was a manipulative, controlling sleazeball on a power trip.

“Are you sure we can’t just shift and eat him?” I asked. “It seems like the easiest way to deal with him, really.”

“We’re not stooping to his level,” Beck chided, but he sounded amused. “And I doubt he’d taste nice, anyway.”

“I hate having morals,” I complained. “Does he honestly think he’s got a chance against us now that we have so many alphas on our side? Even those that are leaving to return to their own packs would be our allies in a fight against Moonmusic and all of the packs they’ve got under their not-all-opposable thumbs.”

“I mean, he hasn’t issued any outright threats since we stopped that kidnapping attempt a few years back, but the ongoing silence is concerning, especially now that we’ve cracked the code on unlocking alphas.” He nodded towards Brandt. “Which takes us back to why learning as much as we can is a good idea. Knowledge is power and all that jazz.”

“So…does this mean we get to go to an Unlocking party?” Dex asked.

Eric sighed. “Make sure your Pill is up to date. Or don’t,” he shot my best friend a wry grin. “We could use more little dragons, after all.”

The look on my best friend’s face was priceless, even if I did have to smother a stab of jealousy at the idea of him hooking up with an alpha.

The fact that I also had to convince myself I was jealous of him and not the fictional alpha in that scenario also made me squirm.

Bad thoughts, Sage, I told myself. Don’t go there.

If only feelings were that easy to ignore. You’d think that after a hundred years or so I would have gotten over them, but…nope.

“You’ll come with me, won’t you, Sage?” Dex implored, pulling me out of the start of one of my usual spirals.

I blinked at him, taking in his wide, hopeful blue eyes and the almost aristocratic slope of his nose. Dex was so handsome, and his English accent was my kryptonite. Even though I had never admitted it, I thought that he knew it, too.

“Fine,” I agreed, even if it sounded reluctant to my own ears. Then I turned to my brothers. “What information do you need us to collect?”