Page 26 of Omega's Flight

Bax smiled. "I know. I don't want that for him."

Abel paused with his hands buried in soap bubbles. "Come here so I can kiss you."

"I'm just going to do another sweep for dirty dishes," Cas said awkwardly and disappeared into the living room to the sound of laughter in the kitchen. He found Noah in his corner playing with the plastic Lego blocks that had been passed down from Abel, to Fan, through Teca and now to Noah. "Whatcha building?" he asked his nephew.

"A tree house," Noah told him seriously. Cas couldn't see any sign of a tree, but there was definitely the start of a house in there, so he made encouraging noises and obediently fetched blocks that had fallen too far away at Noah's command.

An excited yip sounded behind him and a young pup raced into the room. He leaped into the air and landed on Cas, then tumbled to the floor and raced around the room.

"Taden," Bax said behind him. "We don't jump."

Taden just yipped and bounced in place before running over to lick Cas's hand, then he disappeared in the direction of the kitchen to use the puppy flap installed in the door out there, Cas assumed from the creaking noise.

"They're pretty worked up," he said, and got up.

"Midwinter Wolf is coming soon. And tonight's Full Moon. And we told them our news this morning." Bax wore that smile, the one that looked so innocent but that Cas had learned to read as starting his own brand of mischief. Though, knowing his brother, and Bax, he had a pretty good idea what that mischief was.

"You really should make him tie a knot in it," Cas told Bax.

"I like babies. And I like your brother."

Cas knew Bax was teasing, but he must have absorbed a bit more of the human attitude toward sex than he'd thought while he was in school, because the idea of his brother getting lucky while his mate was in heat made him go, "Eww."

And then Bax laughed and Abel poked his head out of the kitchen. "What are you up to?" he asked, grinning.

Bax winked at Cas. "Teasing your brother. He's been out in the human world too long."

Yeah, maybe he had. Cas leaned in and hugged Bax. "Not that long. But be careful, will you? That's six pups."

"And more if he gets his way," Abel said, coming forward to wrap his arms around his mate, his hands resting gently on Bax's lower belly. He kissed Bax's temple and Bax smiled like a wolf with the fattest rabbit. "Anyway, we only found out for sure this morning. The family are the only ones who know so far."

"Which means," Bax said lightly, "that we need to get Raleigh sorted out as soon as possible. Before I'm as big as a whale and only interested in eating and napping."

The new omega. Cas shouldn't have been surprised at the resilience of the young man, obviously bone-weary and emotionally exhausted. It was easy to think of Bax and Holland and the rest of them as exceptions to the rule, except that the more of them he met, the more he realized that the rule was wrong. He wondered how Raleigh would fit in, and then wondered why it felt so important to him that Raleigh did, indeed, find a home here.

"You have any plans yet for this?" It would be an interesting legal challenge, but divorce wasn't an area of law that Cas had a lot of experience with. Still had the books, though that wasn't a big improvement. And they'd be breaking absolutely new ground with respect to the packs—omegas didn't have the right to end their matings, only their mates did. If anyone can manage it, it'll be Bax and Holland. Jason too, despite his solid disinterest in the politics of their liberation.

Bax extricated himself from Abel's arms and led them back into the kitchen. "We'd like to avoid paying for him, but that's as far as we've gotten." And it would be Bax and the other omegas making the decision on that, in their roles as the Omega Council—not its official name, but the one everybody that dealt with it used. So far there hadn't been much pushback about the omegas controlling a good forty percent of the Mutch family funding. Folk were still so excited about the rest of the money coming in and, in particular, about the plans to start breaking ground for their very own hospital-slash-community health center sometime this summer that they hardly paid any attention to the omegas. Not that it had much to do with him—he was just a glorified accountant. But the talk of money perked his ears up.

"You think they're going to demand a ransom for him?"

Bax shrugged. "Maybe. Word's getting around, according to Holland. White River called the other day to see what he could find out. Quin put him off."

"Then he called me," Abel said. "I told him it wasn't my information to give out. I did tell him that he probably wanted to stay on Quin's good side." He grinned cheekily. "Mutch has put Quin on the committee to choose the next pack to get this deal." He squeezed his mate. "You want coffee?"

"Really? You have to ask that?" Bax laughed and let Abel lead him back into the kitchen.

Cas followed, curious. "So he'd definitely talking about extending this to the other packs?"

Abel nodded and started filling the carafe with water, while Bax put grounds in the filter. "He's asked us to rank the packs in order of who we think will most likely meet his requirements. The first of which being that they are willing to change how they deal with the omegas."

It was starting to become more evident that Cas needed to read those journals that Holland was still chipping away at. He could read the ones written by the humans, he supposed—those were all in English. That would give Holland enough time to finish the translations on the ones supposedly written by the Mate of the first Alpha of Mercy Hills. The old pack language had nearly died out after the Enclosure and the creation of the enclaves, but it still lived in isolated corners of their society— Holland being one of those corners. Which gave him a thought, one he was surprised hadn't been broached before. "Has anyone asked around to see if there are any more people who still speak the old pack language?"

Abel paused in filling the coffee machine. "What brought that on?"

Cas shrugged. "Just got thinking about the old journals. It would be good to know what's in them."

Bax turned and leaned against the counter. "It would. The problem being that Mutch and Holland are a little leery about having people from other packs digging through them, which I can't really blame them for. You just don't know what use they'll put the information to."