Page 1 of Watcher's Omega
Prologue
Rhomas
I’ve always been a watcher. My earliest memory is lying in my crib and watching the blurry form of my bio mom watching me through the window. She pressed her paws and nose against the glass and stared at me as if trying to commit me to memory. The stereotypical views of the wild said she should’ve forgotten about me around my first birthday. Only, she showed up well-beyond that and eventually moved into my adoptive parents’ home when she was too elderly to survive in the wild. Her door came shortly before my thirteenth birthday. It came with a buzz and a crack. It arrived with the feeling of electricity dancing over my limbs. Then my mother was duplicated. She lay asleep on the sofa next to where I played The Age of Lions on the big screen television and stood before me not far from the door that would take her away forever. It didn’t come as a surprise but at the same time it did. My biological mom was a wild wolf after all and most of them didn’t live past twenty years even with all the shifter laws in place to protect them and give more them longevity. I was born in the ‘wilds’ not far from Mage Street where Hemlock Academy still stands to this day. My parents discovered my crying shifter self as a newborn while they were out on a run. Growing up I always felt like I lived in both worlds – the wild and the tame. Though, it often seemed to me that the laws of the wild were more easily understood and digested. Nature was cruel but indifferent to all our suffering while other shifters often brought suffering upon each other with strict intent. So, a watcher I remained for he who let his guard downwas the first to suffer. Not that my adoptive dads knew anything about the wild born insults hurled at me. I’d never give my schoolyard tormentors the privilege of stealing away my dads’ peace. Though, my mom did bite one once when he took a swing and a miss early in middle school. Most of the bullies left me alone after that.
By the time I was fifteen, I’d been near where three doors had occurred. All wild wolves and each time they came with the static shock of death that no one else seemed to feel. The summer I turned sixteen I was a lifeguard at the local pool. I was just coming onto my shift and the watcher before me hadn’t paid enough attention to a pup who had wandered a bit too far towards the deep end. No one had. The static danced across my body, and without thinking, I leapt into the water as the door appeared right next to the black text that alerted everyone that the depth went up to twelve foot here. I swam out with the blonde child with his blue lips and limp limbs. Door or no door, my dads hadn’t raised a quitter and growing up with two healers around you learn CPR and the Heimlich young.
Ignoring the door and the shrieks of the pup’s carrier I set to work. Music only I could hear pounded behind my eyes. Like all my siblings, I was taught to perform CPR to an old Grim Howlers’ song that had the perfect ‘time’ for it. I didn’t pray to Juda or Frost or some unknown wild wolf spirit. As always when I prayed, I prayed to my mother and those who had gone before her. I prayed that they might, on this one occasion, hold back whatever ancestors were coming for this little child who looked up wide-eyed at his parents in disbelief. She must have heard my prayers because the boy coughed and lost his duplicity. I was hailed as a hero and played along, letting Uncle Darian and Wrynn award me all sorts of things but I wasn’t a hero. I was doing my job as a lifeguard and packmate. Even at thatimmature age, I knew pups must be protected at all costs – saved at all costs. It was the first law of the wild.
Not long after that my family moved to Heartville and my life was turned tail up even if I was granted a ‘service wolf’ to accompany me from my mother’s line. At first, the wolf was more companion than service animal but soon he picked up on service tasks such as getting in between me and people I wanted to bite. I hadn’t really chosen Ralphie. He chose me and then my younger sister named him after one cartoon rat or another that she was in love with at the time. He was a service wolf because I had grown increasingly hypervigilant after the near-death experience of the pup. Now, I searched for death’s static everywhere I stepped. My parents believed that he helped me relax. I was merely relieved that part of my birth mother was traveling with us to the strange new town where money didn’t mean anything more than it did in the wild. Ralphie was the grandson of one of my littermates. That was a strange thing to explain to other teenagers, so I stopped trying to. If they didn’t understand how quickly wild wolves reproduced that was on them. The others accepted Ralphie because they accepted me and that was a fact that took me years to accept. In Heartville I was no longer the outcast wolf amongst my peers. Instead, I was the wolf everyone wanted to speak with either about living on Mage Street or Hemlock Mountain, because we had houses at both places or to ask if I remembered anything of my time in the wild.
As the years went on Ralphie did more and more for me, from letting me know I wasn’t the only one who felt the change in the air when natural events occurred, reminding me to wear shoes, to letting me know if something was a traumatic reaction or real danger. He helped me sort out the world of shifters. The wolves who followed him did that and more. Healso signaled by bumping my thigh with his nose whenever I forgot to communicate verbally with shifters who didn’t quite understand the language of wild wolves. Shifters didn’t completely comprehend the language of movement, fur, and scents or if they did their language had broken off as a dialect of the wild wolves. And yes, he did get me to safe, quiet places whenever I was near lashing out at shifters due to environmental overstimulation.
It was after a death in Heartville that Liam Moonscale, the First Mate of the territory, approached my parents. I eavesdropped from the stairs, worried I had broken some unspoken social rule of the shifters and it was going to cost my family a lot of trouble.
“I think Rhomas has a gift,” Liam said, one hand resting on a pregnant belly. “I think he might have a bit of seer in him. Given that you both descend from big magic, it’s not all that surprising. He knew that horse’s door was coming. I saw it all over his face and in the way he ran for the stables before anyone even smelled there was a problem. Cloud Runner was elderly and unwell. No one is blaming Rhomas for his passing. I’m just saying he knew something was happening.”
“He has a nose,” Dad said, leaning back in his chair.
“Bane, we all have noses,” Liam countered.
“No, he has a wild nose. It’s the same way he sensed that earthquake last month. He was wild born, Liam. You know that. Being wild born comes with extra senses. He’s not seeing the future. He’s feeling the subtle changes in energy and nature that happen when doors come up. It only looks like he’s a psychic because we can’t feel it ourselves,” he said.
Liam glanced to my other dad who sat in a recliner sipping a bloodshake. He rolled the gooey liquid around his mouth before speaking.
“What do you want to do?” he finally asked, running a hand through his ginger hair. “You wouldn’t come and tell us unless you had something in mind.”
“I work with young seers and even kids with strong intuition…” Liam started but didn’t get to finish his sentence.
“Liam, he stands out enough. You didn’t know him before he came here. He’s making friends here. He’s getting on well in school and with his peers. We’re not adding anything more on top of him. It’s not magic. It’s not visions. It’s his literal senses. Nothing paranormal here. He’s a normal kid.”
“Are you saying I wasn’t?” Liam asked.
“Breaking and entering to read other people’s journals isn’t exactly normal,” my other dad laughed.
They talked a bit longer but I didn’t hang around to hear the rest of it. My teenage brain was a bit addled to know that I hadn’t kept my secrets well at all. They knew about the cruelty of the other children and they knew about the senses my mother left in my blood. I waited for the disappointment and guilt to rise to the surface. I had caused them extra work despite going out of my way not to. Bane and Lee didn’t have to adopt me or keep me. They didn’t have to give me a home and a family. The least I could do was try to be an easy kid to raise. Only the disappointment didn’t rise into my throat as I expected it would. They had kept me despite all the complications and all the extra work I was.
“They’re our family. Our pack,”my wolf chimed off into my thoughts.“They love us.”
It was the first time he or I had thought the words directly. I loved my dads as much as I had loved my mom. I loved my siblings and even some of my less annoying extended family but up until their conversation with Liam, I figured it might be hard to love me.
“They chose us. With the rest of them they just had to keep whoever popped up,”my wolf cackled inside my thoughts, and I barely hid my own laughter.
I didn’t hide my knowledge much after that. I grew more outspoken, warning about earthquakes and storms. I didn’t have many opportunities to know that doors of life and death were about to appear, fortunately, but when they did I warned everyone I could. Eventually, after attending a few security courses and getting a nursing degree I ended up working at Hemlock Memorial Hospital as a Door Watcher in their operating rooms. Plenty happened before then but Frieda and I moved out to Hemlock Mountain. Frieda was my new service wolf after Ralphie. She was a sandy-colored pup from the last litter he sired before old age carried him off to the place I couldn’t follow. I thought I glimpsed my mother when he sprinted through the door, tail wagging.
After Frieda came Jolly, named for his lolling tongue. Jolly was only half wolf because Frieda got a crush on the howl-box of a malamute next door and had a litter in her later years. I dubbed him Jolly because his tail stayed wagging all through his puppyhood. He might’ve been half dog, but sense-wise he was all wolf. Which, of course, confused every dog and wolf he met. Still,Jolly made for excellent company during my long hours spent in the gallery.
Chapter One
Rhomas
Hemlock Memorial Hospital, Hemlock Mountain
My favorite surgeries to watch were appendectomies. Sitting in the gallery was always tense. No matter how many surgeries a door watcher sits through, he never really knew if this would be the time he needed to press the black button that alerted everyone in the operating room the shit was about to hit the fan they all stood facing. I never had to press the black button on an appendectomy in my two decades as a door watcher. They were usually quick ins and outs. Sure, it sucked to have appendicitis on New Year’s Eve and be conked out with a robot tickling your insides at seven PM on New Year's Eve too, but I was certain Rossalind Mayers would think death was worse than that even if the teenager hadn’t conceded that fact before her surgery. She was missing out on the biggest party on Hemlock Mountain. So were Jolly and I. Though, that’s why I volunteered to work tonight. While I blended in better to shifter society now, I still hated parties unless my dads hosted them.
Jolly’s tail thumped against my sneaker. The wolf was one thousand percent sure that I had the easiest job in the territory. The people in the masks paid me to sit up here so they had at least one person watching while they showed off. His job, of course, was to keep my lazy ass safe, sane, and fed while I did my easy-peasy job. I could’ve scrolled through my phone or read a book but chose not to. Most door watchers spend years training to spot doors as quickly as possible. Most had to take the examthree times to pass. They made me take it three times to prove that I hadn’t cheated. They might’ve kept going forever, if my dads hadn’t submitted a long list of references from individuals who saw my skills in action over the years. The little blonde boy was now barely a man and sent in a video of himself recounting how I saved him.
I’d only had to press the button four times in all my years working here. Three of those shifters survived. One old wolf refused to get back into his body. He threatened to give the doctor a free orchiectomy with his own surgical knife if he ran one more round of life saving measures. He hadn’t wanted open-heart surgery anyway. He had wanted to reunite with his mate but his children had insisted and he’d given in. If anything, the door showing up, proved to him that he was right and that it was time to move on to whatever the universe had in store for him on the other side of his current life.