Omega Awakening Bundle Read online

  Omega Awakening

  by

  Aiden Bates

  Omega Awakening - The Full Series Bundle

  Preston Walker / Aiden Bates

  © 2015

  Disclaimer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.

  This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18).

  Book Catalogue

  Omega Awakening – Book 1

  Omega Reborn – Book 2

  Omega Soaring – Book 3

  Omega Unchained – Book 4

  Omega Rising – Book 5

  Omega Awakening

  Preston Walker / Aiden Bates

  © 2015

  Omega Awakening Book 1

  Disclaimer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.

  This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18).

  Excerpt

  It was the guy’s cologne that really caught his attention. Darren had no idea what he was wearing, but it was… god, it smelled good. Like pine trees and leather and smoke. He leaned forward a little as he swiped the man’s purchases across the scanner, trying to get a good sniff of it without being too obvious. The guy wasn’t looking at him anyway, he was on his cellphone, having a conversation that Darren tuned out. He hated people who came up to the register on their phones. It was one of his biggest pet peeves, and rude besides. Like, couldn’t they just wait until they’d made their purchases? It wasn’t like someone was taking a life and death call while calmly standing in line at Walmart and waiting for the checkout boy to ring up their Tostitos.

  That scent – the pine and leather and smoke – grew stronger, and under them something he couldn’t quite place. This musky kind of smell that was probably just the cologne, but might have actually been the guy. Darren’s stomach twisted. He handed over the bag, and their hands brushed briefly as the man reached out to take it from him. Darren was already dropping his gaze when he felt the eyes on him, abrupt and intent, and he looked up slowly through his lashes, not sure why the guy was suddenly staring.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter One

  At night, Darren dreamed of wolves. Not merely of them, but of being one, running through the forest under the full moon, with his pack mates beside him. He dreamed of the way the wind would feel, moving through his fur, of the smell of earth and green growing things, the scent of prey on the wind. He dreamed, and when he woke to his own small bed in the single room apartment, there was always a moment of disoriented disappointment that left him staring up at the ceiling, wondering why he was not curled in a bed of moss with his pack sleeping at his sides.

  The worst of it was the loneliness. In his dreams, there were friends, and though they were invisible in the darkness he could hear them – the nearly silent footfalls of their padded paws, the occasional rustle of a twig when there was no wind. They called to him, singing songs that guided him onward, guided him home. But when he woke, there was no one, and he was left alone to drag himself from his mattress on the floor and dress for the morning shift.

  When he was awake, Darren knew he was not a wolf. He was too timid. Too shy. He wore his ash brown hair with a sweep of bangs that fell over his left eye to hide the scar that cut across his eyebrow and down along the edge of the socket. Hiding himself from the world. The doctors had told him he had been lucky not to lose the eye, though Darren had never thought of himself as really very lucky at all.

  His parents had died when he was a child, killed in a car wreck that he, strapped into his car seat in the back, had managed to survive with no reminder but the scar on his face and the occasional ache in his leg when the weather was cold. Though he had been nearly six, he did not remember them. The doctors told him it was the result of the head injury. At first, they had hoped he might regain something of himself, but as the months and the years wore on, and his only memories of the world before the accident were dim grey things – a river flowing through trees, a voice he couldn’t place – he, and they, had given up hope. He knew now he would never remember what he had lost. Sometimes Darren told himself it was better that way, to not remember. He didn’t know what he was missing. But even he knew that it wasn’t true, no matter how many times he repeated the words to himself.

  He had grown up in foster care, passed from family to family. At first, he had believed in that too. That one day one of the families would want to keep him. And some of them had, but he had always ruined it, waking up with screaming nightmares that frightened their other children. He could never remember those either, and in that, at least, he might have been lucky. Those dreams he thought he was indeed better off not knowing.

  One or two of the families might have kept him even so; even when trips to therapists and sleeping pills and stays in the psych ward didn’t help. But the sleepwalking had been even worse. He had woken up miles from home on more than one occasion, with dirty, cut up feet and no knowledge of where he was or why he had ended up there. And there were so many other children who were easier to care for, easier to love. He hadn’t been surprised when everyone had given up.

  It wasn’t as though he was badly behaved. He had always been quiet and shy, eager to please, obedient. That was why they had wanted to keep him, he thought. Because when he was not waking in the night, he was easy. He did what he was told. He deferred to authority. But the last family, the Bennets, the ones he thought would have kept him… Their children didn’t like him. Didn’t like how often he was praised for his quiet obedience. They had made up stories about him, and Darren, unwilling to outright accuse them of lying, had not known how to defend himself. So the Bennets had given him up too, and by then he was nearly 14, too old to be cute, and not so many families had been interested in keeping him anymore.

  He’d learned then that being quiet and obedient didn’t get you anywhere. It just made other kids hate you. And in the group homes he’d learned that if you didn’t stand up for yourself, there were people who would take everything you owned out from under you. He’d learned that you could get hurt for being quiet, for being obedient. So he’d learned to tell other people to fuck off, had learned to grow and argue and hit back. And it had never been who he was, had never come naturally, but the shell had grown on him until he wore the mask more than he wore his own skin.

  The day he turned eighteen, they had been pretty much done with him. They helped him pack his bags,
moved him into an apartment that they helped him pay for as long as he stayed in school. For a while, that had been okay. It had been strange, living on his own. Strange and kind of lonely, even though he’d never really gotten along with a lot of the other kids. There had always seemed to be something about him they just didn’t like. Something that was different, that they didn’t understand. People were always afraid of what they didn’t understand.

  He’d graduated, though only barely. He had never really been smart, despite what some of his teachers had tried to tell him. Darren had known from the beginning that he wasn’t, and he’d learned over eighteen years that he wasn’t worth much. Case in point: with school over, the foster system had dropped their support altogether, and he’d been entirely on his own.

  Without the check, he hadn’t been able to afford the apartment. He he’d ended up in a homeless shelter a month later. He supposed he was one of the lucky ones there too. Most didn’t get a bed. A lot of the kids he had grown up, or those just like them, with were still sleeping on the street, bedding down under bridges and on park benches.

  When he’d gotten the job at Walmart, they’d called him lucky then too, and Darren supposed he had to agree. With the job market the way it was, a kid with a high school diploma and no real address didn’t have a lot of chances. The Walmart job didn’t pay for an apartment on its own, but with the job at the call center it did. It meant he didn’t get much sleep most nights, but that was okay. He didn’t sleep well anyway.

  Every day it was the same routine. Wake up at 7am for the call center job and down a bowl of oatmeal or cereal, walk out the door at 7:30. It was only a few blocks over to the big building where he worked, sitting in a little cubicle walled with soundproofed paneling. That job was 8am to 4pm, with a half hour break for lunch, which was usually a peanut butter and jelly sandwich brought from home. Sometimes, he splurged and had tuna. Occasionally, he had turkey with lettuce and tomato.

  When the call center job ended, he walked home and had a bowl of ramen and an apple or a banana, then he changed into his Walmart uniform. The Walmart building was also within walking distance of his tiny seventh floor apartment, 5 blocks in the opposite direction from the call center. He was kind of glad it was. At least he got to stop at home for dinner.

  His shifts at Walmart usually started around 5:00. He got off at midnight. If he was unlucky, his shift would start later, and he’d end up working 7:00 to 2am, or midnight to 6. Those were the worst days. Weekends, the call center was closed, and he worked an 8-hour shift at Walmart, which meant he got to sleep in a bit, and go to bed early. Those were the best days. On weekends, sometimes, he had time to watch movies on the second-hand laptop one of his caseworkers had found him and helped him pay for as a gift when he’d aged out. He couldn’t afford internet, but the people in the three-bedroom right below his apartment had an unsecured connection. He liked movies about the outdoors. Documentaries about wolves, especially. The Call of the Wild. He had a few books he read sometimes: Julie of the Wolves, My Side of the Mountain. He hadn’t read the endings after the first time, though. They just made him sad. One day, he promised himself, he would go see mountains, would see forests. He’s leave Iowa and go north, to places where there were still wolves, and once he got there, he wouldn’t leave.

  Chapter Two

  The day everything changed was a Saturday. It began the way ever Saturday since he had started the job at Walmart had begun: with his alarm clock ringing and a bowl of oatmeal.

  He was a little slow dragging himself out of bed. His dreams had kept him restless. Around 3am, he’d woken in a panic, his blankets twisted around his legs and trapping them. When his heart had stopped racing, he’d realized what the problem was, but he’d had a hard time going back to sleep after that, kept half-waking to dreams of being bound and unable to run, crying after the rest of the pack as they swept off into the woods after a deer, but none of them had heard him, and he’d been left alone at the edge of the trees, hearing the sound of car tires in the distance.

  Eating breakfast was more a race to get as much nourishment down his throat as possible before he had to run out the door than a leisurely sit down. He was nearly late anyway, and had to jog the last block. It was the height of summer, and even in the early part of the morning, it was warm enough that he’d shown up to work disheveled and sweating, and he’d had to make a quick stop in the bathroom to splash his face with water and run his fingers through his hair.

  The shoppers that morning acted pretty much exactly like what you’d expect people who showed up at Walmart at 10am on a Saturday to act like. Darren had spent a lot of time biting his tongue against the things he wanted to say to them. By lunch time, he’d been considering walking out. It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed his mind. He spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like if he just pulled off his nametag one day and walked out of the store, walking away from Walmart and the call center and his ratty apartment and just never came back to any of it. Maybe he could hitch a ride to Alaska, or Washington. He was pretty good at wheedling food out of people – it was the big brown eyes that did it – and he was small for a 22-year-old. Maybe he could convince people he was a runaway teenager, leaving some bad situation behind. Maybe someone would give him a ride, and they’d talk, and-

  Darren shook his head at himself, letting a smile slip out for a moment. He’d been dreaming dreams like that since he was 15, and he knew how stupid they were. No one was going to pick him up on the side of the highway and fall in love with him. Anyway, he was too scared to run away. He knew what happened to kids who ran away. Not that he was really a kid, but he wasn’t exactly a black belt.

  When the tall man with the grey eyes walked up to his register, Darren hadn’t really paid him that much more attention than he paid to any reasonably attractive guy who walked up to his register. Not at first. Yeah, he was good looking, with dark hair curling at his temples, and broad shoulders to go with the muscles in his biceps and the strong, square jaw, but a lot of people were good looking. That didn’t mean they were worth his time.

  It was the guy’s cologne that really caught his attention. Darren had no idea what he was wearing, but it was… god, it smelled good. Like pine trees and leather and smoke. He leaned forward a little as he swiped the man’s purchases across the scanner, trying to get a good sniff of it without being too obvious. The guy wasn’t looking at him anyway, he was on his cellphone, having a conversation that Darren tuned out. He hated people who came up to the register on their phones. It was one of his biggest pet peeves, and rude as hell besides. Like, couldn’t they just wait until they’d made their purchases? It wasn’t like someone was taking a life and death call while calmly standing in line at Walmart and waiting for the checkout boy to ring up their Tostitos.

  That scent – the pine and leather and smoke – grew stronger, and under them something he couldn’t quite place. This musky kind of smell that was probably just the cologne, but might have actually been the guy. Darren’s stomach twisted. He handed over the bag, and their hands brushed briefly as the man reached out to take it from him. Darren was already dropping his gaze when he felt the eyes on him, sudden and intent, and he looked up slowly through his lashes, not sure why the guy was suddenly staring.

  When his eyes met the grey ones locked on him, the man’s own narrowed and his head tipped slightly to the side the way a dog’s did when it was trying to figure out what it was you’d just said to it. Darren had never had a dog, but he’d met a few. They pretty much loved him. Cats, on the other hand, went out of their way to stay way out of his, and he liked it that way. The guy was still looking at him, and Darren forced himself to meet that gaze, to raise an eyebrow in a look that clearly said ‘what the fuck are you staring at?’ For a moment they both stood there, squaring off against each other, and then the guy huffed a laugh and turned away, his bag in his hand. Darren felt his cheeks flush with heat. What was so funny?

  He didn’t really have
time to contemplate the question. There were five other people still in line, and he turned his attention to them, pasting on a smile that didn’t quite manage to look anything but completely fake.

  His face still felt hot. In fact, all of him felt hot, and in a brief break between customers, Darren raised a hand to his forehead, hoping he wasn’t getting sick. He really couldn’t afford to. Most of the time he just worked through it, but some things they wouldn’t let you come to work with. His skin was warm against the palm of his hand, but maybe that was just him. He’d have to ask one of the girls to check for him when he went on his break in a few minutes. They were usually pretty nice to him. A few had tried to make friends, but Darren hadn’t really known how to respond, had mostly just looked at them with wide eyes and tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound totally stupid.

  By the time he went on his break, Darren was feeling shaky and unsteady on his feet. He stumbled a little on the way back to the break room, caught himself on the edge of a shelf. His stomach was churning.

  Alicia was in the break room, and she looked up as he came in, her blue eyes widening, and her expression tight with concern. She stood up from her chair and caught him as he almost tripped over his own feet, laying a hand on his forehead.

  “Jesus, Darren.” Her tone told him everything he needed to know, and her expression had told him pretty clearly what he looked like. “You’re burning up.”

  He was definitely sick.

  “I feel like it,” he confessed, words slurring a little. “I don’t know what happened. I was totally fine fifteen minutes ago. And then it was, like, I don’t even know. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “Doesn’t matter, dude. We’re going to go talk to a manager.”