Omega's Run Read online

  Omega’s Run

  The Moon Forged Trilogy: Book II

  AJ Downey, Ryan Kells

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Summary

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Hunter’s End: Cover

  About the Authors

  Outcast and running free but without a pack or home to call his own. It’s a heartbreakingly foreign concept for Remus Reese. More so after the death of his twin.

  Angry, determined, and hot on his trail, Ava Martine is on her own crusade. She’s been tasked with bringing Remus in; and as one of the Hunters it’s her sworn duty.

  But all is not what it seems… Will Ava find reason to betray her life’s cause? Will Remus be able to work with the enemy, injured, alone, and constantly at odds? When these two are forced to work with each other, will opposites attract? Or will worlds collide to devastating effect?

  Book II in the Moon Forged Trilogy by A.J. Downey and Ryan Kells.

  See the trailer on YouTube here.

  Second Circle Press

  Dedication

  To the people who make all my books happen behind the scenes. Jennifer, Melanie, (for this one Hannah), Gabrielle and most importantly, Lia. Thanks for all the effort you do. No one gets to know about you guys nearly enough. – AJ

  To AJ, without whom these books would never have gotten off the ground. – Ryan

  The Moon Forged Trilogy:

  I Am The Alpha

  Omega’s Run

  Hunter’s End

  Chapter 1

  Remus

  I wasn’t sure how I ended up in New Orleans, to be honest. After being banished from my pack, marked as an Omega, and sentenced to death if I ever returned to Washington; it wasn’t like I had anywhere important to go. The Big Easy seemed as good a place as any to hit up. Within a month of leaving the Washington Territory, I had ridden half way across the country and taken up residence in the Crescent City.

  Being alone can give a person time to reflect, time to think about their life, time to think about the path they’ve taken and what brought them to where they are. Time to follow the trail of decisions that led into each new turn in the road. I’d been doing a lot of that kind of thinking in regards to myself and my own situation lately, for sure.

  Our father’d been ruining the pack. If we hadn’t done something, everyone would have been up to their necks in trouble before they had even known anything was wrong. I still didn’t know how Markus hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten. Was I the only one that could see it? Was I the only one with enough sight and the brain matter to back it up, to recognize the writing on the wall?

  Every year things got harder and harder for wolf-kind. The Hunters’ technology was getting better. Their methods to identify us, more accurate. Soon there would be no way to hide, no place that would be safe. The only choice was to find a way to cooperate with them, or wipe them out.

  Killing one man, even if that man was my father, to secure a strong Alpha, was a small price to pay in the face of that. Although, William was right, too. It hadn’t been the right play. At least not the way Romulus, and yes, even I, had decided to go about it. There had been other avenues that I could have chosen, made my brother consider, but for reasons I won’t go into now, we’d chosen the avenue we did.

  End result?

  My father was dead. My twin was dead at my adopted brother’s hands, and William was the new Alpha of the Pacific Northwest Pack along with his mate, the daughter of the very hunter who we’d helped to kill our father.

  Yeah; the convoluted mess makes my head hurt too.

  I grunted quietly and my attention wandered from my churning thoughts to just getting the job at hand done. The cheap hotel room stank of the sweat and bodily fluids of the many patrons to visit before us. It smelled even stronger of sex and fear as I pressed the whore I’d met further into the mattress. She was doubled over the bed, legs spread wide with one of my hands tangled in her hair as I drove myself into her mercilessly over and over. I’m sure anyone that might have been in the adjacent rooms were hesitant as to whether the sounds coming from her throat were moans of pleasure or screams of pain. It was probably a bit of both, to be honest.

  “Oh, fuck,” she whined and I did nothing to hide my sneer. She was weak; she was vapid, and she was greedy, but she was clean, both of drugs and disease, with a huge set of tits and a relatively nice ass.

  Speaking of, I pulled out of her grasping cunt, ignoring her frustrated moan, all thoughts of my insane life driven from my mind by my lust. Before she could react, I shifted position and drove my cock as far into her ass as I could. I grunted again, not surprised to find that the bitch had already lubed it up some before we’d even started. She bucked against me and I held her down, pushing forward until my heavy balls rested against her sopping pussy, every inch of my dick buried in her tight little asshole. That had to hurt some, but that just made me harder with the kind of mood I was in.

  The fucking we’d been doing thus far had me primed, and I spent only a few minutes longer on her, every thrust into her body punctuated by a guttural moan from her and a loud slap as the cheeks of her ass smacked against me.

  The growl that slipped from my throat was purely animalistic as I crested the wave I’d been surfing for a while and I came, firing several shots of semen into her, holding myself balls deep inside her ass until my cock stopped twitching. As I started to soften I pulled out of her, leaving her ass gaping. She moaned quietly, theatrically, something she must have thought was incredibly sexy. She reached back and grasped her cheeks with her hands, spreading her ass even further until my cum started leaking out of her. A cheap porn quality move that did nothing for me, in fact, it did quite the opposite.

  Disgusting slut, I thought to myself.

  “Hey! What the fuck?” she cried a moment later when I grabbed her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. I scooped up her clothes with one hand and shoved them into her Pamela Anderson boob job, hauling her toward the door the whole while.

  “You’re done here,” I growled, ignoring her as she struggled against my grip. “Get the fuck out.”

  “Where’s my money you fucking douchebag?” she shrilled and I laughed.

  “I don’t waste good money on a no good whore,” I explained. I jerked open the door and shoved her through it, still butt naked and holding her clothes in her arms. She glowered at me, dull brown eyes glaring daggers and opened her shockingly red painted lips to scream at me when I slammed the door in her face.

  I turned, ignoring her muffled screaming and pounding on the door and looked at the mess of a room. Single queen sized bed and a dresser with a cheap TV resting on it. A single ceiling mounted light with a lazily rotating fan hung in the center, and a single door across the room lead into the bathroom. I sniffed at the air and made a face at the stench. Mold, mildew, sex and desperation, with underlying rodent activity. If moral decay had a smell this would be it. No w
onder I was here.

  “Clean up and get out,” I muttered to myself as I moved for the bathroom, “This place reeks without the distraction.”

  By the time I finished showering the door had been kicked in and there was a group waiting for me. I walked out naked, toweling my hair, and ignored their presence as I went about getting dressed. Four of them, counting the whore I had already thrown from the place once.

  “Came back for another round?” I asked her as I zipped up my pants. The jeans were several sizes too large to actually fit me and only the belt I wore kept them from falling right back to my ankles.

  “You owe me some money, Mon Ami,” the first of them said with that Cajun flare coloring his voice. The bitch was sitting on the end of the bed she had so recently been bent over. Standing next to her was a mountain of muscle and bad hair, wearing imitation biker gear in an attempt to look intimidating. Two more slabs of meat stood by the door in similar attire and wearing expressions indicative of single digit IQ scores.

  “I don’t owe you a fucking thing, Jack,” I sneered and grabbed my keys from the dresser. Keys went into my pocket and the only thing left was my bag by the bed, a large military knapsack I’d had for decades.

  “You had a slice of my little cherry pie here,” Cajun drawled, running the backs of his fingers down one heavily reddened and swelling cheek. Her face hadn’t been that way when I’d shoved her out the door, so that was likely the result of her telling her pimp that I didn’t pay.

  “And no one gets a slice o’ da’ pie wit’out payin’ me my money.”

  I snorted. He was trying to sound threatening. Trying to be scary. And to a normal person he might have been successful, but neither the gun he held in his other hand, nor the muscle by the door, did anything to scare me. It’s difficult to scare someone who doesn’t have anything left to lose.

  “Look, I just had a halfway decent fuck, and I’m in a halfway decent mood, which leaves me feeling charitable. Not something that happens too often.” I stared the pimp in the eye and told him: “So, I’m going to give you one chance to leave here with all of your limbs intact. Take it now and we can all leave healthy. Push me? And you won’t be leaving alive, get me?” I growled the last for the gomers by the door, there were probably too many words involved for them to catch my meaning otherwise.

  There was silence for a moment, and I started to think I would actually get out of there without having to destroy anyone. As usually happens though, these idiots didn’t know when they were outclassed and in over their heads.

  With one sharp word from the Cajun his muscle rushed me. I sighed once before I reached out and grabbed the first man’s wrist in a tight grip. I spun to the side, turning and pulling on his arm until he left his feet with a startled cry and slammed into the wall head first. He was out before he hit the floor.

  I turned back to the second man, grabbed him by the head and yanked down at the same time that I jumped up, my knee crashing into his face so hard that the front of his skull caved in completely. He was dead before his buddies knew it and my pulse began to race as the scent of blood flooded the room; rich, red, and vibrant. The suddenly lax muscles of the body released, and the man gave off the rank odor of piss and shit as his bladder and bowels voided in death.

  I stalked across the floor, stepping over the twitching corpse, moving purposefully toward the idiot that sent him and his friend to their deaths. The Cajun’s eyes were wide and the bitch was screaming, something that did little to calm my growing anger. As he raised the gun that he had, I reached out and slapped it with a negligent backhand that shattered several of his fingers, the bones snapping with spindling cracking noises as the gun flew to land somewhere on the far side of the room.

  “I gave you a choice,” I growled. The sound that came from my throat was entirely inhuman and came straight from the place of nightmares. “Live, or die. Thank you so much for choosing death, I needed to hurt something.” I grabbed his left arm between his elbow and shoulder and pulled as hard as I could. The muscles in my chest and shoulders bunched tight and with a sickening tearing sound, his arm was ripped clean from his shoulder.

  He fell to his knees and just as he opened his mouth to scream I shoved the tattered stump of his own arm into it, effectively gagging him. He fell over and lay on the ground, shock setting in as he bled out across the shitty carpet and I turned to look at the whore. Splattered in her pimp’s blood and staring at me with a wide eyed look of vacant terror on her face.

  “No one will believe you,” I told her smirking. I shot a little salute in her direction, holding two fingers to my temple before I grabbed my bag and walked out the door.

  My bike was parked at the far end of the lot and I quickly stowed my shit, lashing it to the rear carrier with a set of bungee cords. I shrugged into my jacket, ignoring the way it brushed against the Greek letter Omega that was burned into my chest, a parting gift from William.

  The bike roared to life, engine rumbling and throbbing beneath me. I pulled on my helmet, heeled up the kickstand and roared off into the night, humming a cheerful little ditty to myself as the miles fell away under my wheels. It was time to head north.

  Chapter 2

  Ava

  I watched the television as I slid bullets into a fresh magazine. The volume was off, but I didn’t need to hear. The room was awash in the alternating flashing red and blue lights from emergency vehicles on the local eleven o’clock news. A pretty reporter, mixed race, spoke into the microphone, lips moving with a sense of urgency as the black closed captioning boxes scrolled up from the bottom of the screen, the white type rolling along to fill them.

  Words like ‘brutal attack’, ‘several men’, ‘blunt force trauma’ and ‘no eye witnesses’ flitted along before new ones appeared in their place. It was the same story everywhere we’d been.

  I’d nearly had him in St. Louis. Missed him by an hour in Huntsville. Fucker moved around a lot, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Scum of the earth? Yeah. But they were still worth more than his sorry carcass. I slid the magazine home and pulled back the slide, jacking a round into the chamber. I moved with the practiced ease and precision that all Crusaders were trained with and it felt good. Calm, and full of assurance. I popped the magazine back out of my weapon and topped it off before sliding it back home with a satisfying click.

  He wouldn’t be getting away this time. Failure wasn’t an option. I slid my weapon, a Glock 23 with an attached tactical light, into the holster along the outside of my thigh. The attack on the news was just outside New Orleans. I’d been here a couple of days already on the hunt. If he was willing to draw this kind of heat from the mundane authorities then he was moving on, and if he was moving on, then so was I. I picked up my riding jacket. A Joe Rocket with Kevlar lining and slipped it on, zipping it midway up my chest.

  A final check of my riding boots and I snatched up my knapsack and helmet, heading for the door. I made sure my credentials as a licensed bounty hunter hung in plain sight from the bead chain around my neck. Made the gun, not so much less noticeable, but more understood.

  It really was my day job. When I wasn’t hunting one of them, I spent my time getting paid tracking down your good ‘ol, garden variety, human criminals. It kept me sharp for the hunts that mattered. The hunts like this one.

  I checked out of the roadside motel and pulled on my riding gloves before I mounted my bike. She was a satiny black Buell Lightning and had never let me down. I had a guess as to which highway he would have taken out of the area. I put my helmet on and fired my baby up, pulling out of the lot smoothly, leaning into the turn that would take me out and toward the highway.

  If my calculations were right, if I had gleaned his pattern correctly, he would head north again. I made to follow.

  I’ll get him, James. I promise. I thought to my brother, the familiar fractured ache of his loss giving a dull throb in the center of my heart. He’d gone down in a hunt last year, and it still felt like just yesterday.


  I was well rested, I was primed and I would ride all night and into the next day to close the gap between me and my quarry. Remy Dulcet didn’t know it yet, but he’d met his match with Ava Martine. I would catch him, it was only a matter of time and time, for him, was growing really fucking short.

  Chapter 3

  Remus

  New Orleans to Chicago. I jumped onto the I-55 north, transferred onto the 57 north, and managed a ride that was just shy of a thousand miles in a little more than a day. I stopped as little as possible and didn’t feel too bad for it afterward. A normal human would have fallen asleep at the handlebars or would have been in so much pain from the ride that they barely would have been able to move.

  I checked into a motel near the Loop in downtown Chicago and crashed for a couple hours before I got up and headed out. Even I could admit that I had spent long enough wandering like a lost puppy. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t have anywhere to go since I was made Omega, and for the past six months I had done nothing but wander the country, fucking and fighting whenever the opportunity for either presented itself.

  It was time to stop wandering and figure out a plan. I had centuries ahead of me if a Hunter didn’t get me first, and I couldn’t spend the next few hundred years just doing the same nothing.

  Less than three blocks from my motel was a seedy dive bar. One of those hole-in-the-wall type of places that seem to crop up in every town in every country in the world, no matter the population. Live in a small town in the middle of nowhere? There’s a seedy dive bar somewhere. Just the way of the world.

  This particular dive, while still maintaining the sterling reputation of dives everywhere, at least sported nine foot pool tables instead of those crappy coin operated ones you’ll see in most bars. And this bar also had something else. A regular that I was particularly interested in speaking to.