William

We sailed into harbor in the Republic of Piratical Islands, on the Island of Barbadua, in the Port of New Hope Town late in the afternoon, the skies clear and blue, with the trade winds fluttering the sails, the sound of their slaps flapping above us.

Unfortunately, the only easy passage to the island that held our home was through part of the Omega Triangle. The effects of the triangle faded not far from landfall on Barbadua, but the Triangle itself was an imperfect measurement. It enveloped almost all the routes into any of Barbadua’s ports. Basically, it came down to being unable to visit the island at all—not without going through the Omega Triangle.

In fact, what those of us who lived there long enough knew was that one part of the island itself fell within the triangle. Alpha-omega couples who wanted to conceive had been known to pack up and make camp in the jungle on that side of the island for several days. It was a tried and true method for sending the omega into heat, and for making sure they had the best chance possible for conceiving.

But that meant that we’d had one more crossing, one more chance for all our omegas to go into heat, before we left them behind. I wasn’t sure that we didn’t have even more pregnant omegas.

Still, I couldn’t let that bother me. Everything about the day was glorious. It was the kind of day that reminded me why I had chosen the sea.

It was a good day to come home.

Jolly was waiting on the dock, smiles wreathing his lined face. His braids and his beard had grown grayer since the last time I’d seen him, their white strands a stark contrast to his still-dark hair and his skin.

But his eyes still sparkled like the ocean in sunlight, and I could feel the love pouring out of him. I wanted to bound off the ship and throw myself into his arms like the child I had been when he first took me in, but I contented myself with a hearty “Hallo!” and a wave while I stuck around to oversee my men unloading the goods we had decided to trade while we were here.

Already, Talin, the Neptune’s Jewel Quartermaster, was haggling with suppliers on the dock over the cost of taking on some of the rum that the island produced along with its cane sugar. I suspected some of the men whose ships we’d raided on the way here—a couple of whom had joined the crew—would be surprised to see the dread pirates become merchant men in the blink of an eye.

But we sailors were well willing to trade with each other. It was the pirate way. We only took from those who shouldn’t have been trading in our Triangle to begin with. Too many of them disparaged our lives, our families.

I’d heard tell recently that some of the European countries had been denying the existence of omegas at all—pretending all men were alphas or betas, none of them able to carry children.

I wondered what would become of a world where all men were reduced to the role of alpha. I shook my head. As much as I couldn’t allow pregnant omegas aboard the Neptune’s Jewel, the idea of denying them the right to exist at all made me sick to my stomach. Especially when I was greeted on landfall by the omega who had taken me in after my own omega-father had died and my alpha-father had followed his heart out to the sea.

Oh, my boy,” Jolly said, holding his arms out to me as I stepped off the gangplank once everything was firmly under the Quartermaster’s control. “I’ve missed you, my boy.”

“And I you, Jolly.” We turned toward town, Jolly’s gnarled hands clutching the knobbed end of the carved cane he used to steady his step.

“The Winds are singing me songs of love left behind.” Jolly didn’t look at me as we walked.

“I’m putting all the omegas ashore.”

“Hmph.”

“You know why I have to do this.”

He peered at me out of the corner of his eye. “I know why you think you have to.”

“You have the sight, Jolly. You tell me—is this the wrong thing to do?”

His belly-deep laugh echoed across the beach. “Oh, my boy. I can’t tell you wrong or right. Only that you are here now.

“Can you throw the bones for me? Tell me what they say?”

Jolly paused in the middle of the path leading the short way into the clearing that held his cottage, the small home we had built together when I was around twelve.

“Are you sure you want to see what your future might bring?”

From anyone else, I would have assumed the question was meant to dissuade me from having him do a reading. From Jolly, however, I knew it was sincere. He was checking to make sure that I wasn’t afraid of what the bones might tell me. “I’m certain.”

He picked up his cane and thumped along the path, his bad ankle turning just a little bit. When I was a child, he told me that he was lucky he’d had the Sight, since his bad leg disqualified him from doing much else.

As I got older, I realized that that wasn’t entirely true. Jolly had the Sight, all right—but he had also been trained by one of the best physicians ever to have been spirited away from England aboard a pirate ship. Combine that with an island healer’s knowledge of local plants and herbs, and enough control over his own magic to ascertain the source of many infections, and New Hope Town couldn’t have asked for better care.

No matter what our reputations might be in other parts of the world, the Pirates in New Hope Town were some of the cleanest, healthiest people in the world.

Some of the richest, too, I remembered, as I glanced around Jolly’s hut—another thing that looked very different on the inside than on the outside. The furniture was a mismatched set of beautifully carved tables and chairs covered with silk fabric. An oriental rug covered the floor. The shelves held goblets and dishes of the finest gold, better than anything one might expect to see in a tiny cabin set back only a little way from the beach on a Caribbean island. But Jolly’s patients paid him in whatever they had—food, drink, or the latest take from a pirate ship’s raid.

But we didn’t sit on the furniture.

“The bones take their power from the earth,” I remembered Jolly saying many times. “And when we cast the bones, so do we.”

So without discussion, Jolly took the bones in their wooden cup down from a high shelf, swirling them inside in a rattling spin. We kept walking through the cabin and out the back door into my foster omega-father’s garden, where he lowered himself onto a smooth rock, setting the cane down on the ground beside it.

I sat in my accustomed place across from him and slightly to the right, on another large rock, and his fond smile suggested he remembered our many discussions here, as well.

It was good to come home, sometimes.

I soaked in the atmosphere of the garden, the giant, colorful blooms native to the island blending in perfectly with the carefully cultivated herbs and vegetables. Jolly closed his eyes and hummed, letting his magic run through him, fill him from top to bottom.

Then Jolly shook the cup and scattered the bones out onto the ground between us.

“Death,” he announced. “Destruction. Despair.”

“All D-words, then?”

The old seer gave me a dirty look and I bit my tongue on further commentary. He waved his hands over the bits of ivory-colored bones with their carved symbols. “That’s what’s coming for you, my boy.”

I knew how Jolly worked, though. “What’s the rest of it?”

He laughed, his braids flipping as he flashed a grin in my direction. “You want to know if you’re doing the right thing leaving the omegas on the Neptune’s Jewel here with us?”

“That would be good information to have.”

He peered down at the bones, running his fingers lightly over first one and then another, murmuring to himself as he worked through the meanings. I could almost see the power pouring through him. Finally he turned his gaze up to me and waved one hand over the bones grouped together on the right-hand side of his working area.

“These over here.” He touched four bones in a row. “They illustrate the path not taken. This is what would happen if you turned from your current plan.”

I leaned in, trying to remember what little he’d taught me of reading the bones. I had no aptitude for it, so neither of us had tried very hard. I turned my hands up. “Yes?”

Jolly brushed them away from the others. “You would never return.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Never?”

“No.” He gestured toward the other bones on the ground. “Leave the omegas here and go, and you will return. Take them with you, and you all perish.”

I hadn’t intended to renege on my plan, but Jolly’s calm voice proclaiming my doom sent a shiver through me. “Very well, then. I will arrange for a place for them to stay while we are gone. Will you watch over them for me?”

“I will.” He gathered the bones and slid them back into the cup. “And I’m glad you’ll be returning.”

“As am I.” I wrapped my arm around his shoulder. “As am I.”

“Now, shall we join the rest of your crew at the Dolphin’s Leap Tavern?”

“After I speak to Miss Nellie at the boarding house. The rest of the crew and I will need to catch the tide out tomorrow morning, so we don’t have much time.” My tone was cheerful, but as we headed into town, I was overtaken by a shiver much like the one that had gone through me when Jolly had told me to leave the omegas behind or die.

It was a warning—I was certain of it. I might return to New Hope Town, but I wouldn’t be quite the same person.

And as we moved through the streets, I thought I heard Jolly murmur, “No you won’t, my boy. No you won’t.”