Heat Race - Tanya Chris Page 0,93

darted around as if his relatives might pop out and shout surprise, but no one took any notice of them. Jasper hadn’t thought much beyond driving here, but he saw a sign for town hall and figured that was the way to go. Someone there must’ve sent Saul that family tree.

Turned out the someone was one of Saul’s relatives—a woman named Tillie who claimed to be a second cousin once removed and even indicated her nuclear family’s spot on the chart Saul removed from his back pocket. She’d drawn the chart herself, and as he held it, she verbally detailed branches beyond what the paper could hold. Seemed like Saul was related to half the town. Those ancestors of his had done some serious populating.

“I can’t even tell you how excited we were to hear Barb’s son had turned up,” Tillie said. “And an alpha,” she added proudly. “We’ve thinned out here in Woodhaven. Didn’t hardly have enough omegas this year to bother running a race. We were going to do a joint race with the next town over and then the council decided to just let the omegas figure it out themselves. That’s for the best, don’t you think? Heat races are kind of barbaric.”

When she stepped away from the counter to make a phone call, Saul turned to Jasper with nervous eyes.

“It’s all right,” Jasper told him. He could see Saul was worried about finding his family only to be kicked out of it for being a barbarian. “The race did what it was meant to do.” The four of them wouldn’t have come together any other way, and it was only alphas like Lon who used a heat race as an excuse to force an omega into a claim he didn’t want. For most people, the race was either a formality or a chance to let fate make a match for you.

“This a friend of yours?” Tillie asked Saul when she returned.

“My mate,” Saul said with another concerned glance at Jasper. Now he was afraid of being judged for having an alpha mate. “We’re a pack. He’s an uber-alpha, and I have another alpha mate and an omega mate.”

“No!”

For a moment, Jasper thought this was going to go as badly as Saul had feared, but Tillie’s exclamation was excited rather than appalled. “That’s, like, so fucking awesome. Oh my goodness, wait until I tell everyone Woodhaven made a new pack.”

Jasper wasn’t sure how Woodhaven got the credit for it, but as long as the attitude continued to be prideful rather than condemnatory, he wouldn’t argue. Tillie fairly bristled with excitement. Everyone who came in got told, and most of them turned out to be related to Saul in some way. They all went through their lineage for him—genealogy seemed to be a popular subject in Woodhaven—and then shook Jasper’s hand and asked him questions about his omega and their other mate. Saul’s smile grew wider and wider until he was smiling so broadly he was in danger of splitting the wound on his forehead back open.

“That’s Felicity Woodhaven,” Tillie hissed to Jasper when a sturdy woman with a massive cane thumped through the door. “Barb’s mother. She’ll know for sure if Saul is one of her kin. She’s got a nose like an alpha.”

Felicity limped slowly over to them. She leaned in to scent along Saul’s neck and then her arms flew wide. Jasper ducked her flying cane as she wrapped Saul up, her broad arms and cushioned body enveloping him so completely Jasper couldn’t make out much more of Saul than his face as he turned it into Felicity’s hair and whispered “Grandma?”

SAUL

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Someone steered him into a chair. Jasper, probably. His head was loopy, and through all the joy, he could still feel the pain of his knitting ribs. They were at his grandmother’s house—he had a grandmother!—which was crowded with figurines and furniture, a difficult space for someone his size to navigate, but his grandmother maneuvered through it like she’d been doing it her whole life. She probably had. Everything about the house suggested it’d been inhabited by the same family for generations.

“That’s your momma,” Felicity said, pointing to a faded snapshot of a teenager posing next to a waterfall. “She’s seventeen in that picture. Year after that, she went to Kettlestone. Wanted more excitement than we had on offer in Woodhaven. We figured she’d be back soon enough, but she met Otis there and they were married before we hardly knew it. They stayed