The Littlest Light

#Chapter13-04

#Chapter13-04

The bite-fest was not an isolated incident. When Jonathan attempted to wipe down his sticky hands and dress him in one of his new outfits, the kid screamed blue murder. He refused to settle or stop until I took over. Then it was all smiles and "Star" all round.

"I don't understand," Jonathan admitted as he took a seat at the table, defeated, as I sat on the floor, yanking the new shirt, a Scooby-Doo one, over the kid's head. It was a bit baggy, but all-in-all, it wasn't a bad fit. "He let me change him yesterday."

"What did you do to him?" I asked. "Cuz he f*****g hates you now."

A gasp followed, quickly succeeded by a patronizing round of 'Bad Star'. It was getting tiresome, but the kid seemed immune to death glares.

"I didn't do anything," Jonathan defended. "He's just spent a night in your company, and you've already infected him with your vileness."

Ignoring him, I finished dressing the menace. Grey jeans, and sneakers that were still slightly too big, he still seemed impossibly babiyish. He was a tiny thing, the unnerving element of it stemmed only from the rapid transformation, and his face was still basked in baby fat and simplified expressions. And when Jonathan handed him the yellow bear, telling him it was called Pooh, the kid seemed to dissolve into a happy puddle. His babbles rose past a point of deciphering, and he squished the thing to his chest, patting it and puckering up his lips to kiss its ears.

Dummies and plastic cups had been among Jonathan's initiative. And going by the kids track record with spilling, I decided it was probably for the best.

"So," Jonathan said. After cleaning up the mess Lumen had made with his breakfast, he'd taken a seat at the table. Most of the bags had been emptied, sorted into piles for my approval, and the kid was sitting at his feet, waiting for him to pass him down something else. He'd already gained a dummy, which he suckled on happily, and he had a cardboard book which he 'read'. He stroked or smacked the pages, gurgling away from behind the sucker.

"So what?"

"He really is a baby?" I didn't like the expression on my Beta's face. It was too soft. Too . . . naive? He was letting the creature fool it, and he was doing it so effortlessly. "He's still just the same as when we found him, just slightly bigger?"

"So it appears," I said darkly. "She wouldn't tell me how long he'll stay this way, or if it will happen again. We're in the dark here."

"Joseph has the scouts on recon. They're on double time, searching for anything that could help us figure out where he came from." Jonathan waved to the Pooh bear and said hi to it when Lumen wobbled onto his knees and shoved it in his face. "And I've got Clarke keeping an ear out to see if anybody knows anything about the kid."

"Does he know about the kid?"

Joseph Powel had almost become my Beta. When I had taken over, I'd scrapped their tradition of allowing the current Beta to ascend, and had handpicked my second in command. Powel had qualified because he was for a lot of reasons, but his blind submission to my will had cost him; Jonathan's integrity annoyed the seven bells of Hell out of me, but sometimes, it was a grounding point. Clarke was, by default of rank, my Delta. If tradition was followed, he'd ascend to Jonathan's position of Beta were anything to happen to him. And while the kid was a whole bundle of eager, he was fresh out of his cubhood days, and as dopey as a puppy dog.

Didn't exactly fill me with confidence that he was drawn into the hush-hush of things.

"He knows that we found the kid. Same as a few of the others, but none of them know that he's grown. We're just trying to limit the amount of people that know about him at all, but you know how rumours are. Wildfire and all."

"Dandy."

"What are we going to do with him?" Jonathan asked. A frown worked his brow, a contagious seriousness that made the atmosphere seem all the poorer. "You have a pack meeting this afternoon. We've already got the loyalist stirring up trouble. They could see this as an opportunity to try and take you on."

The loyalists, as Jonathan called them, were the members of the pack that still resented the change in leadership. They hated me; I could deal with that. I was comforted by the knowledge that they couldn't possibly hate me more than I did them.

William Asher and his pathetic circle of cockroach followers had made it a well-known secret that they didn't like my dictatorship. There had been talk of mutiny. I implored them to try. It would have been punishable by death, and it was an outcome I longed for. Keeping Malcolm Asher's son alive had been a mistake. Stripping him of rank and privilege, watching him struggle as the pack's newest Omega, it had been satisfying, but a mistake all the same. He was like a f*****g Frisbee: you'd throw him off, kick him down into the mud until he learnt his place, but sooner or later he'd be back at it.

It was cute at first, but now it grew irksome.

"I'll deal with it," I told him.

Not that I had any idea how, I thought to myself. But I would. I couldn't afford weakness. Not in front of the pack, and certainly not in front of Asher, whom although now an Omega, still carried the blood and heritage, and the cut-throat savagery, of the Alpha he had one day meant to be.

Opening his mouth to protest, my Beta seemed to think better of it, opting for a curt nod instead, busting a U-ey on the convo flow. "This stuff, it'll hold him short term, but if you're going to be keeping him long term, we're going to need more."

We're.

It was a one word discrepancy, but it was one that rang out in my mind. Granting Joseph Powel the rank of Zelta before Beta had never been a decision I'd really given much thought to. Jonathan had simply been a better fit. But moments like these? They were the moments I felt nothing shy of certain that I'd made the right call. Trust defied my every instinct, but Jonathan had proved himself the exception time and time again. It made thinking easier knowing he was going to be there right along side me.

My eyes found Lumen once more. He had given up trying to 'read' and was trying to eat the pages.

Intelligence was clearly the boy's forte.

"If the thing is going to be staying-- " Which wasn't altogether decided, the temptation to defy the Wise One's advice almost impossible to banish, "-- Then it needs to learn some manners."

Specifically 'sit still' and 'shut up'.

"Good luck," Jonathan said, eyeballing the bite mark that still wept, bleeding through the kitchen roll that had been applied. "It looks like you're going to need it."