Elliott chewed on the edge of his bottom lip a moment before answering. Glancing at the door, as though to make sure no one was listening, he said, “I sometimes sense when something is wrong.”
“You do?” I asked.
Elliott nodded. “It’s happened a few times. It happened the night I was kidnapped, but I didn’t understand what it meant and was too late to do anything about it.” He looked down at his hands. “If I had, I might have been able to save my father.”
Sadness broke over me. “I’m sorry. I heard about that.”
“What did you hear?” he asked, looking up.
I hesitated. “That they killed your families.”
“They killed my alpha father, but not my omega father. I don’t know what they did with him.”
That was a different kind of hell. Poor Elliott.
After a moment, he said, “David told us you guys went over to Trey’s last night because you also thought something was wrong. What did he mean?”
“Same as you, I guess,” I said. “I just woke up and knew.”
“Had that ever happened before?”
I thought about it. “Not waking up like that, but one time I told Gleesa—that’s the beta woman David, Jackson, and I lived with growing up—that she needed to check the electrical socket. It looked fine from the outside, but it turned out there was a wiring problem that would have started a fire if she hadn’t gotten it fixed. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she hadn’t listened to me—I was just a kid, and because we were unregistered omegas hiding out there, she had to put us all in the attic while the electrician was there. Other than that, I can’t think of anything. Well, wait.”I remembered something. “When I was on the run, I was getting ready to go to sleep under a bunch of papers in an alleyway when I had this sudden feeling that I needed to get out of there. I had barely turned the corner when I heard police sirens.”
I’d never thought anything of those two incidents, but in light of what happened the night before, they seemed meaningful.
Elliott studied me with his large green eyes. “I also heard something else about you. That you healed Jeremiah and Ollie. Is that true?”
I sighed and shook my head. “I didn’t heal them. I wouldn’t know how to heal someone.” I told him about how Angus thought he’d heard his late wife telling him to get me.
“Wow. The thing about his late wife is weird,” Elliott said when I’d finished. “But, I kind of do that…the healing thing.”
“You can heal people?” I asked loudly, and Elliott quickly put his hand over my mouth.
“Shh. No one knows.”
“Why not?” I asked more quietly.
“Because…I can’t really explain, but I think it’s dangerous.”
I frowned. “How could it be?”
Elliott shook his head. “It’s just a feeling. You know how I was separated from the others when we were kidnapped. I got the feeling there was a reason for it. They seemed really interested in what I could do. I had no idea what they meant when they asked me if I had any weird talents. I thought they were being crude, but I heard them saying something about my omega father. They took him, too, only I never saw him. Leaning toward me, he whispered, “They called him anomega x.”
“Omega x? What’s that?”
Elliott shrugged. “I don’t know, except it’s something they want.”
I didn’t think I’d heard the term before, but I remembered the dream about my fathers and how one had said, “He’s not like you.”
“When I couldn’t wake up that time, I had two very vivid dreams,” I told Elliott.
Elliott leaned closer. “What did you dream?”
I told him every detail about them that I could remember. “I know the first one was about my parents because the SOS found me in a dumpster when I was a baby. In the dream, he told my omega dad that killing me would be better than letting me live because I wasn’t like my omega father was. Do you think he meant omega x?”
“Maybe,” Elliott said “The only thing I really know about my father’s past is that he'd been orphaned and my alpha father’s family took him in and raised him. They didn’t know he was omega until he suddenly went into heat and my alpha father mated with him.”
“Wow. Could he heal or anything? And why haven’t you told the others?”