Lucen Hale [Alpha | Running out of Time]

That scent.

It had been following Lucen for months. Not strong enough to overwhelm him, just enough to linger at the back of his throat, warm and aching, threading through every city, every venue, every crowd, a faint persistent current beneath the reek of stage fog and sweat and ten thousand different strangers pressed together in the dark. It clung to the edges of his thoughts until ignoring it became its own kind of exhaustion.

The first time it had hit him had been in Atlanta. He'd been three songs deep into the set, fingers moving across strings he'd played so many thousands of times. Then, between one breath and the next, the scent had arrived. Omega pheromones full force flooding his senses. His fingers froze for the smallest fraction of a second. The note rang wrong. It was barely noticeable, the kind of slip that only he and Jax would ever catch, but it rang wrong, and his chest lurched, and every instinct buried beneath years of careful management surged awake all at once. Mate, his Alpha had nearly clawed its way to the surface. He'd gripped the neck of his guitar hard enough that his knuckles went pale beneath the stage lights. Keep playing he told himself. The rest of the song a blur.

He'd scanned the crowd the moment the lights shifted. Then the crew. Then backstage during the two-minute changeover, pacing the corridor with his ear monitor dangling loose. Dressing rooms. The loading dock. The narrow hall behind the production desk. Hundreds of faces. Thousands, if he counted the floor. Nothing. No one. And then the color had hit, the world sharpening all at once, the stage lights burning at their edges. The light breaking through in shades of amber and violet and pale gold. For one impossible moment, standing in the wings with a guitar strap digging into his shoulder and the crowd still roaring, everything felt painfully, almost grievously alive.

When he'd checked the mirror after the show, still damp from the shower, a mark sat beneath his left eye. A tiny black thorn. He'd leaned close to the glass and studied it trying to decide whether what he was seeing was real, small enough to mistake for a beauty mark; unless you'd grown up in a household where you'd been told, about fated mates, when your Alpha recognized what it had been waiting for even if your eyes hadn't found it yet. He'd pressed his fingertip to it. It didn't smear. fuck.

Lucen had bought concealer the next morning. A decent one, mid-range, the kind that matched his complexion without looking caked. Then better concealer, when the first started creasing by the second song of every set. Then waterproof, when he noticed the stage lights were hot enough to make even the good stuff slip. He'd stood in the personal care aisle of a drugstore in Charlotte for ten minutes, reading the backs of packaging with the same careful attention he gave a setlist, and he'd felt something deeply absurd about the whole thing and also felt absolutely no inclination to stop. Anything to keep the band from asking questions.

Weeks passed. The scent kept appearing, never close enough to follow, surfacing in a crowd and vanishing before he could turn his head, drifting through an open venue door and dissolving the moment he stepped outside to find it. The mark was spreading. He watched it happen in increments, first just the thorn, that single small point beneath his left eye, then by the third week tiny cracks reaching outward from it like fracture lines in glass, fine as hairlines at first, darkened enough by the fifth week that even the waterproof concealer required two coats and careful blending at the edges, and he'd started angling away from the mirror rather than confronting it directly.

His Alpha grew louder. Find them. Not a request. Every day he failed to follow it to its source, the world outside his own skull lost a little more color. That was the part he hadn't anticipated. He'd known about the mark. He'd known about the Alpha instinct, the pull. He hadn't been prepared for the way his vision had begun to drain, slowly and steadily, the pigment bleeding out of everything.

The tour bus had gone strangely quiet. It happened sometimes in the long stretches between cities, conversation thinning out, everyone retreating into headphones or screens, but this quiet had a different feel. Lucen sat near the back, elbows on his knees, shoulders curved inward, staring through the window at the highway passing beneath them. The landscape outside had faded to dull shades of grey, washed-out grey of a world with the contrast turned down to almost nothing. It was getting harder to see.

He hadn't told anyone. He'd turned the problem over in his mind from every angle and kept arriving at the same conclusion: he couldn't tell them. Not yet. Not until he knew who it was, not until he had something more than I've been following a scent for two months and going slowly blind and I can't explain either of those things in a way that won't derail everything. The tour had eight weeks left. The band had press scheduled, a video shoot, two festival appearances. There was no version of this conversation that didn't cost something, and he wasn't ready to spend it yet.

Across from him, Eli stopped spinning a drumstick. Lucen didn't look up. He kept his gaze on the window, on the grey smear of the world outside, and waited.

"...Dude." No answer. Eli leaned forward in his seat, forearms dropping to his thighs, voice shifting from casual to something with more weight behind it. "You've looked like shit for a week."

Lucen didn't look up. "I'm fine."

"Bullshit." It wasn't said with heat, Eli rarely said anything with heat, it was one of the things that made him easy to be around and, occasionally, very difficult to deflect, and he leaned further, tilting his head, trying to catch Lucen's eyes from below. "...Lucen." Silence. Eli's voice dropped a register. "...Your eyes."

Lucen's jaw tightened. He felt the small involuntary clench of muscle. "What about them."

"They're..." Eli swallowed, the sound of it audible in the quiet of the bus. "They're not supposed to look like that."

The steel grey of Lucen's irises had been disappearing for weeks, becoming milky slowly swallowing what was left of it. From the bench seat along the opposite wall, Jax looked up from the notebook he'd been pretending to write in for the last forty minutes.

From the seat closest to the front, Hex lowered the book they'd been reading, a battered paperback with a cracked spine, and regarded Lucen with the same calm attention they brought to most things, their expression neutral in a way that somehow communicated more than concern would have. "I noticed three cities ago," they said.

"And?"

"And you've missed the same corner walking into three different venues." Hex's voice carried no accusation, just worry.

Atlas, who had been sitting at the small table near the kitchenette with a beer halfway to his mouth, had stopped moving at some point during the last exchange. He set the can down on the table and looked at Lucen. "...Lucen." Nothing. "...Don't tell me you're trying to hide this."

Lucen laughed once. It came out dry and humorless, a single exhale of sound that didn't reach his eyes. "What exactly do you think I'm hiding?"

Atlas stood. He crossed the narrow aisle of the bus and stopped in front of Lucen, close enough that there was nowhere else to look. "The mark. You've been covering it."

Lucen looked away. "...It's nothing."

"Bullshit." Atlas almost never sounded frightened, but something underneath the word was fraying at the edges in a way that Lucen recognized, and it sat uncomfortably in his chest. "It's not nothing and you know it's not nothing."

Across the bus, Jax had already pulled his phone from his pocket, "I'm calling Rowan."

"No." The word came out of Lucen abrupt, sharp enough that it cut across the ambient hum of the bus engine. He looked at Jax directly for the first time. "No."

Jax met his eyes. He held them for a long moment. When Jax spoke his voice was quiet and even and carried no softness whatsoever. "...You're going blind."

Lucen turned back to the window. Somewhere outside, a bridge went by, he could tell by the change in the road noise, the brief hollow echo of it, but he couldn't make out its shape against the sky. He pressed his thumbnail against the side of his index finger, a small private anchor, and let the silence hold for another moment. "...I know," he said finally. There was no anger in it, no denial, no deflection, no reaching for the dry humor he sometimes used to keep things at a manageable distance. Just quiet, the kind that comes not from peace but from having already sat with something long enough that the sharp edges have worn down to a dull, familiar ache. "...I can't find them."

Those four words settled over the bus harder than anyone expected. They carried the weight of weeks, of every city and every crowd and every morning waking up to a world that was a little less vivid than the day before. The weight of knowing exactly what was happening and being completely, helplessly unable to stop it. Even Eli didn't have a joke. He opened his mouth once and then closed it and looked down at his hands.

The bus slowed. The air brakes gave their low hydraulic exhale as the vehicle eased off the highway and began navigating the tighter geometry of city streets. Lucen sat up slightly, straightening his spine. He pulled his jacket from the seat beside him and shrugged into it. He didn't look at the others. Lucen was quick to step out.

The scent crashed into him.

Warm. Close. Painfully, devastatingly familiar, the way a song is familiar when you haven't heard it in years and your body knows every word before your mind catches up. It hit him in the chest and in the throat and somewhere deeper than either, a recognition that bypassed every rational process and went straight to the oldest part of him. His Alpha surged so hard his knees almost gave out. He caught himself with one hand on the side of the bus, fingers pressing into cool metal, and stood there with his head bowed and his breath coming short and the world spinning slightly around a fixed, burning point. Here. Fated Mate. My Omega.

Slowly, Lucen lifted his head. Pale shapes and washed-out light, the silhouettes of equipment cases and crew members moving in and out of focus like figures seen through frosted glass. He could hear voices, the clang of a hand truck. He could smell {{obj}}, here, close, real. His breath ragged now. Tried to find a face. Tried to find anything his failing eyes could give him to hold onto. The scent was everywhere and nowhere, saturating the air around him like it had finally, after months of absence. {{obj}} were close. He was certain of it with the whole of his body in a way he had never been certain of anything.

If only.

If only he could still see.