Page 30 of The Omega's Alpha
“Don’t want to,” I muttered, and buried my face in his chest harder.
“We’re here.”
Yeah. That’s the problem.“I’m up.” I sat up and rubbed the heels of my hands over my eyes until I felt alive again. The smell of smoke blew in through the door—smoke, and other smells that my mind didn’t recognize, but my instinct did. I snarled, because it was better than crying, and then Quin turned my face to him and he kissed me. He knew me so well, despite how little time we’d spent learning each other. His touch, the taste of him, was all I needed to ground me in this time and in my duties to my pack and my people. To remind me how much he needed me, and how happy it made me to see his burdens lightened.
He smiled at me when the kiss ended and for a second I thought he’d be serious. But this was Quin and he was like a hero of legend when it came to his people. If he’d been serious, I’d have dived right back down into that bleak anger I’d been struggling with for the past day. So he wasn’t.
“You have bedface,” he told me. “Or t-shirt face.”
“Bleh.” I rubbed my fingers over the long, narrow dent on my cheekbone and sighed. We were here.
We’d been on the road for half the day, crammed into two buses, stopping only for food and to give the bathroom at the back of the vehicle a break. I glanced down the row of seats as I stood up and hoped I didn’t look as shitty as the rest of us did, but it wasn’t likely. We were all tired and cramped and not a one of us wouldn’t have stayed on that bus for another six hours if it meant that none of what we were going to see had happened.
Quin stood up and moved me gently out of his way so he could face the shifters waiting anxiously in their seats. “As soon as you get off, go around to the side of the bus and grab some of the supplies. This bus has food and tents and blankets. Holland and Bax will be co-ordinating with the Green Moon shifters, see them for instructions.” His fingers played against my back, hidden from the rest of the pack. He was worried, though it was only evident in that restless touch. I leaned back against him, offering the comfort of my body because words weren’t appropriate right now. He spread his fingers and pressed his palm against my back and I suppressed a smile, because that too was not appropriate right now.
Quin stepped off the bus and disappeared almost immediately. I grabbed my bag with my clothes and personal items and swung out onto the rough ground next to the enclave wall.
We’d stopped right by the gate, in a space that had evidently been hastily cleared for our use. The gates stood open behind us, but a half-circle of humans waited just outside, with large guns hanging over their shoulders, and wary expressions in their eyes.
The bus driver, an older human, surprisingly relaxed around a bus full of shifters, had his head stuck in the open side of the bus. As I watched, mounds of crates and boxes grew on the ground beside it. Food, fuel in the form of charcoal bricks, tents, and every spare blanket in Mercy Hills. The other bus held much the same, only exchanging the tents and blankets for clothing, cooking supplies, and everything Adelaide could think of that she might need. We’d ended up bringing her after all because, if humans were nervous of groups of shifters on a good day, they were downright terrified of putting themselves in the middle of a pack that had suffered such a tragic loss, and none of the doctors we’d approach had agreed to come.
From the low wailing choking the air around us, I suspected Adelaide would need all of it and more. There wasn’t any one sound that I could pick out more than others, just a mass of sound so dull and pervasive it was almost below the threshold to hear it, like their misery and shock and fear were being absorbed through my skin and that was how I sensed it. I grimaced and reached for a bundle of blankets and took it with me as I went looking for Quin and whoever was in charge here.
I found him around a bend in the wall, even farther away from the gate than where we had stopped. Our packmembers spread out over the cleared section by the gate, and into what looked like the remains of a largish raspberry patch. The smell coated the inside of my nose with a fetid, greasy scent, and where I’d never felt much one way or the other about humans before, right now I hated them. I’d heard from Quin before we left that morning, as we planned how we would help Green Moon, that the humans had refused to open the gate while the fires raged, and made the pack wait inside with the inferno while the fire engines came from Greenwood. And then how the fire engines insisted that they would only raise the ladder over the wall and put water on the flames that way.
So here we were, and for the next week we would be picking through the charcoal and blackened timbers to find the bodies of the dead and send them properly to the Moonlands.
Quin was talking to an older man, one who I took to be the Alpha of Green Moon. I glanced over my shoulder to see Bax and two of Mercy Hills security crew organizing our volunteers to get the busses unloaded. It was strange to see Bax without Abel and the pups, but someone had to stay home to make decisions for the pack and Abel had been the logical choice. Bram and Duke wouldn’t be here either after all, because when they’d come back to Mercy Hills the night before we left, Quin had decided they’d be next in charge to get the enclave ready for the refugees to arrive. I remembered giggling in exhausted hilarity when Duke said he came to help with the pups that would be left behind, but he was as good as his word, and the pups hardly noticed us leaving for the fun they were having with Duke and Bram.
So I’d left one pack of charges behind in Mercy Hills, but I needed to get my new ones settled somewhere. Quietly, I approached Quin and the other Alpha and waited to be noticed.
The other Alpha’s nostrils flared and he said, “You have an omega hanging in your shadow.” His voice was tired and like I’d expected, he didn’t think I’d be much use.
Quin glanced over his shoulder. “Holland! How’s the unloading going.”
“Bax is looking after it. We need to know where we can set up our camp.” I kept my eyes down and avoided looking at the other Alpha at all, remembering my omega manners.
Quin’s mouth tightened, and I suspected it wasn’t just because of our reason for being here. He hated it when Iregressed, but he didn’t say anything, simply turning a hard look on the other Alpha—the obvious source of my sudden reticence. “Where can I put my people?”
“I saved a place for you.” He turned and pointed in the opposite direction from where the busses were parked. “There’s a small grove of trees that way and a cleared space in front of it. There’s no room for the busses, unless they can be parked in the—” He sucked in a shaky breath. “—burned section.”
“We’ll send the busses away. It’ll cost less, and leaves us with a little more room to set up.” Quin scratched at the back of his head and spun slowly in place. “We have tents, but not enough.”
“We’re going to try to salvage wood from the less damaged areas. You keep your tents, Mercy Hills.”
Quin grimaced. “I think we can spare a few more for you.” But it was obvious even to me that we didn’t have anywhere near enough. He turned to me. “Get Adelaide set up in the big tent first. I might send for Bram after all—we’re going to need more hands here. Once you get her set up, the next step is the kitchen. Put a generator on both tents and I’ll see if I can get my hands on a few more.” He had that look on his face I sometimes saw when he and Abel argued tactics on old military actions and I wondered what he was up to. He didn’t give me long to wonder, because after I got those two tents up and running, Bax and I were to divide the Mercy Hills shifters up into two groups and liaise with the Green Moon shifters to fill the gaps.
I nodded and turned to go, but I couldn’t help overhearing Green Moon say, “You’re putting an omega in charge?” It chilled me and, for a moment, I was back in Perseguir and my chest went tight with anxiety.
But I shouldn’t have worried. Quin’s voiced rumbled into the air. “I would trust him to run my pack if I weren’t there. I do trust him to do that, when I have to be out of the office. If you can’t see why I brought them with me by the end of this week, I’m going to start worrying about you.” And the knot in my chest unfurled into a flower of happiness.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Quin was shoveling brokenwindows and melted asphalt shingles from the Mercy Hills truck into a Dumpster with Mac, both of them sweating and shirtless despite the chill in the air, when he head Bax say something he never dreamed would come out of the soft-spoken omega’s mouth.
“What the fuck are they doing here?”
Quin turned and squinted, trying to make out the details of three figures walking toward them.
