Page 40 of The Omega's Alpha
Mac came walking up, carrying one end of a hastily knocked together bench. Salma Wood carried the other end, and more men and women with more benches came behind them. They lined them up in a perfect horseshoe around the pile of bodies.
The dead had been laid out in a neat row over a grate the soldiers had set up. They’d been dressed at some point in the past day or so, in a clean but motley assortment of clothes gathered up by the survivors. Hair, where it hadn’t burnt off, was neatly combed, ribbons laced through it on the women and girls. Movement in the crowd became purposeful as the elders of Green Moon slowly made their way forward to take seats on the bench, followed by women and one omega male with a bruised face and a splint on one arm. Understanding now what that bruising might mean, Quin watched him closely, but when a man who seemed to be his mate stepped in to stand behind him, the omega didn’t seem bothered, but tipped his head back for a kiss and reached with his good arm to hold his mate’s hand.
Holland appeared at the far side of the crowd, directing a group of young shifters, each carrying cardboard boxes. He didn’t seem to notice Quin, which gave Quin leave to watch him undisturbed as he organized the young ones to stand at specific points around the pyre. Holland went to speak to Alpha Green Moon, ducking his head respectfully, and looked surprised when the Alpha patted him on the shoulder and said something in return. Holland smiled at him, that smile that always made Quin want to roll over and surrender, then stepped around the Alpha and disappeared into the crowd again.
Without Holland as a distraction, Quin began listening to the people around him. The humans were whispering, almost inaudible in the growing noise of the mourners, and out of curiosity and certain sense of self-preservation, Quin borrowed from his wolf to eavesdrop.
“So they burn them?” the reporter asked.
“Yes,” Laine explained. “It’s part of the legislation from the time they were rounded up and put in the enclaves. I dug it out and read it a while ago—it’s pretty ugly stuff.”
“So it’s not part of their culture?”
“Not according to Garrick.”
“Why do they do it? I mean, they’re in here behind walls. Who’s going to see it?”
Quin suppressed a snort of irritation, and listened harder.
Laine had no such compunction. “How big a cemetery do you think they’d need? There’d be no room for them.”
“They could have it outside the walls.”
“See those guns? I have to pass through a gate, under guns like that, every time I go up to Mercy Hills. I need paperwork every time I come to see them, or Garrick comes to see me.”
Quin rubbed his lip and wondered who’d been talking to Laine. Probably Garrick, but Jason seemed to get along with the lawyer as well, and he knew that Bax occasionally sat down with the man to discuss whatever. But it sounded like pups scornfully educating other pups about something they’d just discovered, and he couldn’t wait to share it with Holland and see if he could draw a laugh out of the other man.
Where was Holland?
He had to wait another twenty-five minutes, just before the ceremony was about to start, to see Holland making his way through the crowd with Dorian and Agatha. He must have gone to wash—his hair was still wet and the lines of his body screamed of his stress. They were headed for the benches until Holland spotted Quin at the edge of the crowd and veered back through the mass of bodies, the two pups in tow.
“Hi,” he said when he reached Quin, slightly out of breath. “I can’t stay, the pups are going to make their offering today.” He gazed up at Quin with an anxious, expectant look, then glanced down at the pups.
Dorian was sucking his thumb again, despite the fact that he was holding a small carved wooden dog in that hand, the other one tucked securely into Holland’s. Agatha held a spray of flowers, just a couple, and obviously from a store. She stared unnervingly up at Quin and he looked away, back to Holland, while he attempted to parse the other shifter’s message.
Holland shook his head and then, in a small, uncertain voice that absolutely didn’t sound like Holland, “We’d like to ask for your support, Alpha Mercy Hills. As the pups have no family here to say the words for them, they ask that we help them make their offering to ease their parents’ passage and that of their little brother and sister to the Moonlands.”
Oh. That was a kind thought.He met Holland’s gaze and now understood the anxiety. As a shifter from another pack, and as Alpha no less, he’d be setting up the expectation that he would offer help for these pups—support at the least, in terms of money to find a foster family. More, if he wished it. And then it occurred to him that he’d never mentioned to Holland that he’d been thinking of adopting the two orphans and he wondered if Holland understood the implications. Surely he did—he wasn’t stupid, and he’d been raised in a traditional pack. Which meant…
“I’d be honored.” Quin crouched down next to Dorian and the little boy let go of Holland to go to Quin, burying his face in Quin’s chest and chanting “Up, up, up,” until Quin picked him up and set him on his hip.
“We should go get ready,” Holland said quietly, and began threading his way through the standing crowd, Agatha holding on tightly to his hand.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It pleasedme that Quin had agreed to stand for the pups—they were really too small to understand entirely what was going on. It pleased me more that he understood what he was offering, to stand with the pups for their parents’ funeral. Once the pups were asleep tonight, I was going to make sure he had a very good night. And maybe he’d sleep after.
My hair dripped on my shoulders as we gathered at one end of the clearing, not too far from the pyre. I’d volunteered this morning to help prepare the bodies, but I didn’t want to come back to the pups with the smell of burnt flesh hovering around me so I’d begged the chance to shower from one of the Green Moon shifters and put on my last clean clothes. Bax had taken the pups for me before I went, an odd, knowing expression on his face, but in my mind I was already with the dead and it didn’t touch too much on my consciousness. Now, though, as we waited for the Green Moon Alpha to come out to start the ceremony, I wondered what Bax saw—in me, in the pups. In this whole…thing.
Alpha Green Moon stepped out in front of the crowd and raised his hand. Silence fell like a stone into a lake, a sudden loud drop, followed by a slow descent into the eternal quiet. “Green Moon and friends, our other families. We have this week suffered a grievous loss and it will take time to heal from a wound this deep. But as we go about our lives, finding the new paths, discovering the new shape of our pack, we must remember the good times, and the ways in which our missing family made our lives richer. We must think of them in the Moonlands, with no more walls to constrain their roaming, with plentiful game, and comfortable dens, and most of all, the freedom to be pack, as pack is meant to be. And most of all, we must go on with our lives, and not cheapen their deaths by letting it make us less than we are.” Then he stepped away from the long line of bodies and gestured to a small group of men and women carrying boxes.
These were the death gifts. Not everyone would be in a position to make or buy a gift and while I’d been out with Laine and the other humans, he’d surprised me by asking what would be appropriate for him to give. I hadn’t known what to say, didn’t even know if any gift would be appropriate coming from a human. I’d finally convinced him to choose small things. We went to a store to buy alcohol, where the humans bought dozens of tiny bottles to be burned with the dead, then cases of larger ones.
“Something for the living as well,” Thom had said when he’d seen my wide-eyed expression. Then they’d taken me around to at least a dozen different stores to choose small items that would become the death offerings for those in Green Moon who had lost so much they otherwise wouldn’t be able to give one. He and Laine and the journalist had been entirely useful and, not only that, a welcome buffer between myself and the human population of the town.
None of the humans carried those boxes, though. It was a mixed choice of shifters from each of the packs that had sent people to help with the clean-up—Salma Wood, Jackson-Jellystone, Mercy Hills. I wondered what Bax thought, seeing these people who had once been part of his immediate pack, but he seemed to bear no grudges and spoke to them as easily as he spoke to others. Alpha Green Moon gestured the mourners forward to choose something from the boxes and go to their dead to speak their final words and set the gift in its place. I watched, holding Agatha against my chest and waiting to be nodded forward.
While we waited, my thoughts couldn’t help but turn to Usher, my age-mate and greatest rival in Buffalo Gap until I’d been mated away. Such a different ceremony. Usher had gone to the Moonlands covered in beauty. Here, the dead were so numerous it would be a miracle if they all had even one thing.
