Page 38 of The Omega's Alpha
Quin wasn’t sleeping. How could he, with so much to do and the ghosts of his past riding him like a Noknika, that dream beat that would sink their claws sunk deep in a sleeper’s heart as they fed on his spirit? He tossed and turned on his little patch of earth in the corner of the long army tent allotted to the Mercy Hills shifters and finally threw the blankets off and went for a walk. Maybe he could wear himself out, though how an extra walk around the Green Moon enclave would tire him enough to sleep when eighteen hours of backbreaking and heartbreaking labor couldn’t, he didn’t know.
It was planning the damn funerals that had him on edge. And the smell. Not that there’d been many funerals overseas, but there’d been lots of death and it all smelled the same, which seemed to just set the scene for the wolf part of him to be snarlingly on edge. The smell, and the humans.
The meeting tonight had left him wanting to break things, or change shape and run as far and fast as he could, run until his feet bled and he couldn’t go any farther. Him and Salma Wood and Green Moon and Jackson-Jellystone, all crammed around a table with a half-dozen of the human military to go over the details, and none of them happy. The humans didn’t understand what being Alpha meant, or what this forced incineration meant to their people, or that this wasfamily. They didn’t try, didn’t care.
Oh, they gave lip service to it, but Quin had been on the receiving end of that in the Marines. He’d never have gotten as far as he did if he hadn’t been so damneffectiveat his job. Which had been a complication of its own, when it came time to just be Quin, and not the soldier. No one liked to drink beer and shoot the shit with a killer. Especially if that killer sometimes had fur and fangs.
Thankfully, they’d allowed Garrick and Laine to sit in, and then Harris had forced himself into the talk somehow, and Quin had distracted himself from the bullshit by trying to read the expressions and changes of scent in Garrick’s human friend, over the scent of guns and anxious humans. His nose was still full of the smell of gun oil that had drifted off the enlisted men standing in a semi-circle around them, and it mixed nauseatingly with the charnel house miasma that still covered the enclave. He needed to move, to forget the present somehow.
But it was late now, and most everyone was asleep, and he could say goodnight to his old friends and walk off the nerves. Carefully, he picked his way past the bundled lumps that were his packmembers, heading for the only unburned patch of woods at this end of the wall.
He thought the trees would help—they often had at home. But there were living bodies everywhere, rolled up in blankets—his pack, who had given up their tents when they’d realized that Green Moon didn’t have enough. Even with the smell of exhausted shifter drifting up to fill the spaces between the trees, the space still reeked of charcoal and burnt flesh and then it became the hot stale scent of sand and golden-white dust and he could smell himself and his human pack and the dead body that was rotting in that building filled with mines that they couldn’t get to and he couldn’t tell anymore where he was because it all smelled like death and fear and—
Someone touched him and he reacted, pure alpha hunter, taking their legs out from underneath them and slamming them to the ground with all his weight behind his attack. He angled his forearm across their throat, not enough force to kill, but enough that it would be hard to breathe, and he could cut off their air with the tiniest bit more pressure if he needed to. He smelled smoke and blood and wolf and … Wolf? The smell tried to cut through the memories hanging between him and the here-and-now, but it was a dull thing compared to the heavy weight of the past. He couldn’t see his attacker’s face in the dimness of the tiny grove and his arm pressed forward, a fraction of an inch.
The body beneath him made a gurgling noise and he could smell its fear. Then, just as quickly as the past had reached up to swamp him, it began to fade, eroded by a warmth that he’d never felt before. A sensation that reminded him of his mother’s arms and safety and those moments when Holland lay quiet and sated in his arms. It shook before him, weak as new moonlight, but it never gave up, and eventually, even as rock gives way before water, so did the hold the past had on him. Until he was himself enough again and could push it back without help.
“Earth to Quin,” Holland croaked beneath him. “Can I have my windpipe back?”
“Shit!” Quin rolled off him and slammed against the trunk of a tree hard enough he saw stars. When his vision cleared, it was to find Holland lying on the ground in front of him, watching him with concern and something that went beyond fondness.
“You okay to touch now?” Holland asked.
“I’m sorry.” He pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned back against the tree that had so recently whacked him sensible. “It’s the smell.”
“I wondered.” Holland sat up too, then carefully, with much checking of Quin’s comfort, he moved over next to Quin. “I brought my blankets and yours. I thought we could put two of them between us and the ground, and cuddle under the other two.”
“I don’t want people talking about you,” Quin told him.
“Like I give a fuck what Green Moon says.” Holland crawled away and then back again, dragging a heavy bundle of cloth behind him. “And Mercy Hills is bored with talking about us, I’m sure. I’m not bothered. You’re worth it.”
Quin was too numb to give that comment the attention or reward it deserved, though he gave it residence in his heart, all warm and comforting enough to ward off his demons. On the outside, all he could do was move out of the way when Holland nudged him, then back onto the folded blankets at Holland’s gentle urging. It was this, this warm comfort, that had helped lift the edges of the waking nightmare. He’d missed being around that all day and some of the nights too, and to feel that sense of Holland around him eased some knot of unhappiness he’d hardly been aware of.
Holland sat beside him and leaned against the tree again, and Quin let himself be pulled down into Holland’s arms. He rested his head against Holland’s chest as Holland covered them with the other two blankets, and began to relax.
“Holland?” came a puppy voice. Agatha.
“Agatha, sweetie, what are you doing up? You should be asleep.” Holland held out a hand and two pups emerged from the dark to grab for it. “Both of you!”
“Can we stay with you and Alpha Quin?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. She crawled in between them, laying her head on Holland’s shoulder. Dorian, clumsier in his three-year-old body, tripped over Quin’s legs and landed on him. Thankfully, not onthatpart of him, but it was a near thing. To avoid any more close calls, Quin picked him up with one hand and settled the little boy against his chest.
Quin heard Holland take a breath and sensed thenothat was going to come out on it.Easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission.“It’s okay,” he said, breaking into the conversation before Holland could send the pups back to the tent to sleep. “But you have to sleep on the other side of Holland, both of you. I twitch a lot when I’m sleeping and I don’t want to smack you by accident.” That would probably be safe enough. And somehow, since that first night, he’d always avoided Holland, even when deep in dreams. He widened his eyes innocently at Holland, and offered a kiss as recompense. Holland frowned at him in amused frustration, but he took the kiss and then settled the pups more comfortably on the side away from Quin.
“Sleep, pups. We have a long day tomorrow.”
They did, but Holland and the pups seemed to form a buttress against the bleakness tomorrow would bring. Here, now, wrapped up with the warm smell of shifter and puppy all around him, the scents of the enclave faded away and he could dream himself home with his family.
Family. When it came time to go home to Mercy Hills, he was planning to take some of the homeless with him anyway—what was a couple of orphaned pups more? Assuming no family came forward to claim them. He closed his eyes and listened as Holland sang puppy songs under his breath. Holland had one arm around the two pups, already halfway to dreamland, but his other one rested on the back of Quin’s shoulder. It drifted lightly over Quin’s skin, soothing away the last of the tension and anger and fear, and letting fatigue take its rightful place.
As the words toTen Little Pupsdanced through the air above his head, Quin’s emotions loosened their grip on his body, and he drifted away into sleep with Holland curled around him like shelter in a storm.
* * *
They woketo the air filled with the sounds of packmembers already well into their daily tasks in this horrendous recovery. The sun was up, the light sneaking through the branches of the trees to play across their faces and shine in their eyes, and Quin winced at how far advance the morning had to be if they could see the sun over the enclave’s walls.
“Shit, it’s late,” Quin grumbled. He staggered to his feet, stiff and sore, and held out a hand to Holland, still disentangling himself from the blankets and the two pups. Holland was beautiful, even more so than usual, with his hair tumbled everywhere and a slightly befuddled expression on his face. Quin didn’t feel befuddled, he felt alive. Last night had probably been his best night’s sleep since this whole nightmare had begun. And he was pretty sure that he was looking at the reason for it.
Holland let Quin help him up, then started to turn away, already reaching for the blankets, brushing dirt and twigs off the pups clothing with one hand as he picked them up. Quin tugged on his hand, turning him back so they were face to face. “Mate me,” he said.
