Page 38 of Sanctuary
“Jannalie’s gonna give us a drive north so I can get to a doctor,” Ori said, turning to smile at Patton. “She’s got an aunt in Colorado, she’s driving up to stay with her so she can go to school to be nurse assistant. If you don’t mind moving some of her stuff into the trunk, she says she’ll trade us a drive for some gas money.” Underneath the feverish color in his cheeks, Ori looked kind of gray to Patton. How much money did they have?
Patton dug into his pocket and pulled out their tiny bundle of human money. “I don’t have much. How much money are you looking for?” If it was as expensive as the bus, they were out of luck.
“Oh,” she said, drawing the word out as if she had to think about it. “You got forty bucks?”
They did, but it wouldn’t leave them with a lot to work with going forward. Patton glanced over at Ori, who seemed to be trying not to plead with Patton with his eyes, and failing miserably. “Yeah, I can give you forty. Thanks for the lift.”
She shrugged and reached down beside her. The trunk jerked and made a clunking noise. “You can put the stuff from the back seat in the trunk, there should be room.” A clunk inside the door said she’d just unlocked the doors. “Go ahead. I’m gonna see if I can find my headache stuff. Looks like Ori could use it.”
Ori nodded and started to limp over toward their packs.
“You get in,” Patton told him. “I’ll deal with that.” To prove his point, he opened the back door of the car and pulled out an assortment of plastic bags filled to the brim with clothing, making space for his mate. “Lie down, you.” He made sure that Ori got in before he headed around the back of the car to cram their driver’s belongings in among the rest of her possessions.
A few minutes later they were on the road, their backpacks on the floor in the back seat, Ori stretched out just above them, and Patton sitting in the front with a much smaller bundle of money in his pocket. Still… “Thank you,” he said quietly and glanced into the back seat, where it looked like Ori had fallen into an uneasy doze. “We thought we were ready for all sorts of stuff that might go wrong, but we weren’t expecting that.”
“He don’t look good,” she said quietly, and the needle on the speedometer crept farther around the dial. “What happened? You guys weren’t really camping, were you?”
What story to tell? They hadn’t really talked about it, but he guessed kind of the truth. Enough of the truth, anyway, to make it smell like it wasn’t a lie. “His parents were telling him he had to get mat—” He stumbled over the word, remembering the human in the seat beside him at the last moment. “— married and he didn’t want to. He wanted to go away and see the world, and they wanted him to stay home and look after his family.” He felt the strands of the lie come together as he told it, weaving themselves in among the truths until they were nearly indistinguishable. “We’ve been friends since we were small, and when he told me, I said we should run away. He’s got relatives in the east, Tennessee way. We’re heading there and hopin’ they’ll take us in.”
She blew out a breath. “Yeah, family can be a right pain in the ass.” She glanced in the mirror and frowned. “He looks pretty comfortable back there. I’d bet the sleep will do him good.”
But she couldn’t have been that complacent about it, he realized, because moments later he felt the pressure as the car’s speed inched up again.
They drove until it got dark, only stopping occasionally for gas and to go to the bathroom. At Santa Fe they got food, hamburgers and french fries, and Patton woke Ori up to eat and drink the massive cup of coke he’d bought for him. The nap did seem to have done Ori some good, though he handed the rest of his hamburger back to Patton after only a couple of bites, claiming his stomach didn’t care for it. He laid back down shortly after and appeared to doze, though every time Patton turned in his seat to check on him, Ori’s eyes opened, so he obviously wasn’t sleeping.
“There’s a clinic I know in Denver,” Jannalie said quietly. “They only charge you what you can afford and they’ll make sure you have any medicine you need. I’ll drop you off by the clinic, but they’re only open in the evening and I forget the hours, so you might catch them tonight or you might not.”
“That’s fine,” Patton said with honest sincerity. “Thank you for doing as much as you have.”
“Yeah, well, we all have shit things happen to us,” she said. “He looks like he needs someone to keep an eye on him.”
Patton shrugged. “Ori can look after himself, but yeah, sometimes he forgets to.” Funny that this human should see Ori so clearly after such a short acquaintance.
Jannalie nodded. “I’m going to have to stop for gas.” Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror again. “He’s awful quiet back there.”
“He’s tired,” Patton reminded her.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t look right.” The car made a series of binging noises and she pulled it over into the parking lot of a gas station, putting it right in the brightest lights on the lot. “I’m going to check on him.” Before Patton could say anything, she was out of the car and opening the back door. “Ori?” she said and then Patton got out too, opening the other one to slide onto the seat and lift Ori’s head into his lap.
“Ori?” He shook his mate gently. Ori groaned and his eyes opened, the lids fluttering as if they weren’t sure what to do, then he turned his face away from the lights coming in through the glass and muttered, “Turn the damn light off, it’s too—” He yelped and sat straight up, making a noise like he was going to change his form and attack. He smelled of wolf and forest and even though Patton couldn’t see his face, he knew the change was trying to force its way through.
“What the fuck?” Jannalie shouted and jerked her hands away from him.
Oh shit. Patton dragged Ori out of the car and laid him on the pavement, then snatched their backpacks from the back of the car. He almost forgot the sacks with their extra clothing, but only managed to hook a finger into the mouth of one of them before Jannalie had jumped back into the driver’s seat and floored the car. The doors slammed shut with the acceleration and blood dripped from the back of Patton’s hand where the steel had scraped it raw. He ignored it and crouched to peer at Ori’s face.
What he saw worried him—Ori was twitching and his eyes seemed to focus both on Patton’s feet and on nothing. He still looked sick, but he also looked like his wolfish side was panicking and trying to escape or take over, to get Ori to safety. What do I do? Patton had never had to take care of someone who was sick before—that was delta work and omega work. He dropped the sack at Ori’s feet and sat down to pull him into his lap. “Hey, I’m here, you’re not alone, I’ve got you.” Patton unzipped his jacket despite the cold air, and pulled it around his mate, holding Ori close against his chest. His heart leaped in his chest like it was a rabbit in hunt, pounding so hard he could feel it in his hands and his feet.
He remembered, when his great-grandpa had been dying at the end, he’d gone a little crazy. Growling and biting and trying to get out of bed or change shape right there. Patton’s Ma had explained it was the wolf part trying to cope with the coming death, without the human part to help keep it calm and assist it in understanding what was happening. They’d kept the window closed despite the stifling heat of the day, and someone—or sometimes more than one—stayed by his side the whole time, filling the room with the scent of pack. It kept the wild side of him distracted, though it didn’t stop the whining and the mumbling and the worried scrabbling at anything that came close enough to be grabbed at.
His scent seemed to be helping. Ori’s twitching movements slowed and his body began to relax. He made one long whining noise and then a human sob broke through. His fingers twisted in the front of Patton’s t-shirt and the fever beat off his body like the sun in August.
“Don’t die,” Patton whispered and hugged him tighter.
“Hey, I called an ambulance,” someone said.
Patton jerked and clutched at Ori. “What?”
A guy wearing a polo shirt with the name of the gas station written across the front stood diffidently about ten feet away. “I saw what your drive did, that was shitty. He shot or beat up or what?” The guy eyed them curiously, but made no move to come closer. Which suited Patton fine, because he wasn't sure how much the humans around here knew, and the farther away they stayed, the less likely he and Ori were to get outed by a casual onlooker. Even if they meant well.
