Page 44 of Sanctuary
"Damn." Patton reached into his pocket and pulled out the now soggy napkin. "I brought you some of my supper. And your orange."
"And that's the other reason I love you." Ori sat up and took the bundle of meat, and set the orange in his lap. "Thank you."
Patton's flushed with pleasure and shot his mate a warm smile. "It's what you do, when you love someone." He watched Ori take the first bite, then he slid down the wall, his own exhaustion finally taking hold, to sit on the floor and wait for Martin the human to come to them with—hopefully--their safe passage.
C H A P T E R F O R T Y
A fter he’d finished his meat and his orange, Ori curled up in the chair and dozed while they waited for Martin to do whatever magic he was intending to get them quietly out of the hospital. When the human came back, there was a short discussion about who would carry what, then he led them out of the hospital, a slip of paper trapped between his first two fingers and Ori's backpack hanging over one shoulder, something Ori was far too grateful for. He shouldn’t have been, because for all he knew Martin would take off with their belongings or use them to force Patton and Ori to do something they weren’t comfortable with. It sometimes happened in the pack, but omegas learned early on not to give anyone an opening.
But he thought they were safe for now--Martin seemed firmly convinced they were human and there was nothing about them at the moment to give away their differences. Give it a couple of months, though, and you'll be popping through your jeans. Well, time enough to figure that out then. For now, being out of the cold and the predicted snow the nurses had been talking about relieved some of Ori's worry.
Martin dug into his pocket, coming up with a set of jingling keys. "It's a couple hours drive to the city, then almost another half-hour to get to the shelter. We're a little tight for space, what with the cold weather coming on, but we'll find you a place." The lights on an older foreign sedan blinked twice and they headed in that direction. "First thing tomorrow we'll work on getting your ID back and see what programs you're eligible for. There might be one or two that will help with bus fare to your grandmother's, but that's not my specialty." He held the back door of the car open while Ori tried to climb inside without making his leg hurt more than it already did. He was under strict orders to get it checked tomorrow and the next day and to not miss a single dose of the medicine written on the slip of paper. The way he felt, they were probably right. He got settled in the back and let his head rest against the cool glass of the window after Martin closed it. He jumped at a thump behind him that turned out to be their bags being stored in the trunk, and then Patton was crawling in beside him through the other door and all was right with Ori's world. He shifted his weight to lay his head on Patton's shoulder and was asleep even before Martin had the car started, certain that Patton would take care of him.
He didn't remember getting to the shelter, he didn't remember Patton carrying him inside, he never even twitched when Patton laid him on the floor of a closet padded with blankets and covered him with another. He simply woke the next morning in a strange place, but with the smell of his mate all around to calm him. Dim light crept in underneath a door, enough barely to make out Pat's profile on the floor beside him. "Pat?" he whispered, as memories of the day before came swimming back to him.
Patton woke with a start and a long indrawn breath. "Ori?" he whispered back. "How are you feeling?"
"Better, I think." Right now, anyway. It was anyone's guess what he'd feel like once he got up.
"Good. You need to take your medicine, you were out so hard last night we couldn't get you to stay awake long enough to take the first pill." He squirmed in place, pushing Ori out of the way, and then something in his hand rattled. "Here." Something small and hard was pressed into Ori's hand--a pill bottle. "They gave me a tour last night after I put you to bed. Everyone eats together for breakfast, but we're on our own for the rest of the day." He sat up and Ori could see him running his hand through his hair. "Damn. Ori, are you lying on my hat?"
Ori snorted at Patton's aggrieved tone, then felt around him until he found the much beloved hat. "I guess I was," he said, and handed it over. "I hope I didn't crush it too bad."
"Naw. A good hat always looks better crushed a bit." Patton slapped it on his head and grinned. "I'm glad you're feeling better. You want to come raid the kitchen? I don't know what time it is in here." He glanced around the tiny dim room. "Martin said this was the only place they had left to put us last night, but he'd ask around and see if some other shelter might have a bed. We're not really supposed to be sleeping in here."
Suddenly, Ori felt all his old fatigue settle back into his bones. He didn't want to be out in the cold, and he sure didn't want to be trying to find a way to Mercy Hills through the fabled Colorado winters. Was there some way to ask Patton how he felt about settling down for a while without making him feel guilty? One thing to be said about his mate, he took his responsibilities to his omega seriously. Terribly seriously. "How much money did the guy from White River give us?"
"Forty dollars. Not enough to rent a place or get the bus, according to Martin. I asked." Patton leaned in and kissed Ori's forehead. "So, breakfast?"
Breakfast? As soon as Patton said the word, Ori became ravenously hungry. Or maybe he'd been hungry all along but had gotten used to it, and so hadn't noticed. "I could eat a wall," Ori told him and they laughed, despite the uncertainty of their future. Doesn't matter. We're together and everything else is worth that. "Let's go."
I n the end, they spent nearly three and a half months in Denver, which had been both a relief and a worry to Ori. They'd first met Martin just before Midwinter, just as the cold weather was setting in. He found beds for them—the Lady Lysoonka must have been looking out for them, because a couple of the other people staying there had found jobs and had announced during Ori’s and Patton’s first breakfast with the group that they’d gotten a small apartment together. Ori and Patton had moved into the room they were leaving, a small one with four bunkbeds and they shared the space with two other young homeless people. Ori missed waking up wrapped in Patton's scent, but when January came and he looked out the window at the snow whirling past, he decided it was a small price to pay.
The place wasn't exactly a shelter. Martin had explained it all as if it was something Ori already understood and Ori, not wanting to hurt this man who was helping him and Patton and their still undiscovered baby, had nodded and pieced together as much as he could from Martin's explanations and casual conversation with the rest of the young people staying in the old rambling house. From what Ori gathered, they took in young people who didn't follow what humans thought of as the 'normal' relationship cycle--girls who liked girls, boys who liked boys, boys who were girls inside and vice versa.
Which was why the nurse back at the hospital had called him for Ori and Patton. She'd correctly guessed that they were in love and, thankfully, had entirely missed that they were shifters. He had to be grateful for that past part, though it did make him wonder how humans could be so unaware of the shifters that lived in their midst.
Ori had known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that many humans were uneasy with shifter lifestyle, that they thought it was wrong for two men or two women to enjoy each other. And that they were horrified by the idea that someone like Ori could carry a child and give birth, which was one of the reasons that omegas were never allowed outside walls and why Mercy Hills was such a scandal among the packs for letting their own omegas out into the world.
So, they had a home for a while, even if it wasn't the home they'd dreamed of. Their original intention had been to stay until Ori's foot healed, which had taken the better part of a month to be declared back to normal. The Midwinter full moon had been tricky, but they’d managed to slip out through the night to run and worship the gods in their wolf form—and get a little personal time in their human form, though sex with a sore foot while still wearing most of your clothes wasn’t as easy or romantic as their trysts in the desert had been.
Then the snow had started piling up so they'd put their departure off a little longer. Martin had found someone willing to pay Patton under the table until they figured out what had 'happened' to their records so they could get their imaginary birth certificates and social insurance numbers back, and it was hard to turn down that money when they had nothing left. Ori replaced his lost clothing and spent a lot of time cleaning the old house and, eventually, doing a little cleaning under the table to earn some more human money. They missed running on the January and February full moons, both of them agreeing that the risk wasn’t worth it, and both of them uneasy in their lack of piety.
As the months passed, Ori had pretended to try to contact his fictional grandmother without success, until Martin eventually stopped pressing him about it. Instead, he started talking about how they could get a passport issued without a birth certificate and began questioning them both about where they were born and who’d been there for it. It took a couple of days before Ori realized that Martin thought the grandmother was abandoning them too, and as soon as he did, he began to ruthlessly use that idea to give them time to plan for when they did leave. Because they would have to soon and the answer was staring back at him this morning from between the shamrocks plastered over the bathroom mirror.
His pants wouldn't button.
He'd been having trouble for a while but for some reason, today was the day they'd chosen to absolutely refuse to stretch any farther. He sucked in his gut as far as he could and pulled with all his might, but the button just wouldn't come close enough to the buttonhole to slip through.
Shit.
He gave up and leaned on the sink, staring at himself in the mirror. If someone saw the rounded curve of the baby, it would end in all sorts of questions that they couldn’t answer without someone eventually figuring out what they were. And it hadn’t taken long to figure out that pretty much everyone in the shelter—including Martin, which had hurt—saw shifters as violent predators that should be dropped on a deserted island for everyone’s safety. Well, the safety of the humans, anyway—no one seemed to worry about the safety of the local shifter pack, and Ori’s one attempt to defend his people had ended in subtle threats in the hallways until Patton had stepped in with his own. Patton said he’d fixed it, but Ori hadn’t breathed easy again until Martin threw the bully out for other, not entirely unrelated reasons.
Better tell Patton.
Ori found his mate in the kitchen, on his back underneath the sink while one of the other homeless youth handed him tools. "Pat?" he said, trying to keep his anxiety out of his voice.
Patton wiggled out from under the sink. "What's up? Just fixing that leak under the sink again, but I'm going to tell Martin he needs to replace the pipe. I can't keep soldering it--there's almost nothing left of the pipe itself."
