Page 52 of Sanctuary
Ori looked up from where he was getting ready to feed Willie Rose. "I know. I realize we're not out of the woods yet. Literally." His eyes danced at his pun and Patton laughed along with him, so glad to see Ori hopeful again. "But we're here," Ori reminded him. "So close we can see them, hear them. If it takes a few days, it takes a few days."
But Patton noticed that Ori was careful not to mention any time-frames that might be better measured in weeks. Or never. Well, it was too late to worry about that now—they were here and, hopefully, they were here to stay. Though if Mercy Hills turned them away, he didn’t know what they’d do. Go to Canada, he supposed, though the thought gave him chills.
Ori had gotten pretty good at making nests in hollows between trees and they settled down to pass the rest of the night, knowing that curfew would keep the Mercy Hills shifters behind walls until the sun peeked out again in the morning.
They rose with that first hint of dawn on the horizon, the sky in the distance fading from luminous blue to purple edged with a deep bloody red. It was a beautiful sunrise and they ate their breakfast, in portions carefully measured to make their food stores last as long as possible, while watching the sun set the sky on fire as it crept into view.
The clank and grind of the gates opening was absent here--at some point, Patton went for a stroll to see what was delaying the daily unlocking, only to find the gates already opened wide, the gap in the wall teasing freedom and safety cruelly as he hid in the trees.
Was there anything else he could do, more notes he could leave, signs he could set in place to get the attention of the shifters inside the enclave? He didn't think so, without losing another of their precious plastic water bottles. But, if they ever came outside, he could make sure they knew there were other shifters around.
He picked his way back to Ori, stopping to piss on every fourth or fifth tree as he went. Scent marking, the old fashioned way. Any alpha worth his salt could follow that trail and know there was a strange beta roaming wild in the woods here. It was the only other thing he could think of, so he marked his trail until he couldn’t wring anything more out of his kidneys.
And then, all that there was left to do was wait.
C H A P T E R F O R T Y - S I X
A bout half-way through the morning, they heard them. The bright chatter of voices, mostly pups, a few women, some men. The sound came from the direction of the gate.
Patton and Ori looked at each other for a long, painfully hopeful moment, then scrambled to gather up everything they'd laid out in their little den, shoving bottles and clothes and bites of food into the bags at random. When they had everything collected, Ori stood up with Willie Rose on his shoulder and nodded to Patton with his eyes bright with anticipation. "We should get closer."
Patton nodded and carefully led the way through the trees, making sure they still had some brush to hide in, just in case. He didn't want to come this far, have survived and struggled through so many things, only to lose Ori at this point. Peering out between the branches, they watched what turned out to be a rather sizable group of shifters strolling along the grass with baskets and empty sacks hanging from their hands.
"Him," Patton whispered, pointing to the young redhead again. "He's the one I saw last night." The tall dark man didn't seem to be with him this time. At least, not last night's tall dark man. Today’s tall dark man had long hair down to his shoulders and was narrower of body, lacking the heavy muscling of the redhead’s companion of last night. He carried a toddler with his same dark hair propped on his hip.
Patton recognized him just before Ori whispered, “It’s Holland.” His voice spoke of his relief, and his pleasure at seeing the other omega. “He looks happy.”
Patton felt a tension he hadn’t realized he been carrying drain out of his shoulders. But if Holland was happy, it seemed likely that they were good to their omegas, and that was at the moment the most important thing in the world to Patton.
Beside Holland walked a shorter man, with mid-brown hair that looked like it wanted to curl but wasn't quite sure how to go about it. Another one walked beside him, a man with the same dark hair as Holland’s but cropped shorter and curling tightly around his face. Behind him walked a blond, shorter than the rest of them. And a small group of tall alpha males brought up the rear, carrying either babies or toddlers.
But that wasn’t all. There were pups too, of all ages, running wild about the grass, shrieking or yipping depending on their form. Their parents called them back whenever they strayed too far away, but for the most part, they seemed shockingly relaxed about being outside walls. And the humans appeared just as slack in their attitude, lounging around outside the gate, keeping a lazy eye on the noisy group. They didn't even follow them across the front of the enclave, merely pulled a couple of chairs outside the security building and made themselves comfortable.
One of the pups running four-footed, the largest of the small, busy pack, made a beeline for Patton and Ori, his ears pricked forward intently as he nosed about in the brush. He yipped when he found them, sending Patton's heart up into his throat. Ori tensed beside him and he caught Patton's hand in his, squeezing harder than he had since the day he'd had the baby.
The pup yipped again, then dashed away to jump on the curly-haired man before he tumbled away in a play-fight with one of the other pups. Pups in human form shrieked and chased after them, waving sticks in the air and shouting something in a language Patton couldn't understand. Don't they speak English here? That would be a problem.
The crowd strolled gently like a flock of swallows, the group changing shape as it changed direction, their progress so gradual that Patton almost didn't realize it until one section of them had come to a stop right in front of him and Ori. He held his breath and gripped Ori's hand tightly.
Holland made a show of turning to speak to the brown-haired man. “Don't you two move until the rest of us get out here," he said in a tone of complete authority.
Ori caught on first. "We won't. You got our message?"
Holland bent down to set his toddler on the ground, and the pup immediately began to crawl around on its human hands and knees. "We did. Is it really you, Ori?“ He cast them a surreptitious glance, his gaze hungry as he tried to pierce the leaves and shadows of the brush.
“It is.”
Holland took a deep breath and exhaled shakily. “I’m glad you made it. You’ll have to tell me the whole story once we get you inside walls. We got a message from Perseguir about five months ago, but it sounded so much not like you that we wondered if there was some sort of scheme in the works.”
“It was stupid,” Ori said, with that tone in his voice, the old Ori from their childhood games. Kind of sarcastic, but not mean about it. And Patton realized that it had been a while since Ori had spoken to him like that. The stress of their journey had crushed Ori’s sense of humor lately.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Holland said, looking away to hide a smile. He leaned in as if speaking to the curly-haired man, who looked surprisingly like him. "This is Bax. The blond is Seosamh, the redhead is Bram and the brunet is Jason. We're some of the omegas of Mercy Hills."
"Some?" Ori said, a spark of hope growing in his words.
"Some," Holland agreed. He raised one hand and waved at the alphas who were dawdling along the treeline, talking and examining the tree trunks closely.
One of them, a tall dark man--taller, Patton thought, even than the man he'd seen yesterday--walked up to them, carrying a child that was somewhere between toddler and pup, but Patton hadn't spent enough time with pups other than Willie Rose to even take a guess at the baby's age. "You found them?" he said, taking obvious care not to look.
