Page 20 of Omega's Flight
"Yeah, it's just slick." Add in that Duke was five inches taller than him and didn't spend his days moving paper from one stack to another, and Cas was seriously regretting having volunteered to gather up furniture and move it into the house for their refugee. He was going to feel this tomorrow and he wondered if he could coax some painkillers out of Holland, aspirin or whatever. He knew Holland kept the cupboard stocked for Quin, for the days old injuries flared up.
He wanted to talk to Quin too, feel out if there was anything he could do to help out with his brother's mental health.
Cas had always thought of the oldest of the four of them as being the most rock solid. He'd certainly had enough to do with raising them, and he'd been acting like a father instead of an older brother from the time he was twelve and Cas had been born. And maybe that was the problem—he'd disappeared at the age of eighteen and they wouldn't even have known where if it hadn't been for needing the Alpha's permission to leave the pack to join the military.
And hadn't that been an explosion of epic proportions. They were living in Salma Wood at the time, and Cas still remembered his mother screaming at his father, and his father—the then Alpha of Salma Wood—yelling back that Quin wasn't his pup and he wasn't going to tell a grown shifter what to do anyway. And then his mother yelling back that it was his job to tell adults what to do... At that point, Cas had run out the back door as fast as his six-year-old legs could carry him. No way had he been planning to get caught eavesdropping on the adults.
Quin had sponsored him into Mercy Hills when he turned eighteen, gotten him out of that mess of who he was supposed to be and how he was supposed to act and—Lysoon help him—who he was supposed to mate. Things had been much calmer since. And if he hadn't come to Mercy Hills, he never would have had the opportunity to go to college in the city, or go to law school. Salma wasn't big on mixing with humans. So he figured he owed his brother a little care back.
They walked the mattress through the house, down to the master bedroom off the kitchen. No hallways except for the tiny one that the bathroom was hidden beyond; these old houses were the epitome of efficiency.
The old bedframe, steel with a wooden block substituting for one leg at the foot, accepted the mattress with a creak and thump. Almost as soon as they'd gotten the mattress in place, they were pushed out of the way by Jason, coming with an armload of sheets. "What else are you bringing along?" he asked and tossed the bundle into the middle of the mattress. "Here, you take this corner and help me figure out which side goes where." He frowned at the mismatched sheets. "I never get it right the first time."
Cas nodded to Duke. "I'll catch up with you." Duke tossed him a casual salute and disappeared toward the front of the house. Beyond him, the sound of more footsteps moving through the house echoed against the walls, and then a banging started up in the bathroom.
"Pipes aren't great," Jason told Cas. "They should have been replaced, but Bax tells me Quin and Abel are still arguing about what to do with the houses." He held out a corner of the sheet for Cas to take.
"For what it's worth, I think Quin's right. Maybe we can keep a few, but the rest should be razed and new ones built. These are hardly worth keeping." Cas stretched the elastic corners down over the end of the mattress, then pulled it off and helped Jason turn it ninety degrees clockwise. Apparently, Cas couldn't figure which was an end and which was a side on a fitted sheet either. Not like he worried too much about it—he just kind of slept cocooned in a pile of blankets in his little apartment.
"I feel the same way, but Mac's got a bug up his butt about it too. Must be having been a Mercy Hills shifter from birth, which is funny, because Abel was born to Salma, but Bax says he's never considered himself part of the pack there. Quin's influence; that's the only explanation I can come up with for it." Jason flicked the other sheet out over the bed, letting the fabric drift gracefully down onto the mattress. "We haven't had much time to talk about this, but Bax knows this omega that's coming. He wants a divorce." Jason paused in tucking the ends of the sheet in to glance up at Cas. "I guess I'm asking, do you know anything about divorces? You took the same courses as Garrick, right?"
Cas picked up a blanket from the shelves at the end of the room and began to unfold it. "I took one Family Law course and all the civil procedure stuff, about the same as Garrick. You're going to need to talk to Laine and see if he recommends anyone, because family law is an old wolf with a lot of teeth and an uncertain temper." He helped Jason spread the blanket out. "I don't know—does he really need one? This is pack. It'll be dealt with between the Alphas. I imagine the biggest problem would be that his mate is still alive and will want the pups." He cursed himself for an insensitive fool as he watched the corners of Jason's mouth turn down. "I mean, not that there isn't something that can be done about it. Don't you sit on the omega council?"
Jason sat on the bed and pulled one knee up to his chest. "Yeah, we'll see. Don't know if we want to get into the habit of buying omegas from the other packs. I think the solution to my situation set a bad example." He squinted up at Cas and, while his mouth had turned back up into his usual smile, there was a hint of sadness in it. "Imagine how high the prices would go if we kept just giving money to every pack that had an omega that wanted to come here."
"Oh, yeah. Hadn't thought of that." For all that the money the Mutch family was offering would grease a lot of wheels and open a lot of doors, it seemed to be creating as many problems for Mercy Hills as it was solving. "I'll corner the lawyers tonight and we'll see what we can come up with."
Jason jumped up off the bed and started digging in the closet. "Uh, maybe leave that until tomorrow?" His voice was muffled, but Cas was pretty sure he heard a snicker. "Once the new omega's inside walls, we'll have a few days," he added, coming out with a couple of flat, stained pillows. "I don't think Garrick would appreciate you co-opting his human for a brainstorming session tonight." This time the snicker was impossible to miss.
"Fine." Cas took one of the pillows and started forcing the shapeless thing into a pillowcase while Jason did the same with the other. "If anyone complains about them making noise tonight, I'll direct them to you."
Jason set the pillow at the head of the bed and tried unsuccessfully to fluff it. His movements were slow and a thoughtful frown creased his forehead. When Cas leaned over the bed to drop his pillow into its place, Jason put a hand on his arm to hold him there. "Are you okay with Garrick and his human?"
Okay? Did it have anything to do with him? "It's Garrick's life. He's a big boy, he can handle the consequences."
"Yeah, but you two work pretty closely." Jason stepped away from the bed and started to move around the room, closing drawers and straightening the odds and ends on top of the dresser.
Ah, there it is. "And you're worried I'm going to get upset because they're sleeping together?"
"You're pretty quiet."
I am? "First time I've ever heard that term applied to myself."
Jason smiled and shook his head. "You know what I mean. You talk a lot, but never about yourself." Then Jason said something that scared the crap out Cas, for no reason except it was like the omega had opened Cas's head and looked inside. "You're home now and you know we've got your back on everything. Including your choices of who to spend time with and who not to."
Lysoon take it, damned True Omegas. "I'm fine. Really. And it's not like I didn't have a lover or two in college. Some of the girls there like a bit of rough, and they aren't afraid of a bedmate with teeth."
"But how do you feel about Garrick and Laine?"
"What are you hearing?" Cas didn't think he'd done anything more than give Garrick the usual 'be careful where you stick your dick' lecture that every young shifter got when they first started showing interest. Granted, Garrick was a bit older than the usual fourteen or fifteen-year-old, but it was the thought that counted right? And hooking up with humans—well, Cas had learned his lesson on that and had chosen his companions carefully after the first one nearly shot down his post-secondary career. Only luck and the fact that he'd been sleeping with two of them at the time had saved his ass.
Jason shook his head. "Nothing. Not about you. But there's others that we're keeping an eye on." He stopped and sucked his lower lip into his mouth, chewing on it thoughtfully. "We just want to know he's got a friend close by in case of less obvious stuff. What Quin calls covert actions."
"So this is Quin watching out for him?"
"And us." Us being the Omega Council as the official dealer with all things omega. Which apparently now extended to Garrick as the pack's link to the local legal community.
"He's fine. I'll keep my ears open, but I'm not hiding anything from him if I hear something suspicious."
