Page 63 of Omega's Flight

"This?"

Bax waved his hand at the enclave. "I'm not sure and Holland won't say, but I think Quin was on the verge of imploding when he and Holland finally got together. I know Abel was concerned, but I didn’t know Quin from before, so I really can’t judge.“ He snorted, then covered his mouth and looked around furtively. "The number of times I had to throw them together was ridiculous. I've never seen an omega work so hard not to be chosen by an alpha." He sighed. "Still, they're good for each other." He nudged me with his shoulder. "And how are you doing? All we ever seem to talk about is the pups. I want to know about you."

"I'm fine." It was automatic. I'd been trained in that response since I was a pup.

"Really? There's nothing you want? Nothing you need?"

I thought about it, tried the words out again to see how they felt. The rolled over my tongue like spring's first fruit, sweet and tart and singing of the bounty that was to come. "Yes, I’m fine.” I know I sounded surprised to him, because I sounded surprised to me. "I mean, we don't know how this is going to turn out, but I have hope." I looked down at the ground, watching my feet scuff through the grass in their new sneakers. It was liberating. "I hadn't realized before that I'd lost it."

"No." Bax sounded thoughtful and a bit sad. "Our people don't encourage omegas to have hope. Not that kind of hope, I think. It wasn't always like that."

"Why do you say that?"

"The journals. Cosimo's journals. The first Alpha's Mate of Mercy Hills. I thought Holland was going to tell you about them."

"He did. I forgot." With everything else, and the sudden and complete relief of being here legitimately, they'd slipped my mind.

"I'll see if I can figure out who has the first one." Bax shook his head. "We need to get more copies made, but Holland wrote them out by hand."

Maybe that would be something I could help with. "I can learn how to type. Then I can type them while I'm reading them."

"No, it's okay. Don't force yourself to learn a skill you don't enjoy."

We stopped in front of the library entrance at the back of the building. Cas's office was in the next building over but his door was closed and the light was off in the window. Sometimes I stopped with coffee for him when the pups would come for Story Time, but if the lights were off he was probably out.

Bax put out a hand and I took it. "Take your time," he told me earnestly. "Make the best choices for you, but think about the pack too. And now, I have to get to work." He pulled me close and hugged me, and I hugged him back because it felt so good to be friends with another omega without the underlying infighting that we'd always seemed to be involved in before.

We parted there, him to go back around the front of the building and up to the Alpha's office, me to take the turn through the shrubbery to walk through the door to the pack's library.

C H A P T E R 4 6

I stacked up the university catalogs that the librarian had loaned me and brought them back to his desk. "Thank you," I said as I set them on an empty corner.

"Did you find anything interesting?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Can I come back and look at them again?"

"Of course." He smiled at me and waved as I left the library.

Personnel was up on the seventh floor of the main building. I hunched my shoulders against the chill in the air and took care with where I put my feet. I'd discovered this morning just how easy it was to slip on the stuff and it was just as cold as it was pretty when you landed in it.

I wondered if the day's cool temperature might mean more snow tonight. It was still a novel experience to look out the window and see white all over the ground, though both Bax and Holland told me it wasn't a common event. That just made it all the more special and I'd sent a silent prayer to the Moonlands that morning as I and the pups had played our way to school that it would still be there when I went to pick them up at the end of their day.

The elevator made me even more nervous as it whooshed me up into the building. I imagined the ground falling away below me and the floors flashing by, until it stopped on a floor that wasn't the one I'd chosen. Two young shifters, a male and female, got in. They looked at me curiously, and pressed the button for the ground floor.

The elevator doors closed and the car started to move upwards again.

"Damn," said the male, and eyed me speculatively. "Who are you?"

"Raleigh," I said politely. He was a gamma, so probably not a threat. Not really. Okay, everyone was a threat to an omega.

"Stop bugging him," the female told him, punching him gently in the arm. She was either a strong beta or a weak alpha—it was hard to tell by her scent. "I'm sorry, he's nosy." She looked me up and down too, and I took a step back. "It's getting hard to remember the names of all the omegas, we're getting so many."

I didn't know what to make of that, so I said nothing, just kept my distance at the back of the elevator car. She gave me another look up and down that made me uncomfortable, and then the doors opened as if Lysoonka herself was watching out for her wayward child. "Nice to meet you," I muttered, and then I brushed past them with more haste than was polite.

Personnel was around the corner from the elevator, Holland had said, and I hurried down the corridor until I found the door. It swung easily when I pushed on it and a young gamma female looked up from a form she was filling with closely-written neat text. "Hello," she greeted me and stood up. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Raleigh," I said, almost apologetically, but old habits died hard. "I'm here to see what jobs I can do around the pack."