Rejected By The Alpha For An Omega novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Secondhand

Imogen clears her office, June quits with her, and at the human hospital the ER attending reads Posy's chart and says Posy isn't a wolf.

I didn't wait for Monday.

At seven on Friday morning I walked into the clinic with four liquor-store boxes and a roll of tape.

The whole day staff was already there.

Two nurses, the orderly, and the girl at the front desk.

Nobody was pretending to work.

They had heard.

The whole valley had heard by midnight.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning, Doc," said the orderly.

He said it at a funeral.

I went into my office and started with the wall.

My diplomas.

My father's diplomas, which I had never taken down.

A photo of him in front of this building the day it opened, in a tie he hated, squinting into the sun.

I wrapped each one in a surgical drape and laid it in a box.

The front desk girl stood in the doorway.

"Is it true?" she whispered. "You're the Luna?"

"I was," I said. "For about three years and nine minutes."

She burst into tears and ran.

I kept packing.

June came in at seven fifteen, still in her coat, with two coffees.

She put one on my desk.

Then she looked at the boxes.

"Oh, hell, no."

"June."

"No. Absolutely not. That son of a bitch."

"Lower your voice."

"I will not lower my voice in a building your daddy paid for."

She took off her coat.

Under it she was wearing purple scrubs, and she had pinned her clinic badge on upside down.

"What's wrong with your badge?"

"Nothing. It's ready." She unpinned it, held it up so the whole hallway could see, and snapped the plastic in half. "There. Now it's ready."

"June, you have three boys to feed."

"My boys eat like a logging crew, and I've fed them on worse jobs than this." She dropped the pieces in my trash can. "Where you go, I go. Somebody has to hide your keys."

The nurses in the hall started clapping.

One of them stopped quickly and looked over her shoulder.

That told me more about the pack than anything Jarek had said.

"Where are we going?" June asked.

"I don't know yet."

"Great. Love a plan."

We carried the boxes out to my car together.

My father's old stethoscope went on the passenger seat.

I looked up at the brick front of the clinic one more time.

Somebody had already taped a sheet of printer paper over my name on the door.

DOCTOR STARTS MONDAY.

No name.

Just the job.

"You want me to go rip that off?" June asked.

"No."

"I want to rip that off."

"Let him have the door," I said. "I'm going to go get a job."

There's only one other hospital in this valley.

It sits across the river, past the bridge, on county land.

The pack calls it the human hospital, the way it calls a cheap watch a human watch.

Copper Falls General.

Forty beds.

An ER with a busted automatic door that sticks halfway open, so everybody has to turn sideways to come in.

I turned sideways and went in.

The ER smelled like burnt coffee, floor wax and a hundred strangers.

No wolves.

Or almost none.

I told the woman at the desk who I was and that I wanted to talk to someone about night shifts.

She looked me up and down, at my good blazer and my bad night's sleep.

"You want the attending," she said. "He's in the back. Good luck."

"Why do I need luck?"

"You'll see."

The attending was in a glass box of an office no bigger than a supply closet.

He was a big man folded into a small chair.

Shaggy sandy hair, a short beard, a nose that had been broken at least once and set by somebody in a hurry.

Blue scrubs.

A canvas jacket over them.

He was drinking coffee out of a beaker.

An actual lab beaker.

"Dr. Bracewell," he said, without looking up from his screen.

"You know me?"

"I know your handwriting." He turned the monitor toward me. "You wrote this."

It was a scan of my prescription.

Ibuprofen, ice, elevation.

My signature at the bottom, crooked from the snapped pen.

"Your Alpha brought her in at eleven last night," he said. "He wanted an MRI. I gave her an ice pack."

"I heard."

"He told my charge nurse your clinic was irresponsible."

"I heard that too."

He took a sip from the beaker.

He didn't even wince.

"It's a good script," he said. "It's what I would have written."

"Thank you."

"I'm not being nice. I'm being accurate." He scrolled down. "I'm Abel Hendry. I run this place at night, mostly by yelling."

"I'm here about a job."

"I know why you're here. Everybody in this building knows why you're here. The cafeteria lady told me before I'd had my eggs."

I felt my face go hot.

"Then you know I'm good."

"I know you're good." He finally looked at me.

His eyes were a warm, light amber, almost gold under the bad lights.

Wolf eyes.

I had been so tired I hadn't smelled it.

"I want to ask you something first," he said. "As a doctor. Not as whatever you were to him."

"Ask."

He tapped the screen.

Posy's chart.

Pulse seventy-two.

The same number I had felt with my thumb.

"Your Omega," Abel Hendry said flatly, "isn't a wolf."

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