the biological urge to protect what he considered his was too strong to resist. He’d been fooling himself to think he could lead Jasper to Jack Henry and walk away.
“What do we do?” For now, at least, he and Jasper were confederates, not rivals.
“We’ve gotta assume they’re fighting over an omega. Probably ours.”
Ours. Elias liked the sound of that.
“I’ll come at them dead on,” Jasper said. “Catch their attention. You approach from downwind. Grab Jack Henry and run. Get him out of the way somewhere while I deal with the alphas.”
“Just you against two of them? Shouldn’t I help?”
Jasper’s expression suggested he didn’t expect Elias to be much help. Right. His instincts might be telling him to charge into the fray, but he would only get himself killed if he did. That was why they’d agreed it would be Jasper who claimed Jack Henry. Because Jasper had the coolness and the killer instinct to be the alpha Jack Henry deserved.
The two of them crept closer to the sounds of battle until Jasper made a motion with his hand, directing Elias to circle around. They parted there, Elias to creep as stealthily as he could through the underbrush aiming for the treehouse. When he had the tree in sight, he paused. From here, he could see the combatants tussling with each other in the clearing at the base of the tree. One of them was Saul, which wasn’t so bad. Jack Henry would be happy to be claimed by Saul. But the other one was Lon, and that was awful.
Saul’s body was covered in bloody slashes. He was swaying on his feet, but Lon looked equally beat up, also bleeding from multiple spots. Lon charged forward, smashing into Saul with his full weight, and the two of them went down, rolling through the clearing as they grappled for the upper hand.
Elias slid through the foliage, trying not to attract attention. He couldn’t see Jack Henry, but he could see that the ground beneath the tree had been trampled and that the bark on the lowest branch was disturbed—clawed and shredded as though more than one alpha had tried to brute-force his way up. Jack Henry was up there, no doubt. The question was how to get to him. Elias didn’t have either Saul’s strength or Jack Henry’s agility. He was going to have to think his way up.
While Lon and Saul were directly engaged with each other, he made his move. He grabbed a sturdy branch from the brambles around him and propped it against the trunk, forming a makeshift ladder which he used to quickly disappear into the foliage overhead. A whimper floated through the air, telling him Jack Henry was up here and scared, but he suppressed the urge to go straight to him long enough to haul the branch up behind him so no one could follow him up. The branch would make a good weapon too. If Lon tried to climb up here, Elias would poke him straight in the eye.
Jack Henry wasn’t on the platform, but Elias made out the glow of his eyes in the darkness of the branches overhead.
“Jack Henry?” Elias reached as high as he could toward him. “It’s me. Elias.”
“Elias?” Jack Henry leaned down, and Elias caught him around the waist to carry him down to the platform. He sat with him cradled in his arms, snuffling all along his neck and chest to make sure he was whole and unharmed.
“It’s going to be okay,” he promised as he rocked the omega in his arms. “Jasper’s here too, and we’re not going to let anything bad happen to you.”
Jack Henry had never seemed so omega—so soft and scared, so deliciously scented. The ripe smell of heat overlaid the familiar smell of friend, and the combo was more alluring than anything Elias had ever smelled in his life. He was hard in an instant, barely able to hold on to any thought beyond claim, claim, claim. Below him, a battle raged, but up here there was only him and Jack Henry.
“Are you going to claim me?” Jack Henry asked in a voice that was small and hungry. His nipples formed hard points against the lighter skin of his bare chest, and a trickle of slick soaked right through his track pants to wet Elias’s thigh.
“Should I?” Elias salivated at the thought. His canines weren’t as sharp as Jasper’s, but they were ready to go.
“Need you.” Jack Henry clawed at him—they were real claws