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“No,” I say, too quickly, as much because I never admit to being afraid of anything as because I think she’s going to think that’s rude.

“Someone warned you off me?” she says.

I shake my head. “No. Just… omegas in general, I guess. I got laughed at today by a beta for daring to introduce myself.”

Kyvelki smiles very widely. “Ah, I see. I’ve often wondered about secular alphas, what they’d be like. If they’d be fun to break.”

I do my best not to react to that. I remember thinking about flirting with this woman for information, doing more than flirting… Calix could have been right that I should have left this to him. I wonder if this was a bad idea. Am I out of my depth here?

Kyvelki laughs. “Oh, your scent, little secular alpha!”

Guess I’m doing a terrible job at not reacting. I clear my throat. “Sorry about that. Look, we… no one else has teeth like this?”

“No,” she says. “No one does.”

“So, how do you do bites, then?” I say. “Just with regular human teeth?”

She shrugs, pulling down the collar of her shirt so that I can see the bite marks there. I realize they don’t look like our bite marks. They look like a full set of teeth coming down. They’re lumpy and half-moon shaped, with indentations for each of the teeth. Ours are two twin teardrop shapes, fang marks.

“What?” she says. “Your expression?”

“Only that our bite marks look different,” I say.

“But you haven’t bitten anyone,” she says. “I can scent you’re unclaimed.”

“I did bite another alpha,” I say. “And… we leave behind fang marks, not teeth marks. It’s different.”

“Yes, your teeth don’t seem like wolf teeth,” she says. “They seem almost… snake-like.”

I nod. “We’ve thought that.”

“There is another story,” she says. “Another origin story, in fact. You’re right, the one that is commonly told is the one similar to your Snow White story, Bella and the Six Hunters. In this story, a woman wishes to be the king’s only wife, and she sends one hunter after the other to go and kill her rival, the beautiful Bella, or whatever she is called in the stories, and each of them end up being unable to kill her and pledging to protect her instead. There are different versions of this story. Stories like this are often obsessed with cannibalism. It’s present in a lot of early stories. Anyway, the wicked wife is often serving her husband organs she thinks belong to Bella, but it turns out the hunter will have just killed some animal and brought back its liver or heart or lungs or whatever. You’ve heard stories like that before?”

I admit I have.

“Anyway, in that origin story, Bella is the first omega and the hunters become the first alphas. It’s different than the wolf origin story, wherein the alphas turn the omegas. In this case, the omega turns the alphas. It’s the one that is most commonly used in our religious traditions. Bella is considered a type of the Goddess herself, in other words, she is not the goddess, but she is a representative of the goddess in that story, a sort of Goddess stand-in. You’re aware we worship a goddess, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I say.

“And you? You worship a God?”

“I…” I lift my shoulders. “Not real religious, really.”

“Yes, a secular alpha,” she says with a laugh. “We see all of your culture as lacking divinity.”

She’s not exactly wrong, I guess. But I don’t know if that’s really a weakness? Maybe in some ways, it is. I don’t think theirway of being is superior, however. I don’t want to move in here with the Polloi permanently, I have to admit.

“But the origin story I’m thinking of, it’s perhaps a variant of Bella and the Six Hunters,” she says. “There are similarities, anyway. In this story, there is a step-parent, not a rival wife. The wicked stepmother casts the girl out because she is a competitor with the girl’s father for his affections. The girl goes out into the desert where she passes three days and three nights in prayer to the Goddess, begging for safety. The Goddess takes pity on the girl and sends to her protectors in the form of cobras, who fight off the predators that come to hurt the girl. But then, the cobras see the girl herself and they come for her.”

“They bite her?” I say.

“They do. The girl does not try to protect herself but instead prays to the Goddess for protection and surrenders to the cobras as they descend upon her. And the Goddess rewards the girl by changing the cobras into men, her lovers, even as their fangs are stuck inside her skin. Then, together with her cobra men, the girl creates an oasis in the desert where she rules along with the Goddess’s favor and she is rewarded with riches in harvests and many children and all of those sorts of things. According to this tradition, the Polloi are all descended from her.”

“Right,” I say. “So, which of these is the real story?”

“They areallthe real story,” says Kyvelki.

I raise my eyebrows, but I don’t argue. I don’t know what to say to something so preposterous. Obviously, though, all of those stories are made up. None of them actually happened.