Page 34

“If you mean, of course, which of them is a piece of historical fact, the answer is none of them,” says Kyvelki.

I swallow, confused.

She laughs. “Let me ask you, something, secular alpha. Why do we tell stories like this?”

“I…” I shake my head.

She sits back in her chair, though, and waits.

It’s quiet, and the silence stretches on, and it becomes clear I’m going to have to answer this question.

So, eventually, I say, “Uh, to know what happened.”

“To know what happened,” she says. “But why do we care what happened?”

“It’s good to know,” I say. “I guess because…” I’m struggling here. “Well, if something similar happens, we’ll know, or if there’s something about what happened that gives us more information about what we know now, or that kind of thing, maybe?”

“So, we are interested in the past only to the extent that it affects the present,” she says.

“I mean… I guess.” But notonly, right?

“So, these stories, they are about the present, not the past.”

“Uh, okay,” I say.

“We can learn things from stories,” she says. “We interpret them to mean what we wish to know about ourselves.”

I don’t say anything.

“You disagree?” she says.

“I just… I think, when we’re trying to find things out, what we really want is not an interpretation, but the truth.”

She laughs again. “Well, what is truth, though? Truth is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?”

“No,” I say. “No, truth is truth.”

“These stories, about the first alphas and omegas, we tell them amongst our people to affirm our story over and over again. It is always thus with us. We are persecuted. Someone, usually a jealous someone, wishes to hurt us, to hurt our people, and we must run and take shelter. We are saved by the Goddess herself, who has given us the gifts we need to triumph through our own designations. This is our truth, you see, and this is what our stories tell us.”

I see what she’s saying, but… it’s not very scientific, is it?

“You, secular alpha, what story did you want to hear? One in which you and your pack were different than every other pack because of your sharp, fang teeth? Perhaps you thought there would be a story about some chosen pack, one that was here to free us all from some oppressive scourge, and the fang-like teeth would be the sign that you were here to save us all. Were you thinking that?”

I wasn’t thinking that, not at all. But I understand why she says it, because what else could it have meant? The idea that we’re a scent match, that our teeth are different, all of that, it seems to denote us as some kind of pack of superheroes. I guess maybe I did wonder if there was some prophecy we were supposed to fulfill.

I would have scoffed at it. Not very scientific, after all.

But maybe I did think…

I give her a sheepish look. “So, uh, nothing like that, huh?”

“Of course there’s something like that,” she says. “Why would I have mentioned it otherwise?”

I sit up straight.

“Yes, at the end of the story with the cobra-men, sometimes, there’s a coda to it. It says that once all alphas had snake-teeth, but that it was slowly bred out of us, and that if it is activated again, it is a sign that a new age of purity has begun and the Goddess will lead us all to crush our enemies under our heels.”

I furrow my brow.