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Calix touches my arm, and it recedes, and everyone breathes.

Kyvelki lets out a wild laugh. “Astounding,” she breathes.

I sit up straight. “All right, never mind that. Back to what he said. If Penelope couldn’t resist me, how did she call the police?” I cringe. “Oh, God, we killed them.”

Calix soothes me again. “We weren’t in control,” he says tightly.

Kyvelki gasps, recovering from my cringe, I think. “Your emotions are so intense, kyra,” she marvels. “You are this bright, wild thing, so very powerful.” She takes a breath. “Well, as to Penelope’s ability to disobey your wishes, she said your power faded as she left the circle of your scent.”

I nod. “Okay. Good to know.”

Kyvelki shakes her head, as if to clear it. “We were speaking of what led up to the biting frenzy, however.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Um, I went downstairs to talk to Dr. Acker.”

“Right,” says Kyvelki. “I don’t entirely understand who that woman was.”

“She used brainwashing techniques on my mates,” I say. “She used their alpha instincts against them, made them associate their desire to claim an omega with killing. She turned them into omega killers.”

Kyvelki’s lip curls in disgust. “Glad she’s dead.”

“I didn’t mean to…” I feel a rush of confusion and shame and horror. “It happened so fast. I lost control. But that is what they did to us in that place. We were stripped of our identities. It’s like the facility split us down the middle, separated our designations from our higher thinking selves. And that’s what this whole thing was, not a biting frenzy, it was… going feral. We all went feral.”

I look around at the others, feeling the confirmation of this through the bond.

“Well,” says Calix quietly, “that’s what a biting frenzy is, too, though, isn’t it?” He looks to Kyvelki. “It’s like the story of Nanna and her alphas, when they are put in captivity and they escape when the Goddess imbues them with a wild and savage strength.”

“Yes,” says Kyvelki. “There are a number of stories of being filled with the Goddess, which manifests as a kind of barbaric madness.” She rubs her forehead. “But what if it isn’t something supernatural, what if it is just something that is part of being an alpha or an omega, a connection to the brutal, primeval element of nature. What if the stories are only offering some explanation for a natural phenomena, like so many stories in folklore.”

“Like ones that say that thunder is someone bowling in the sky or something?” I say in a tiny voice.

Kyvelki laughs. “I hadn’t heard that, but yes. In much of folklore, natural phenomena is personified in a deity or the effects of a deity’s emotion.”

“If that’s the case,” says Calix, “what’s happened to us, or to my mates, isn’t because of bloodlines, it’s because of whatever scientific experiments were done on them. Lotus’s extreme omega power is because of the effect of having herself split in half by the side effects of drugs.”

I don’t know if I want to be the Frankenstein’s monster of omegas. “What about the scent match?”

“Could be,” says Kyvelki. “Either the scent match was going to happen anyway, and it intensified the effects or the intense effects cause the scent match.”

“Why would it have affected me if it’s because of the drugs?” says Calix. Then he makes a face. “I’ve been taking the rut suppressants, though. That’s the whole reason I got the goddess-damned job.” He puts his hands on his head.

“I can’t believe it’s all chemical,” says Kyvelki, shaking her head. “No, I refuse to think the hand of the Goddess isn’t present in this. This is her divine will.”

“Oh, there is no fucking Goddess,” says Calix, getting up off the couch. He stalks out of the room and pushes past Kyvelki’s mates to get out.

“You shouldn’t go outside, Calix,” says Kyvelki mildly. “The reinforcements have probably arrived by now. They’ll be searching for you.”

This alarms me. “You don’t think they’ll look here?”

“They’ll eventually search this house, I suppose,” says Kyvelki. “We’ll make sure you aren’t discovered when they do.”

“But if everyone is gathered on the other side of the property, aren’t they going to notice you’re not there, and come directly here?” I say.

“Eventually, perhaps,” says Kyvelki. “There are too many people all gathered together for Penelope to notice our absence right away, I think. But we do need to look into hiding you, and I suppose we shouldn’t dally too long before we find a solution to that problem.”

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