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calix

“I’M TELLING YOU ,” I say as I walk down the hallway of the Cedar Falls facility, speaking to Tammy, “it was food poisoning or something. You should have let me come back in. I didn’t even throw up again. Total waste of a day.”

Tammy is my immediate supervisor, and she’s dressed the way everyone is who works in this part of Cedar Falls, in scrubs with a white lab coat.

People know that there’s an experimental wing doing cutting edge medical work on designations in the bottom levels of Cedar Falls.

But it’s not common knowledge that alphas and omegas who’ve been damaged by the drugs that Cedar Falls administers are here, lab rats to be experimented on this way, treated like animals, locked away from the world.

“Better safe than sorry, Cal,” says Tammy. “I made that call, and I’d make it again. But I’m glad that you’re feeling better today.”

“Me too,” I say. I had to get up at the ass crack of dawn to drive all the way down here from the compound where my pack is staying in upstate New York.

My pack? They’re all lab rats from this place who’ve been healed by…

Goddess, we don’t even know what? The magical power of a scent match?

Whatever the case, weeks ago, they were all too feral to speak words or remember their names. Now, they’re fine.

“Yeah, I’m glad I’m feeling better, too,” I say. “Like I’m saying, I could have come back in yesterday.”

“It’s cute that you’re trying to be such a loyal martyr here, but I don’t need that from you,” says Tammy. “This is a job, not a calling.” She sighs.

Anyway, I wasn’t sick yesterday. I was just pretending to be sick so that I could get out of working. And I only did that because I had to help my mate Knight escape with Dr. Acker, who’s the evil science-bitch who turned some of my mates into killing machines.

“I like that,” I say, nodding. “A job, not a calling.”

“I think there’s this expectation sometimes, with people you work for, to make things into something mystical when it’s just an exchange of skills for monetary compensation,” says Tammy. “And there’s really nothing worse than that sort of expectation on a day like today.”

“Right,” I say. “Any idea what happened to Dr. Acker?”

“It’s like she dropped off the face of the planet,” says Tammy. “Coltrain’s losing his mind.”

“Yeah, what do you think?” I say. “About the rumor that they’re fucking?”

Tammy raises her eyebrows. “Well, I hadn’t heard that rumor, but it explains a lot.”

“Doesn’t it, though?” I say.

“She’s dead,” says Tammy in a low voice, a final voice.

“Well, we don’t know that,” I say. Of course, I actually do know that she is alive, in the basement of the punishment house on the compound where we’re staying, and that she’s also a massive bite block.

If it weren’t for Dr. Fucking Acker, I’d have a life bond with my pack right now, but that didn’t happen. Thanks so much, lady.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” says Tammy. “What she did to those alphas, it’s unnatural and disturbing. And it’s karma in a way. She taught them to kill women, and they kill her? I don’t know. I’m not saying she deserved it. No one deserves that. But…”

“Hey, she could be alive,” I say. “Maybe she programmed something into those hounds, so that they can’t actually murder her. Some safe word or something.”

Tammy stops walking and eyes me. “Can she do that?”

I mean, I happen to know that the answer is yes to this question, too. It was such a fucking weird night last night.

I shrug. “We really don’t know what she did with them.”

“True,” says Tammy. “We don’t. Well, here’s the drill today, Cal. The omegas are nervous and they can tell something’s off. Probably because we kept everyone inside yesterday, and you know how much they enjoy their time outside in the gardens.”

“Yeah,” I say. People need to see the sky and the natural world.

It’s one of the things that’s so debilitating about prison, after all.

The feral alphas and omegas seem to need nature even more, though.

It’s like they’re nothing but animal instinct, and they are very soothed by trees and grass and stuff.

“Well, I can imagine they’re very off-kilter today. ”

“They are,” she said. “You’re so good at soothing them, though, so if you can work your magic, that would be amazing.”

It’s not magic. It’s my alpha scent. But yeah, noted, I can do that, even though I don’t even know why I’m at work. I was pretty sure, yesterday, after I helped my mate steal Acker out of this place, that I would quit forever.

But then, last night happened, and here I am instead, back to the grind. We simply aren’t sure whether my having access to this place is going to be helpful for us, so we decided not to cut ourselves off from Cedar Falls.

We don’t know what our goals are, though.

Basically, at this point, all we’re trying to do is survive.

“Law enforcement may be here,” says Tammy. “If they want to talk to you about anything you might know about Acker or the hound that took her, you’ll cooperate, obviously.”

“Oh, obviously,” I say.

“If you need anyone to cover you while you’re talking to the police, just send me a text?” She lifts her phone. “I’ll sort it out.”

“Sure thing, Tammy,” I say.

“I’m really glad you’re feeling better today, Cal,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”

lotus

I’M IN THE middle of duct-taping Dr. Acker’s mouth shut.

There’s duct tape down here in the basement of this place.

I’ve tried to do it three times already, and she keeps managing to somehow move her jaw enough that she can talk around it.

Or maybe she’s using saliva to weaken the tape. I don’t even know.

I can’t believe I’m this person, actually.

I can’t believe I’m the person who’s trying to figure out how to keep someone’s mouth taped shut.

That’s not me.

I should feel ill about it. I really should. I recognize that I should. But I don’t. I feel only a dull anger that I’m not capable of having that kind of moral center anymore.

It’s really this woman’s fault.

I never saw her while I was imprisoned against my will at Cedar Falls. But she did personally fuck with the heads of my mates. And she is part of the system there. So, she holds responsibility for what has been done to me.

Right now, Dr. Acker is tied to a pole in the middle of a basement. It’s a load-bearing pole, and her arms are tied behind her back. I have put duct tape all over her face and her chin, leaving only her nostrils free. I’m not trying to kill her. Well, not yet, anyway.

Why does Dr. Acker need her mouth taped shut?

After all, when we first got her here, I did not try to attempt to keep her from speaking. She was tied up down here, and I figured that was good enough.

And then, she started talking.

So, we had to do this.

“Lotus,” comes the rumble of a deep voice.

I recognize it as belonging to one of my alphas, Striker. I don’t even turn to look at him. “Get back upstairs,” I say to him. “I don’t want her affecting you.” Again.

“This can’t go on like this,” he says. “Knight says—”

“I know what Knight says, and I’m not willing to give up on it quite so quickly yet.” I do turn to look at him now.

“Yes, but—”

“Besides,” I say. “Knight couldn’t do it before.”

Striker nods. “I know. But he thinks he’d find a way around it now. He is the first one of us who figured out how to get around her mind control to get an erection, after all.”

“No,” I say. “None of you figured out how to get around it. You all had to use it.”

And it’s true. She did some weird association brainwashing technique with them, made it so they could only get hard if they associated it with violence.

And they all had to do violence to get hard to service me.

They didn’t do any permanent damage to me, and they claim they couldn’t, but we all know we’re just playing with fire out here.

This woman broke them.

This woman can fix them.

I glare at her.

She glares back, looking at me with a kind of hatred and superiority that makes me livid.

I slap another strip of duct tape over her mouth.

She makes a noise through it.

We stare each other down for several moments.

“Go back up,” I say to Striker. “I’ll be right behind you.”

striker

I WAIT FOR Lotus upstairs, wondering what happens next.

I already gave Knight a piece of my mind for going and bringing this woman here.

He didn’t fight with me about it, either, just bowed his head and rubbed the back of his neck and said he didn’t think it through.

Yesterday, we came here.

I don’t know what this place is, not exactly. It’s one of the Polloi compounds, and the woman who runs the place, the Vasilissa, I guess they’re called, she’s Calix’s great-grandmother or something? Great aunt? I don’t know.

The Polloi are all of our ancestors, I suppose.

Everyone with a designation can trace themselves back to the Polloi in some way or the other.

But the Polloi have been treated badly over the past several hundred years.

Chased out of their homelands, forced to always be on the run, persecuted and feared, all that sort of thing.

I guess it’s a typical story if you look at human history.

We humans, we have as vast a capacity for cruelty as we do for altruism.

Anyway, yesterday, we came here, and we were given this house, and Dr. Acker was tied up in the basement.

Lotus went and talked to the Vasilissa woman, and right after that, she was gung-ho to get bites.

We’ve all gone back and forth on the bites, whether they’re a good idea or not. At one point, I wanted us to do them yesterday, and at another, I started to get worried that the inherent, uh, bloodiness off them—we have to break her skin with our teeth—would trigger us.

We don’t really know what triggers us, but the triggering does happen.

And when we get triggered, we’re out of control.

Thus far, after being triggered, we haven’t done any permanent damage to Lotus, but last night…

Well, it was Dr. Acker’s fault.

We were all gathered up here, in what is meant to be a nest, I suppose, whatever a nest even is. It’s a room with a bunch of mattresses and pillows, and Lotus has been talking about a nest since we first found her. Hell, it was practically one of her first words.

That sounds fucked, like we had the brain capacity of toddlers or something. But we were all like that, when we got out of the facility, all of us barely able to think or form words, and we needed each other. We healed each other. And the sex was part of it, as weird as that sounds.

I don’t think we took advantage of her, not in that way. We were all on the same level when that happened.

Maybe we took advantage of her by being violent and out of control, though. Maybe I did. I remember the first time I had sex with her, that I was holding her face down, against the rug, and later, she had an abrasion on her face, and I…

Anyway, I say that guilt is a message, and you take the message and change, and I want to do that.

But if I can’t stop myself, if I’m triggered by Dr. Acker, then how can I get the message from guilt or my shame?

Acker’s voice floated up the stairs, while we were all half-naked, all of us getting ready to stick our very hard cocks into Lotus and each other. And then I whited out.

Next thing I knew, I was on my knees, whining, because Lotus was ordering me to do that, and I was obeying her.

We obey our omega, apparently, all of us.

But we hurt her, because of whatever Dr. Acker said.

Right after that, Knight tore down the stairs. He tried to kill Dr. Acker, but she stopped him, used her strangely velvet, awful, wheedling voice on him, and he couldn’t do it.

So, that was when Lotus decided to tape her mouth shut.

We were all too worried and freaked out for bites or even sex after that.

Lotus was hurt. We had hurt her. Again.

I can’t live like this. I cannot keep putting marks and bruises on the skin of the woman I love. I need that to stop.

Maybe she does need to die, Dr. Acker.

In my former life, I was a priest. I would never have countenanced violence against anyone, nor would I have said that anyone deserved to have their lives ended. But I love Lotus.

I will not protect Dr. Acker if it means putting my omega in danger.

Some things are more important than right and wrong.

Lotus’s safety is one of them.

On the other hand, we’ve been triggered by other things besides Dr. Acker’s voice. So, if we kill her, it doesn’t really solve the problem.

Lotus thinks only Dr. Acker could solve the problem.

She’s determined to make the woman do it.

Funny thing, though, how a person who knows she’s about to be killed isn’t particularly forthcoming. Dr. Acker has no reason to help us.

I have no idea what we’re going to do.