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lotus

FINALLY, I GET someone to tell me that Selene is scheduled to arrive the following evening. I say that the tournament will go on as planned, though I know that no one can possibly stand against me.

It’s hard to explain how I know this, what I am now.

I don’t know what moment it happened.

It’s tempting to think it happened when I killed Dr. Acker.

But it happened before that.

It happened when they separated me, made me two—my omega self and my human self. Now, I’ve been put back together, but in the right order. Before, my human self was in charge.

And my human self?

Well, Penelope was right about me. Demure, hesitant, wilting, weak .

I am an omega.

I am the life mate of four vicious and strong alphas who would protect me with their lives.

To them, I am the most important person in the universe.

Now, I will behave as if I understand my importance.

I will not make myself lesser for the comfort of others. I will inhabit who and what I am. I will demand what I wish. I will take control.

After Penelope and the rest of the people in the main house clear out, I spend the rest of the day nesting.

If I notice that they try to hide the fact they have a phone from me, or that they are typing into it, I don’t pay it any mind.

I dimly remember that the Polloi have never had landline telephones, and that they eschew smart phones with apps and the internet, but that they have adopted using old cell phones, ones that can only be used to call or text.

I remember it from some documentary I watched once.

But it doesn’t register to me as anything to worry over.

I feel as if I have waited quite a long time for a nest, and I want one with an ache that overtakes me, that explodes in my chest. I have my mates stand guard on the porch of the house while I go looking for nesting materials.

I seize anything and everything that strikes my fancy, going through closets and bedrooms and the living room. I take fur coats and throw pillows. I take quilts and eyelit-lace curtains. I take flowered tablecloths and pink robes.

When I get back down to the front porch to tell my mates that they should go and scent the nest up with their own unique smells so that it smells like ours, Striker has collapsed.

The others have done nothing about this, staring forward, following my orders.

I sense this is not because they wished to do so, but because my control of them is so strong that they could do nothing about Striker.

I kneel down next to him, running my hand over his chest. “What’s wrong?”

“We haven’t eaten, kyra,” says Calix. “You only fed us semen.”

“Oh,” I say, furrowing my brow, wondering at that. “Well, eat then.” I open the door wide and they come inside.

Knight has picked up Striker and is carrying him in.

“Is he going to be all right?” I say.

None of them say anything.

We go into the dining room. I feel that my mates are weak, tired. I have run them ragged, I think again, but I feel a jolt of discomfort at the thought.

No, no, no. This is more weak human thought.

I am an omega. They are my mates. They are my alphas. They have been put on earth for me. They are mine and they serve me.

Except I’m not sure how I feel about that either.

I tell them all to sit down and I go into the kitchen and make them sandwiches. I’m in the midst of an assembly line of turkey and cheddar when Calix appears in the doorway.

“You don’t… serve us,” he says.

“Yes, I do,” I say, annoyed. “Go sit down.”

He looks me over and then obeys. He has to obey. He is my alpha, and I am his omega.

They eat, and I eat, too, because as I am assembling the sandwiches, I realize I am also hungry. The food makes me feel sleepy, and we all crawl into the nest together to sleep.

We curl around each other and I am safe and happy here, surrounded by my alphas.

Peace overtakes me.

calix

I AWAKE LIKE surfacing from a long stretch of being underwater.

I gasp for air, flailing in the nest where we’re all sleeping together.

I remember this feeling, but I’ve only felt like this once before.

And I can’t think about it, because I am hearing something that is incongruous, a noise that I shouldn’t be hearing here, on a Polloi compound.

Sirens.

They wouldn’t have done that. Penelope would never have called the police. The Polloi hate the police more than they hate anything on earth. They distrust them. They think of them as evil, secular and goddess-forsaken, controlled by the enemy—and everyone who is not Polloi is the enemy, of course.

But this feeling, this memory…

I get up from the nest, going to the window to look outside and I see the police car pulling straight up to the house.

All the while, the memory is rushing through me.

I was young, but it was after I had presented.

I was thirteen, maybe fourteen. No, thirteen.

I remember because Maggie was still on the compound, and she left the following year, when she turned seventeen.

Maggie is my beta sister, and I remember the look on her face as she looked me over when I turned up at the doorway of the trailer we all lived in.

I remember the curtains on the windows in the trailer.

They were plaid and a little frayed at the ends, fluttering in the breeze, because the window was open.

The breeze was spilling out over the stack of bunk beds in what was meant to be the living room of the two-bedroom trailer we lived in, but there were too many of us kids, so four of us slept in the bunk beds, two to a bed, on the narrow twin mattresses.

Those beds were all unmade, which was strange because it was a point of order that we all made our beds first thing in the morning.

Discipline, it was what held our way of life together.

I remember looking down at my hands. My fingers were bloody and the nail on my index finger had gotten torn. There was dark blood under my nails, and it was brownish, the way blood gets when it dries.

It was deer blood.

I remember that, too, ripping into the animal, the group of us alphas, all of us in this vicious frenzy while the drums were still beating in the background and everyone was dancing and whooping around the bonfire.

But it was morning at that point, and the deer was dead, and I was still running around, drunk on the energy of the biting ceremony I’d attended, the one that Maggie must have left sometime much earlier in the night. I would have left them early too, before I presented.

Anyway, this didn’t usually happen at a biting ceremony, whatever it was that had happened.

I had never experienced anything like it.

I had heard stories of being overtaken by the power of a joining, where the Goddess took control of her people and gave them the power of ten men to fight their enemies.

Stories, though, and I had always thought that when people claimed this kind of stuff happened it was just the way that a mob gets overtaken by a frenzy, just what happens when people drink too much cheap wine and drinks made of vodka mixed with Sunny D, that kind of celebratory madness. Not… whatever this had been.

Which frankly frightened me.

I was naked, and my dick was hard, and I had a knot. That was strange. I was just a kid, but there had been… sex. Blood and sex and drums and madness.

And Maggie was staring at me in the doorway of the trailer, and I surfaced, like this, like coming up for air and gasping for breath and—

The police car pulls to a stop and two officers get out. I can see them through the window, drawing their guns. They are coming for the door.

Penelope wouldn’t have called them.

The bond stirs within me.

I feel it yanking on me. It wants to pull me down underwater again, and I try to push back through it, to find Lotus, and to do what I did to her, across the distance, when she wanted to let Striker bite her. I try to steady her, but…

She’s too strong.

We are all mated now, and the others are waking, too, and their alpha presence splashes into the bond, bright colors of alarm that make me feel as if I cannot keep my balance.

I clutch the windowsill to stay upright, fighting for some semblance of myself in the midst of the rising flood of instinct and emotion.

Danger .

It’s not a word, not exactly, but it is somehow now the unifying force of the pack, who are moving together, like hulking, predatory cats. The others move around Lotus, keeping her in the middle as they surge forward.

The bond pulls me in, too.

Our omega is in danger, and it is our mandate, our Goddess-blessed purpose, to protect her.

A banging on the door. “Police. Open up.” The words are harsh, and I sort of register them somewhere, but the force that is controlling my body does not understand them as anything other than danger.

My mates, my fellow alphas, are trained to deal with danger, and they are lethal. They spring out of the nest with a single-minded movement. I know we are going to rip that danger to shreds, no matter what is in the way.

We surge down the stairs, all our movements fluid and graceful, like panthers tracking prey in the wild. Lotus stays to the rear, but she is moving in the same way, all of us together, and she has a lethality to her that zings through me and makes me feel lit from the inside.

Another knock. “Open up or we come in.”

We’re into the living room now, the front room of the house.

We all crouch, ready.

The door opens.

The police there have their guns out, but pointing at the floor as they move inside, looking around.

One begins to bring his weapon up.

And Striker tackles him.

They go down in a tangle of limbs, and the other officer points his gun at them, but he can’t seem to see what’s Striker and what’s his partner, and he hesitates too long before he brings his gun up to aim at the rest of us.

And we are already on top of him.

In moments, we have their guns.

Knight tucks one into the waist of his pants as Striker stands up with the other officer’s gun.

The two police cower, hands up.

Striker takes aim, his face entirely expressionless.

No , says some part of me, some thing deep inside, something that still thinks and reasons. We can’t have the death of police officers on our heads.

Striker glances at me.

I’m fighting again, trying to break through to the surface.

The bond inside all of us goes tight and high-pitched, like the shriek of a falcon.

The gun goes off.