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knight

IT’S LATER.

THERE are bodies downstairs.

We have retreated to the nest, where we huddle together, guns sitting on the floor in front of the mattresses.

Lotus is in the middle of all of us and we have spent the last however long it has been frantically licking at the bite marks on her body, sometimes our own, sometimes our mates’ marks. Sometimes, I lick Arrow’s and Striker’s marks too.

We are frightened.

Someone is at the door to the nest, which is barricaded with a haphazard stack of chairs we took from the kitchen.

Before we did that, before…

There was a moment after shooting the men in the living room, where the blood short-circuited us somewhere. We turned on her, our omega, all three of us hounds, and we could smell blood on the air, and she was there, omega, and we all remembered, the voice, the other voice.

My good boys know what to do with an omega.

But our omega stopped it, easily, something I realize now she could have done all along.

We feel shame for having tried to hurt her, but we all know it will never happen again. If it does, she has the power to stop us.

The someone at the door is saying my name. “Knight, I know you’re in there. You don’t have to open the door. We can talk this way. I know you can hear me.”

I nuzzle into Lotus, who holds onto me.

I feel us, all of us, through the bond, as if we have one shared heartbeat, and it hasn’t slowed since we woke.

“Knight, it’s Theodorus. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt your omega. Say something.”

Say something.

I turn to look at Lotus, confused, seeking… what? Permission? Assistance?

“There’s backup on the way. The place will be crawling with police in no time. They’ve called someone from that facility you got out of. Colter? Colvin?”

“Coltrain.” It’s Calix, his voice barely audible.

“I hear you,” says Theodorus at the door. “I volunteered to come and try to talk you down. Kyvelki thinks she can help. But we need to go now . You can’t stay here.”

I start to make sense of the words that I’m hearing, and I have a sensation, as if I’m underwater, and I’m looking up and I can see the surface above me, but distorted.

I hesitate for another long moment.

And then I fight my way up, to that surface above, and I break through, feeling sluggish and strange. My head hurts.

But I can think again. I climb out of the nest and go to the door. “Theodorus,” I say.

“Knight,” he says and he sounds relieved. “What happened?”

I don’t know what happened. I have memories of the past few days, but they are all so very strange that I can’t seem to put together anything coherent to even make sense of them, let alone find words to describe them. “We…” What? Went crazy? “Bit our omega.”

“Biting frenzy,” Theodorus says with conviction. “Kyvelki thought it was that. Your omega is more powerful than anyone could have imagined. She’s the most dominant thing anyone’s ever felt. Penelope’s frightened, but Kyvelki’s fascinated. Come with me. We can help.”

We can’t trust them. None of them.

And anyway, it’s not up to me. It’s up to Lotus. She’s the omega. She decides.

“You can take me,” says Theodorus. “Tell your omega—well, I imagine she can hear me—that she can hold onto me as hostage. Kyvelki will not risk me.”

I don’t know if I believe that. Kyvelki didn’t seem overly concerned with her mates, and knowing everything I know about the way things work here, I don’t think I trust that.

Lotus feels that through the bond, which goes strange and powerful, and I feel it trying to pull me back down.

Panicked, I stagger at the doorway, trying to hold onto this thread of myself, but the urge to surrender is overwhelming.

“If you stay here, they will take you back to that facility,” says Theodorus. “We’re wasting time.”

Cedar Falls.

The bond is filled with our shared images of that place, its cold institutional reality.

We all recoil from that.

Lotus stands up and everyone stands with her. She comes forward, and we begin pulling the chairs away from the door.

When we open it, Theodorus is standing there in one of his old-man cardigans. “Well, then.” He holds out his hands. “Want to secure me?”

Lotus’s voice is cold. “We will follow you, but we trust no promises made by the omegas here.”

Theodorus considers that, shrugs, and nods as if whatever she said was utterly reasonable. “We’ll go out the back door,” he says.

lotus

MY PACK AND I go with this alpha, Theodorus, winding through a path in the woods as he looks around to make sure no one is following us.

He tells us that the extended pack has gathered in a few houses towards the other side of the property, that everyone is frightened of the police presence and of our pack.

I am apparently the most terrifying thing that has ever happened here.

We arrive at a house where we are greeted at the front door by two aging alphas.

An older woman, Kyvelki, I presume, is sitting in an easy chair in her living room.

Her scent is strong and intense, an omega scent.

It hits me differently than any other omega scent has.

There is a settled regalness to it, unlike Penelope’s scent, which was strong, but somehow erratic.

“Leave your men out in the kitchen,” says Kyvelki.

“No,” I say. “They stay.”

She lifts her chin and surveys me for a long moment before nodding her assent. She gestures for me to sit down on another easy chair.

Instead, I sit down on the couch, and I use the bond to pull my alphas down with me. The couch isn’t quit big enough for all five of us. I sit on Striker’s lap. He curves a hand around my hip, holding me against him.

I want to calm my mates, but I am not calm, and I don’t know how to do it. Their fear and worry is infecting me, however, and—in turn—I am aggravating them with my own fear and worry.

I am beginning to think that I must give the human part of me—the weak part of me—some avenue for control, because I am out of my depth. I don’t know what to do. However, I’m not certain how to even find that part of myself. It seems choked, pushed all the way deep down into me somewhere.

“I wonder about your bloodline,” murmurs Kyvelki. “It’s amazing that an omega with so much raw power would have been born into the secular world. Do your parents have designations?”

“No,” I say. Does this matter?

She puts her hands together, palm-to-palm, and presses her joined forefingers to her lips.

She is quiet for some time before she speaks.

“You wouldn’t know about biting frenzies, I suppose.

They are rare, but with this, the way your whole pack scents, it should have been obvious to me that it would happen.

” She tilts her head at Knight. “I should have noticed when you came, I suppose, but I got distracted by the teeth.”

“What’s a biting frenzy?” I say.

“About what it sounds,” she says. “In times gone past, whenever one would happen, it was considered a sign of the Goddess’s favor, but I suppose anything that is otherwise inconvenient, frightening, and often dangerous must be described in some positive way or else it’s too much to bear.

” She shrugs. “We’re lucky that it was contained.

If you had been in a house other than the punishment house, the whole pack might have caught it. And how long has it been going on?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“When did you get your bites?”

“I…” I don’t know how many days it’s been. I curl closer to Striker, and I want his protection, and I wonder if that’s the weak, human part of me again. I shove that away, thinking I’ll even get out of his lap. And then I remember I wanted that part of myself back.

“You need to tell me everything,” says Kyvelki. “That’s the only way we’ll be able to determine anything. What happened directly before the bites?”

I drag my upper teeth over my lower lip. “Well, I had two of them already, but then I…” I think back, trying to piece things together. “We were having an argument. I wanted the pack to allow me to face Selene in the tournament, and they wanted us to run.”

“You knew about the tournament.” Kyvelki smirks. She raises her voice. “This is your doing, Theodorus. Did you tell them about it?”

“I did,” comes Theodorus’s voice. He and the other alphas are not in the room, but they are listening from just outside the doorway.

“Theodorus has a crush on your alpha.” Kyvelki gestures at Knight.

“I absolutely do not,” says Theodorus, firm. “But it wasn’t an honorable move, Kyvelki. I didn’t think it was fair, to claim we were giving this pack sanctuary and then turn on them.”

Kyvelki considers that and sighs. “Perhaps. It was Penelope’s idea, really.

I think she wishes to curry favor with our sister, Calix’s grandmother.

She’s a beta, and she married into another pack a long time ago.

Gave birth to an omega, Calix’s mother, though, which is where all her power lies, with her offspring.

It’s not a great deal of power in that pack, but Penelope would like to exploit it.

She’s the one who set up the match between Calix and Selene in the first place. ”

I feel Calix react in the bond to that, and I reach out to him through our connection to comfort him. He didn’t know he was a bargaining chip. I understand it through him, now, as I feel his emotional reaction to it.

“It was political,” I say.

“Yes, Penelope and the Vasilissa of that pack do not get along. But then, omegas rarely get along.” Kyvelki shrugs again.

“I don’t understand that. I’ve never allowed myself to succumb to that kind of petty power play.

Anyway, if Penelope could bring Calix back into the fold, return a wayward alpha to the bond of a powerful omega, it would impress that Vasilissa.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have given my tacit agreement to all of it.

Had I scented you, I don’t think I would have.

I would have realized it was a fool’s errand. ”

“What do I scent like?” I don’t understand any of this.