Page 21

“You scent like utter and complete command, my dear,” says Kyvelki.

“I have never really submitted to a Vasillissa. I stay here with my sister because she permits my independence. But I would submit to you. I think I’d follow you anywhere.

If you wished to lead us, all of the Polloi, into battle? I’d follow you. I’d die for you.”

I’m speechless. My mouth is dry. I just stare at her.

And that’s when my human part claws its way up from wherever it was that I have smothered it and tries to take control back. Internally, I feel a brief but violent struggle as my omega self vies with it. Inside me, I feel as if a storm rages for a few short, violent moments.

But as each side of me takes the other’s measure, they quickly cease their fighting. My human self settles in against my omega self. It is a truce, then. We are both now, equally.

I let out a gasping sort of breath, clutching at my chest.

My mates all reach in to put their hands on me. Striker finds his bite mark and passes his tongue roughly over it.

I groan.

Kyvelki laughs, bemused but somehow delighted. “Yes, I don’t quite know how to feel about that either. You must understand, when a woman trains as I did in the tradition of being a teller, it often has, well, perhaps the opposite of the desired effect.”

“What do you mean?” I’m not even sure if I care, but I didn’t follow that at all.

“Tellers are—were—sort of the clergy of the Polloi,” says Kyvelki.

“At one point, in the ancient past, a teller would lead a pack as a Vasilissa, but that hasn’t been done in hundreds of years.

The Polloi have become more and more disillusioned with our beliefs, you see.

The traditions promise us some distant triumph, that we will rise up and rule the entire world, but this triumph never seems to happen.

After years and years of oppression and disappointment, no one wishes to hear what begins to seem like a pretty lie.

Anyway, when I trained to be a teller, it was because I was a very devout girl, starry-eyed in my devotion to the Goddess.

I wanted to be one of her holy emissaries.

But the more that I learned, the more I myself became disillusioned with the stories.

I began to see the stories as tools, not as holy messages from a deity.

They were tools to give us the strength to keep going in the face of heartache, but they were not the means of breaking the chains of our suffering. ”

I remember what Knight told us about her, and I think I understand what she means. “So, a teller should be the staunchest believer in a pack, but tellers tend to believe less strongly than everyone else?”

“Yes,” she says. “Too many stories, too many contradictions, too easy to see the seams of the stories, how they are simply meant to impart lessons, not to give any answers. I began immediately to see how our worship of the Goddess was simply a way to control us.” She smiles at me.

“But you, omega, you make me want to believe again.”

“Just because of the way I scent?”

“And what you did to Penelope,” says Kyvelki. “When I spoke to her, the sheer terror in that woman’s voice. She said that she tried to resist you, but that you crushed her will like a flower in your fist. She said she wanted, deep down inside, to simply please you. She said—”

“But she called the police,” breaks in Calix. Then he winces. “Apologies, kyra, for speaking without permission.”

“No insult is taken,” says Kyvelki, waving this away.

“Wait, alphas can’t talk unless they get permission?” I say, and I feel my anger filling the room like a powerful drug and everyone wilts against it, Kyvelki included.

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.”