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calix

I PUSH OPEN the door and emerge from the attic, hands up.

A police officer lifts her gun as I do, shouting at me to stand down, stand still, hands on my head.

I put my hands on my head and go still. “I want to speak to Dr. Coltrain,” I say. “Right now.”

She trains the gun on me. “Backup is coming.”

“Yeah, you could shoot all of us,” I say. “But you noticed how that one there—” I point at Penelope, who’s cowering in the doorway. “You notice how she suddenly started to try to get you not to look?”

Jones glances over her shoulder at Penelope and then back at me. Her voice is wary. “I did notice that.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Well, if my omega back here turns on the juice, she can make every single Polloi on this compound go crazy. You might be able to shoot them all, but do you really want to explain why you murdered a whole group of people when it’s on the evening news?”

“What are you saying?”

“Coltrain. Now,” I say. “We cooperate, no more fighting, no more issues. But we want to speak only to him.”

Jones hesitates, pointing the gun at me.

“Get on your walkie-talkie there,” I say, nodding at it.

“I can’t, not and cover you at the same time,” she says. “We’ll just wait for backup, and when they get up here, you can do whatever talking you want.”

So, we stand there, her pointing her gun at me, for moments that drag on and on.

Until more police officers are rushing up the stairs and coming in through the doorway. They come for me, but I yell at them that unless they want the entire compound mobilized against them, they need to leave me in here to talk to Coltrain and only Coltrain.

The threat of Lotus controlling everyone is pretty empty, because I don’t think she can do it.

I think to influence people, they have to be close enough to scent her.

And anyway, I don’t know if she’d even direct a bunch of people to hurt cops, especially not if it meant they were going to get shot to death.

But Kyvelki did say she’d die for Lotus.

So, it’s possible, anyway.

I reiterate it, claiming that my omega is too powerful not to be taken seriously. “Tell them how powerful she is, Penelope,” I shout.

Penelope, for her part, cringes and says we should be given whatever we want.

Coltrain pushes into the room, looking at me with wide eyes. He’s wearing a suit, but his tie is loosened and his hair looks mussed. He takes me in. “You.”

“Me,” I say.

“You’re the one who let her out,” he says.

“Just putting that together, huh?” I say.

“You’re an alpha,” he says.

I shrug.

“We’re not negotiating with you,” he growls.

“I think you are,” I say. “I think you have to.”

“I definitely do not,” he says. “And I don’t care if you threaten to mind-control the entire population of the Polloi into a suicide attack. I will never—”

“No,” I say, “that’s not my bargaining chip with you.”

“No?” he says.

“No.” I shake my head. “Here’s what’s going to happen, Coltrain.

You’re going to bring us back to Cedar Falls, but we’re not going to be locked up downstairs in those rooms that are prison rooms. You’re going to give us a suite like the ones used for heats and ruts and paying customers.

And then we’re all going to work together to figure out what the hell it is your drugs have done to supercharge our alpha and omega sides. ”

“Wait.” He swallows. “What?”

“Yeah,” I say. “And then we’re going to get some people looking into a cure. A real cure, even if it’s not profitable. We’re going to fix every single alpha and omega in that place.”

“That’s a lot of demands,” says Coltrain. “It’d probably be easier to just shoot you all, don’t you think? I saw what you bastards did to Debbie.”

I raise my eyebrows at him. “So, you guys were fucking.”

Coltrain glares at me. “You said you had a bargaining chip. If I do all of that, what will you do in return?”

“In return?” I say with a big smile. “We will not go to the press.” Honestly, we should have probably thought of this before. It seems obvious now, but I guess none of us really know any investigative reporters.

He just laughs. “Gonna be hard to go to the press when you’re dead.”

“Well, I’ve been on the phone back here with someone,” I say.

“Not the press, but a person on the outside, who needs to hear from me within a set period of time or else I release a number of documents that I’ve already downloaded from the Cedar Falls network.

I’ve managed to get into everything, even stuff far above my security clearance. ”

This is, of course, a lie. I haven’t done anything like that. Will he call my bluff?

Coltrain rubs his chin. “That’s it? That’s your bargaining chip?”

I shrug. “I mean, you can make it happen, right?”

“You killed Debbie. You killed two police officers here,” he says. “There are security guards from Cedar Falls you killed in New York City. You and your little pack, you’re stone cold murderers. You’re out of control. And you think that I can wave a magic wand and make the police not arrest you?”

“Yes,” I say.

He barks out a laugh and backs out of the room.

Jones stays there, covering me with her gun.

I look behind me at my mates inside the room in the attic, all of whom are looking me with incredulous expressions on their faces.

I look away, wincing. It’s going to work.

I mean, if it doesn’t work, they’re just going to shoot us.

We can’t die.

This isn’t the end.

Besides, that would be a terrible ending.