Page 7

“Is this woman a danger?” says Penelope. “If she gets free again, will she hurt my pack?”

I hesitate several moments.

And Dr. Acker takes the opportunity to speak. “Do I look like a danger?” she says, her voice thick. “I don’t have a weapon, and I’m not strong enough to hurt anyone.”

“If she gets free, and she reports our location to the Cedar Falls facility, it could be very bad for everyone,” I say. “She could bring the authorities here, too.”

“And you do want her dead,” says Penelope.

“Not yet,” I say. “I want her to fix whatever it was she did to my mates.” However, I can’t be sure that she isn’t simply a liability at this point.

“I can shoot her right now,” says Penelope to me, with a little shrug. “Would you like me to do that for you, little omeglet?”

Omeglet? What is that? Is it an insult? Should I be affronted?

God, I’m exhausted. I shove my hair away from my forehead, because I’m sweaty, and it’s pasted there. “I don’t want her dead yet, so no.”

Penelope laughs. “There’s a little fire to you sometimes, omega. Just a little bit. I’m not sure if it’s going to be enough, but it’s something.”

I sigh. “I know you’re going to want a guarantee that she won’t get free again, though, so—”

Penelope shifts the gun and pulls the trigger.

I rush forward, letting out a high-pitched noise. I just said that I didn’t want her dead, didn’t I?

But then I hear Dr. Acker screaming. She’s clutching at her foot, curling up around herself as she holds her ankle, which is wounded.

Penelope shot Dr. Acker in the foot.

“That should keep her from going much of anywhere,” says Penelope, putting the shotgun over her shoulder. She looks pretty pleased with herself.

“That’s definitely one way to handle the problem,” I say.

Penelope shrugs at us.

I look at Calix. What are we supposed to do now? “Okay, you think we can carry her together?”

Penelope makes a noise in the back of her throat. “Oh, omega, that’s not how you talk to your alpha.”

Calix looked up at her, his nostrils flaring.

Penelope glares at him. “None of that, boy.” She rounds on me.

“Do they explain nothing to you in that world? Don’t you see that the very nature of things is for an alpha to serve his omega, to do her bidding?

Pleasing you is what pleases them. They can’t be happy unless you are happy.

So, you need to clearly communicate to your alphas what you need and how they can serve you.

That’s the path to a happy pack. That’s what they want from you. ”

“What’s what they want from me?” I say. “To be ordered around?”

“Yes,” says Penelope, as if I’m a total idiot.

“Well,” I say, annoyed, “maybe I’m going to treat Calix like he’s a human being with his own will and right to decide.”

Penelope lets out a disbelieving laugh. “Goddess help us,” she says. “Do whatever you want. Just get this woman off my front lawn. She’s very noisy. There are babies trying to sleep around here.”

Dr. Acker lets out a wail.

Penelope walks off.

Calix steps close. “Maybe get the others to help me.”

“But she’ll—”

“No, she won’t,” says Calix pointedly to Dr. Acker. “Because if she tries to trigger them, I will put my finger inside the wound on her ankle.”

Dr. Acker whimpers.

striker

WE BIND DR . Acker’s wound with gauze and medical supplies in the bathroom in the cabin where we’re staying. Then we tie her back up in the basement and duct tape her mouth shut. We duct tape her to the pole down there in addition to tying her up.

She’s hurt but she’s bound too well to get free anyway this time.

She cries the whole time, but she doesn’t try to use that voice on us, or to make us do her bidding, or to get us to attack Lotus again. She’s afraid of the pain that Calix has threatened her with, I guess. She’s probably in a lot of pain. The shotgun did a good bit of damage to her.

After, we get upstairs and Lotus sits down on Calix’s lap in one of the chairs and he licks the back of her neck, and I stand there, the only one without a bite of any kind, and I remember being jealous before, when I was the only one who couldn’t get an erection for her, when I was the only one who couldn’t fuck her.

They say I’m the lead alpha, that I’m in charge, but I feel like I’m just the alpha left out most of the time.

“I don’t like this,” I decide to tell them. “I don’t have any defense of Dr. Acker here, but I don’t know if I can participate in murder.”

“Is it because of God?” says Lotus.

When I think about the man I was in my past life as a priest, it feels like remembering someone else’s existence.

Killing is wrong, though, and I know that.

It’s only that I’ve already got so much blood on my hands that I can’t rightly distance myself from the activity anymore.

“No, not because of God,” I say. “But I don’t know what’s left of me if I do this. ”

Knight speaks up. He has his arm around Arrow and Arrow is leaning his head on his shoulder. Knight says, “This was never supposed to be you, Striker. This was supposed to be me. I never expected she’d have that kind of power over me still.”

I’m a little annoyed. “Look, it’s not that I can’t handle it—”

“I wanted to get rid of her,” says Knight. “I wanted to make things better for you.” He says this directly to me.

And I remember when I broke down, remembering what it was we all did when we were brainwashed by Dr. Acker, the women we killed, the way we were trained to behave that way.

I remember how he held me and he soothed me.

I was grateful, even though Knight is frankly dangerous and unhinged.

He loves me, though, and that… well, it’s good to have someone like Knight on our side.

“I wanted to make it better for all of us,” says Knight, turning to include everyone in this statement. “But the truth is, I only made it worse. If she wasn’t here, everything would be different.”

“She’ll cooperate now,” says Lotus. “If she does, maybe we don’t have to kill her.”

Calix stops tending her bite for a minute. “Come on, sweetheart, how do you figure that?”

Lotus turns to look at him. “Well… I don’t know.”

“We can’t let her go,” says Arrow darkly.

She sighs, her shoulders slumping. “Yeah, I guess I know that. If she gets free, we’re in danger.”

Everyone’s quiet, and the silence stretches on and on.

“So, Calix bit you,” I say finally.

Calix pulls off from tending again. “Yeah, we have so many things to talk about, like, what’s going on with our teeth?”

“Oh, is that abnormal?” I say.

“And what’s with Knight and Arrow?” says Calix. “Now that I’m scenting that, it’s… what the fuck?”

“That’s abnormal, too?” I say.

Calix groans and goes back to licking Lotus’s neck.

I look at Knight. “You couldn’t stop Arrow from attacking our omega, I noticed. You couldn’t stop yourself either.”

Knight sighs. He shoves the hand that’s not wrapped around Arrow into his pocket.

“But you said that biting him meant that you’d be able to—”

“I know what I said,” mutters Knight.

I throw up my hands. “You know what? I’m hungry. Anyone else hungry?”

“Starving,” says Calix.

I go into the kitchen and open up the refrigerator. It’s basically empty except some condiments on the shelf. I open the freezer. Well, then. This is more like it. There’s meat up there, frozen meat. I sort through it, but it’s not exactly labeled. I don’t really know what it is.

I take out some ground something-or-other.

Might be beef. It’s probably beef, but it’s sort of freezer burned and it’s hard to tell what the actual color is.

“I think there was Hamburger Helper.” I open up a cabinet, and yup, sure enough, two boxes.

I take those out and start looking for a skillet to cook this in.

Knight wanders into the kitchen and picks up one of the boxes. “They eat this kind of stuff in the Polloi?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Calix.

“I thought it was like, clean food, farms, stuff like that?”

Calix snorts. “Okay, well, there’s Polloi and there’s Polloi, so you got to get that straight, first.”

“What’s that mean?” I say, and I’ve found a skillet.

I put it on the stove. It’s a gas range, so I turn on the flame and then adjust it before I put the skillet down.

Then I empty the bag of frozen meat into the skillet.

It lands with a plunk and sits there, sizzling, ice crystals melting. Yeah, this is definitely ground beef.

“I’m trying to tend my bite here,” says Calix.

“Is it complicated?”

“You were a priest. You have to understand that there’s the rules of a religion and there’s how people in the religion actually live,” Calix says.

I guess I understand that.

Lotus strokes his hair. “Well, I’m curious, too. Because I’ve heard that the reason Polloi go into heat and ruts on schedules and we don’t is because of impurities in modern culture and diet, like if we stopped drinking alcohol and eating McDonald’s and stuff, we’d be better off.”

“Right,” says Calix, “and the doctrine of the Polloi is no alcohol and to eat fresh food from farms and things, but the doctrine of the Polloi is asking too much of most of the members of the Polloi. We don’t all have farms, for one thing, and not all groups believe in the alcohol prohibition.”

“Oh,” says Lotus, nodding.

“Yeah, it’s up to the Vasilissa, a lot of the time,” says Calix.

“Penelope’s old school. No booze out here.

But where I grew up, it was much laxer on that.

Neither this pack or my old pack had farmland or anything like that.

Everyone was supposed to go out and work, but the closer you were to the Vasilissa in terms of bloodline, the more likely you were to actually sit on your ass.

The money all got turned over to the Vasilissa, though.

She was supposed to divide it evenly amongst everyone for food and things?

But, uh, she kept more of it than she gave out.

We ate cheap. A lot. Ramen. Rice. Beans.

Hamburger Helper.” He goes back to tending Lotus’s bite.

I speak up. “So, you’re saying that the ideals of the Polloi might be noble, but the execution of them is often corrupt?”

He shrugs.

Lotus bites down on her lower lip. “Why’d you bring us here, Calix?”

He doesn’t answer. He just tends.