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lotus

IN THE DARKNESS , my stomach full of beef and powdered cheese and noodles, I can hear Dr. Acker in the basement. Even though she has her mouth taped shut, she is whimpering in pain, and I can hear that.

I am pinned against Calix, who fell asleep with his mouth to my neck, and Striker is in front of me.

Knight and Arrow are on the other side of him, all twined up.

I don’t know what happened regarding that bite of theirs, to be honest, and I don’t know what it means for us that Calix and I are the only ones bonded.

I can feel him now, and when he talks about the Polloi, I feel his pain splashing through me, dark red, so dark it’s almost black. He hated it here. I can’t imagine why he brought us here at all, and he doesn’t seem to know either.

All I want is to be safe.

I want to be bonded to my mates. I want them not to be triggered into killing machines at the drop of a hat. I want somewhere we can live where there’s no threat of law enforcement or Cedar Falls coming after us. I want a nest. A real nest.

All I want…

Maybe it’s actually a lot.

Maybe I’ll never have any of it.

Why won’t that woman stop making noise?

I wriggle out of Calix’s arms, and I climb out of the makeshift nest we’ve made here. I am only wearing a nightshirt, so I put on a pair of leggings and then I go downstairs into the basement.

Acker sees me when I pull the chain on the hanging light down there, bathing the place in yellow-ish light, and she cringes from me in fear.

I go to her and yank all the tape off of her mouth.

She lets out a loud sob.

I roll my eyes. “Cry me a river, lady.” I sit down on the floor, facing her, crossing my legs.

She shakes her head at me. “Please.”

“Stop,” I say. “Stop trying to make me feel sorry for you.”

“Let me go,” she says. “I don’t know how to turn off whatever it is that triggers them, okay? I don’t know. If you let me go, I’ll never tell anyone where you are. I promise. I’ll—”

“Stop,” I say again.

She collapses in fresh sobs. “You’re going to k-kill me no matter what I do, aren’t you? There’s n-no way to save myself?”

“What were you thinking when you decided to train human beings with amnesia like animals?” I say.

She snorts, looking up at the ceiling. “Oh, please.”

“What were you thinking when you started using their sexual arousal to control them, when you started stimulating them sexually? Did that excite you or—”

“I was trying to make them useful ,” she says. “After the reaction to the injections would affect certain alphas a certain way, there was nothing to do with them. They were worthless. I made them useful.”

“Useful to kill omegas?” I say. “Who even needs omegas killed?”

“That was never the intent,” she says. “I thought they’d eventually be able to find kidnapping victims or runaway children, that sort of thing. I started with omegas because it was easier for them to track them.”

“Kidnapping victims?” Does this women believe that or is she blowing smoke up my ass? “What if they killed the kidnapping victims?”

“I would have trained them not to do that,” says Acker.

“I was getting closer and closer. It wouldn’t have been long until I would have been ready to move to the next level.

Digger was going to take some convincing, because he worried about the fallout from anyone discovering the way we’d been experimenting on human beings.

But I knew that—” She grimaces, cutting herself off quickly.

“What did you know?” I say. “What were you about to say? That alphas weren’t really human?”

“No,” she says.

I should kill this woman now.

“I don’t think that,” she says. “But I don’t think it would be hard to convince people that our hounds weren’t really human anymore. Their capacity for thought had been diminished so much—”

“You’re disgusting,” I say to her.

“Maybe,” she says. “But sometimes you have to cross moral lines in the pursuit of knowledge. I needed to know what would happen. I had to discover it. If there were sacrifices made in the discovery, it was worth it.”

I gape at her, horrified.

“Sometimes, that has to be done,” she says. “It’s for science. It’s for knowledge, and that knowledge helps the whole of the human race.”

I stand up, glaring down at her. “You better think of some way you can help my mates,” I say to her. “Because if you don’t, I am going to kill you, and it will be slow and painful. I will cut things off you, you bitch.” I pick up the duct tape and brandish it.

“So vicious,” she says to me. “I was always surprised how much the omegas fought, how willing they were to hurt us. Maybe the truth is that you aren’t human, omegas and alphas. Maybe you really are just wild animals.”

I tape her mouth shut again, grim.

When I get back to the nest, Calix is sitting up in bed. “Where were you?”

“Nowhere,” I say. “I was nowhere, doing nothing. I feel like that’s all that keeps happening. I feel like, whatever I do, even if it seems like I’m going to get somewhere, I’m stuck getting absolutely nowhere.”

He pulls me into his arms. “We’ll figure this out. We will.”

I want to believe he’s right.

But everything feels hopeless right now.

knight

CALIX’S ALARM GOES off early and he gets up to go in to work at Cedar Falls. I get up, too, because I smell coffee brewing.

Calix points at me when I come into the kitchen. “Not taking you to work with me today, not like last time, okay?”

I smile sheepishly. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to ask.”

He’s doctoring up his coffee, and I see there’s some in the pot, so I pour it into a mug for myself. “Hey, I thought you said it was a thing we could do to each other, bite each other. I distinctly remember you saying it was about something in our saliva that would make the bites scar.”

“You’re talking about you and Arrow,” he says.

“Yeah, you said something about the scent.”

“It scents… I’ve never scented anything like that,” he says.

“When I said that we could bite each other, I was talking about something cosmetic. Sometimes alphas bite betas or other alphas or whatever, but it’s just for show.

It’s a mark on their body, that’s it. There’s more to it with you and Arrow, isn’t there? It’s a bond.”

I nod. “It is, yeah.”

“Well, I don’t know how that’s possible,” he says. “As far as I know, that’s not something alphas can do to each other.”

“But maybe it’s because of the scent match?”

“Maybe,” he says. “And maybe the weird teeth shit is because of that, too.” He pauses, thinking about something, then lifts a finger. “Hey, you know who might know something about this?”

“I obviously don’t,” I say.

“Okay, so, one thing about this pack that’s weird is that some of Penelope’s sisters are still here, omega sisters.

She has two, who could have gone off and started their own packs.

They could have been Vasilissas in their own right.

They were subservient to their mother, but once she was gone, there was no reason to accept Penelope as their ruler.

But they did. One of them is an elderly woman named Kyvelki.

She’s an omega, and she’s a little eccentric—okay, a lot eccentric. She’s a teller.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a cleric, essentially. A revered and religious position. She knows a lot about Polloi lore. She trained, when she was a girl, in the Polloi tradition, and she had to memorize a lot of the ancient tales and wisdom. Anyway, if anyone knows about scent matches, it would be her.”

“So, okay,” I say. “I could go talk to her?”

“No, definitely don’t,” I say. “That would be very disrespectful. You can’t just go visit an omega, if you’re an alpha. Maybe Lotus could go, but we need to get Penelope’s permission first, probably.”

“Why can’t I go visit her?”

“You’re an alpha,” he says. “She’s an omega. Not only that, you’re an unclaimed alpha. She might ask you to fuck her or something. She’s so highly ranked, she could do that.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“What’s that look on your face?” he says. “You can’t go fuck this omega. I mean, she’s old, anyway, like really old.”

“So, how likely is it she actually does want sex?” I say. “I could flirt with her.”

“How would Lotus feel about that?”

“Well, considering that Lotus is currently fucking all of us, I would think—”

“You know how jealousy goes outside of the pack,” he says. “You saw how she got about Arrow’s wife.”

That’s true.

“Besides, you’re just not getting this,” he says. “You could go to that omega, and she could be so offended that a lowly alpha like yourself would dare to approach her that she could have you executed.”

I shift on my feet, furrowing my brow. “What kind of place is this, Calix?”

He sighs. “Yeah, okay, I didn’t think things through before we came here. I think partly I had forgotten how bad it is here.”

“They hate alphas?” I say.

“No, not if we keep to our place,” he says.

“Which is to be subservient?” I say.

He shrugs.

“That just doesn’t make sense,” I say. “If we’re supposed to be so subservient, why is the sex the way it is? Why do omegas submit to alphas in bed?”

“If we’re not subservient, why do omegas need more than one of us?” he counters.

I lift my chin, thinking about that.

“Look, I don’t know what I think, exactly,” he says. “I don’t think that either designation is subservient to the other. But we both have the capacity to control the other in various situations, and that’s undeniable.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“Look, I have to go to work today,” he says. “But the next time I have a day off, I’ll go and talk to one of Kyvelki’s alphas, see if he can find out any information for us about the teeth or the bites with you and Arrow, or anything else we need to know about a scent match.”

“So, you think that’s the best way?” I say. “Talking to one of her alphas instead of going straight to her?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Definitely.”

Which is why, after he leaves, I finish my coffee and get myself dressed and go wandering around the grounds.

After our conversation, I’m careful not to speak to anyone who scents like an omega. But I do chance a conversation with a beta woman who’s standing outside on her back porch hanging up wet sheets.

“Hi,” I say.

She looks me over. “You must be one of those weird alphas who’s staying in the punishment house.”

“That’s me all right,” I say. “Name’s Knight.” I offer her my hand.

“Oh, right, you’re one of the secular alphas. Introducing yourself and everything.” She snickers.

“That’s, uh, not done here.” I close my hand into a fist and pull it in against my body.

She laughs a little. “No, it’s fine. You stopped to talk to me for a reason. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I wanted to know about Kyvelki’s mates,” I said. “Who are her alphas? Where could I find one of them if I wanted to try to talk to them?”

“Wow,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “You think they’ll talk to you?’

“Am I being crazy to think that?” I say.

She tilts her head to one side. “What do you need to talk to them for?”

I’m thinking about how to explain.

“Got to be because you’re a scent match,” she says. “I heard that. That’s true, then?”

“It’s true,” I say. “We just don’t know anything about it. We don’t know what to expect.”

“And you think Kyvelki might.” She nods. “Yeah, it’d be worth a shot.” She clips the last clothespin in place and runs her palm over the hanging, wet sheet. “You play chess at all?”

“A little,” I say.

“Theodorus, he’s one of her mates. He likes chess. If you were to challenge him to a game, he’d like that.”

“Good to know,” I say.

“He hangs out around mid-morning down by the pond,” she says. “Good luck.”

“Thanks for your help,” I say.