4
striker
I SAID A word .
It was Lotus, her scent, it gave me a word, it gave me speech.
“What?” says Dr. Acker, reaching into her pocket, finding the stun gun she keeps there.
I realize my mistake. I duck down, letting out a few tiny whimpers, doglike noises.
Dr. Acker does not stun me.
“You sure they can’t talk?” says my alpha, his voice almost lazy. “Maybe they’re too scared to talk.”
Dr. Acker looks frightened as she tilts her head to one side and sizes me up. “Is that true, Striker? Is my good boy afraid? You know you don’t have to be afraid of me, right? Right?” she is crooning to me.
“That’s how you talk to them?” says my alpha.
“Oh, as if you talk differently to the omegas,” she snaps.
I can’t kill Lotus.
I won’t.
But I don’t know what to do, because I can’t go anywhere else, either.
We have left twice, to hunt omegas, and it was easy to see that there was no way that we could survive out there, in that world. I would have to protect both Knight and Arrow, of course, because they need me.
We can’t speak. We can’t operate machinery or use money or anything like that. Even if I have a vague understanding of these concepts, they are far too complicated for me to entirely grasp.
The outside world is overwhelming.
And anyway, we…
After we kill an omega, we are very… needy. Last time, I started to help my alphas out, to touch them because they were whining and scrabbling at themselves, trying to get at their hard and swollen cocks, because that is when we are supposed to be hard, during the kill.
I tried to help them. I could see they needed a release.
But Dr. Acker appeared and stopped me.
Only Dr. Acker touches us, after all.
So, yes, she’s the one who strokes us off. After. It’s our reward.
I still hate her, but… it’s confusing.
If we don’t kill Lotus, we’ll never get a release. I don’t even think I can get hard like that anymore, not without blood. It’s ingrained in me now. Too much time in Dr. Acker’s little room, too many shocks, too much punishment, too much training. Too many times having her show me pictures of dead women while she touched me.
Which is fine.
I don’t need a release.
I do not have to kill Lotus. I don’t.
Of course, if I come back here, and I haven’t killed her, I don’t know what happens to Knight and Arrow. Me? Fine, they can torture me, but them? I can’t watch them in pain knowing that I could have stopped it.
I am caught in an agony of this choice. What am I going to do?
Dr. Acker puts a hand on my chest now. “Striker,” she says to me, and I focus on her. “Let’s go find the others.”
So, I go with her, because I learned long ago that I must do as she says or else I will be hurt. She takes me away from the security guard and from my alpha in the lab coat and we walk through the hallways together. I trail behind her as if she’s leading me on a leash, but I am not bound to her physically.
Even so, I’m hers in a way that I don’t know if I can get free from.
calix
I STEP INTO the office of Dr. Digger Coltrain, who makes all the decisions about this part of the Cedar Falls facility. He glances up at the door when I enter and then goes back to his computer screen. “Have a seat, Mr. Beckwith.”
I sit, waiting for him to be ready for me.
He rolls his office chair a few inches to the right, away from the computer, so that he is looking directly at me across his desk. He raises his eyebrows, expectant. “What can I do for you?”
“I…” This is delicate, because I could give myself away if I’m not careful. I’m responsible for Lotus getting out of the facility, after all, and if they find that out, it won’t just mean that I’m fired or something. It could mean much worse. They do very bad things here, things that people in the general public don’t even know about. It’s all under the cover of research, and they have signed waivers from all these people they’re experimenting on, but I don’t think anyone who checks into Cedar Falls means to sign up for this when they sign those waivers. I really don’t. “I’m a little concerned, I suppose.”
“Concerned about?”
“Well, Dr. Acker summoned me today, and I understand that she works with the damaged alphas, and—”
“We don’t like to think of them as damaged, Mr. Beckwith.”
Don’t we? “Right, well, calling them, um, hound dogs seems…” I grimace. Partly, it’s because I am an alpha, of course. Alphas and omegas are relatively rare in society, mostly only popping up because of intermarriage that happened with my people hundreds of years ago, when many of them assimilated with the cultures who came to our homelands. So, most betas don’t think of us like equals, not exactly. They think of us as people with some rare disease or something, some handicap.
Dr. Coltrain furrows his brow, thinking this over. “Noted,” he says. “But you’re not here about terminology.”
“I understand they kill omegas,” I say.
“Well, it’s not commonly believed that omegas can be quite fierce and violent, just like alphas,” he says. “I know you work with the omegas, and they tend to be small and sweet and docile and you can’t imagine them being anything other than—”
“No, I’m not saying that,” I say. Imagine that, trying to say that the Vasilissa of a pack would be considered docile. I know what an omega truly is. I grew up in a pack, a real pack, not like these bare echoes of a thing that exist in the wide world these days.
“Well, then, you know that sometimes, these things happen,” he says, sighing heavily. “We are working hard on trying to reverse these adverse affects that happen, but we currently cannot do so. When an omega becomes a danger to others around her, there is nothing we can do except—”
“Have her ripped to shreds by alphas who’ve been twisted into killing machines?” I say. “Because we don’t even do that to criminals anymore. If a person is given the death penalty, they get a lethal injection, and—”
“We would absolutely do that, but in this case, the omega in question has escaped the facility, am I correct?” He blinks at me. “It is Lotus we’re speaking of, yes?”
I draw in a breath, trying to keep myself from having an emotional reaction, because that won’t help my cause.
“It’s quite common for people working with omegas to become attached,” he says to me. “I know you would like to excuse her bad behavior. That’s also common.”
“Respectfully, sir, with the exception of escaping from Cedar Falls, I’m not aware of any bad behavior that Lotus has exhibited.”
I probably shouldn’t have let her out, I suppose.
If I’d known that I had a scent match with those feral alphas, I probably wouldn’t have done it. Everything’s bad now.
I knew that Dr. Acker would release her hounds, of course. That’s what always happens when omegas escape. Up until now, however, omegas have only escaped by clawing their way free, hurting guards and running off into the nearby woods. The hounds find them within hours. No one objects to the hounds killing the omegas because they’ve been so unhinged.
I figured it wouldn’t matter, because I would drive Lotus far enough away that the hounds could never find her.
But… with a scent match…
They might.
I need to do something, but I don’t know what.
Now that I’ve gotten her out of here, I can’t bring her back.
I also can’t be near her, because she’s mentally damaged, like a child, and I want to… well, I want to do what alphas do to their scent-matched omegas. I want her like that . Which is disgusting.
I have a plan, to get her out of my sister’s house, but it’s going to take time and money and resources. I can’t let the hounds get to her before I can make that happen.
“She has been violent on a few occasions,” says Dr. Coltrain.
“Not in some time,” I say. “It was before I worked here, in fact.”
“True, we thought she had learned from her mistakes and was being cooperative,” says Dr. Coltrain. “But then she fled the facility. We don’t know how she did it either. We can’t bring her back here. Anyway, Acker’s hounds are only trained to kill. They can’t stop themselves.”
“Don’t release the hounds,” I say, coming right to the crux of the matter. “Please.”
“We can’t leave her out there,” says Coltrain. “The hounds can scent out omegas in ways that people like us can’t. It only makes sense to use them.”
“Well, use the other ones, then, not the three that work in a group,” I say.
He narrows his eyes at me. “Dr. Acker says that the others must work alone and it’s a handicap. It’s been over twenty-four hours at this point. Who knows how far that omega got? The three hounds are the best. We have to use the best, Beckwith.”
“My understanding about leaving her out there is that it’s because she’s a danger,” I say. “But… she’s not. So, if we could simply—”
“That’s not the only concern, of course,” he says softly.
Oh, right.
Of course it isn’t. Of course, it’s hardly common knowledge what can go wrong at a facility like Cedar Falls.
Alphas and omegas check into these places during heats or ruts. They’re given drugs at the beginning of the experience, drugs that essentially make them entirely out of it, entirely suggestible, and cause complete amnesia.
So, the omega checks in, gets a shot, and to her, it feels like she wakes up four or five days later fresh as a spring rain, heat managed, discomfort over, as if nothing happened at all.
But that’s not what happens. It’s not a big secret or anything. Everyone knows that omegas and alphas come in here and they have anonymous sex with random strangers and that they wake up and don’t remember it.
There used to be facilities which were different, which didn’t use the knock-out drugs, or the drugs that made the omegas and alphas highly malleable.
For some reason, everyone prefers this, however.
In my opinion, it’s because they never allow the alphas and omegas to fuck each other .
No one wants that.
They might mate, after all, and no one wants to go off for your heat and come back to your entire life being turned upside down, now life-bonded to a stranger you know nothing about. No one wants big decisions like that decided during a rut or a heat, when the desire for a bite is so intense it’s painful.
So, alphas and omegas pass their heats and ruts with betas, typically speaking. And I can hardly imagine what that’s like.
Me?
I haven’t been through a rut since I came to this place. I specifically took this job so that I could steal the inhibitory drugs they’re working on here. They’re not ready for the market yet, or so they say, but I often wonder if that’s true.
They give them to the brain-damaged omegas and alphas with no issues, after all.
If they offered them to omegas and alphas instead of making them come here to the facilities, the facilities would be taking a pay cut, however. It’s in their best financial interest both to take money from the omegas and alphas for their four-to-five-day stays in the facilities and from the betas who pay money to come and fuck them anonymously. They’re never going to release drugs that would mean they all go out of business.
“Right, of course,” I say. “If anyone finds out about her, then omegas and alphas will know about the more dangerous side effects of those drugs you give them and they might be wary of coming here for their heats or ruts.”
“No,” he says witheringly. “I’m talking about Lotus’s safety, of course. She’s basically like a wild animal, you realize? Like a confused and sometimes dangerous pet who’s running free out there. Like a dangerous predator, escaped from a zoo. She could hurt others, or she herself could be hurt. We owe it to her to track her down immediately and end her suffering.”
I fight the urge to clench my hands into fists. That’s my fucking mate he’s talking about. She’s a person, not an animal.
But I can’t let that show.
I knew this was a long shot, anyway.
I force myself to smile. “I guess I just didn’t think about it that way, Dr. Coltrain. But you’ve really given me some perspective. Thank you, sir.”
He nods, his expression condescending. “Oh, of course. You haven’t been working here that long. You’ll come to understand it all soon enough. If there’s nothing else, then?”
I shake my head.
“You can see yourself out?” He goes back to his computer screen.
arrow
I’M THE BEST tracker, and we all know it.
I’ve even heard Dr. Acker say it before. Sometimes, she’ll spend ages of time running her hands through my hair, raking her fingernails gently over my scalp, toying with my earlobe…
I like that.
She’s… she’s not always nice, Dr. Acker, but when she is nice, she’s very nice. I like to do whatever I can to make sure she stays nice.
Anyway, when she’s doing that, stroking me all over, she’ll say that I’m the best tracker, that I get a scent and I don’t let go of it until I find it. She’ll say that I’m the best, and it feels good, and it sometimes makes my cock hard. Maybe because of the way she’s talking to me or the way she’s touching me or maybe just because I know sometimes, sometimes, Dr. Acker will touch my cock, and I’m always sort of hoping this will be one of those times.
No one else ever touches it.
If I touch it myself, I get in trouble.
They show me the videos of nighttime, and there I am on the screen, masturbating, and tell me that’s not right, that alphas don’t do that, that there’s only one time alphas are allowed a release and it’s after a kill.
I know it’s not true, that they’re wrong, but…
Well, anyway, if they hurt you enough times, you stop masturbating.
They do hurt us.
Dr. Acker does that herself a lot, too.
Like I said, she’s not always nice.
Anyway, I’m the best tracker, and after I get this omega’s panties and I put my nose against the crotch of them and smell her, everything changes.
I never smelled an omega like this, for one thing.
Omegas, they always smell good. They always smell like coming in from the cold to bound into someone’s eager and waiting arms. They smell like curling up by the fire and knowing you’re safe and you’re needed and you’re enough.
I don’t even really know what that smells like, admittedly.
And, you know, in a sexy way.
Anyway, omegas? They smell fucking good.
But this omega, this omega smells good in this other way, this way that I didn’t even know was possible.
This omega? I belong to her.
Don’t know how I know it, but I do.
It’s like, all along, all throughout my life, ever since I can remember, something’s been kind of… empty in this way? It’s always been that way, so I’m used to it, but it also always hurts a little, like a dull ache, like a missing spot, like something just a little wrong.
This omega is right.
She smells so good and the scent of her promises to fix everything.
If I can just be with her, everything will okay. I’ll be filled up and that ache will be soothed and I’ll belong and have a purpose and everything…
Sounds crazy.
But it’s true. I know it.
And after I smell her panties, I also just know where she is.
This is why I’m the best tracker, because I can do this.
After I get the scent of an omega, I can sort of sense her. It’s not exactly like a scent. I’m not following a trail or anything, not exactly. It’s just that I sense her, like, um, her essence or something.
Or his, if he’s a male omega.
Either way.
Usually, with most omegas, though, this wears off unless I get the omega’s scent again. But this omega, the omega who I belong to, my omega…
Well, it’s not wearing off.
I need to go to her. She’s far away. It will take us a lot of time to get there, and I don’t even know how we’ll do it, not exactly, because I’m afraid of all the things outside the facility, the roads and the cars and all the people who look at us in funny ways. I don’t want to be out there for that long, for as long as it will take to get to her.
But I have to go to her.
Except…
What do I do when I get to her?
I know what we’re supposed to do. Kill her. Dr. Acker has told me this so many times, told me that alphas are meant to kill omegas, that it is why we are drawn to them, that it is my nature to kill an omega, that it is why I can track them.
But she’s wrong.
I know it.
It’s only…
When I scent this omega, my cock wants to get hard, but my cock doesn’t get hard anymore, not unless one of two things is happening—either there’s a dead omega or Dr. Acker is there.
I won’t kill her for an orgasm.
I won’t do it.
I swear I won’t do it.
I just hope I can stop myself.
I need to go to her.