11
calix
I’M NOT SURE how I’m going to find the hounds and Lotus, so I just hang around the facility, way past my shift is over, puttering around trying to look like I’m doing busy work.
At some point, a bunch of security all go into Coltrain’s office, and they’re in there for a long time.
After that, I notice one of the guards goes out for a smoke.
I don’t smoke cigarettes, but I go out, too. He looks up at me and I give him a little wave, patting around in my pockets, like I’m looking for something and coming up empty. I approach him. “I seem to have lost my pack of cigarettes. Can I bum one?”
“Oh, sure,” he says, fishing one out for me.
I take it.
“Need a light, too?” he says with a grin.
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”
“You ain’t got nothing but a habit,” he says to me, lighting my cigarette.
I take a drag and fight the urge to cough. How do people do this? It is the most unpleasant experience I think I’ve ever had. I resolve to just puff it from now on.
We stand in silence for a bit.
Then I say, “Uh, you guys were in Coltrain’s office for a while. Something happen?”
“Those hounds… it doesn’t make any sense.” He shakes his head. “They stole a car.”
“No shit,” I say. “I didn’t think they could… I mean they can’t talk.”
“Right?” He spread his hands. “Anyway, they found the car, all the way in Staten fucking Island, man.”
“Seriously? They drove all the way there?”
“Acker says no way. She thinks they must have gotten some poor sap to do it for them, threatened them or something. Anyway, we’re all heading up there. After I finish this smoke, I got to go be part of a manhunt on Staten Island, looking for a bunch of killer alphas on the loose. She thinks we can bring them in alive, of course. She’s nuts. Coltrain says to recover the assets if we can, but that if we have to shoot to kill, do it. She’s not pleased.”
“Yeah, she wouldn’t be,” I say.
“Those things are like her pets,” says the guard. “Of course, she also jerks them off, so it’s disturbing.”
“Very disturbing,” I agree.
“I think Acker and Coltrain are fucking,” says the guard.
I raise my eyebrows. “Really?”
“Why else would he let her do this?” says the guard. “It’s batshit insane, the stuff that lady gets away with. If anyone found out, Cedar Falls would get shut down by the government, don’t you think? It’s got to be illegal. You can’t do that to human fucking beings.”
“I hear you,” I say, making a face.
“Yeah, but what are we going to do?” He shrugs at me. “We’re just cogs in the machine here. Sometimes I think about quitting, like, I feel guilty about making my living here. But you know why I don’t?”
“No,” I say, surprised at this turn in the conversation.
“Because it wouldn’t change anything. They’d still be doing it. At least if I’m here, I can, you know, make things just a little better for the alphas and omegas. I can look out for them. Little ways, like letting them stay outside longer during their little outdoor sessions, stuff like that. It’s not enough, but it’s something.” He shrugs.
Man, I really lucked out, didn’t I, getting the exact right security guard to talk to? He’s already willing to bend the rules, and he’s already questioning this place. No wonder he sang like a canary so quickly.
I cast a glance at the guy’s name badge in case I need assistance again. Maybe I could trust this person.
“I’m sure that they appreciate it,” I say to him.
“You work with the omegas, right?” he says.
I nod. “Yeah.” When I first started working here, I got in on any entry level position I could get in on. I don’t have any credentials or work experience or anything like that. All I needed was access to the drugs, right? That was why I took this job. So, I was janitorial staff at first.
Then, one day, I was cleaning up a spill in the lab, and one of the omegas in there was freaked out. They were restraining her, but she got free and came over to me, and I calmed her down.
I do know about how to calm omegas down, after all. I was taught this kind of stuff growing up, and I’m an alpha, so all I really have to do is, you know, smell good.
Anyway, everyone was astounded, and they called me in a few other times to calm omegas down, and then they offered me a position full time working with the omegas, and everything was going great. Until Lotus, of course. My fucking scent match.
“Did you work with the omega who escaped?” he says.
“Barely,” I say with a shrug. “Didn’t know her well or anything. But I gotta say, it kills me to think of her getting hurt. I don’t want her to be shot to death.”
“Yeah, that’s the weird thing, of course. Those hounds are acting erratically. They should have killed her already. There should have been a body for Acker to clean up, but there wasn’t.”
I knew they couldn’t kill her, but I’m relieved to hear this all the same.
“Anyway,” continues the guard, “I gotta get back in.”
“Yeah, of course,” I say. “Thanks for the smoke.”
He gives me a wave and heads back inside.
I wait until he’s gone and then drop the rest of the cigarette he gave me and grind it out.
I need to think this through. Staten Island?
We’re out here in Connecticut, and it’s not exactly a crazy journey to Staten Island or whatever. Sure, tons of people here commute into New York City for work. It’s doable.
But it doesn’t make sense to me why they’d go there, and why Staten Island of all places. It doesn’t seem like a place they’d go to by accident is all.
Maybe they could. Maybe they would.
But assuming that they have a reason to go anywhere… well, maybe they overheard something that Acker or one of the others was saying or something. Maybe they went to Staten Island because of something they picked up on here in the facility.
But even so, that doesn’t quite make sense.
They can’t drive, and Acker’s idea that they threatened someone to make them drive them somewhere doesn’t seem to work either, because they can’t talk.
However, I can’t help but think of what Maggie was saying, that Lotus was trying to say her name.
In the stories about scent matches that are told amongst the Polloi, they’re sort of magical. Packs who are scent matched can do things in the stories like practically read each other’s minds and stuff. There’s one story about a scent-matched pack who manage to forge their way through the wilderness in the winter—but that story is all mythology. It’s got talking animals that the pack makes deals with, stuff like that.
And while my grandmother and grandfathers might have been adamant that scent matches were real, most of us of the younger generations had never heard of one actually happening in real life, so I don’t think any of us really believed in them.
Now, I’m in one.
But what if the scent match is healing them?
What if scenting me let Lotus get back her name? What if, while they’re all together, they’re remembering more and more things about how to function? Maybe they remember how to drive and maybe the scent match helped them do that.
In the stories, it wouldn’t even be farfetched.
Anyway, let’s just assume it’s true.
If so, why would they go to Staten Island?
It’d be because Staten Island is important to someone’s past.
Whose, I don’t know, but maybe if I could get access to files on the network here, I could find out more about who these alphas and omegas used to be. And if so, I could anticipate where they are going next.
arrow
WE HAVE CASH now, so we can get a hotel, but it turns out that most hotels don’t want to give people rooms if they don’t have a credit card. Knight knows of a close-by hotel that will just take cash, but you can pretty much expect what that kind of hotel is.
I’ll say this for the room we get. It’s clean. A little shabby, though, the carpet stained and the bedspread looks like it was purchased sometime in the 1990s, but it’s serviceable.
Lotus is leaning against Striker, rubbing her cheek into his chest, and we all recognize that she’s going to need some kind of help soon, Knight’s knot, we guess, because neither Striker nor me can even get a hard-on yet.
The hotel room has two double beds and a dresser with a TV on it. There’s a ratty-looking easy chair with a scuffed circular coffee table in front of it and then the bathroom is in the back of the room. Knight settles down in the easy chair and Striker and Lotus sit on the bed.
I stay standing.
“We need you two able to get hard,” Knight says, propping his feet up on the table. “I’m thinking she must be going into heat.”
“Oh,” said Lotus, biting down on her lower lip. “You think?”
“I mean, I don’t think it’s normal to have to have sex every three hours or whatever. Is it?”
“We need food before we even worry about this,” I say.
“Maybe,” says Striker. He eyes Lotus. “But if you need—”
“No, maybe I just need to eat,” she says.
“Okay, so what do you we want to eat?” I say.
Lotus hugs herself, shaking her head.
“Get pizza,” says Knight decisively. “It’s easy and it feeds a lot of people, and everyone likes it. There’s a pizza place across the street.”
“Okay,” says Lotus, turning to him gratefully, and I can see she was pleased that he made that decision for her, not leaving her to worry through it herself.
“I’ll go,” I say. “You guys stay here.”
They give me money. I leave. I walk down to the pizza place, order two larges with pepperoni and I wait for them to be done.
As I’m standing around, I notice people looking at me, and I realize the clothes we have on from the facility maybe aren’t exactly stealth clothes. We’re all wearing black—black shirts, black pants—and we maybe look like a strike team or something.
Next door, there’s a Dollar General, and I go in there and grab some clothing, easily estimating Knight’s and Striker’s sizes, but struggling for Lotus. I think about going back and asking her, but I remember how grateful she seemed, and I just do my best to get what I can.
I have some memory about how you should always buy too small for a woman, because that’ll flatter her, but I think that’s probably not true in a situation where you actually want her to wear the clothes, so I don’t go too small. She is tiny, though…
When I get back to the hotel room, I have pizza and clothes.
The clothes I got for the guys work pretty well, but the ones for Lotus are all wrong. Some are hopelessly too large while other things are way too small. I laugh as she sorts through them, wrinkling her nose, shaking her head.
“Sorry,” I say to her. “I should have come back and asked for your size.”
“I don’t remember my size,” she says. She holds up one of the shirts I got. “I can make this work. These pants I have on are fine, I think. I don’t look like I’m working for stealth ops like you guys.”
“Good point,” I say.
We eat pizza, and while we eat, Knight tries to convince us to attempt to murder Lotus just to get our cocks working, and none of us are down with this.
Lotus categorically says she will not subject herself to that.
Striker says that he won’t do it and he’ll stop anyone who tries.
Knight looks very pained by all of this and rolls his eyes a lot.
I munch on pizza and say that I don’t think it even makes sense. “It seems to me like it shouldn’t be holding on so hard,” I say. “I remember so many other things—”
“Yeah, but not about yourself,” says Knight. “You remember things about being alive and doing things in the world, but you don’t know who you are. And until you can get your dick working, that’s going to be blocked.”
“We don’t know that,” says Striker. “That’s how it happened for you, and that’s how it seems like it’s happening, but it might be different for each of us. We just have to figure that out. Maybe there’s a way around whatever it was Acker did to us.”
“Around it,” I say. “Like, how do you figure?”
“I don’t know,” says Striker. “Have you had an erection any time, for any reason, besides if Dr. Acker was in the room or if there was a dead omega?”
“Uh…” I shake my head. “No.”
Knight sighs. “Maybe I just wasn’t as, um, well trained as you guys. I could do this thing, where I’d get hard into my bed. I’d barely move, but I’d be able to get off like that. I didn’t do it often, but when the pressure got bad—”
“You’ve been able to masturbate?” says Striker, glaring at him.
Knight shrugs. “I guess.”
“Look, the fact you can get it up now? It probably wasn’t even because you tried to kill her, then,” says Striker.
“It was,” says Knight. “But since you guys are too afraid to even try, I guess I’ve just got the omega all to myself now.”
Lotus licks grease off her fingers, looking adorable and pretty and sweet. “It would be better if I had your knots, I know that.”
“Do you think you’re going into heat?” I say to her. “You’ve done it before. You’d know what it was like.”
“If she’s going into heat, it may trigger ruts for us,” says Striker.
“Right,” I say. “Lotus?”
She shrugs. “I just don’t know. Before this, I didn’t go into heat very often.”
“Right,” I say, nodding. “I don’t remember going into ruts all that often until I was working with the public more and I think I must have been running across alphas and omegas more.”
“Working with the public more?” says Lotus. “Doing what?”
Damn. That just came out, didn’t it? Except I don’t remember, so it doesn’t matter. I probe it anyway, reaching in, begging the answer to come to me, but it’s tantalizingly out of reach. I shake my head. “No, I got nothing.”
“Maybe it’s not heat,” says Knight. “Because it seems to come in waves.”
“I think there’s something about us,” says Striker. “We all know that we connect to other alphas differently than we connect to each other. And that when we scented her for the first time, we just knew that she belonged to us.”
“Or that we belonged to her,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Striker, nodding. “It does feel like that. She’s the anchor to all of it. We all connect to her, and that’s why we connect to each other. But however it works, we have something together.”
“The pack thing,” says Knight quietly. “Yeah, I don’t know, I get a feeling there’s something I’m supposed to be doing.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Like the knotting, only more than the knotting,” says Knight. “I just keep pushing it aside though, because I feel like it’s… blood.”
“Blood?” I shoot up off the bed, dropping my piece of pizza into the box. “That’s not cool, that’s not something you’re supposed to be doing to the omega.”
Knight runs his tongue over his teeth. “Yeah,” he mutters. “I know.”
“What do you mean, blood?” says Lotus softly.
Knight shrugs at her. “I wouldn’t do anything you didn’t want, and you should know that by now. I get the feeling you’d really like this, actually. That you want it.”
She raises both eyebrows. “I want to be bloodied?”
He ducks his chin down against his chest.
She glares at him. “Besides, I did not want you to practically strangle me to death.”
“I’ve said I was sorry—”
“I really don’t think you have,” she counters.
“Well, I am,” he says, lifting his gaze to hers. “I am, omega. And it’s different now.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, now that I’ve knotted into you,” he says. “It would be impossible for me to do that to you now. If you didn’t want it, I couldn’t.”
She chews on pizza and regards him. “You say that, but I have no real way of knowing if it’s true.”
He rolls his eyes. “You can sense it’s true.”
She doesn’t say anything. She looks thoughtful.
“We need to think longterm,” says Striker. “We can’t run forever. Whatever money we have from Knight won’t last forever.”
“To get anywhere longterm, we need you two to get hard-ons,” says Knight.
“No, that’s really not the priority here,” says Striker. “The priority is not getting killed by Acker or the mafia—”
“They don’t even know we were there,” says Knight.
“And not getting arrested by the police,” says Striker.
“Well,” says Lotus, “if I get worked up, it is going to be the priority, because it affects all of us.”
Striker nods. “True.”
She puts the rest of her piece of pizza in her mouth and licks her fingers clean. She shrugs at us. “Well? I guess we should try to appease my sex drive, now, huh?”
“You think that’ll work?” says Knight, raising his eyebrows. “You don’t think we need to wait until you’re already worked up?”
“I guess there’s one way to find out,” she says with a grin. “You’re not up for it?”
He snorts. “Of course I’m up for it.”
So, then, Knight knots her, and Striker and I help by inserting our cocks and fingers into her mouth and then fingers into her ass when she says maybe that’ll help.
It’s different, though, not as hot or as electric as it has been before.
Afterwards, they’re knotted together and she lies there, looking up at the ceiling, and she yawns. Soon, we’re all yawning.
“I don’t think that worked,” says Striker as we turn out the lights. “It didn’t scent right.”
“It’s because I should have bitten her,” says Knight in the darkness.
“What the fuck?” I say.
“A bite,” says Lotus in a strangled voice. She sounds half-disturbed and half-turned on. “Where would you do it?”
Knight is still knotted in her. They are on the bed together and Striker and I are on the other bed. In the light coming in from around the curtains on the windows, I can see Knight tracing his fingers all over her bare skin. “I could do it anywhere you wanted. It’d scar, baby, you know that, don’t you? It’d be, like, a mark. A claiming mark?”
“Yeah?” she whispers, sounding more turned on.
“I’d like it if it was somewhere everyone could see,” he says in a low voice.
“I bet you would,” she says, but she’s not angry, just knowing and a little amused. “You can’t fucking bite me, Knight.”
“I can and I will,” he says.
She shoves him. “Can you… unknot?”
“I want you to beg me for it before I do it anyway,” he says, his voice even lower.
She stills, her breath noisy, as she looks up at him. Her scent begins to fill the room, getting stronger.
“Omega,” he says, his voice a whine.
“Fuck me again,” she murmurs.
He’s already thrusting between her thighs. “You will beg for my bite,” he gasps as he works his huge knot in her pussy. “I know you will.”
“Not tonight,” she says, and she’s gasping too. “Not tonight, alpha.”
“But someday?” he says.
She just gasps.
But she doesn’t say no.