Page 1 of Feral Creed

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calix

“I’M TELLING YOU,” I say as I walk down the hallway of the Cedar Falls facility, speaking to Tammy, “it was food poisoning or something. You should have let me come back in. I didn’t even throw up again. Total waste of a day.”

Tammy is my immediate supervisor, and she’s dressed the way everyone is who works in this part of Cedar Falls, in scrubs with a white lab coat. People know that there’s an experimental wing doing cutting edge medical work on designations in the bottom levels of Cedar Falls. But it’s not common knowledge that alphas and omegas who’ve been damaged by the drugs that Cedar Falls administers are here, lab rats to be experimented on this way, treated like animals, locked away from the world.

“Better safe than sorry, Cal,” says Tammy. “I made that call, and I’d make it again. But I’m glad that you’re feeling better today.”

“Me too,” I say. I had to get up at the ass crack of dawn to drive all the way down here from the compound where my pack is staying in upstate New York. My pack? They’re all lab rats from this place who’ve been healed by… Goddess, we don’t even know what? The magical power of a scent match? Whateverthe case, weeks ago, they were all too feral to speak words or remember their names. Now, they’re fine.

“Yeah, I’m glad I’m feeling better, too,” I say. “Like I’m saying, I could have come back in yesterday.”

“It’s cute that you’re trying to be such a loyal martyr here, but I don’t need that from you,” says Tammy. “This is a job, not a calling.” She sighs.

Anyway, I wasn’t sick yesterday. I was just pretending to be sick so that I could get out of working. And I only did that because I had to help my mate Knight escape with Dr. Acker, who’s the evil science-bitch who turned some of my mates into killing machines.

“I like that,” I say, nodding. “A job, not a calling.”

“I think there’s this expectation sometimes, with people you work for, to make things into something mystical when it’s just an exchange of skills for monetary compensation,” says Tammy. “And there’s really nothing worse than that sort of expectation on a day like today.”

“Right,” I say. “Any idea what happened to Dr. Acker?”

“It’s like she dropped off the face of the planet,” says Tammy. “Coltrain’s losing his mind.”

“Yeah, what do you think?” I say. “About the rumor that they’re fucking?”

Tammy raises her eyebrows. “Well, I hadn’t heard that rumor, but it explains a lot.”

“Doesn’t it, though?” I say.

“She’s dead,” says Tammy in a low voice, a final voice.

“Well, we don’t know that,” I say. Of course, I actually do know that she is alive, in the basement of the punishment house on the compound where we’re staying, and that she’s also a massive bite block. If it weren’t for Dr. Fucking Acker, I’d have a life bond with my pack right now, but that didn’t happen. Thanks so much, lady.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” says Tammy. “What she did to those alphas, it’s unnatural and disturbing. And it’s karma in a way. She taught them to kill women, and they kill her? I don’t know. I’m not saying she deserved it. No one deserves that. But…”

“Hey, she could be alive,” I say. “Maybe she programmed something into those hounds, so that they can’t actually murder her. Some safe word or something.”

Tammy stops walking and eyes me. “Can she do that?”

I mean, I happen to know that the answer is yes to this question, too. It was such a fucking weird night last night.

I shrug. “We really don’t know what she did with them.”

“True,” says Tammy. “We don’t. Well, here’s the drill today, Cal. The omegas are nervous and they can tell something’s off. Probably because we kept everyone inside yesterday, and you know how much they enjoy their time outside in the gardens.”

“Yeah,” I say. People need to see the sky and the natural world. It’s one of the things that’s so debilitating about prison, after all. The feral alphas and omegas seem to need nature even more, though. It’s like they’re nothing but animal instinct, and they are very soothed by trees and grass and stuff. “Well, I can imagine they’re very off-kilter today.”

“They are,” she said. “You’re so good at soothing them, though, so if you can work your magic, that would be amazing.”

It’s not magic. It’s my alpha scent. But yeah, noted, I can do that, even though I don’t even know why I’m at work. I was pretty sure, yesterday, after I helped my mate steal Acker out of this place, that I would quit forever.

But then, last night happened, and here I am instead, back to the grind. We simply aren’t sure whether my having access to this place is going to be helpful for us, so we decided not to cut ourselves off from Cedar Falls.

We don’t know what our goals are, though.

Basically, at this point, all we’re trying to do is survive.

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