Page 84 of Feral Creed

“You think I should let these brain damaged alphas and omegas mingle and mate, don’t you?” he says. “You think I should stop suppressing their heats and let them in with those alphas.”

“Well… no,” I say. “Not really, because you trained all the alphas to kill omegas, so I think that’s a really bad idea.”

“I didn’t train them,” says Coltrain. “That wasn’t me. That was Dr. Acker.”

“Whatever,” I say. “The only way my mates stopped being triggered in that way was because Lotus went feral again, and we can’t really make that happen here.” I don’t know what to do. If we let those omegas go into heat, then we either have to let them suffer through it, or someone has to have sex with them. It really shouldn’t be someone who isn’t also at the same developmental level, or else it’s just disgusting. But all the alphas are killer alphas. We’re kind of screwed at this point.

We float some other ideas. Let the omegas go into heat with each other, maybe?

But they are sometimes aggressive with each other, just as the alphas are with each other. We’re not sure that’s a great idea.

Let them go into heat and keep them comfortable with sex toys and blankets and the like, but no partners?

This gets debated for a long time.

By the time we’re moving out of Cedar Falls, we still haven’t gotten much further than this.

Other things are happening while we’re trying to work on this problem, though.

Arrow’s ex-wife knows he’s still alive, and she starts contacting Cedar Falls to try to find out what has happened to him. Eventually, this means that Arrow is back in touch with his family, and this means that everyone else slowly begins to get back in touch with their families.

We all meet everyone.

Arrow’s parents come, and they shake hands with all of us and try not to seem freaked out that Arrow is currently in a bisexual relationship where he cheerily admits he’s sexually involved with three other men. Mostly, they do okay with it.

Striker’s family is much more old school Catholic, and they don’t try to hide the fact that they’re freaked out. Striker ends up going on a walk with them alone, just him and his mom and his two sisters and brother (apparently, his father just didn’t come, since that’s how much he wasn’t going to hide the fact he was freaked out). When Striker comes back, he’s alone. He says they left. They don’t come back. He talks to them on the phone, though.

Knight’s parents are really sweet, and they seem sort of gobsmacked that Knight is in any kind of relationship at all. They watch him be affectionate with us, and his mom actually gets teary eyed. She hugs me—she hugs all of us—but when she hugs me she says she thinks it’s wonderful, just wonderful.

Lotus’s family arrives, her sisters and her parents, and they are overwhelmed by all of us. I can imagine it must seem daunting, the idea of your little girl with this many men, all of us sort of huge and imposing in that way alphas tend to be huge and imposing. They try to make Lotus go on a walk with them, probably so they can try to talk some sense into her and tell her that they’ll help her get out of this if she wants, probably for reasons like that. Lotus won’t, though, insisting that the pack is important to her, that we’re all bonded for life, and that there’s nothing she needs to hide from us.

I try to step in with them, to assure them that we all live to protect Lotus, that we are devoted to her safety, and that we love her. They hear my words, but I’m not sure if they truly believe them.

So.

Everything’s awkward.

Maggie and her girlfriend come to see me. I don’t have contact with my mother anymore. Her choice. She said I was dead to her when I wouldn’t go and bite Selene, and she’s sticking to that. As for my dads, well, I never had much ofa relationship with any of them, even with Jason, who was probably the contributor of half my DNA. I looked the most like him, anyway, and he seemed to think I was his. We were close, sometimes, mostly when I was younger. He sure as hell isn’t ever going to go against the edict of his omega, though. If my mom says I’m dead to her, I’m dead to him, too.

Lotus remembers Maggie, but she can talk now, and she expresses to Maggie and her girlfriend (whose name is Kim) how much she appreciates them taking care of her right when I got her out of the facility.

“Well,” says Maggie, “we almost let you get hit by a car.”

Lotus laughs. “That wasn’t your fault. I just didn’t understand anything.”

“Then we kept you in that room, like you were a prisoner!”

“You didn’t want me to get hit by a car,” says Lotus, who’s still laughing.

I can tell Maggie wants to talk to me about what I’ve gotten myself into here. She says a few little things here and there, about how she knows that I wanted something else out of my life, and I remember having conversations with her, right after I left the Polloi, conversations about monogamy.

But I don’t go and talk to her, because it makes something in my chest open up and ache in a way that’s too painful to truly feel entirely.

I should have known that wouldn’t be for me, anyway.

I should have known I would never be enough for someone, that a woman would want only me.

That was never in the cards for me.

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