Page 26 of The Alpha Experiment
“I hadn’t gotten that far ye—”
“So you were, what, planning on taking out an ad looking for a fucking mate?” he went on relentlessly. “Letting some fucking creepy shifter bite you? Thousands of humans mate werewolves, and all kinds of other shifters! It doesn’t turn them into shifters themselves!”
The last couple of words rose to a shout, and the sound of them echoed for a second, buzzing in my head.
The buzzing made a nice counterpoint to the swelling, boiling feeling of pressure in the back of my mind, a mix of anger and frustration and annoyance.
“I’m well aware of that,” I gritted out. “I wasn’t planning on actually mating anyone, for a few reasons, starting withI’m well aware of that! Do you think I haven’t approached this from every legitimate scientific angle already? Do you really thinkIneedyouto tell me that?”
“Okay,” Colin said. He smiled, and blinked at me innocently, and it set all the alarm bells I owned clanging like they’d been hit by a hurricane. “You’re the smart one. So explain to me exactly what you have in mind. In detail. Use small words, dude. Like one of your intro classes you’re always telling me are just like high school, only dumber. Make it easy for me.”
I was the one who felt dumb, all of a sudden. Dumb, unobservant, self-centered, and unkind.
Had he had a chip on his shoulder all along? Resented staying home and living with his pack after high school while I went off to the university, and then to grad school in California, and then back to Southern Oregon Tech to teach, with three diplomas hanging on my office wall?
Had I made him feel inferior by flaunting it?
It felt like stepping through a funhouse mirror. Colin was a werewolf, an alpha, formerly in line to be a pack leader and now holding the title, good-looking and well-built and easy-going and likable. My brain and the education I’d achieved with it were all I had going for me.
And yet he seemed to thinkIlooked down onhim?
“You’re smart, Col,” I said, my voice coming out hoarse and thready. “You don’t need me to dumb it down for y—”
“Yeah, and I don’t need you to be a condescending dick, either,” he snarled, and spun on his heel, pacing across the room and then back again. He turned again and pointed his finger at me. “You,” he said, “are smart as hell. But you don’t need to be a fucking genius to realize that using yourself as a—as a research subject is a bad fucking idea!”
“Okay!” I yelled back. “Fine! Then give me a better one! If you’re so fucking smart, and actually I know you are, I’m not being condescending, then maybe you should hear me out before you start calling me crazy!”
We stared at each other, his chest heaving and his eyes glowing faintly. I was panting too, like I’d been running, and the silence hung thick enough to be suffocating.
“I’m sorry,” we both said at the same time.
I eyed him for a second. He didn’t look all that sorry, but he’d sounded sincere enough. “Actually sorry? Or sorry like you want to stop fighting?”
His lips quirked. “Actually sorry. But not because I think I’m wrong. I just…Newt, you had to know I wasn’t going to be stoked about the idea of you selling yourself off to some werewolf who wanted a mate just as a Hail Mary to finally be one yourself, right? Especially because that asshole Greenwald’s putting the screws to you.”
That yanked a crack of incredulous laughter out of me. “Selling myself off? Are you joking? I’d probably have to pay him! Or her, if I got lucky enough to find a woman who needed a mate. Which I wouldn’t.”
I hadn’t thought too much about that side of the problem, because denial was a river I wanted to sail down as long as possible. But since shifter magic heavily favored male offspring, and even human female children of shifter matings were much rarer, shifter women—alphas or not—never had trouble finding a mate. Or several, in a few communities that structured their societies that way.
I wasn’t into guys, but I’d have to suck it up if I wanted to mate with a werewolf.
Colin was looking at me like I’d actually sprouted those fangs and claws after all. “Am I joking? Newt…do you honestly…” He stopped, sputtering a little, like all words had flown right out of his head. “Look, so most female werewolves want a werewolf mate, I get that. But anyone looking for a mate would be lucky to have you. You really think you’d have to pay someone off?”
He sounded so bewildered, like he truly couldn’t understand.
I knew he thought I was awesome in my own way, but honestly? Was he that blinded by friendship? Or was he just following the friend code of boosting your buddy’s ego when he got down on himself? But in this case, with no actual relationship at stake, it didn’t matter either way.
“Whatever,” I said. “I mean, thanks. But it’s not really an issue. Because mating with someone wasn’t the plan to begin with. Which you’d know, if you’d stopped to hear me out.”
Colin made a ‘go on, then,’ gesture that only missed being a really rude gesture by a centimeter or so. I ignored it.
And I sucked in a deep breath, because slightly-less-crazy or not, the rough sketch of a plan I’d worked out in my head wasn’t precisely high on the sane-o-meter.
“I was asking about mating rituals because most of them started for a reason. They came out of instinctive behaviors that developed organically.” I paused for a moment. “Maybe not the fermented deer blood. Something like that takes planning, gods help us all. Anyway. Things like hunting down your mate—that’s obviously not something people thought of intellectually and decided was a good idea. Right?”
He nodded, and I relaxed a little, glad he wasn’t already picking another fight.
I went on a little more confidently. “Okay. So mating,quamating, isn’t necessary. What I want to do is capture the spirit of mating, the parts of it that stimulate those predator-prey instincts, and use that. Adrenaline isn’t the only hormone released during that kind of high-stress activity. There are hormones found in shifters that aren’t found in humans. I’ve done enough analysis to know I have some of the genes that encode some of those hormones, I just haven’t been able to figure out why they’re produced or when, or what they do exactly. So I’m guessing here. Danger is a possible stimulus, but it’s also, you know, dangerous. So I’m thinking, if I simulate something to do with mating, some kind of instinct-based ritual, I might be able to trigger the expression of those genes. Theoretically.”
