Page 30 of The Hero Within
"Whatare you doing?" Cole squeaked, rising to a crouch.
Johnny dropped the talisman into his palm, meeting the kid's eyes. Then he gently placed it on the ground beside him.
The kid's breath caught, and he reached for the hilt of his knife, his heartbeat accelerating.
Johnny drew his knees up in front of him, resting one hand laxly on the right one. "I'm not going to go furry. You can relax."
Cole seemed frozen in place. "You can't.... I just...."
"I don't need it," he said. "I never have. Sit and let me finish, and then you might understand."
Cole sank into a cross-legged seat, but tension remained in his body. He released a slow breath, his eyes darting to the talisman. "How?"
"I'm not the same strain of warg as you," Johnny replied. "But you could learn to control your inner beast, just as I can."
"What do you mean, the same strain? And control it? Nobody can control it!"
"Yeah, they can."
"But—"
"Just listen. I don't know the exact science behind how wargs were created," he admitted, turning his knife over and over in his hands. "But they were trying to create a soldier who wouldn't flinch in the face of danger, a pumped-up adrenaline-junkie who relished killing. You can probably guess how this goes wrong. I think the first trials failed, and the second wasn't much better, and in the end five different types of wargs were created until they finally got to a stage where their wargs weren't so volatile. You've got your alpha strain, your beta strain, gamma, delta, and omega.
"Project: Gamma was the first hybrid created. Problem was they were utterly batshit crazy. Your general run-of-the-mill psychopath warg who needs to be put down. You can't reach them, you can't teach them to control themselves, and they just want to fuck or fight. You see them out in the Wastelands sometimes—the direct descendants of the original gamma hybrids. Stink like rotten flesh from the kills they drag back to their nests, and they're generally filthy and dangerous. The second you smell that scent you know you've got to kill them. Best solution is to put a few silver bullets in them and move on.
"Wasn't exactly what the military wanted, so the scientists moved on to Project: Delta. Phase two. Not as batshit insane as the gamma variant, but still uncontrollable. Very, very occasionally you come across a delta warg out there who can fight the urge to destroy everything around it, but chances are they'll go rogue at least once in their life. I've only ever come across two. One was a killer. One was an old rogue who just wanted to be left alone, and I'm pretty sure he'd done some bad shit at some stage in his life.
"Which brings us to the alpha and beta strains. They're variants of the third hybrid created. Your alphas were bred and engineered to be leaders of their military units, once they'd finally crafted a warg hybrid that wouldn't simply murder everything it came across. Alphas have a slightly different base code, and when they're fusing—which is what I did to you and those dogs in that alley—they give off some kind of chemical scent that makes other wargs want to obey. My father called it pheromones, said it's all got to do with hormones or something. That scent says obey or die, and depending on the strain you're infected with, you'll most likely obey.
"Especially if you've got the beta strain. Similar to alpha, but they're designed to be soldiers. Militia. There's a subordinate streak in them that makes them naturally crave to be in the pack, just not at the head of it."
"And your omega strain?" Cole looked fascinated.
Johnny stabbed his knife in the dirt, his hand clenching around the hilt so tightly the timber ingrained itself in his palm.Easy. "Project: Omega was the last warg hybrid they managed to create. Don't get me wrong. Your alphas and betas might be more in control than the others, but most of them go warg these days. I imagine it might have been different back when they were created and had the training to resist it. Omegas, however, are the most stable of all wargs, and they give off calming pheromones. Rarely fight, rarely turn warg. If you've got an out-of-control alpha or even a delta, an omega's about the only thing thatmightbe able to rein them in."
Except for the one time in his life when it had mattered.
Bitterness churned within him. His mother had always been the aggressive one, but his father.... Hell, his father should have known better than to think anything he could have done would have talked Bartholomew Cane down.
The second Cane rode onto their small homestead, Johnny's father had been a dead man, and his mother had panicked as her past finally caught up to her.
"Hide,"she'd rasped at Johnny, shoving him toward the small game trail that led into the wilderness behind their cabin."Whatever you see or hear, don't come back. Don't let my brother see you."
And his father—the father who'd rarely lifted a hand against anyone—had grimly walked out to meet the lone figure on horseback. It was the last time he’d ever seen him.
The sound of a gun firing echoed through his head, and Johnny flinched.
"What's wrong?" Cole asked, as the breeze swirled past them.
"Bad memories."
He could almost feel the lingering stroke of Cole's gaze on his face. "You knew someone who was an omega?"
"My father."And I really don't want to talk about it.
The warg itched under his skin as if it sensed his anger. Left to brew, it would use that rage to tear its way out of him if he allowed it. Not even he was immune and the lunar tide pulled at him.
Feel the wind on your skin and remember who you are, his father's voice whispered in his memories.Feel the dirt beneath your feet and use it to rein the monster in.
