Oops, You Bullied the Alpha Queen novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Moonflower

Mercy's own Beta tells her to go home, the omega dorm gets trashed, and a gift of tea turns out to be laced with a drug that forces a shift.

Garrick didn't come to me that night.

He waited until morning, behind the gym, where the dumpsters blocked the view from the quad.

I was carrying a mop bucket. Omegas started their service duties at six.

He leaned on the brick wall in his long coat.

"You look tired," he said.

"You look far from home."

He smiled the same smile he'd given me across the gym.

When I was twelve, that smile meant I'd done a good punch.

"I came to help," he said.

"I didn't send for help."

"The northern packs are nervous, Mercy. Rumors. People say the Queen has vanished."

"The Queen is on a thirty-day errand. You know that. You stood beside me when the Priestess set the ring."

He looked at my thumb.

The moonstone was cool now. Dull as a pebble.

"Go home," he said softly. "Take the ring off and go home. I'll hold the forty-nine for you. I always have."

"If I take it off, there is no forty-nine. They go back to killing each other by Christmas."

"Then let me find another way."

"There isn't one. That's the point of a vow."

He pushed off the wall and came close enough to fix my collar.

"Why are you standing next to the Beta of this pack?" I asked.

"Because someone has to know what he's planning for you."

"And what's he planning?"

"The Run. You heard him."

"I heard him. I'm asking why you were whispering in his ear."

Garrick's hand stayed on my collar a second too long.

"You've always been suspicious of the people who love you," he said.

Then he walked away across the gravel, and his coat didn't make a sound.

I stood there with the mop and watched until he turned the corner.

The ring stayed cold.

I didn't.

Lark found me at lunch and dragged me down to the basement.

"Official tour," she said. "Don't get your hopes up."

The omega dorm was under the gym.

You went down a concrete stair past the boiler room, and the air got warm and wet and smelled of old sneakers.

Twenty bunks in one long room, under pipes that knocked at night.

One window at the top of the wall, at grass level, where you could watch people's ankles walk by.

"Penthouse," Lark said. "Ours is the bunk at the end. I took the top. You're welcome."

There was a photo taped to the wall beside the bunk.

Two girls on a dock, squinting into the sun.

One of them was Lark.

The other was tall, with a wide grin and a fishing rod.

"Who's that?"

Lark's face did something quick.

"My old roommate."

"Where is she?"

"Home. In Medford. With a cane."

She sat down on the bottom bunk.

"Last year's Run. They chase us to the river. She went the quarry way. They found her at the bottom of the ledge with her back broken."

"Who found her?"

"The varsity. They said she slipped."

"Did she?"

Lark looked at the photo for a long time.

"She was the best climber in this dorm," she said.

That was all.

I didn't push.

We went back up for afternoon classes.

When we came down at six, the dorm was wrecked.

Every mattress was slashed. Somebody had dumped the laundry bins on the floor and poured bleach over the pile.

The photo of the two girls had been torn in half and stuck back on the wall with gum.

On the mirror, in pink lipstick, it said: KNEEL NEXT TIME.

Lark stood in the doorway and didn't say anything.

The twins from the bunk by the boiler started picking up socks without a word.

"Pink," I said. "Bold choice. You'd think she'd use a pen."

Lark laughed. It came out wet.

"She wants you to know it was her. That's the whole point. She's never once been in trouble."

I peeled the gum off the photo and smoothed the two halves together on my knee.

"Have you got tape?"

We fixed the photo first.

Then the mattresses, with duct tape from the cook, who came down from the kitchen with a roll in each hand and a face like thunder.

By ten the room was nearly a room again.

That was when Lark found the basket on the stairs.

It was a wicker thing with cellophane and a ribbon.

The tag said: For Lark. Sorry about your room. Love, Mom.

"Mom never sends anything," Lark said, delighted. "Mom forgets my birthday."

Inside were cookies, socks and a tin of loose tea.

"Sit," she said. "You're blue. You've been cold since lunch."

She boiled water on the hot plate and made me a mug.

She made herself cocoa, because she said tea tasted like a wet yard.

I drank half the mug before I noticed.

Under the honey was something sweet and green.

I knew that taste.

My father made me learn it when I was ten.

Moonflower.

It doesn't poison you.

It just tears your wolf out of you, whether you like it or not.

The ring lit up on my thumb.

Then it went white-hot.

I dropped the mug.

"Mercy?"

My spine pulled. My jaw ached at the hinge.

My wolf hit the inside of my ribs so hard I bent double.

If I shifted on this floor, in front of twenty omegas, the vow was over.

Forty-nine packs, back to war by morning.

"Mercy, your eyes."

I didn't answer.

I ran for the stairs, and out the back door, and down the dark path toward Cold Lake.

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