APEX - Season 2

Ch. 11: Alpha Pride

Rhys

I clamped a pillow down over my head to drown out the sounds of carnal passion emanating from my guest bedroom. Getting a solid night's sleep tonight would have been optimal, but when Genevieve showed up at my door, having made a surprise trip to Sury, my plans for a silent night went right out the window.

"We'll keep it down. I promise," Tobias said when he arrived an hour later. "We know you've got a lot on your plate."

"If their wild moans and the rhythmic clank of their headboard banging against the wall was them keeping it down, they could have given Calla and me a run for our money. Still, I didn't begrudge my friends for their fun. With their relationship still a closely guarded secret and the future of werewolves threatened by the upcoming referendum, it was easy to see why they might view this as their last opportunity to be together for an indefinite period.

I didn't want to put a damper on their time together but lying here with my damaged body aching in places I'd never paid much attention to before, and a weakness in my limbs that I hadn't experienced in all my days, their presence represented a level of virility that was making me doubt myself.

I'd been poisoned. I was certain of that now, and not just because Calla had made a connection to my condition and an attack on werewolves in Kenya in 1953. Deep within my foggy brain, memories of what happened to me the night of my Lucky Seven stakeout had begun to surface. Still blurry and disjointed, these flashes were also illuminating. The hit to my rental car had knocked me unconscious, but unlike what I'd previously believed—that I'd stayed unconscious until Calla found me the next evening, I realized now I'd been awake through at least part of my ordeal.

I'd come to several times, entering a fugue-type state that seemed closer to a nightmare than reality. And perhaps that's all it really was. Maybe in my damaged condition, I'd imagined everything. Something told me, however, that it was more real than I wished it to be. How easy it would be if my mind had made it all up. I wouldn't feel compelled to confront it all as I lay here listening to my friends fuck for what had to be the fourth time tonight.

Don't they ever sleep? I thought, and then I forced myself to go over my broken memories one more time.

I'd been taken from the car and brought somewhere. It was impossible to know where that somewhere could be. It looked like a storeroom or possibly a small warehouse. Wooden crates lined the wall and industrial shelving held cardboard file boxes. There might have been writing on the crates, as well as on the boxes, but if so, I couldn't recall any details. I seemed to be awake only for a few moments at a time.

One of my most uncomfortable recollections focused on the presence of other people. Humans. There was a woman with me, and then later, a man. After that, the same woman appeared again. She seemed vaguely familiar, and now, thinking back, I realized it was the woman standing with Vicki at her infamous press conference.

I tried to talk to the woman during one of my clearer moments, but my words came out garbled. She'd laughed at me—that memory might have been the sharpest. It was a cruel and heartless laugh—one that made clear to me that I was nothing more than a captured beast to her. My hands and feet were bound and even if they weren't, I couldn't move them. They'd already beaten me—that was another realization I could make in the present that I hadn't been able to grasp at the time.

Once she finished laughing...that's when the syringe came out.

A prick to my upper arm. Another hollow laugh, and then, a freezing cold pain spreading across my chest, as though I was trying to breathe in air during an Antarctic winter.

It still sat there, that pain pressing in on me as I lay in my bed. Everything was quiet now. Finally, my friends must have fucked themselves to sleep.

Unable to achieve this same state, I got up, my lower back twinging as I swung my legs onto the floor.