Page 20 of Unhinged Omega

"The fuck am I supposed to feed it then?" Lex asks, exasperated. "Kibble? You know Bess doesn't share."

The scruffy shepherd mix that shadows her all the time pants up at me with her distinctly microwaved-cod-scented breath as if to agree.

"It could eat people," I muse.

"It sure ate some of our men like it had five minutes to finish its last bucket ever of chicken fingers," Lex says with a snort.

That earns a wary stare from me. "And what the fuck is a chicken finger?"

“Best damn food on the planet. Popular back in Columbia before they started using synth meat instead because it was more cost-effective,” she says, waving me off. "You wouldn't get it. I'm sure you only go to those bougie places where you drink pricey champagne out of a stripper's ass with a paper straw."

"I think you and I have very different definitions of 'bougie,'" I say dryly. I need to get this conversation back on track. Lex's specialty may be derailing trains, but it's also derailing a goddamn conversation. "Maybe it eats people."

"The stripper's ass?" she asks, bewildered.

"No," I snarl. "The monster in the fucking pit."

"Why didn't you just say so?" Lex mutters. "And yeah, that's a good point. But it's not like we have a bunch of bodies lyin'around we can throw to it to test that theory." She glances up at Mikey and Reese as the alpha lumbers by with the prattling beta close behind him like a mangy puppy dog. "Unless these two morons fuck something else up."

I grunt, already striding toward the pit we dug out on the far side of the airfield. "I'll take a look at it."

The closer we get, the more the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There's something... off about the air around the pit. A heaviness, like the calm before a storm.

Or maybe I'm just on edge from lack of sleep.

I peer over the edge, and sure enough, there it is. The Knight. Standing perfectly still in the center of the pit like it's meditating, its iron-masked face tilted up toward the sky. Following its eerie gaze, I spot a thin sliver of crescent moon peeking through the clouds.

Even motionless, the thing is a sight to behold. At least eight feet of pure muscle and metal, its skin a patchwork of scars and grafted armor plating. The iron mask fused to its face gleams in the moonlight, those eerie blue eyes glowing from within like trapped stars. It would look human except for the chip in the lower left quadrant, enough to reveal monster jaws full of sharp exposed teeth.

Rods of metal jut from its back like a twisted parody of wings, and its right arm is solid metal and fully articulated, ending in a clawed hand with massive curved blades where fingers should be. Despite the off-and-on rain we've been getting, there's still blood on those claws from what it did to twenty-six men.

Mymen.

I should throw a few bombs into the pit for that. It was the most gruesome, violent thing I've ever witnessed out here, and that's fucking saying something. But I knew the moment I saw it in action, I had to have it in my arsenal.

And not in pieces.

"Thought you said it was being aggressive," I mutter to Lex, unable to tear my eyes away from the creature below.

She throws up her hands in exasperation. "It was! Snarling and clawing at anyone who came near the edge of the pit. That's what all those marks are from." Her frustration ebbs back into a smirk. "Maybe it's got a crush on you. Calmed right down as soon as you showed up."

"Fuck off," I growl. My mind is racing, piecing together fragments of rumors and half-forgotten stories. The Vytoskyk facility. Vrissian experiments pushed beyond the limits of human endurance.

"What should we call him?" Lex asks.

I give her a weary look. She insisted on naming that mutt we found scrounging around in the ruins, gnawing on a human arm bone, too. Bess is a hell of an innocuous name for a beast that's eaten half my favorite boots and pissed in my favorite chair.

"They call it the Knight," I answer. When I see the look she's giving me, I add, "Finally dug it out of the Ghost who wears the plague doctor mask. Says they encountered it on their escape from that lab. Guess their feral omega got attached."

She snorts at that. "An omega? Bit skittish for that, aren't they?"

"Perhaps," I muse, studying the beast below as it continues gazing up at the night sky with a fixation that borders on worship, as if it's completely oblivious to our presence. "All the ones I've encountered have been."

"You should go encounter the one in our basement," she scoffs. "Maybe you can charm her into giving us some intel on where her daddy keeps the big bucks before we hand her over. Don't think she likes women."

"Maybe she just doesn't like scumbags," I counter, already headed toward the entrance to the other storage facility turned dungeon.

"You're one to talk!" she shoots back.

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