Claimed By The Hidden Alpha

RILEY The bone shard works itself deeper between my molars with each swallow. Rabbit vertebra, probably. Or maybe the small bones from a paw—I've gotten good at identifying remains by texture alone. My tongue prods the sharp edge until copper blooms fresh across my palate. Pine needles have carved a topographic map into my bare shoulder blades. The forest floor beneath me is frozen hard as concrete, but my skin steams in the predawn air, body temperature running hot enough to create its own microclimate. Somewhere in the canopy, a crow calls out a warning. Smart bird. Even the scavengers know to keep their distance when I'm like this. I don't need to open my eyes to catalog the damage. The smell tells the whole story—viscera and terror-piss, the iron-sweet stench of things that died badly. My right hand is tacky with blood that's already going brown at the edges. There's fur caught under my fingernails, gray-brown and soft as dandelion fluff. The first rabbit lies six inches from my left hip, throat opened in a ragged smile. The second is harder to locate until I realize I'm partially lying on it, its ribcage crushed flat beneath my shoulder. The third— My eyes snap open. The third rabbit is different. Arranged almost artfully against the base of an oak tree, its white winter coat mostly intact except for the precise opening down its belly. The organs have been removed and placed beside the carcass in order: heart, liver, kidneys, intestines coiled neat as rope. I did that. Some part of me, in the black space between midnight and dawn, carefully dissected prey with the precision of a first-year anatomy student. "Jesus f*****g Christ." The words scrape out raw, like I've been gargling gravel. Or screaming. Sometimes I find blood under my fingernails that matches the scratches in my throat. Standing takes three tries. My muscles burn with the specific ache of overextension, like I've been sprinting for hours. The forest floor spins lazily, and I have to brace against the oak until the vertigo passes. That's when I notice the marks—four parallel gouges in the bark, too deep to be anything but claws. The walk home is six miles of muscle memory and shame. I know every deer path, every gap in the fence lines, every blind spot in Rosewood's half-assed surveillance network. My feet find their way without conscious input, leaving bloody prints that'll wash away with the next rain. By the time I hit our property line, false dawn is bruising the eastern sky purple-gray. The kitchen window glows warm as a lighthouse beacon. Mom's silhouette moves behind the glass—making coffee, pretending this is normal. That her son coming home naked and blood-drunk is just another Thursday morning routine. The back door sighs open before I can reach for the handle. "Shower first." She keeps her back turned, hands busy with the coffee maker. "I left clothes on the counter." The kitchen smells like French roast and the lavender candles she burns to mask what I bring home—predator musk and forest rot, the copper stench of small murders. I want to say something, maybe explain about the surgical precision of that third rabbit, but my throat closes around the words. The hall mirror shows me what she's trying not to see. Six-four of lean muscle painted in dirt and gore, green eyes too bright, pupils still blown wide like I'm high on whatever makes me hunt. A handprint of blood—not mine—decorates my ribs. My hair, black and perpetually unruly, has leaves and pine needles tangled in the curls. The bathroom door clicks shut, and I finally let myself breathe. Mom's left my favorite jeans and a WVU Medical sweatshirt folded neat on the counter. The normalcy of it makes my chest tight. I make it to the toilet just as my stomach decides it's done playing host to raw rabbit. The meat comes up in pieces, barely chewed, and I try not to think about how my teeth must have torn through fur and flesh, how my throat opened wide enough to swallow chunks whole. My body fights the purge—whatever I become out there wants to keep what it kills. The shower runs pink for a solid five minutes. I scrub until my skin stings, but the smell lingers underneath. Wild things and winter woods, blood gone tacky between my fingers. The water scalds, would leave anyone else with burns, but my skin barely registers it as warm. When I finally emerge, the kitchen table is set for confession. Mom's got tomato soup steaming in my old blue bowl, the one with the chip on the rim from when I was twelve and thought I could juggle dishes. Dad sits across from her in yesterday's scrubs, thirty-six hours of hospital shifts written in the bags under his eyes. "Eat." Mom slides the bowl closer. "You need something real in your stomach." The first spoonful threatens to come right back up, but I force it down. They watch me like I might bolt. Or break. These days, it's hard to tell which they fear more. "The new sedative cocktail didn't take." Dad's using his clinical voice, all emotion stripped away. "They never take." I crush oyster crackers into the soup, watch them dissolve. "Just make me feel like I'm swimming through molasses the next day." "The dose I gave you would put a grown man in a coma." "Good thing I'm special then." "Riley." Mom's hands tremble around her coffee mug. "You went through the bedroom wall. Straight through the drywall and studs. The wood is splintered like something exploded from inside." I close my eyes, try to remember. But there's nothing between swallowing pills and tasting rabbit. Just black space and the echo of something that might have been howling. "I'll fix it this weekend." "That's not—" She cuts herself off, takes a breath that shakes. "We're running out of options, sweetheart." "Your twenty-first birthday is in three weeks." Dad pulls out his phone, scrolls to something that makes his jaw tight. "The incidents are escalating. Your body temperature is up another full degree. Your healing rate has doubled since September. Last week you bench pressed four-fifty without trying." "So I'm healthy." "You're impossible." He turns the screen toward me. "This is your bloodwork from six months ago versus last week." The numbers blur together. White cell count that should mean infection or cancer. Testosterone levels that should have my heart exploding. Protein markers that don't match any human baseline in medical literature. "I have a colleague who specializes in genetic anomalies." Dad's voice goes careful, like he's approaching a spooked animal. "Military funding, discreet location. He could—" "Could what? Cure me? Put me in a cage and study what happens when the moon gets full?" The spoon bends in my grip. "I'm not a f*****g science experiment, Dad." "Watch it, mister," Mom says automatically, then catches herself. As if profanity is our biggest concern when I'm waking up with viscera between my teeth. "Michael." She touches his hand. "Tell him." They exchange one of those married-people looks, entire conversations in a glance. Dad scrubs his face, suddenly looking every one of his fifty-three years. "You were six hours old when we found you." His voice drops, quiet enough that I have to lean forward. "January sixteenth, twenty-one years ago. Someone left you on the hospital steps during the worst blizzard in a decade." "You said I was a safe harbor baby." "We said what the social workers told us to say." Mom's crying now, silent tears she doesn't bother wiping. "But you just... appeared. One second the security footage shows empty steps. The next, there's a basket with a baby that shouldn't exist." "That's impossible." "So is healing a compound fracture in ten minutes. So is running a fever that never breaks. So is—" Dad gestures helplessly at me. "Whatever you're becoming." He shows me the security stills. Timestamp 3:47:12 AM—empty steps buried in snow. Timestamp 3:47:13 AM—a basket that materialized from nowhere, containing a newborn that would grow up to hunt rabbits in the dark. "We ran every test." His clinical voice can't hide the tremor underneath. "DNA panels, genetic markers, chromosome mapping. You're human, but there are sequences we can't identify. Anomalies that shouldn't exist in nature." "Maybe they're not supposed to." The words slip out before I can stop them. Both parents go still, and I realize this is the first time I've acknowledged what we all know—that whatever's wrong with me might not be wrong at all. Might just be what I am. "I should head to campus." I push back from the table, can't stand the way they're looking at me. Like I'm already gone. "Pathology at nine." "Riley, please." Mom catches my wrist, her fingers cool against my furnace skin. "We're just trying to help." "I know." I fold her into a hug, careful with my strength. She feels bird-hollow against my chest, and I remember when I was seven and she seemed like the strongest person in the world. "I love you too." Dad joins us, arms wrapping around us both. For a moment we're just another family in the suburbs, normal and whole and unbroken. Then I catch our reflection in the microwave door—them pale and exhausted, me too tall and wild-eyed—and the illusion cracks. My phone buzzes against my hip. Three missed calls from Jenna, probably wondering why I bailed on our study date. Again. I let it go to voicemail and grab my backpack, checking that my laptop survived yesterday's pre-transformation lockdown. "I'll come by tonight. Help Matty with his solar system project." "He'd like that." Mom attempts a smile. "He keeps asking when you'll teach him more constellations." "Ones that won't set anything on fire?" "That would be preferable." The drive to campus usually grounds me, but today every sense feels electric. I can smell coffee through sealed car windows, hear music from earbuds three cars over. My hands leave indents in the steering wheel. Jenna calls again as I'm pulling into the medical school lot. Her photo flashes on screen—blonde hair and that crooked smile that used to make my chest tight for normal reasons. Now I look at her and see prey. Soft throat, delicate wrists, all that breakable beauty. I let it ring. The lecture hall is already half-full of gunners and grade-grubbers. I claim my usual spot in the back corner, far from the eager beavers who treat medical school like gladiatorial combat. "Christ, Riley." Amit drops into the seat beside me, all worried brown eyes and energy drink breath. "You look like death warmed over. When's the last time you actually slept? Like, real sleep, not whatever that zombie thing you do between classes." Before I can formulate a lie, someone crashes into my chair. Impact jarrs through me, and suddenly there's coffee everywhere—soaking my notes, dripping onto my jeans, filling the air with the smell of burned beans and artificial vanilla. "s**t, sorry, I didn't—" The kid's maybe nineteen, probably some overachieving undergrad sneaking into upper-level courses. Floppy hair and nervous hands, adam's apple bobbing as he scrambles for paper towels. The rage hits like a lightning strike. White-hot and electric, flooding every synapse with the need to hurt, to establish dominance, to show this little rabbit what happens when it spills coffee on an apex predator. My hand shoots out, locks around his wrist before he can retreat. Bones grind together under my grip, fragile as bird wings. "Please—" The kid's voice cracks. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean—" His pulse hammers against my fingertips, rabbit-quick and terrified. I can smell his fear-sweat blooming, sharp as ammonia. Something in my chest rumbles approval, a sound too low for human ears but felt in the bones. "Riley!" Amit's shouting, hands pulling at my arm. "Let go, man! You're hurting him!" The kid's face has gone pale, eyes wide and glassy with pain. Prey eyes. Rabbit eyes. For one horrible second, I can see exactly how his throat would tear, can taste the copper-sweet rush of— I release him like he's made of flame. He stumbles back, cradling his wrist, and bolts from the lecture hall. Half the class stares. Amit looks at me like I've grown a second head. "I need air." I'm moving before he can respond, shouldering through the door hard enough to splinter the frame. Someone calls after me, but the words blur into the white noise building in my skull. The restroom is blessedly empty. I grip the sink hard enough to crack porcelain, watching my reflection ripple and shift in the mirror. For just a moment—between one blink and the next—something else looks back. Not quite man, not quite beast, but something caught screaming between the two. My phone buzzes. Text from Mom: Don't forget Matty's bedtime story. 8:30 sharp. He picked something about astronauts. The normalcy of it almost breaks me. In twelve hours I'll tuck my baby brother into bed, read him stories about space explorers and distant stars. Pretend the monster under his bed isn't sitting on the edge of his rocket ship sheets, trying to remember what it feels like to be human. Water drips pink in the basin. My gums are bleeding, teeth aching like they're trying to reshape themselves. The healing kicks in before I can catalog the damage, flesh knitting itself back to the lie of normal. Three weeks until I turn twenty-one. Three weeks to pretend the boy they found in a basket still exists somewhere under all this rage and hunger. Three weeks before— The thought cuts off as another wave of fury crashes through me, sourceless and consuming. I grip the sink harder, porcelain groaning under my hands, and try to remember how to breathe like something that wasn't born to hunt.