Chapter 95

Sarah POV

StayDrunk21: CPS? Are they kidding?

IndustryStandard: Looks like an old hag. Car is for shit.

JonesJane32: Look at the caption: “the drive into the compound.” It’s not a compound. It’s just a big house.

BigGurlRegrets: They grow veggies there. Sounds like a compound 2 me.

Jane Dayviellers: Veggies. They’re a gateway plant.

Bopbop84: What’s a home visit supposed to do? I hope Alpha Zane challenges her.

IndustryStandard: LOL @Jane Dayviellers

Rosemary&Sage: I heard the family’s driver is a beta named Ollie. How cute is that?

While the girls prepped with Dr. Hayes for their PPE and Zane consulted with the legislative board, Travis and I went through everything we could find on Family Justice United on our laptops.

“Am I awful for hoping we find out Scott is their biggest donor and we could just expose this as his attack against Zane?” I asked while scanning their posted financials.

“I have visions of Alpha Zane hunting Cho down in a field, so no,” Travis said.

The numbers blurred a bit on the screen, and I found myself looking at the door to the sitting room.

“Worried about them?” Travis asked.

I looked at him in surprise.

“We’ve kept it out of the press, but it’s no secret in the household their PPE is tomorrow.”

“Luna Amelie helped, telling them their futures are together, but what is Chloe outperforms Grace? She’ll be devastated.”

“They both will. But maybe you can have a little faith?”

I sighed, then frowned at the screen. “Before it was Family Justice United, it looks like it was a bunch of smaller operations: the Alpha Reparations League, Beta/Gamma Homeward, something called the Federation for Werewolf Equality, and Dildos for Cops. Is that last one right?”

Travis looked at me and laughed. “It’s a lesbian-run group, or it was.” He tapped a few keys. “You’re right, they dissolved about a year ago, and the leadership had the members join Family Justice United. What was the connection there?”

We both went back to our laptops.

“I’d feel better if I at least knew what the test was like,” I said. “I was planning to petition the court to have a practice test and hire a tutor to prep Chloe. Nothing like Dr. Hayes, of course, but someone who could at least tell us both the basics.”

“Well, there will be portions that work like human tests, #2 pencils and Scantron forms. And they’ll write a short essay and take an oral exam as well as a few medical exams.”

“Medical exams?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

Travis nodded, his attention still halfway on his computer. “Their senses will be tested and a baseline established for both of them. They’ll do a basic stress test on an inclining treadmill, and they’ll be tested on their hunting abilities.”

I stopped typing. “They’re going to take the girls out in the forest to hunt?”

“No, no. They have facilities at the center, and besides, you and Alpha Zane will be able to monitor them.”

“Really?”

Travis sent me a wry look. “Do you think Alpha Zane would just hand over his daughters and tell them to have at it?”

I rolled my eyes at him. He was lucky my tongue didn’t make an appearance. He chuckled, and we both went back to our research.

“Hm,” he said after a bit. “I’d got a video. Ted Talk. Want to see?”

I nodded, and he turned the screen so we could both see a female standing on a small stage in front of what looked like a large crowd, though that could just have been the camera angles.

“We are born into a world very carefully structured to suit our needs and promote our cultural preferences,” she began after a short round of applause. A close-up showed her light brown eyes, bobbed brown hair, and carefully applied “natural-looking” makeup. “This world is so very carefully structured, so reinforced in everything we do, that we don’t usually think about just why we have these particular preferences, as well as our aversions.”

She used a remote in her hand to put a familiar graphic up on the large screen above her. There was the basic outline from a pup’s first-level textbook: an alpha at the top, then a beta, then a gamma. I knew a more advanced textbook would include the omega in the graphic, but it was a subject deemed too “complicated” for truly young pups.

“Alphas rule, betas obey alphas, and gammas obey betas and, if an alpha actually notices them, gammas obey them too. This hard fact is pounded into every aspect of our society and taken as a fact as much as the sky’s being blue.

“But I’m here to ask you to consider, just ask yourself, if only for a minute or two, why this is. What is it about the alpha that makes it mandatory for others to follow? Why do betas and gammas bow and scrape to someone just because of the way they were born?”

She changed to another slide, a graphic of four famous betas from history: Plato, Fannie Farmer, Anna Freud, and Thomas Jefferson.

“These were betas, and they were able to make great contributions to society, but think about this: they were only able to make such contributions because their alpha colleagues allowed it. How many betas who could have made such contributions not been allowed to reach their potential, not been allowed to contribute to our society, because some alpha’s ego forced them to be quiet?”

She changed the graphic again, this time to famous alphas from history: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Elizabeth Báthory, and Queen Mary I.

“Let me ask this question differently. How much suffering could have been avoided, how many lives saved, if these alphas had not commanded instant respect from those around them?”

I reached over and paused the playback. “What a bunch of bull. Besides, nobody respected the serial killer. Just who is this, anyway?”

He frowned at me. “It’s Charlotte Cho.”

I stared at him. “No, it’s not.”

“I assure you—”

“You said Cho is a beta.”

“She is.”

I pointed at the screen. “That is an alpha. I mean, she must be wearing brown contacts, and she’s starved herself down to the bone, but that’s an alpha female.”

“She can’t be.”

“Travis, I’ve spent over five years watching for signs when someone is an alpha, a beta, a gamma, and even an omega. I’ve had to watch because I don’t have a werewolf’s sense of smell. I know the tics, the inflections, the ways of walking and talking that let me know just what kind of wolf I’m dealing with and just whom I was letting come around my werewolf daughter.”

I pointed at the screen more insistently. “That woman there is an alpha. I’d stake my life on it.”