A beast stood in the reflection of the mirror that stretched from one to the other, from ceiling to floor. Long, pointed ears swiveled at the noise that echoed behind it and a long and powerful muzzle curled into an irritated snarl.

A man's obnoxious laugh. The hiss of a cigarette crushed in an ash-tray.

As I titled my head, the beast did too. I was an ode to the Lycan race, a beast the mirrored the size of their Alpha, but I was sleekness and hidden strength.

Dark, cold eyes – my eyes, blinked balefully back at me. They only ever brought down the mirror when I was in this form. My human skin, my true self was just a distant memory in the back of my mind.

A light flashed above the mirror and like the trained, docile dog that I was, I fell back into the centre of the room. Wickedly sharp talons clicked against the stone floor and I moved like a mirage, sitting back as the mirror began to slide upwards. The mechanics were beginning to squeak and I shivered at the noise, ears pressing tight to my skull. The sound shredded at my brain. They would have to fix that soon.

The mirror vanished to reveal a thick pane of reinforced glass and a squadron of doctors behind it, standing together in the observation room that was always attended. The glass was marred from all my previous attempts to break through. Thick gouges were cut into it, but no matter how hard I hurled myself against it or what talons I ripped from my knuckles in my attempt to cut through it, the glass never broke.

Hatefully, I watched them.

A woman stepped out from them, smiling indulgently at me. Doctor Mai – a woman who doused herself in lavender perfume and never let a single hair stray from her immaculate bob. "Turn back 112."

My form rippled and dark fur shrunk beneath painfully dull skin. I shrunk and withered, my muscles dampening down, my nose shattering and reforming along with my jaw. Shrinking into almost nothingness compared to the raw power of the beast's body. My spine snapped into place as I straightened, teeth gritted against that shivery feeling.

"No please?" I asked dryly. "Did your mother teach you any manners?"

Doctor Mai, or Doc Mai as I called her, smiled sardonically. "As you can see gentlemen, prisoner 112 has a sharp tongue. One we haven't been able to curb."

I pouted, resisting the urge to gag at the smell of her perfume wafting in through the vents. "Its been a week since your last visit. I thought you forgot about me."

Doc Mai didn't deign that with an answer, but she rarely did. The condescending expression on that face of hers was a perfect mask. I longed to shatter those cheekbones beneath my heel, to rip out her eyes as she screamed...

I blinked coolly, examining the doctors.

Some I recognised, some I didn't. The ones I knew were the veterans of my cell, used to my rages and quirks. The new ones were excited to work on me - to pull me apart and see how I worked. They would have been warned that I was dangerous, but they wouldn't listen.

They never did until I was gored a few of them.

An older male stepped forward. I didn't recognize him. He examined me with open curiosity and I did the same, my gaze level and emotionless while my mind whirred. The shoulders of his lab coat were damp. His hair was stark white, his hands brittle and covered with liver-spots. He smiled hesitantly at me.

I looked to his shoulders again. Was it raining? Snowing?

"How are you?" The man croaked, his voice somewhat...kind? "My name is Jones."

Doc-Mai watched me closely. I tucked my hands behind my back, letting the seconds tick by and relishing in the twitch of Mai's mouth as her annoyance grew. She hated disrespect and hated that I continued to give it.

"Jones," I mused over the name. "I would say nice to meet you, but it isn't."

"It's always nice to meet new people." Jones said softly.

"If you weren't locked in a cell, surrounded by homicidal doctors and patients, then I suppose it would be." My voice carried in the room, crisp and sharp like broken glass.

Doctor Mai pursed her lips tight. "112's medication has been changed. We've noted that it has made her more docile. Deceptively docile. In the last month, she managed to kill two doctors."

The hands locked behind me back began to shake, claws unsheathing as I wrestled to keep my calm. "I fail to see why you give me medication anyway, but sure, why not? I've a sprig of Elf in me, a cup full of Siren and a pitcher-ful of Lycan. What's next, Mai? A dash of dragon?"

"It's Doctor Mai to you." She bit out.

Ah hah. Got ya.

"You haven't shown me the credentials I've asked for, Mai. How am I to know that you aren't some loony whose running a mad-house, masquerading as a doctor so you can pull people apart piece by piece and stick them together as something else? Actually...wait..." I titled my head. "Doesn't that sound familiar?"

Doctor Mai muttered something about a door and vanished with the other doctors trailing after her, leaving only the elderly doctor alone with me.

There was always a doctor left to watch me. Watch me with small, evil little eyes. I always took the eyes if I could get a claw on them.

The scent of lilac began to fade. The old doctor eased back as I slid my gaze to him, bored now. "Why did they leave an old man to watch the Omega?"

That was the name they gave me. The Omega. The end. I barely remembered my old name – that was lost in the buried memories of a happier time, safe away from Mai.

"There are no microphones in your cell." Jones said quietly, typing something into the device on his wrist.

"The noise drives me cuckoo." I stepped closer to the glass, away from my designated x spot. They always tried to be so overly cautious. "If you can believe that."

The glass shimmered and a small opening appeared. The scent of Jones washed in and ice locked my limbs as I recognised it. My lips curled, my fangs bared as I snarled. The sharp tang of fear chased the scent of a Lycan.

"You're not human."

Jones cheeks reddened. "Neither are you."

He hid his fear quickly – that I would give him. I took another step towards the glass, wary of another doctor appearing and punishing me for stepping outside my 'x'. Even with the pane of glass between us, Jones shrunk back. I had always been tall for a girl, all legs, and gangly limbs. Craning my chin up, I let the silence talk for me.

It worked.

"I need help." He croaked.

Why would a Lycan some into a Ravi testing centre? They loathed each other? I had seen the Lycans thrown into the Mad-Maze, captured off the streets. They had always suffered horrific deaths.

"You're a spy, aren't you?" I cocked a brow. "You're a brave man, Jones. Don't you know what they do to Lycans here?"

The old-man's face hardened, fury sparking in those narrow eyes. "I know."

"Are you going to continue giving me dead-end answers? I have things to do."

Jones looked into my cell. A single bed. White sheets. A toilet that offered no privacy. White floors. White ceilings. White walls. So much fucking white. Even my uniform was white. Some-times, when the whiteness seemed to drown me, I opened up my own veins to see the redness of blood.

It never killed me. They wouldn't give me the mercy.

"She's going to send you into the mad-maze," Jones hissed, eyes flashing towards the door. He needn't worry – I would hear her long before he would. "Two young adult Lycans were snatched from the streets and put in here. I've been tracking them for weeks."

"Weeks?" A hint of lavender caught my attention. "If they've been in the Mad-Maze for weeks, then they're dead."

"You've survived it and you're only human. At your longest, you were in there for ...seven months." Jones glanced over his shoulder again.

Seven months. Memories flickered of days stretching on in near darkness, the heavy scent of blood and the pitter pattering of hearts. Those days had been dark – I had trusted nothing and morphed from prey to hunter, solidifying myself as the Ravi's Omega.

"I'm the exception. Your teenagers are the rule. They are dead."

"I don't believe that," Jones hissed. "I need you to look for them. If anyone can find them, it's you."

Heels clicked in the distance. Jones startled as he heard it, teeth setting as his lips lifted into a snarl. "Just look for them. Please."

Eyeing the damp patches on his coat, I mulled over his request. Mai was sending me into the Mad-Maze again. Even the thought of it caused my gums to throb, my mouth salivating at the chance of a good, fresh kill. A new hunt.

"Answer me this, Jones." I lifted my eyes to his. "Is it raining or snowing outside?"

Confusion, mixed with frustration crossed his face. Before he could answer, i stepped swiftly back, silently cursing Doc-Mai. Jones frowned in confusion, glancing behind him with his head cocked.

Then Doc-Mai stepped into the observation room, her attention falling on me first. She checked that I was standing on the 'x'. I smiled toothily at her.

"How was she?" Doc-Mai asked Jones, loftily holding out a clipboard.

"Docile," Jones' gaze slid to me.

"Docile?" Doc-Mai looked up sharply from her clipboard, "Be careful, Jones. That means she intends to tear your belly open."

I snorted.

Doc-Mai held the clipboard in front of her, sighing loftily. "I've some questions for you, 112"

"The same ones you've been asking since I came here?"

Her lips thinned. "You refuse to answer."

"And you've tried persuading me plenty before." It should have been no surprise that a doctor who would pull out the insides of one and morph a once human girl into a beast of nightmares, would torture the same beast to get some measly answers. Some nights when I closed my eyes, I still saw the lightening behind my lids.

"What is your name?" Doc-Mai asked sweetly.

"Prisoner 112."

"No. Your real name."

"Omega."

Doc-Mai gripped the clipboard a little tighter. "You know what I am taking about, 112."

I longed to say my name – a fleeting thing that didn't really belong to me anymore, but I would keep it's secret viciously. It was the last part of me I could protect from them. They had taken my body and made it their own. They had broken my mind and my morals but my name was something they would never have.

"If I was legally admitted into this facility," I said calmly, "Then you would know my name."

"How old were you when you were admitted here?"

"One hundred million years old." I resisted a smile even though I knew she would punish me anyway.

Jones frowned at her. "You don't know her name or age?"

She shook her head delicately. "She was brought to us with an infected bite, dressed in school-clothes. That was eight years ago and throughout all her treatments, she has never given up her name."

Eight years in this hell-home because of him. I was twenty four, my youth wasted. A Lycan's bite had marked me as prime pickings for the Ravi. I wanted to rage at her, to scream that none of this was fair. I had been only a girl, innocent to all of this when they yanked that bag over my head and carried me away from the only life I knew.

But I didn't. Pleading didn't work and mustering the strength to care about what happened to me was just wasteful.

"She was a Lycan's moon-bound?" Jones looked at me critically.

"Because of him, I was locked in this shit-hole." I flexed my fingers, unsheathing long, black talons and watching how they tore through my skin.

"This is an asylum for people who have been deranged with the blood or saliva of the Lycan. You are in here for your protection and the protection of others."

"Huh. I didn't realise that a Lycan tearing a chunk from my neck was enough to lock me up in here. That makes so much more sense. Sorry, Mai. I'll behave now." I said with saccharine sweetness.

She tapped something into her watch, ignoring me. "You're going into the maze now."

She said it so casually, as if the Mad-Maze was nothing. Grown men and women went crazy in it's darkness, driven mad by fear. The Maze made prey out of most, but some became monsters.

Behind me, a thick door of stone shifted backwards. It revealed a dark silhouette of a doorway; cold, lecherous air wafted inwards, bringing with it the distance scent of blood. Saliva coated my tongue, my hollow stomach snarling.

I glanced back at the doctors. Doc-Mai just blinked at me impassively, her brows knotted. When I looked to Jones, he mouthed one word. Snow.

I just turned and stepped into the darkness, my mind made up. Goosebumps rose up along my arms, the cold air sinking into my skin, stirring malice and blood-thirst.

No sooner had I stepped into the dark cold hall, did the door behind me slam shut. I barely reacted, eyeing the long walkway ahead of me. Lights flickered ominously on either side of me, illuminating only a circle of stone every few metres.

This was a game I knew.

The Mad-Maze.

It was a place where patients roamed free – floors of empty rooms and dark hallways. Here, Doctor Mai could weed out the weak from the strong. Most patients who were pushed out into the halls did not last the night and other adapted. Those who adapted were called back and experimented on.

There was only one rule – stay alive.

And it was broken often. Thin, metal bands on our wrists told the doctors of our deaths and strict security on windows meant there was no possibility of escape. Other than that, they left us to butcher, to cannibalize and mutilate in peace. Bodies were allowed to decay and become easy pickings for the hungry.

It was in these halls where I killed my first person. I barely remembered her face, but I remember the burning desire to survive, the anger that I had been locked up in here. Fear that somehow, he would find me. Wishing then that he would because he couldn't be as bad as this life.

I padded down the hall, relishing in the chance to stretch my legs. My fingers curled, talons flicking out and back in, tearing through skin that healed rapidly, only to be ripped open again. I skirted around old rusted hospital beds, past familiar blood stains on the walls. Some doors were poorly barricaded but I heard no skirting heartbeats behind the doors or the quick pause of breath.

There were rarely live ones near my cell. The ones who wandered the halls the longest, never called back to their cells, knew to fear the corridors near my cell. They knew the Omega slumbered there and would never dare to wake it.

Too long seemed to pass before I heard greedy slurping. A man was hunched over a dead body, his gleaming eyes flashing to me as he paused in his gorging. In one hand, he held a heart. I smelled the rot in the body's meat.

"Personally, I like my meat well-done." I told him critically. "And besides, if you didn't kill that body yourself, you don't know how safe the meat is."

That was one rule I kept - no cannibalism. They released wild animals into the Maze regularly to keep everyone in a frenzy and when I had picked bones clean, mice worked well too.

He took off down another hall, the heart still clenched in his hand. Instinct roared through me and I rose up onto my toes, overcome with the desire to hunt him down and tear him open.

Damn Ravi. I was no dog.

Instead, I scoffed. "Rude. And I ...maybe would have told him he was eating spoiled meat. Idiot is going to end up killing himself."

I kept walking through the dark hallways, silent as a whisper in a thunderstorm. Distantly, I heard screaming. Pleading. The usual sounds in this little circle of hell.

Jones' request circled in my mind- snow. I tried to remember what snow was like. Cold. White. Beautiful. Probably the one thing that I could stand without a splash of colour.

For giving me that – for telling what the weather was like outside, I would find the two Lycans for him. If they were still alive.

The whispers began. Omega.

The name was whispered, echoing in large vents and in dark corners. I heard people scurrying like rats to get away from it. Me. They never associated the tall, lanky girl with the bald head with the beast that prowled in the darkness, stronger and more savage than a Lycan. Still, they could sense me like animals sensed a cataclysmic event before humans did.

I spotted another patient. He was curled against the wall, rocking himself as he moaned. His hands were scabby and raw, his back shaking as he sobbed openly. He turned his face to me and I stilled, staring down at the rough stitching across his face, the raw and seeping wounds that were sending an infection straight to his heart.

His mouth formed a dark 'O' and he began wailing, scrambling against the wall as if hoping the stone would swallow him whole. "She's coming!" horrible, terrified choking sobs caught in his throat. "She's coming!"

"Rude. Please stop – you're hurting my ears." I told him blandly, my temper fraying as his voice grated at my ear-drums, feeling as if it was scratching at the inside of my head.

The wailing continued, ringing through dark and gloomy halls. I ran my tongue along sharping fangs and knelt beside him, gripping his chin tight. "Stop!"

Spittle clung to his lips, his wailing growing louder as he fought against my grip.

My talons slid outwards, sliding through greying skin. His wailing subsided suddenly when I snapped his neck, grimacing as I stood again. Ick.

I continued on, senses tuned for disturbances but I was able to by-pass those who lingered in the halls without a sound, my movement softer than a whisper. It wasn't until I heard whispers of new-blood that I was pulled from my searching.

I stepped into a wide hall, head tilted as I listened. If they were Jones' people and if they were still alive, I'd have to find them quickly. New-bloods were a delicacy in here. Their flesh was disease free and their muscles were not as tight as fear.

Lambs for the slaughter.

I loved a new hunt but I always thought hunting a newbie was no fun. They were too scared, prone to pissing their pants when they saw me. I preferred hunting the veterans who thought that they were too clever to be caught by the Omega, too skilled to ever be defeated by Doc-Mai and her Mad-Maze.

I ruled this Maze but I knew never to underestimate it. The doctors here had warped my body, had stripped all morality from my mind but I still held a kernel of fear for this maze even with all the tools they had given me. Still, it was better than the cells and the constant eyes watching me, the whispers of experiments and the dread I felt when I heard Doc-Mai's heels.

I checked a chain-linked door beside me. A little Elven girl stood on the other side, watching me with wide eyes. Saliva coated my tongue, my hands trembling as I scented the blood seeping from a wound.

I moved on quickly.

"Sunny, shhh." A male's voice whispered. "We'll be fine. I'll protect you."

Doubtful.