by A. D. Ryan
Rustling floated across the narrow hall, and when my eyes focused, I saw Cordelia appear near the bars of her cell. “Y-you’re okay?” she inquired. “He…he didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No,” I lied, bringing my right hand up and rubbing the exposed skin of my neck that my collar didn’t cover. “I’m fine.”
I sensed her relief, but it still didn’t eclipse her fear. I knew that only one thing could bring her the peace she’d likely been hoping for day after day for seven years: her freedom.
After the conversation I’d had with my brother—I thought back to our reunion and chastised myself; he was not my brother anymore. The things he said… The things he tried to do to me… The things he implied… No. He was absolutely not my brother anymore. The conversation with Bobby had rattled me a lot more than I’d hoped.
Not only was I the key to this new species he was trying to create and rule, I was his test subject. The second he pulled that syringe out of his pocket, I’d thought my time was up and that I’d failed Cordelia. That I’d never make it back to Nick. Telling me it wasn’t his blood before he injected me with it failed to comfort me. It only meant we were postponing his plans…
For a few months.
I could look at this as an extension on my prison sentence—which, admittedly, I did at first—but the more I thought about it as I stared into Cordelia’s frightened little eyes, the more I started to look at this as a good thing. Knowing I had months versus hours or days meant I could perfect my plan to escape. It meant I would be taken from my cell again, and while that wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time, it meant I could gather more Intel on our captors, where we were being held, and how I could get my hands on a set of keys…
“Keys,” I murmured beneath my breath, clenching and unclenching my hand as I looked back down at the floor. My eyes travelled along the uneven stone surface. Shards of rock from my rage-fuelled punching sessions were scattered about. The ashes of Jason Smith surrounded my feet, and beneath them, something glinted in the tiny sliver of light that we were blessed with. My heart pounded as I slowly lowered myself to the floor, realization coming together like a jigsaw puzzle. My hopes started to rise higher with every inch I dropped to the ground. Scared about being disappointed, I extended my arm and let my fingers hover over the ash, twitching with nervous anticipation.
“Brooke?” Cordelia asked, voice trembling with nerves. “What is it? Is everything okay?”
The tip of my middle finger touched the ash first, uncovering my treasure a little more. It wasn’t until my cheeks began to hurt that I even realized I was smiling, and my hands moved quicker to uncover and snatch up my find greedily. Excitement pulsed through me as I clutched my enclosed hands to my chest protectively, and I stood up, whipping around to face Cordelia.
Her eyebrows were knit together in confusion as she stared at me, and I could see that she was still waiting for my response, so I pushed my hand through the bars, opening my hand for her to see the ring of keys that failed to turn to ash when Jason was murdered.
“Never been better,” I finally assured her, pulling my hand back into my cell and looking a little more closely at the keys. There was one that was smaller than all the rest, so I used my left hand to feel the back of my collar. I closed my eyes and visualized what the pads of my fingers were telling me, and when I looked at the smaller key again, I realized that it was the key to unlimited transformations. Deciding I needed to know for sure, I blindly slipped the key into the lock. It fit. I took a minute to pray to whomever might be listening. I prayed that this key would disengage the lock on my collar and allow me to gain the upper hand. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and turned the key. All the air left my lungs when I heard the single click of the lock and the relief around my neck as the collar released.
I met Cordelia’s wide eyes once more to find shock reflecting back at me. “You ready to get out of here?” She must have been stunned, because she didn’t answer me at first. “Because we’re escaping tomorrow.”
Chapter8 | observe
“We can’t,” Cordelia whispered. “They’d stop us.” There was a tremble in her voice that reminded me just how afraid of these sickos she was.
Before I replied, I listened closely. I needed to make sure we were alone before I started filling her in on what I’d been planning. When I didn’t sense anyone else’s presence, I held Cordelia’s gaze. “Look, I know you’re scared—so am I—but we will escape. We’ll wait until they’re dormant.”
Cordelia shook her head. “There’s always someone around,” she whispered, eyes darting around nervously. “They’ll never let us get away.”
“No,” I told her. “I’ve been paying attention ever since I woke up here. They stop coming around during the hours we’re left in here to sleep, then they come back and take us to the rooms. I don’t know exactly how long we’re left alone, but it’s several hours—more than enough time for us to break the hell out of here.”
I watched as Cordelia’s expression softened slightly, registering what it was I was telling her, then she contested me again. “They don’t all rest at the same time. Someone’s always around.”
Ready to argue with her on this, my mouth opened, but I immediately snapped it shut again; she’d been here far longer than me, so chances were she knew what she was talking about. Perhaps I was jumping the gun. I didn’t even know the entire layout of this place; how could I expect to get us out of here undetected?
Nodding, I slipped the keys into my pocket and kneeled on the floor. “Okay,” I told her. “We’ll wait. We can plan this together.” I paused, gauging her reaction. She still wasn’t convinced that this was possible. “But I’m going to need your help.”
Cordelia’s slumped shoulders lifted for the first time I’d seen. I’d made her feel important—necessary—something I was certain she hadn’t felt in quite some time if at all. “You will?”
My head bobbed again. “Absolutely. I need to know more about this place. Their habits, where the exits are, how guarded they might be.” I bit my lower lip lightly before releasing it, suddenly nervous that she wouldn’t have any of the answers we needed. “Do you think that’s something you can help with?”
Inhaling a shaky breath, Cordelia smiles. “Y-yeah,” she told me with a single nod. “I can help.”
We spent the next couple hours sitting in our cells while Cordelia told me everything she knew.
“I’ve never been outside,” she confessed. “But I’ve been near the exit often…usually when they take me to one of the other rooms.”
“Other rooms?” I was shocked to hear there were more than the ones I’d been to. “And you’re sure this door is an exit?”
“They’re not stupid enough to mark it, but I could smell the fresh air, and they don’t take me there often, but when they do, it makes me feel…different.”
My eyebrows pull together. “Different?”
“Yeah…my tummy feels weird, my heart beats really fast, and my hands start to shake.”
I understood in an instant: the wolf sensed the freedom of the outside world and wanted out. Smiling, I explained that to her. She understood and even looked relieved to know it was normal to feel that way. This also meant that this door absolutely led to our freedom.
“So, have you ever run outside as a wolf?” I asked, changing the subject for a little, hoping to keep her feeling comfortable. She shook her head. “Never? Well, I guess we’ll have to change that in the near future.”
Cordelia continued to tell me everything she knew about this place. She told me where this exit was located, whether or not it was usually guarded, and I learned that every door used only a key to unlock it. For a secret underground fortress, they were surprisingly minimalistic. This would work in our favor.
Unfortunately, escaping from our cells was sounding more and more impossible with everything I learned.
“They usually have someone at that door,” Cordelia explained. “Even when the rest of th
em are sleeping.”
I let this information sit for a moment while I tried to find a workaround; I failed. If we waited until we were taken to one of those rooms, only one of us would get out. Cordelia must have sensed my desperation, because she offered a possible solution.
“The last wolf they had here—Barry—they took us together sometimes.”
“Who’s Barry?” I asked.
Cordelia pulled her knees to her chest. “He was nice. Older, like my brother. I think he came from up North—near Slave Lake. He was always more worried about me than himself.”
“What happened to him? Why isn’t he here anymore?”
Cordelia paused, almost as if remembering a memory that was less than pleasant. “They’d take us to a bigger room, wait for us both to change, and then expect us to fight.”
“And did you?”
She shook her head. “Barry refused every time. It’s why he’s not here anymore.”
I shuddered, realizing the truth of what she was telling me. They’d brought another werewolf in here, put them together in a room, made them shift, and then expected them to fight one another. It was already a questionable situation, but then to kill a man for refusing to fight a child…it was the cherry on top of an already messy sundae.
Her eyes rose from the floor and locked with mine. “It won’t be long before they put us in that room together. Barry was here almost a week before they put us in that room for the first time.”
I nodded along, wondering if there was any way I could speed up that process. The sooner I could get us close to that exit, the better off we’d both be.
Turned out, we wouldn’t have to wait for long.
Two vampires came for Cordelia a few hours later. She put up a fight as they hauled her from her cage, but it was no use. She wasn’t strong enough to fight both of them off.
I didn’t know where they were taking her, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone came for me. What they had in store for me remained a mystery. After my little chat with Bobby, I just couldn’t be sure. But I could be prepared for when they came.
It was unlikely I’d be taken to the same room as Cordelia, so I decided to stash the keys I’d kept hidden in my pocket. I looked around my cell until I found a crack in the wall from when I’d punched it the other day. It was the perfect size and just deep enough to conceal the keys until I would need them.
I had just finished hiding them when the huge iron door opened and I heard someone coming for me. Imagine my surprise when I watched my brother saunter toward my cage door and open it.
This time, I didn’t hold back the snarl I felt building upon locking eyes with him, and he only smiled as he reached into his pocket and withdrew a syringe. I glanced at the fluid in it for a moment, recognizing it as the sedative that had been used on me last time and not his blood. While I didn’t want to be sedated, a part of me was glad that this was not the day I would be used as his lab rat to test this whole hybrid nonsense he’d been spouting off about.
“Good evening, Brooke,” he said, finally tipping me off to the time of day. I may not know the exact hour, but I could use this as a rough estimate. Maybe I could hone the wolf; she’d always been pretty good at sensing the sunset on the day of the full moon. I bet I could use her to do the same any other day. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier?
“What do you want?” I spat at him, moving to the left as he moved to the right. He’d left the cage door open, and while I hadn’t planned to escape right now, the wolf couldn’t let the opportunity slip by.
“I’ve come to escort you to the lab for a few tests,” he informed me. “To make sure you’ll transition successfully in the coming months.”
“I told you I’m not interested. I’d rather die.”
The smile that crossed his face sent a chill straight down my spine. “Well, that’s always a possibility with our little experiment, so you may very well get your wish.”
I was a foot from the cage door, and while I tried to keep myself from bolting toward it, the wolf wasn’t missing out on the chance for freedom. She bolted, but I’d barely made it out of the cage before Bobby’s arm was wrapped around me from behind and I felt the pinch of the needle in my neck.
He pressed his cold cheek to mine, his clammy lips grazing my skin as my body went limp in his arms. “Don’t worry, sis, I’ll have you back in your cell after we complete your little check-up.”
“Brooke?”
The voice I heard sounded far away, almost like I was hearing someone call for me while I was submerged in a pool of water. My brain felt foggy as I tried to focus on the voice, but every time I was called, the clearer the voice became. It was Cordelia.
Slowly, my eyes opened, and I groaned when I sat up, pressing the heel of my hand against my temple. It felt like a vice grip was tightening around my head, and I needed it to stop.
“Cordelia?” I said, my voice raspy.
She exhaled a breath of relief. “You’re okay. They brought me back to my cell and you were gone…then when they did carry you back in here, you were so out of it, and I could smell blood.”
“Bl-blood?” I asked, confused and unable to wrap my head around it. I sniffed tentatively and picked up on what she had smelled. I raised my hands and inspected my arms. In the crook of my right elbow was a small red dot. Someone had drawn my blood. I inspected the rest of my body, not finding anything. Was that what Cordelia had smelled? The wound was so small…but the smell was…
My stomach lurched as I caught another whiff of the dried blood on my skin and I ran for the corner of my cell and emptied the contents of my stomach. It was weird. The smell of blood had never done this to me before—especially my own. Hell, I’d managed to keep myself from throwing up whenever I caught the putrid scent of a vampire. The only explanation was that the sedative they used was making me nauseous.
“Brooke?” I groaned in response. “Are you okay?”
I spat and then held the back of my hand to my lips for a minute, feeling my stomach roll again. When I was sure I wasn’t going to get sick again, I slowly stood upright and turned around to find Cordelia looking at me, her eyes wide with concern.
“I’m fine, sweetie.” I smiled, hoping it was convincing enough. “I think the drugs they gave me upset my stomach.” Her head tilted to the left, eyebrows knitting together. She was eyeing me in a way that worried me. “What?”
Closing her eyes, she shook the expression off her face. “Nothing. I was just worried.” She paused for a moment. “Can you remember anything about where you were?”
I tried to, but the last thing I recalled was Bobby’s cold face pressed against mine. “No.” I held out my arm and looked at my elbow again. “But I think they took me to the lab. They must have drawn blood for whatever testing they need to run for their stupid project.” My knees trembled, and I succumbed to the feeling, collapsing to the ground.
I needed to rest some more. I needed to clear my head of the drug-induced fog so I could further plan our escape.
I leaned my back against the wall of my cell and turned my head toward Cordelia. “How are you?” I asked. “Did they hurt you?”
She gave a non-committal shrug. “Not really. They mostly focus on my transformations. Doing whatever they can to force it. I’m getting pretty good at it.”
I could only imagine the lengths these bastards went to to force a young girl to shift, and it made me angry enough to forget about my fatigue. “I’m going to kill them all,” I promised her. “Maybe not the day we escape, but I promise you, none of them will survive this fight.”
“About that,” Cordelia interjected. “The escape?” I tried to push the thoughts of vampire genocide away for a moment. “When they were bringing me back here, I pretended to be out of it.” I nodded, sitting forward, suddenly alert. “I overheard them saying they’d be pitting us against each other in a few days.”
I inhaled deeply, not because I was worried that I would be forced to fight Cordelia, but becaus
e in just a few short days, we could be on our way back home.
Chapter9 | action
We waited. It was all we could do. Having been given a rough time of day from Bobby, I was able to sort of gauge where we were at as each day passed. In addition to that, I tried to listen to my body a little better. Over the course of a couple days, I was able to pinpoint when the wolf became a little more agitated, and compared it to how I’d felt in the past. I recognized these feelings as ones that usually occurred around sunset. I told myself to trust my gut, and it pleased me to know that I was finally channeling the wolf so easily. I might not have been able to shift, but I could rely on her to help me through this as best as she could from her submissive vantage point.
We hadn’t been taken from our cells since I was drugged and tested on. The only vampires we saw were the ones who brought us the silver-laced food I advised Cordelia to refrain from eating as much as possible. I felt a little weak and shaky without food, but I hoped it wouldn’t be much longer before we would be taken to this room. Not eating the food could almost guarantee we would be able to shift the minute I got the collars off of us.
As she grew increasingly more agitated, I wondered if she was worried about the escape, which was completely understandable. Of course, the idea of seeing her parents and the rest of the Pack after all this time was also a reasonable explanation for her behavior.
We slept a little here and there, but I think it was hard for me to fall into that restful sleep due to my deep desire to get the hell out of here. The way I saw it, there would be plenty of time for sleep once I got back home and could sleep in my own bed…with Nick.
Thinking of Nick made my heart hurt. I was loathe to admit that I refused to think about him often. Why? Because I couldn’t afford to be distracted. And thinking about him did exactly that. All I could do was think about how I left things, and how it was my unwillingness to act like an adult and talk through our problems that led me here.
