But we would always be in danger unless we finished this. Bryce would keep chasing us as long as he thought we were useful to his work.
I followed.
Around a couple of corners in the hallway was a reinforced door with no identifying sign. Prairie held up the little plastic prox card, and when the lock clicked, she pushed the door open. I ran to catch up. When Kaz saw me he hesitated only for a second before holding the door for me.
“Hailey, no!” Prairie hissed.
“She deserves to be here,” Kaz said as I pushed past him.
I grabbed Prairie’s hand and squeezed hard. “I’m not going back.”
She stared into my eyes for a moment and then nodded once. “All right. All right. You two start dousing the edges of the room, along the walls. I’m going to start the wipe-disk program. I doubt I can get in the server room—that requires a retinal scan and I’m sure I’ve been blocked—but I can do it from my workstation. And take this, just in case.” She pressed the prox card into my hand and I pocketed it.
Prairie snapped on a bank of lights and I saw that we were in a huge lab, with workstations and sleek monitors and equipment I couldn’t begin to name. There were robotic-looking devices in various states of assembly on platforms, and banks of blinking boxes with cables running in and out in loops. More cables snaked along the floor.
The one thing that was missing was a human presence. Other than stacks of papers and coffee cups and a sweater or two left over a chair, it was as if the people who worked here brought nothing of themselves with them. There were no photos, no kids’ drawings tacked to cubicle walls, no plants or paperweights or figurines.
Prairie disappeared down a corridor at the other end of the room, and Kaz dug in his backpack, then handed me a can of lighter fluid.
“Shouldn’t take much,” he said. “Just concentrate it along the drywall.”
We set to work, stepping around the equipment. At first I was cautious, but then I followed Kaz’s example and shoved things out of the way, pushing desks aside to reach the walls. The acrid smell of chemicals filled the air, stinging my eyes and making me cough, and adrenaline pumped through my veins.
I thought I heard something—a slam, a muffled cry—from the corridor Prairie had entered. Kaz heard it too, and we both went still, looking at each other and trying to listen over the hum of the equipment. Then we were both running toward the source of the sounds.
We were barely into the hallway when there was a crashing of metal on wood and a heavy door rebounded off the walls a few feet in front of us.
Prairie stumbled into the hallway, followed by someone else.
Bryce Safian—it had to be. A well-built man with close-cut brown hair and a starched button-down shirt was holding a gun jammed against Prairie’s back. Kaz reacted before I could absorb the scene—he rushed forward and slammed between Bryce and Prairie, knocking her to the floor. He grabbed for the gun and it went off, and a split second later he grabbed one hand with the other, wincing, blood dripping between his fingers. He’d been shot in the hand, and now Bryce had the gun aimed straight at his heart. Kaz backed up slowly as Prairie crawled out of the way and got to her feet.
The man’s eyes met mine, narrowed, and then relaxed. He smiled, a cruel and calculating expression that wasn’t all that different from the way Gram used to look when she thought Dun or one of her other customers had said something funny.
“You must be Hailey. I’m Bryce Safian. Please call me Bryce.” His smile grew wider. “It’s a good thing I decided to come check on things in the lab when I heard that my employees had managed to let you slip away yet again. You should be congratulated on your ingenuity. Remarkable, really.”
“Your hand …,” I choked out, watching Kaz bleed onto the floor.
“Don’t worry about him,” Bryce said dismissively. “He’s not worth your time. You know, Hailey, if things had gone differently, I might have been your Uncle Bryce.”
I looked from him to Prairie. I had never seen her look so angry.
Bryce followed the direction of my gaze. “Yes, that’s right. I had been thinking of proposing to your aunt. That is, until she made it clear that we had profound, ah, you might say, fundamental character differences.”
“You have no character,” Prairie spat. “You have no shame. You’re—you’re inhuman.”
Bryce laughed, a rich and cultured sound. “That’s pretty funny, coming from you, darling. Seems like it might be you that deserves that title. Did you know,” he said conversationally, tipping his head to me, “that your aunt has chromosomal abnormalities so severe that technically she shouldn’t even be alive in any condition known to science?
“Oh dear,” he added, creasing his forehead and pretending to be sorry. “I shouldn’t have said that, seeing as you—and your young friend here too, I take it—have the same … deficiencies.”
Kaz raised his bloody hands as though he was going to go after Bryce again, but Bryce swung the gun between me and Prairie and back at Kaz. His gun hand was steady.
“Don’t get any bright ideas,” he said to me. “You all bleed regular blood—and I should know, considering all the testing we’ve done here. Presumably, losing enough of it will kill you just like it would any normal human. And I know you can’t heal this one without touching him.”
I could feel the rushing that signaled the need to heal. I couldn’t take my eyes off Kaz’s shredded hand. My fingertips pulsed with the compulsion to touch him, to find the wound and let my energy flow to it. But I couldn’t reach him. Bryce would never let me get to him. And without touching, I couldn’t heal. Milla, Rascal, Chub … I’d had to lay my hands on them to feel the energy from my fingers go into their bodies.
“Kind of funny, really,” Bryce went on. “If you could get to big boy here, you could probably fix him up, but I’ve got lots of extra clips, so I’d just keep shooting holes in him. No doubt who’d win that race, huh, sunshine?”
“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Prairie muttered.
“Oh, but I do! Who’s been running those tests for all these months? Hmm? I’d say I’m intimately familiar with just how your special little powers work, wouldn’t you? In fact, I think I’d be able to hurt your young friend here just badly enough that you’d have a very difficult choice to make. Isn’t that so, Prairie?”
She looked stricken, a choked sob dying in her throat. I remembered her promise to Anna. I’ll guard him like my own.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Bryce went on, smiling lazily. “I don’t need you anymore. I found someone new. She’s not as pretty as you, and I doubt she’ll prove as … amusing. But she’s cooperative—very cooperative, considering she’s become, let’s say, a permanent guest of the laboratory. And now that I have Hailey, the two of them are all I need to get the last of our work done. It’s a shame, really, that you won’t be around to share in the glory.”
So Kaz’s vision had been real. Bryce had found another Healer, and locked her up here just as he intended to lock me up. My heart sank as I realized that all our work might have been for nothing. Bryce planned on keeping me alive, but he clearly didn’t intend to keep Prairie or Kaz around. I felt despair overtaking the determination I’d started the night with.
“You won’t live that long,” Prairie said, surprising me with her fury. She stepped toward Bryce, unafraid. “Shoot me if you want. Go ahead, I dare you. Your new girlfriend’s never going to make zombies for you. That’s not what was ordained, and you can’t fight it.”
Bryce chuckled, genuine mirth crinkling his eyes at the corners. “Oh, Prairie, such idealism, it’s so refreshing. I’ve always loved that about you. If you only knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Where do you think I found out about your little niece here?”
Prairie hesitated, and I saw uncertainty flicker in her eyes.
“The guys you hired,” I said, trying to edge closer to Kaz. “Your men. Your dead men.”
Bryce lau
ghed harder. “That is so amusing to me, you see, because once they traced Prairie’s true identity, we found an unexpected ally. Someone who was willing to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about you, little Hailey, for a price. Someone willing to set up the perfect opportunity for my men to come and get you, someone who not only wouldn’t miss you, but would make sure no one else did, either.”
A murmur started inside my ears and built quickly into a roar. I shook my head and whispered “No,” but I knew exactly who he was talking about.
“Your grandmother, Hailey,” Bryce said, barely able to conceal the smug satisfaction in his voice. “Alice Tarbell. Gave you up for five thousand dollars and a ticket to Ireland. Oh … and the promise that, not to be indelicate, when it was time for you to procreate, we would furnish you with one of your own kind.”
Kaz shot forward, launching himself low against Bryce’s torso, trying to knock him down. But I could see that Kaz’s injury had weakened him, made him miscalculate. Bryce stepped neatly out of the way and his finger tightened on the trigger, almost in slow motion. I heard the shot and saw Kaz’s injured hand fly out at an odd angle and bang against the wall in a spray of blood.
CHAPTER 25
THE HOLE IN Kaz’s bicep stayed neat and round for a second before blood began to leak from it. I could see now that his hand was badly damaged, the fingers bloody and bent at odd angles, his index finger hanging by a thin strip of skin. A wave of nausea rolled through my stomach, followed by shame. I was supposed to be a Healer—how could I be so weak?
Prairie reached for Kaz, but Bryce jammed his gun under her chin and drove her back against the wall. Kaz sank to the floor, his face going white as he tried to squeeze his uninjured hand around his arm, above the bullet wound, and stop the flow of blood.
Bryce sighed. “I told you we could do this the hard way or the easy way, Eliz—I mean, Prairie.”
I stepped toward her, but Bryce swung his arm around and aimed at me. “That’s far enough, Hailey. It might be wise for you to remember that your aunt won’t be a bit of good to you if you get hurt. Kind of an interesting arrangement, wouldn’t you say? It’s going to be fascinating to study that, Healers’ natural resistance to each other’s gifts. I’m certainly looking forward to that research.”
Prairie was inches away from Bryce, backed up against the wall, and the second he turned away from her, she tensed. I could tell she was going to attack him. I shook my head and tried to form the word no, because I knew Bryce would kill her, but I also knew that she was past caring. As she lunged at him, I waited for the sound of the gun, a silent scream building inside.
But Bryce surprised me.
He brought the gun crashing down against Prairie’s skull, above the temple, and she crumpled to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.
But he didn’t kill her.
When he looked up, there was something in his expression I recognized. It was part longing and part defiance. It had something in common with the way Rattler had looked at her. The ancient blood connection was missing, but in that second I realized that Bryce too had loved her, in his way. Enough that he couldn’t shoot her.
And I realized that love could be dangerous. “Don’t think I won’t enjoy killing her slowly,” Bryce said, but now we knew he had a weakness, and for the first time I saw uncertainty in his eyes. He kept his gun trained on me, but he knelt beside Prairie and felt for her pulse.
If only there was a way to use his weakness against him. I glanced at Kaz. His eyes were squeezed shut with pain. I could tell that he was starting to lose his balance. A shocking amount of blood was leaking from his arm. The bullet must have hit something important.
The need to heal surged hot and demanding inside me, pulsing its way along my nerves to the tips of my fingers, and my desire to put my hands on Kaz, on his wound, was irresistible.
I willed him to open his eyes and look at me—and he did. The second his eyes found mine, I felt it again, the connection I’d noticed when he first took my hand.
Only, now his life depended on it. All of our lives.
I stared deep into his eyes and tried to shut out everything except the gift that was a part of my lifeblood. Kaz’s eyes flickered, his lips parted slightly. I could feel my heartbeat slowing and then I sensed my breathing diminish to almost nothing. Something happened to my vision, too; the edges fell away, replaced with a haze of shimmering shadow, and there was nothing but me and Kaz. My vision began to fade and my lungs screamed for air, but it was beautiful, too, exquisite and so sharp that it felt like it might tear my heart in pieces, this link between us that was more powerful than either of us could ever be alone.
I fell.
I didn’t realize it was going to happen until I collapsed onto the floor at Prairie’s feet. Bryce yelled something and turned his gun from Prairie to me, and I braced for the impact of the bullet, wondering where he’d shoot me, wondering whether it would be better if he merely disabled me and kept me alive in his laboratory—or if he killed me.
And then Bryce slammed into me hard. It took me a second to figure out that Kaz had shoved him, that he had found the energy, a last reserve of strength, to attack.
“Get away, get away from him!” Kaz yelled. I tried, but Bryce was so heavy and he was scrambling on top of me, heavy knees and elbows—God, it hurt—and what about the gun? He still had the gun, and then he was pulled off me and slammed into the drywall and that was Kaz. Kaz, whose good arm was plenty good; Kaz, whose bad arm was good enough, because I’d healed it, not very well because it was damn hard to heal without putting your hands on someone, but enough. Enough.
Kaz kicked Bryce and the gun went skittering out of his hand and down the hall. I pushed against Bryce as hard as I could and managed to roll out from under him. I tried to reach Prairie, but I knew I couldn’t do anything for her now. I couldn’t heal her, couldn’t wake her up.
Kaz was fumbling in the backpack that lay open on the floor, pulling out the last can of lighter fluid, holding it in the crook of his wounded arm while he twisted the cap off. The smell hit me hard as Kaz shook the can over Bryce, the clear liquid splashing his clothes and his face, and he clutched his eyes and started screaming, a scream of rage that turned to terror when Kaz lit a match.
So much screaming. I had finally found my voice and it joined Bryce’s. I backed away from the fireball that Bryce had become, dragging Prairie with me, watching the trail light up like a sparkler in the dark.
Bryce’s scream turned into a horrible yowl of pain as he rolled toward the door he’d come through. Kaz grabbed my arm and pulled me upright.
“You don’t have much time,” he said urgently. “Check the server room, make sure she got the program started. Just in case it doesn’t all burn. I’ll take care of Prairie until you get back.”
“Don’t wait for me,” I said, already backing down the hall. “Just go, take her with you.”
But our eyes met and held and dark energy passed between us, and I knew he wouldn’t leave.
I wouldn’t have either.
I bolted down the hall. Smoke rolled down in hot, gritty clouds after me, and I knew the fire must be raging in the main room. The last thing I saw before entering the server room was Kaz bending low next to Prairie, pulling his shirt over his mouth, and I prayed there would be enough air for them.
The door was open to the smaller, inside server room. It was still cool and dark in there, where the fire hadn’t yet reached, and glowing numbers scrolled at lightning speed along the single monitor on the desk. So Prairie had succeeded—the data on the disk was being scrubbed out of existence.
It was about time for some good news.
I emptied the lighter fluid around the equipment and had turned to go, to run back to Prairie and Kaz so we could try to race the fire out of the building, when I noticed a door along the other wall of the server room. It was a heavily reinforced door, like the one to the main lab, with a scan pad set into the wall next to it.
&n
bsp; I hesitated. The fire was burning, and the data was being erased. It ought to be enough.
But the door was locked. Something in there was important enough that Bryce had secured it separately. More data? Specialized equipment?
And then I remembered what he had said: She’s become a permanent guest of the laboratory. His new Healer—she was imprisoned somewhere nearby, and this was the last place we hadn’t looked.
Fear shot through me. I had to find her and get her out of the burning building, to save her if I could.
I didn’t have a gun, didn’t even have any more lighter fluid, but I pulled the prox card from my pocket and jammed it against the pad. I heard the click of the lock releasing; without thinking I grabbed the door handle and yanked it.
What I saw struck me with such blinding horror that I nearly fell back into the raging flames. A scream started in my throat and burst from me with the ragged, howling desperation of a trapped animal. I tried to run, but my legs weren’t working—my terrified brain couldn’t control my movements as electric panic shot along my nerve endings and adrenaline threatened to drown my conscious mind.
Inside, sitting motionless on a dozen folding chairs, were a dozen men dressed in plain T-shirts and khaki pants. As I blinked away smoke and gulped the poisonous air deep into my lungs, I saw that these were no ordinary men. They were decomposing. Their skin ranged from pasty white to gray and purple, and in a few cases it had started to separate from the bone. The smell hit me next, worse than anything I had ever smelled, and bile rose in my throat. Some of the men weren’t wearing shoes, the flesh swollen and splitting from the bones of their feet. The one closest to me had stains on his shirt. With a wave of nausea I realized that his torso was leaking bodily fluids.
Worst of all were their eyes. Empty, as though the souls of these men had been sucked out through the sockets.
Their heads slowly turned to me. One by one, they rose from their chairs and started toward me, arms outstretched.
They were zombies. And they were coming for me.
Banished Page 20
