by Zoe Chant
“As I hypothesized. His resistance is still slightly greater than that of an ordinary shifter. I expect he’ll regain consciousness sooner, too.” The doctor snapped her fingers. “Give him another dose.”
The man with the dart gun fired again.
“No!” Justin yelled. “No! I’ll kill—”
His eyes closed. He slumped down and lay still.
Fiona let her own head rest on the cold concrete floor, cursing herself. She shouldn’t have let Justin come with her. She should have told Hal she wanted more backup—but with that big of an ambush, wouldn’t whoever he’d sent just have gotten captured too? In that case, she shouldn’t have come at all.
With an effort so hard that it felt tangible, Fiona pulled herself together. Blaming herself was a waste of time and a distraction from what needed to be done. She’d gotten out of bad situations before. She just needed to stay calm and keep her wits about her.
“Knock her out too,” said Dr. Mortenson. “I don’t want any trouble on the plane.”
A sharp pain jabbed into Fiona’s back. Just before the darkness took her, she thought, We did want to know where the Apex base is. I guess we’re about to find out.
Chapter Fifteen
Fiona
Fiona woke up sitting in a chair. She opened her eyes with a gasp.
She was in a sterile white room. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and her ankles were cuffed to the chair, both with metal shackles to prevent her from shifting, and the chair was bolted to the floor. Apex was taking no chances.
Justin was also cuffed to a chair. He looked alert enough that he’d probably been awake for longer. Dr. Mortenson sat behind a heavy steel desk with a computer. Four guards, two armed with tranquilizer rifles and two with real guns, stood off to the side.
My team—our team—will track us down, Fiona told herself. When we turn up missing, they’ll know where we disappeared from and who was probably involved, and they’ll find us. That’s how we found Shane when Apex kidnapped him.
But the comparison to Shane was less reassuring than she’d intended. It had taken them a long time to track him down, and in the meantime both he and Catalina had nearly died.
“Welcome back to the world of the waking,” the doctor said. “We’ve been waiting for you, haven’t we, Subject Seven?”
The glee in her voice made Fiona’s skin crawl. Justin didn’t reply, but his fists clenched.
“Remember how I said you were my leverage over Seven?” Dr. Mortenson went on. “I’m going to test that right now. We spent a lot of time, money, and effort on him, and we were very disappointed when he ran away. We want to make sure that will never happen again.”
“It won’t,” Justin said.
He sounded scared. Fiona didn’t blame him one bit. The contents of the room sent a chill down her spine: metal tables with straps, medical-looking devices and machines she couldn’t identify, and—most horrifying of all—a wooden chair with a tangle of electrical wires attached to it.
An electric chair, she thought. But not for executions. It’s to hurt prisoners until they wish it would kill them.
But Justin’s eyes slid over the electric chair with barely a flinch. Instead, his gaze was captured by a metal table near an industrial sink with a bucket and a cloth sitting ready. Fiona didn’t understand why that, of all things, was what frightened him. It was the most innocent-looking thing in the entire room. Then she remembered how Dr. Mortenson had waterboarded him until he could hardly stand to have a sheet of damp paper put over his face, and she felt physically ill.
Trying to keep her voice calm, she said, “Justin, remember that promise you made not to use your invincibility? Forget it. If she tries to torture you, do it so you can’t feel pain.”
“A reasonable plan,” said Dr. Mortenson. “However, it won’t work. Seven, tell her why not.”
Justin let out a long, shaky sigh. “It turns off automatically if I pass out. I need a minute or two to concentrate to turn it back on, and I can’t do it if I’m too stressed. Tranquilizers don’t work on me—I mean, back then they didn’t—so if they wanted me to stop being invincible and I wasn’t cooperating, they had to cut off my oxygen.” He jerked his head at the table by the sink. “That’s how that got started.”
“And, of course, your friend Subject Ten—” Dr. Mortenson indicated Fiona. “—can also feel pain.”
“Don’t hurt her!” Justin sounded frantic. “I told you, I’ll cooperate.”
“I’m going to need some proof of that,” replied the doctor.
Dr. Mortenson snapped her fingers at the guards. The ones with real guns leveled theirs at Fiona, and the ones with tranquilizer guns aimed theirs at Justin.
“Remember, she’s expendable,” warned the doctor. Then she walked to his chair and unlocked his bonds. She indicated the table by the sink. “Go lie down on that.”
Justin went white. “I’ll do it...”
“No!” Fiona burst out. “Don’t do this for me!”
He ignored her, his gaze fixed on Dr. Mortenson. “On two conditions. One. Take her away. I don’t want her to see it. Two. Put me in with her afterward, so I know she’s all right.”
“Agreed,” said the doctor.
Justin stood up.
“Justin, no!” Fiona shouted. Then, realizing she could never persuade him, she too turned to Dr. Mortenson. “Torture me instead. I won’t fight either.”
“Hmm. What would I gain by that?”
“New data,” Fiona suggested. “I’ve never had it done before. My reactions might be more interesting than his.”
“This isn’t about science,” Justin said to Dr. Mortenson. “You just want to punish me for running away. Fine. Do it. Just leave her out of it.”
He walked to the table and lay down on it.
“No!” Fiona yelled, frantic. “Do it to me instead!”
“Get her out of here,” Justin said quietly. “Now.”
Dr. Mortenson was clearly enjoying the entire scene. With a dramatic sigh, she said, “Oh, all right. Just remember, Seven, how long the deal lasts is entirely up to you.”
“I know.” He reached out and pulled the straps across his own chest.
Inside Fiona’s head, her snow leopard let out a long, wordless shriek of pure rage.
A scarlet haze came across Fiona’s eyes. Though she knew it was useless, she threw herself against her bonds, intent on killing the doctor before she could hurt her mate.
“I’ll go harder on him if you don’t stop fighting,” Dr. Mortenson said sharply. “Every minute you struggle is an extra minute he’ll spend in here.”
Fiona went limp. She let the guards unlock her from the chair and escort her out. The electronic door slid shut behind them.
Rip out her throat, hissed her snow leopard.
I will, Fiona vowed.
As the guards escorted her along a corridor and then locked her into a small room with two cots, she tried not to imagine what was happening to Justin. What he was willingly suffering to protect her. She couldn’t bear to think about it, but she could think of nothing else.
It felt like an eternity before the door opened. Two guards supported Justin between them. His eyes were open but his head hung down and his feet dragged on the floor. When Fiona reached out for him, four more guards leveled their tranquilizer rifles at her.
“I’m not going to attack you.” She tried to keep her voice calm, even though she felt anything but. “Just let me have him, all right?”
“You better not try anything,” a guard warned her. “No sudden movements.”
Moving slowly, Fiona put Justin’s arm over her shoulder and her arm around his waist. He couldn’t seem to support his own weight at all. As she laid him down on one of the cots, the guards backed out. The door shut behind them.
She knelt on the floor beside the cot. His hair was dripping wet, his face was ashen, and he was shaking like a leaf in a high wind. When she touched his cheek, his skin felt cold. She pulled
the blanket over him, then fetched the blanket from the other cot and draped that over him too. Finally, she pushed the narrow cots together so she could lie in the other one and hold him.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” she said. “It should’ve been me.”
His voice was so soft that even lying with her arms around him, she had to strain to hear. “I couldn’t let her hurt you. You know that. Besides, I had to finish the demonstration.”
Fiona wondered if he was delirious. Nervously, she said, “What demonstration?”
“That I’m too scared and weak and broken-down to risk making a break for it.”
Relieved that he was making sense, she asked, “What’s your plan? Jump her the next time she hauls us into the lab?”
He shook his head. “Jump the guards the next time they come in. It’ll be the last thing anyone will expect.”
Doubtfully, she said, “Can you?”
“I think so. They don’t have clocks here to keep us disoriented, but one of the guards dragging me was wearing a watch. I sneaked a look at it. It’s 1:00 AM. They’ll shove some breakfast in around 9:00. That gives me eight hours to recover.”
Fiona didn’t want to throw cold water on his plans, but there was a very obvious problem with it. “You really think the two of us can take out six guards without either of us getting nailed by a dart?”
“No.” Then, to her amazement, he smiled. “But I think I can take out six guards by myself if it doesn’t matter if I get hit.”
“But—”
“The darts don’t affect me.”
“They don’t?”
“When you got ambushed at the warehouse, I couldn’t rescue you and I couldn’t go for help. My only chance was to get myself taken along with you. I didn’t have a plan for getting free afterward until they shot me with a dart. They know tranquilizers don’t work on me, so they’d only do that if they thought they had one that did. And I know how they usually work. So I faked it.”
“Wow.” For the first time since they’d been captured, Fiona felt hopeful. Admiringly, she said, “You’re sneaky.”
“Thanks. I learned it from you. Seriously. I remembered what I’d seen you do, and I tried to do it like that. Though I couldn’t figure out how to cry on cue. How do you do that?”
“Do you ever cry at movies?”
“Never,” he declared. “Well... The Shawshank Redemption gets me a bit misty-eyed if I’m watching it alone.”
Fiona translated this from guy-ese as Never come home unexpectedly when I’m watching it because you’ll catch me crying like a baby.
Trying not to laugh, she said, “If you ever want to cry, picture the most moving scene in it and say the dialogue to yourself. Are there any lines you remember?”
“Sure. ‘Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.’” Justin’s eyes welled up as he quoted the line.
Fiona had forgotten that he shared a nickname with one of the characters. That must have felt as if those words had been spoken directly to him. Hope never dies. No wonder that got to him.
“Whoa. It works.” He wiped his eyes. “What’s yours?”
“The Lion King. When Simba’s father dies.” She was relieved when he didn’t point out the parallel with her life, but merely squeezed her hand, letting her know he understood without making her talk about it.
His eyes fluttered shut, and it was a moment before he opened them again. He’d stopped trembling and his skin felt warmer, but Fiona could tell he was still exhausted and shaken.
She kissed his cheek. “Go to sleep. You’ll need your shifter healing. You’ve got a big day ahead of you.”
Justin nodded and closed his eyes. He seemed to drop off immediately, but Fiona stayed awake longer.
Once in her life, she’d had everything and still wanted more. More designer clothes, more expensive trips, more nights out on the town. She’d gotten everything she’d longed for when she’d been a teenager in the group home, living on hand-me-downs and store-brand cereal with powdered milk. But it hadn’t made her happy. The more she had, the emptier she’d felt.
Now, as she held Justin close, she no longer felt empty, but she wanted something more desperately than she’d ever wanted anything before.
I want Justin to get out of here safely and never have to worry about Apex again, she thought. I want him to get his house with the big backyard and the three dogs. And me. I want him to get the happily ever after he deserves.
She hoped she wasn’t tempting fate.
Chapter Sixteen
Justin
Justin lay on the cot, eyes closed, waiting for the guards to enter the cell. He’d slept deeply and felt much stronger, but his heart was beating rapidly. Once the guards found out he was still immune to their tranquilizers, they’d never use them on him again. He’d only get this one shot.
The loud click of the door opening almost made him start, but he made himself lie still. He heard footsteps coming in.
“Hey, Justin, they brought food...” Fiona said, shaking him lightly. “Justin?”
She shook him harder. He let himself flop limply.
“Justin?” Her voice was sharp with alarm. “He’s not breathing!”
More footsteps, hurrying. Fiona exclaimed, “Hey!”
That was the signal: all the guards were inside.
As a male hand came roughly down on his throat, feeling for a pulse, Justin shifted. His big paws lashed out at the guards bending over him, sending them flying into the walls. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fiona whip around to punch the nearest guard in the jaw just as he reached for his walkie-talkie, then snatch his ID. He lunged to put his body between her and the guards as she whirled to close the door.
A sharp pain stung Justin’s side, then his neck. He ignored it and pounced on the guard who was firing at him, slamming him into the floor. The man’s head bounced off the concrete, and he lay still.
Justin looked up. Fiona had grabbed a tranquilizer rifle and was methodically firing darts at all the downed guards, making sure they were out for the count. The first guard he had attacked, who had just staggered to his feet, dropped down again and lay still.
There was silence in the cell. All the guards lay unconscious on the floor.
Justin shifted back. He took a quick look at Fiona to make sure she was unharmed, and plucked two darts out of his body. Then he dressed in the uniform and shoes of the guard who was closest in size to him, and took the guard’s ID and tranquilizer rifle. Fiona did the same.
“You were great,” Justin said.
“You too.”
They exchanged a quick kiss, then opened the door a crack. The corridor was empty. They stepped out and used an ID to close and lock the door, then set out. When they turned the corner, they nearly ran into four guards who were just exiting a room. Justin’s pulse thundered in his ears, but Fiona nodded pleasantly at them. The guards nodded back. One of them locked the door behind him, and then they headed off in the opposite direction. Justin was immensely relieved.
The door the guards had just locked bore a small plaque that read SUBJECT NINE.
“That’s right,” Justin muttered. “Shane was Subject Eight, and Dr. Mortenson called you Subject Ten. They’ve got someone imprisoned here. We need to let them out.”
“Let’s go in,” said Fiona. “I don’t want to try to explain everything standing in the corridor.”
Justin used his ID card to unlock the cell, and they slipped inside and locked the door behind them.
A man was sitting on the floor with his knees up and his face buried in his arms. An untouched meal tray was on the floor beside him. He must have heard them come in, but he didn’t move a muscle.
Justin’s heart went out to him. How many hours had he spent at Apex in that exact position? He crouched down in front of the prisoner, out of easy striking reach in case the man lashed out in panic or rage. Speaking softly and gently, he said, “Hey. We’re not with Apex. We�
��re prisoners who just escaped. And we want to take you with us.”
The man’s head jerked up. He looked at Justin, startled and suspicious.
“You!” Fiona’s exclamation was filled with shock and fury.
Justin scrambled to his feet. The prisoner was staring at Fiona like he’d seen a ghost, and she looked ready to kill him.
“Who is he?” Justin asked.
“Carter Howe,” Fiona spat out. “The man who bit me and left me to die in the cold.”
Red rage engulfed Justin. He moved faster than thought, yanking the prisoner to his feet and punching him in the face. Carter staggered back against the wall, bleeding from a cut lip. Justin drew back his fist to hit him again...
...and only then realized that the man wasn’t trying to fight back. He wasn’t even defending himself. He stood still, arms at his sides and hands open.
Justin stopped, angry and frustrated. “Put up your fists!”
For the first time, Carter spoke. But it wasn’t to Justin. His gaze was fixed on Fiona. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. It was wrong.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it!” she snapped.
“I know. Go ahead and kill me. I deserve it. And I don’t care.” Carter tilted his head back, exposing his throat.
Justin glanced at Fiona. She looked as unsettled as he felt. He took her hand as they both backed away from the man.
“What do you want to do with him?” Justin asked her.
“I was going to help you beat the living daylights out of him,” she replied. “But now I’m not so sure. Unless this is some kind of trick.”
“I don’t think so.” Justin recognized the prisoner’s blank, bleak gaze; he’d seen it in the mirror. To Carter, he said, “How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Supposedly his plane went down over the Pacific,” Fiona said. “If that’s when they took him, it’d be over a year.”
Carter looked neither surprised nor unsurprised. He seemed lost in his own private hell.
“Serves you right!” Justin burst out. “You bit Fiona against her will. You left her to freeze to death!”
