Kyle bit down as hard as his jaws allowed, clawing as he did so.
And still biting down, he shifted back to wordside. Well, at least he didn’t have to worry about being tangled up in clothes, which usually happened when he shifted on the fly.
Being human made the blood taste even worse, but also gave him a much bigger jaw.
He bit for all he was worth, kneeing the guy’s groin at the same time.
Gristle and cartilage gave. Kyle’s mouth flooded with blood. The man underneath him roared, rolled over so Kyle was under him. Blood poured onto Kyle’s face. Sanity returned with a painful thump that bore a suspicious resemblance to the injured man pounding Kyle’s head against the floor.
Had Meaghan and Deck taken the opportunity to escape during the distraction? Were they safe?
Kyle didn’t want to die with his head smashed in on a tile floor hundreds of miles from the ocean, but if his partners were safe, he’d go to the Otherside content enough.
Only they weren’t safe. They were flinging spells at the big agent.
Who unfortunately either had some resistance to magic or was just too stupid to know when to give up. He was soaking wet, shivering and sporting the cracked lips of dehydration, but none of it was slowing him down much.
The agent was freakishly strong or made that way by pain and terror. And freakishly fast too. Kyle shifted, but before he could squirm away, hands closed around his neck.
He squirmed, twisted, but the world was already going dark. If the agent actually knew how to break a neck, he’d be dead already, but the guy must have missed the training on how to dispatch lithe, weasel-like mammals while bleeding profusely.
Which meant Kyle was strangling slowly instead of dying quickly. Not necessarily an improvement, but at least it might give him time to…
Escape?
Electricity jolted through him like sticking a fork in a light socket. The agent’s grip loosened and Kyle narrowly avoided being crushed as that big body went slack. Dizzy, Kyle started to burrow his way out. His shoulder hurt even in otter form. His head spun.
But he was alive.
And the agent was curled up in a bloody ball, whimpering. His hair, damp though it was, was singed.
Otterside Kyle was content. His raft, for the moment, was safe, and predators that tried to attack his raft were dead or incapacitated.
Humanside Kyle wanted to vomit, see if that sour taste would wipe away the copper reek of blood. But instead he joined the others in running.
They’d come this far. Might as well see if they could rescue anyone else.
Someone was following them, which was hardly a surprise. Deck was about to say something when Meaghan, who had been following along a wall, grasped at the nearest doorknob. It opened easily; Deck figured he must have fried all the locks with his magic. “In here,” she hissed as she entered.
They closed the door just before the pursuers rounded the corner.
Deck blinked, his brain working slowly through a haze of magical exhaustion, and said, “Someone’s in here.”
It looked like a hospital room, but more like one in a rehab center or nursing home, where the patient had been staying for a long time and would be staying for some time to come. Plants. Books. A framed photograph of Yellowstone over the bed. It could pass for a bedroom in a small, rather bleak apartment, except for the institutional smell, the institutional lighting, institutional furniture augmented with a few homier pieces. A dim night-light cast a yellowish glare that helped Deck’s witch-sight and regular sight alike to pick up details.
The man who’d sprung upright in the bed when they barged in looked ordinary enough, a middle-aged black man on the stocky side with a gentle, round face. Deck’s witch-sight, though, prompted him to yell, “Shields up!” and yank Kyle close enough to extend his shields over the dual as best he could.
He looked like a teddy bear of a guy, Deck thought, the favorite uncle who helped nieces and nephews get into wholesome mischief, the good-natured coworker who picked up coffee for everyone on the team. Except for his aura, a snarled mess of sorcerous fuschia and healer’s rose, tinged with steel gray and a virulent yellow that Deck had never seen before. Deck braced for the worst, not knowing what “the worst” might be.
The man held out his hands toward Meaghan, palms facing up. Without hesitation, Deck jumped in front of her, hoping his stronger mirror shields would deflect whatever was about to happen. He wasn’t surprised when Kyle ended up in front of both of them.
“If we live through this, you are so getting spanked,” he whispered as he shoved the otter behind him.
To Deck’s astonishment, the man in the bed smiled. As he did, his messy, scary aura warmed, shading more toward rose and the pleasant light purple of a well-balanced sorcerer, less gray and yellow, less of the vivid fuchsia that marked a sorcerer about to fuck you up.
“I’m glad to see Meaghan has friends,” the older man said. His voice, tinged with a slight Tidewater accent, was deep and pleasant. Soothing, Deck thought, but it was a natural thing, not a sorcerous effect to roll their minds.
“Garrett?” Meaghan leaned forward, her lovely face etched with pain. Deck and Kyle worked together to push her back.
“You’re with them willingly, sweetie? I won’t hurt you boys if you’re here to spring Meaghan,” the man called Garrett whispered. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Kyle’s head perked up. He sniffed the air, his face curious, the otterside obvious inside the humanlike body pressed against Deck’s. Everything went very still. “He’s telling the truth,” the otter confirmed after a time that might have been seconds or hours. “Thinks he is, anyway.”
“I can help you.” The man Meaghan called Garrett was whispering, barely audible.
Meaghan stiffened. Her aura darkened with a mixture of confusion and fury. “Why should we trust you? You work for the Agency.”
Garrett pointed toward a machine by his bedside. It looked enough like an ordinary medical monitor that it hadn’t really registered with Deck, but when Kyle looked at it, he cocked his head to the side and stared as if he’d never seen anything like it before.
And since the medical student/EMT thought it looked funny, Deck peered at it through his witch-sight.
“He’s hooked up to some kind of monitor,” he whispered for Meaghan’s benefit. “More magically enhanced electronics that need to be destroyed. Santa got my letter.”
Deck, as delicately as he could, reached for the lightning inside him, for the memory of a storm on the beach and Kyle underneath him, convulsing around him, and electricity and red magic snapping in the air.
Something rumbled in the distance, but Deck doubted anyone but he could hear it because it was a storm that existed in the wild places of his mind.
He took three cautious steps closer to the device.
Not to touch it. If it was monitoring magic, that would send through one last jolt of power that, to anyone watching the results, would clearly not be Garrett’s.
He sent the energy not into the machine itself, but into its cord and to the outlet into which it was plugged. Sure, there was a surge protector, but those could only handle so much.
The device’s screen went black and the flashing lights went out.
All but two.
Damn, backup power.
Another surge and the thing died altogether.
With any luck, it would take awhile for anyone to notice since it was the middle of the night. Then again, they were already looking for intruders, so it might not buy much time.
He repositioned himself in front of Meaghan again. “Talk, and talk fast,” Deck barked. Something in him wanted to like Garrett, but Meaghan knew him. Meaghan said he was an agent. He couldn’t be trusted.
Which didn’t explain why he was in a room that was obviously meant to lock from the outside.
> Or why Kyle said Garrett smelled honest when he said he wanted to help them.
“Meaghan’s right,” Garrett said. “I do work here, though not by choice. There are Differents who are too useful to destroy, but too dangerous to reintegrate into society. We end up working for the Agency whether we want to or not. I’m one of them.”
“Are you an experimental subject, a prisoner?” The question came from Kyle. It could have sounded compassionate, but Kyle’s voice was cold.
“I was. They found other uses for me over the years.”
“Like winning my trust. I thought you were my friend!”
Garrett blinked, and Deck could have sworn he was crying. “I am, as best as I can be. The best I know how. I’m a monster, Meaghan. But I’m a monster who knows I’m a monster. Not like some of them.”
“Not like Shaw, you mean.” Meaghan’s voice dashed over Deck like a cold wave. He could only imagine how it was for Garrett. “But you still do what they say.”
“I can kill people with a touch. I can lock down other people’s magic. And when the Agency found me, I didn’t have any control over either power. I was an ER nurse. One night the police brought in a suspected serial killer who’d been shot resisting arrest. He wasn’t hurt badly, and there were reasons to keep him alive. Bodies to locate. Closure for families. A possible accomplice to track down. I had my job to do, but that time I really didn’t want to. Not when there were other patients waiting, children and old people in pain, and this guy didn’t deserve life. But I went to do my job—and he died under my hands. The doctor figured it was some freak thing they’d find during the autopsy. But the next day the Agency showed up at my door.
“I shut the magic users down without knowing how I did that, either. Hard. One of them was in a coma for days afterward because I broke things in her head. But someone had a tranq gun. When I woke up, they explained to me that I was both a witch and a sorcerer, which is weird since witch magic is innate and sorcery is mostly a matter of will and training, and it’s rare to have both. Neither form of magic was under my control and they weren’t playing well together. They understood acting in self-defense, and they understood subconsciously wanting to bring justice to a killer, but I had to get my magic under control and they could help me. It took awhile for me to figure out I’d been arrested, that they were studying me. But they were right I was dangerous. I kept hurting people accidentally.”
“Until they got you doing it deliberately.” Deck was guessing, but it seemed like a reasonable guess.
“They said if I worked for them I’d be allowed freedom to come and go as long as I remained stable. After a couple of years of imprisonment, I couldn’t resist. When they needed a nurse who could also monitor the magic locks on Meaghan, I figured I might actually be able to do some good. Take care of a sick child, ease her pain, like a nurse is supposed to do. Better that than shutting down magic the Agency couldn’t control, or euthanizing subjects they’d broken too badly.” He paused, drew a deep, sobbing breath. “I thought you were dying, in the end. All I could give you was a chance to die on your own terms.”
“You thought I was dying.”
He shook his head. “You were, but not from the neurological disorder. From being magic locked for too long on top of already having a medical problem.”
“Deck and I are going to ask you more about that,” Kyle slid in, “later, once we’re safe. How can we get out of here with the least risk of being killed in awful ways? Since we just found out Meaghan’s not dying, we have even more incentive to get out of here alive.”
When Garrett moved, Deck jumped forward, poised with a spell—or, failing that, a right hook. But the older man simply got out of bed. He was wearing worn green-plaid pajamas that reinforced his look of a kindly uncle. “I’m on lockdown right now—I was angry, which makes my magic unstable, and since I was angry at the Agency, the higher-ups were concerned—but most of the staff doesn’t know that. They think of me as an agent, not a subject. They know I’ve worked closely with Meaghan. If anyone asks, I caught you trying to break one of our subjects loose. When I realized one of you was a Donovan, I thought it would be a bad idea to just make you disappear, so I magic locked you and was bringing you to the director. You are a Donovan, aren’t you?”
“How do we know you won’t do that anyway?” Deck asked instead of confirming. He supposed anyone who worked for the Agency would recognize the magical signatures of any of the major witch lines, even in their funkier forms.
Kyle stepped closer. Rather than just sniffing the air, he sniffed Garrett more directly. Garrett looked distinctly miserable. “Still telling the truth as far as he knows it. Still might be crazy.”
“I believe you,” Meaghan said. “I have no reason to believe you, but all those years, you and Becky were the only people who cared about me.”
“Becky’s brother is telekinetic, which is almost unheard of for a human. The Agency found out and took him, thinking he might be useful as some kind of weapon. Becky tried to intervene. When they caught her, she was given two choices and the other was worse than working here. All those books she reads help her to feel like she’s free, but she’s not, no more than I am, even if she can go off-site at night.” Garrett was dressing as they talked, white short-sleeved shirt and navy pants like a business man, but a scrub shirt over the other shirt. “You can help her and the kid brother, right? You Donovans.”
“Of course,” Deck said, though at this point he had no idea how. Then he did. “I’ll need files. Proof of what’s going on here. My father and Elissa’s are still connected.”
“Flash drive in a safe deposit box in Eureka. It’s not everything, but it’s enough, combined with what’s up here.” Garrett tapped the side of his skull. “After I let Meaghan go, I figured I might be in danger, so I took precautions. Not for my safety, but to get the information out. There are innocent people stuck here. Kids. And I know they’ll make another try for the Donovan baby as soon as they figure out how.”
Before they headed out the door, Garrett grabbed a set of scrubs and handed them to Kyle. “Put some clothes on, kid. I’m guessing you’re a dual and don’t give a damn your cock’s flapping in the breeze, but it’s making me nervous.”
Despite everything, they all laughed.
Because it was better than screaming, which was the other alternative.
To survive, they had to rely on one of the enemy staying a turncoat to the organization that had given him a sense of purpose when his world went mad.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The handcuffs were an unpleasant, though logical, surprise. Garrett might have some seriously weird magic—Kyle had to take the witchy types’ word for that—but he was a middle-aged, chunky guy who moved like he had a touch of arthritis. Even if he had mad martial arts skills, they were rusty. Kyle and Deck could overpower him and if they really were captured, would certainly try.
Hence handcuffs.
At least the psytech in them wasn’t activated. He could still shift, which would get him free in 1.2 seconds.
Hopefully that would be enough time if it became necessary.
After all the skulking around, they were moving openly now, if awkwardly. At the slightest hint of noise, Garrett grabbed Kyle’s cuffed hands and began to frog-march him. Deck supported Meaghan; they’d both been instructed to act sedated. Since Deck was also cuffed, it wasn’t graceful, and it was definitely slow.
But the first group of agents they encountered seemed to buy Garrett’s story of finding the intruders everyone was looking for and neutralizing them.
Bought it all too well, in fact. “Should have called for backup, Mr. Clark,” a burly uniformed man said. “You could have been hurt.”
Garrett laughed scornfully. He sounded different, Kyle thought. Harder. More like he’d expect a senior agent to sound. And he smelled of lies, though lies mixed with just enough truth to be co
nvincing. “You know what I can do, Mack. And it wasn’t like I was in danger. This moron’s an otter dual. What’s he going to do, cute me to death? And the blond kid’s a Donovan, a gooood witch”—his voice dripped scorn and he stank of lies and what Kyle thought might be envy—“so as soon as he realized he was caught, he surrendered in hopes he could keep his friends safe.”
“The good thing about idiot liberals is they don’t fight back real well. But let me and José take the guys just in case. The big guy could do some damage if he comes around feeling less cooperative.”
Kyle supposed the only way Garrett could keep his cover was to let the bruiser Mack take charge of Deck. At least José, who took charge of him, wasn’t quite so huge. Which didn’t help much, since the guy was armed and Kyle was not only unarmed but handcuffed.
Not to mention that Kyle sensed something strange about José, a flicker of something not human, but no longer dual either. He couldn’t tell if Mack was also something unknown, but he moved like his human-looking body didn’t fit quite right.
Like the guy they’d encountered in the hallway, the one whose blood tasted alien.
Hadn’t Shaw and his people been trying to mutate duals into supersoldiers? These guys didn’t seem particularly super, but they might be prototypes, usable mistakes.
Lovely.
The Agency guards kept them moving at a brisk pace, chatting about baseball, beer and plans for the weekend like there was nothing odd about the situation.
Which, from their point of view, there probably wasn’t. All in a day’s work. Apparently they hadn’t heard about the mess in the stairwell yet.
Instead of endless stairs, though, this time they all squeezed into an elevator. José made sure to jostle Kyle’s injured shoulder against the door as he shoved him in.
As if being a handcuffed captive of a heavily armed mutant frat boy wasn’t bad enough, he was now about to endure every dual’s favorite part of the human world: the dreaded rising-and-falling metal box. Small-animal duals like Kyle endured elevators better than their larger cousins: Kyle didn’t even want to think what Jude might do in an elevator.
Witches' Waves Page 26
