But he’d given me something to work with. Maybe. I wasn’t sure why, but I’d take the sliver of a chance.
“It’s finished,” Holdrun said, keeping my gaze a few seconds longer before he turned and stepped off the stool. “Have at him, then.”
Cavanaugh didn’t seem to notice that the dwarf had undone the last rune. “Oh, I will,” he said. “Please vacate my lab now, if you don’t mind. You stink of sulfur.”
Apparently, Holdrun was out of angry comebacks. He walked to the door, opened it and left, closing it almost gently.
And the pain of my immediate future surged into the room behind him.
Chapter 24
I kept my mouth shut for the moment and watched Cavanaugh drag a bunch of things in front of me from various places around the lab. A crash cart loaded with vials and black fabric cases and sharp objects, a machine with a pair of electrodes dangling from it that looked like it belonged next to a hospital bed. A plain wooden chair that he set up facing me, empty.
“For me?” I finally said. “Thanks. I wouldn’t mind taking a load off. Got a cold beer around here somewhere?”
Cavanaugh didn’t rise to the bait. “We’re just going to run a few preliminary, exhaustive batteries of tests on you for now, until he’s ready to see you,” he said, completely ignoring me. “Then we’ll go ahead and experiment with whatever’s left when he’s done.”
I tried to grin, but my face wouldn’t cooperate. “Only a few?”
“Oh, and don’t bother holding out hope that your friends will come and save you,” he said. “They’re dead.”
My heart attempted to shut down. “Bullshit. That’s not going to work on me.”
“Believe me or not,” he said with a shrug. “I really don’t care, Mr. Black.”
The part of me that wanted to rage at him remained locked behind a wall of horrified despair. The fact that he didn’t care if I believed it spoke volumes, more than any insistence or gruesome, taunting descriptions of how they’d died ever could. This simple, neutral dismissal was a lot more convincing. And hell, maybe he knew that.
Or maybe he was telling the truth.
I couldn’t let myself think that way, so I reverted to my default setting. “Anyway. About that cold beer,” I said. “Could I get some pretzels to go with it?”
“You won’t get a rise out of me, Mr. Black.” Cavanaugh smiled for the first time since he’d entered the room. “Monologuing is for fools and amateurs. I happen to be a genius.”
Okay, so I was probably in a lot of trouble here.
Cavanaugh walked up to me, grabbed an arm, and pulled — or tried to, anyway. It didn’t move, but the skin around the runes actually dimpled like there were wires wrapped around me. And of course, it hurt like hell. “That dwarf,” he said, shaking his head. “You’d think a Fae killed his dog or something.”
I didn’t really want to think about the many ways Holdrun had taught these assholes to hurt us.
“Well, let’s get started.” Cavanaugh moved to the crash cart. He picked up one of the fabric cases, unzipped it and selected a syringe, then set the case down and plucked a vial of familiar, translucent purple liquid from a field of small glass bottles.
“Mandrake oil,” I said, fighting to keep the catch from my voice. “My favorite.”
“It has to be just the right amount. Factoring in your weight, the genetic mix, and —” he turned his head back, looked me up and down. “— blood loss, we’ll put the initial dose at three CCs.”
I managed not to react at the words ‘initial dose.’
When he’d measured his perfect amount, he jabbed the needle in just above my collarbone and flicked the plunger down. The agonizing effect of the poison took hold instantly. Everything became louder and brighter, every rune carving throbbed like gunshot wounds. The deep slash in my side was a vortex of agony, and my entire back side was in flames against the cold iron.
“Refreshing,” I gritted through my teeth, once I could finally draw a breath through the pain.
But Cavanaugh wasn’t even looking at me. He’d taken a CB unit off his belt and moved a few paces away. Now he held it near his mouth and depressed the talk button. “Breckenridge, come to the lab. It’s time,” he said into it.
There was a click, and then a two-tone beep. “On the way,” a male voice said.
I decided not to ask what it was time for.
While we waited for Breckenridge, whoever that was, I tried to look around as much as I could through my watering eyes and glaring, mandrake-enhanced vision. There was my stuff in the box on the counter. Probably useless, even if I could get to it. Against the wall next to the counter was something that looked like a police floodlight, a bat signal without the cutout bat. Also useless. The crash cart, loaded with sharp instruments and much closer, yet so far away. I could maybe reach it with my foot — if I could lift my leg. Which I couldn’t. And there was Cavanaugh, armed. But even if I got him close enough to grab with my teeth or something, I’d never be able to reach his guns with a hand that only went about three inches in any direction.
If I got the opportunity, though, I’d damned well bite him anyway.
The door eventually opened, and in came who I assumed was Breckenridge. Big, muscle-bound meathead type stuffed into a soldier’s uniform. He was probably here to beat the shit out of me. With the mandrake coursing through my blood and the inability to move and cushion the blows in any way, it was going to be excruciating.
But instead of battering me with his barrel-sized fists, Breckenridge calmly took a seat in the wooden chair across from me.
“The others are outside?” Cavanaugh said as he wheeled the hospital-contraption thing behind the man in the chair and fixed the electrodes to his temples.
Breckenridge nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“All right. You remember what to do?”
“Yes, sir.”
I didn’t like this. At all.
I liked it even less when Cavanaugh drew one of his guns and shot the soldier in the forehead.
Breckenridge slumped forward, dead. He hadn’t even blinked.
“Well, go on.” Cavanaugh looked at me and gestured to the soldier he’d just executed without a word of complaint. “Talk to the dead man.”
I was too horrified to speak my protest, so I shook my head.
“You’re not going to do it?” he said.
I stared at the floor so I wouldn’t have to look into Breckenridge’s dead eyes. “Even if I did, you wouldn’t be able to hear him,” I said. “I need magic for that. Without it, he can only talk in my head.”
“Yes, it’s some sort of glamour, isn’t it? The projection you create to mimic the dead.” Cavanaugh reached out and flipped a switch on the monitor, or whatever it was he’d connected the soldier to. The machine’s screen flashed on and showed a glowing green grid. “Use magic, then,” he said.
I glared at him. “I can’t. Cold iron and mandrake, remember?”
“Enough cold iron and mandrake. Just enough, in fact, to prevent you from casting your more powerful spells, but you can still use small ones,” he said. “Your own glamour is still intact, isn’t it?”
Holy shit, he was right. Why the hell didn’t I notice that?
My shock must’ve shown on my face, because Cavanaugh laughed coldly. “Well, we’ve established that you can, in fact, talk to the dead man,” he said. “So do it.”
Like hell I would. I looked at Cavanaugh instead, and said, “Beith na cohdal.”
He did not fall asleep.
What he did was blink and cock his head slightly. “Was that supposed to do something to me?” he said. “You’re only wasting your spark, you know.” He opened the top button of his shirt and spread it apart, showing me part of a line of dark blue tattoos. Dwarvish runes, the same as the ones on Holdrun’s chest that blocked magic. “That little bastard was supposed to give these to all my men, but he never got around to it. Now you’ve killed some of them. But at least they took your fri
ends in return.”
Bile surged into my throat, hot and bitter. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced the thought away. They were not dead.
“Well. If you’re sure you won’t show me your little trick,” Cavanaugh said.
My lip lifted in a sneer. “I’m sure.”
He shrugged, went back to the monitor box and pushed a button. A brief buzz of electricity sounded, and Breckenridge’s body jerked and twitched a few times.
And the dead soldier’s voice sounded in my head, bellowing the lyrics to the Dave Matthews Band’s ‘Ants Marching’ at the top of his lungs.
The pain was utterly consuming. What felt like a gallon of blood burst from my nose, and the taste filled my mouth with bright copper. “Ruaigh,” I gasped, which should have expelled his soul from my head.
It didn’t.
By the time Cavanaugh pushed another button and stopped the awful singing, the blood from various orifices had run to my waist in streaks and splashes. “You could have stopped that by projecting him with a glamour,” he said. “Do you want to try again?”
“Bite me,” I panted.
Cavanaugh pushed the button.
Breckenridge proceeded to shred everything inside my skull. This time he used ‘500 Miles’ from The Proclaimers.
At least I was getting some variety with my torture.
The evil cowboy tried it four times altogether, and then used the walkie to call in two more soldiers, the ‘others’ who’d been waiting outside. Two more chairs, two more electrode machines. Two more bullets into unflinching heads.
Three souls, each of them screaming a different song at rock concert volume.
At some point I passed out again, but it didn’t last long. Cavanaugh brought me back with a bucket of cold water. I could barely make out the shape of him right in front of me — my eyes were bleeding too, and everything came in various shades of red and throbbing black. I was pretty sure I could see sounds and smell colors.
The smudge of Cavanaugh faded into the background, and the sounds of something heavy being pushed across the floor sent blue-white tracks through my field of vision. A switch clicked and everything got fifty shades brighter.
“I hope you didn’t have your heart set on dying.” Cavanaugh’s voice made ugly black splinters in the air. “Once you’ve healed a bit, I suppose we’ll have to start over.”
Healed? I thought, before I realized I could already feel a few pains becoming separate and distinct from the screaming cocoon of agony that was my existence. And I knew what the bat-free signal really was: artificial moonlight. The Pennsylvania facility had used it to force werewolves to turn, so they could put them into lethal pit fights against ‘enhanced’ humans.
This was going to be a very long death.
Chapter 25
The fake moon didn’t work as quickly as I wanted it to, even though it was glaring directly into my face. But it was working. I could feel my extremities again. And I could see Cavanaugh moving around the lab, stopping to fiddle with a piece of equipment here, look through a cabinet of supplies there.
If I didn’t do something soon, I was going to find out exactly how many fun tricks he’d learned from Holdrun.
Speaking of the two-faced dwarf, he’d given me part of a way out of this. The more I healed, the more likely I’d be able to actually do something with that bit of knowledge. If I managed to restore some of my spark before Cavanaugh shot me up with another dose of mandrake, I could call the moonstone to my working hand — provided it was somewhere accessible, like in that box. Then I’d have to cast the spell that made it a sword and try to bend my wrist enough to slice the runes on my arm. It wouldn’t work if I didn’t get all of them from wrist to elbow, at least. And if it did, it’d take a long damned time to destroy the rest of the symbols.
Which meant Cavanaugh would take my toy away, and probably fuck me up on general principle, long before I finished. So that idea was out. And I couldn’t affect him with magic.
But maybe I could affect myself.
The thought that occurred to me was horrifying, but possible. Even likely to work — though I didn’t exactly look forward to trying. It would cost me dearly. Using my spark in this condition was painful by itself, not to mention the additional damage the spell would cause.
Still, a thousand cuts at once would have to go through most of the runes out of sheer probability. I didn’t have too much skin left to cut.
I made myself go limp, as much as possible, and dropped my glamour so Cavanaugh wouldn’t get any ideas about me being healed enough to torture some more just yet. I waited until he crossed the room to head somewhere behind me, and I heard cabinets opening and tools clinking. Then I bent my hand as far as possible, attempting to curl a finger and point it at myself.
“Míilé brihs,” I whispered, hoping Cavanaugh wouldn’t hear me.
The responding magic was fire in my veins. The cuts were worse. I bit my tongue, almost screaming anyway when my teeth encountered a bloody split through the meat of it. There was so much pain that I barely noticed the invisible bonds breaking until my knees sagged, and I damn near slid to the floor.
All but one, anyway. The spell had missed a single rune still glowing on my right wrist. But to compensate, it had left more than one throbbing mark on my manhood.
For a second I almost felt sorry for the guy I’d cast this on in the tunnel.
I clenched my jaw and straightened slowly. Still heard Cavanaugh tinkering with whatever-it-was behind me, so I hoped he’d stay busy for just another minute. The crash cart with the sharp stuff was almost within reach now, but I didn’t want to risk bumping it and making noise. So I used a sharp, unglamoured nail to slice through the last symbol.
Then it was easy to get to the cart. I snagged a scalpel and peered carefully around the standing metal sheet, where Cavanaugh stood with his back to me, assembling something on the counter. It looked pointy and painful.
Too bad he wouldn’t get the chance to use it.
I took a long, shallow breath and started toward him. My bare feet made slaps on the cold tiled floor, but I suspected that was only me hearing it because of the mandrake still in my system. This was not my favorite way to heighten my senses.
I’d gotten to within three feet of him when he froze, and his head came up. “Did you say something, Mr. Black?” he said half under his breath.
Then he turned around, and his smug expression slid into shock and horror. I could actually see him racing to figure out how I’d cancelled the dwarf’s magic.
“Yeah.” I held up the scalpel. “I said monologue this, genius.”
And slit his throat.
He crashed back against the counter and sank down, gurgling and clutching the red river of his life with both hands as it gushed over his fingers and drained away. I stood there watching him die. I felt nothing. But that was probably because I didn’t have any room for emotions with all the pain crowding them out.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
When Cavanaugh stopped twitching and his eyes started to cloud, I tossed the scalpel on his lap and staggered away. Clothes first. I reached the box on the counter and pawed through it, dripping blood all over the fabric, until I found my pendant and slipped it around my neck.
The stone immediately started glowing, as if it sensed the damage and wanted to heal me.
I grabbed the box and carried it crookedly across the room. Might as well multitask. I could get dressed and use the moonlight lamp at the same time. It took me a minute to drag the heavy floodlight so it wasn’t pointed at the cold iron, and then I sat on the floor in front of it and closed my eyes for another minute or so. At least until I had enough strength to put clothes on.
It was going to take more than a dose of fake moon to restore me fully, but I’d take what I could get. Right now, I had other things to worry about — like whether my friends were still alive, and how the hell I was going to find them.
I wasn’t sure how long it took, but I
got dressed, pausing between every item. I gave myself five more minutes with the lamp and reached a state that was most of the way to human-ish before I forced myself to get up. I’d been right that my weapons weren’t in the box. But the dead soldiers had plenty of guns.
So I relieved them of a few, along with a nice pair of combat knives and one of their CBs, and then plodded back over to Cavanaugh’s blood-drenched body. I didn’t take his guns, but I did find a magnet-stripe badge that looked different from the ones we’d taken off the soldiers in the tunnel and helped myself to it.
I was getting ready to force the truth about my friends from his dead ass when I heard the distant sounds of a fight. There was gunfire, shouting, and words that weren’t English followed by a faint but definite surge of magic. Taeral. Relief flooded every inch of me, erasing most of the lingering pain with a magic stronger than any Fae spell.
They were taking the base. And it was time for me to join them.
Chapter 26
I rushed to the door of the lab, expecting to find it locked. It wasn’t. Cavanaugh must’ve been supremely confident in his own genius, to try keeping me in an unlocked room. To be fair, though, I shouldn’t have been able to beat Holdrun’s magic. I was only free because the dwarf had shown me how to do it.
So maybe my bluff about Valhalla had worked after all. Sort of.
The door led to a hallway, and the fighting sounds came from my right. I headed that way and met another corridor. Once again, the gunfire and shouting was to the right, apparently behind a security door at the end of the hall. The volume increased as I got closer, but the frequency of sounds decreased to the occasional pop of a gun and a few words in raised voices.
Someone was winning. I seriously hoped it was us.
There was a magnetic card slot next to the handle. I swiped Cavanaugh’s card, and the click of a releasing lock rewarded me. With a quick prayer to any gods who weren’t Dante that might be listening, I palmed one of the stolen guns and opened the door.
Hand of the God Page 13
