by Kim Harrison
“Get the bug,” I heard the blond woman say matter-of-factly, and her lab coat came and went before my eyes. “Damn it, get the bug before he scratches my fucking eyes out, Jennifer!” she said again, louder.
Jennifer? That crazy woman in the chair was named Jennifer?
“Sons of bitches!” Jenks shrilled. “You friggin’ sons of bitches!”
I had no magic. I was down. Despite all my preparations, I was helpless. Wayde was right. Trent was right. I was wrong, and now I was going to pay dearly for it. The blonde held my hands behind my back, and the familiar feeling of plastic went around my wrists. “Stop,” I gasped as my air finally came back, and my fingers cramped when the strip was tightened too far.
The smell of propellant hissed into the air. Jenks hit the ground, struggling to run so they wouldn’t step on him. His wings were glued shut. Oh God. Run, Jenks!
A car was coming from the distant parking lot, its headlights shining on me. Hope leapt in me. They’d heard the noise and were coming. “Over here!” I shouted, then grunted when Jennifer kicked me again. I squinted as the car pulled up to the warehouse door, its tires screeching. But my hope vanished when the window was rolled down and the man who’d run out with the woman who’d been in the cage shouted for the women to get in. Oh God. I was in trouble. From the trunk, thumps and screaming sounded.
Bobbing flashlights were coming closer from deep within the warehouse, and I frantically kicked out, fighting. If I could keep from being put in that car, I’d be okay. “Over here!” I shouted, squirming. “We’re over here!”
In the glow of the headlights, the blond woman stood confidently, her fingers moving in a charm I recognized. Panic filled me. “Down! Everyone get down!” I shouted, but it was too late, and with a victorious glint in her eyes in the bright light from the car’s headlights, the woman clapped her hands.
“Dilatare!” she shouted, and I cowered as a boom of sound pushed from her. The officers cried out and the lights fell and rolled as the force hit them. My eyes clamped shut, and my ears began to ring.
“That should do it,” the woman said in satisfaction, her voice muffled to my spell-stunned ears; then she turned to me. “This is for hitting Jennifer,” the blond woman said, her foot pulling back.
Her boot met my head, and I felt myself move, my body sliding across the cement a few inches. My head felt like it was exploding, and my breath eased from me in a soft sigh. A pair of masculine arms went under my arms, shortly followed by the pinch of being lifted and half dragged to the running car. I barely recognized the wonderful smell of fine leather car upholstery as my face hit it, and then the car light went off as the doors thumped shut.
“Suck it up, Gerald! I’m not going to sit in the back with that animal!” the woman said. “Drive!”
The engine thrummed, and my eyes shut, and I felt unconsciousness, creeping out from the pain, take me. But before I passed out completely, I had one last thought.
Five cots. But we had seen only four captors.
Chapter Thirteen
My forehead was pressed into something small and cold, and it hurt. My outstretched arm was tingling, as if something was wrapped tight around my biceps. The floor was equally cold and hard, and it smelled like bleach-washed stone. I could hear a series of soft noises that could only be described as a shuffling clatter. Behind that was a soft weeping.
A woman’s high-pitched voice said, “Hurry up, will you? I’ve almost got this thing calibrated,” and my eyes flashed open.
I was on the floor with my arm stretched through a narrow gap in the mesh of a cage, my head pressed into the wires. A syringe was stuck in me, and Jennifer was reaching to undo the tourniquet. Her eyes opened wide when they met mine, and her little mouth dropped into an O.
“Hey!” I shouted, painfully yanking my arm back through the mesh and sitting up. Jennifer’s grip slipped from my wrist, but her hold on the syringe was tighter, and it pulled out of me, leaving a long, throbbing scratch.
Jennifer fell back on her butt, her round, baby-doll face showing fear. In a corner, a man in overalls, on his hands and knees, glanced up from wiring a TV monitor to a panel, then went back to work. I recognized him as the man who had been driving the car. The woman from the cage was in here with me, and she hid her face and sobbed, scrunching deeper into her corner.
“Holy shit!” Jennifer breathed, looking behind her to the blond woman in the lab coat. “You see that?” she said, scooting back to stand up. “You see how fast the chubi came to?”
“Maybe I should’ve kicked her harder,” the blonde said, then turned back to the tabletop machine she was fiddling with.
“You call me that one more time, Jennifer, and I’m going to choke you in your sleep,” I said, unwinding the tourniquet and dropping it beside me. “You’re not getting any of my blood. Got it?” Oh my God. I was stuck in a cage who knew where? At least Jenks was okay.
Jennifer went white. “She . . . she knows my name!” she said, her face ashen and her grip on the syringe going white-knuckled. “How do you know my name?” she shouted, totally freaking out. “He was right! You’re a demon!”
The woman trapped with me sobbed harder, her hands now over her head as if I were going to beat her. Yeah, that was a laugh. I was just as scared as she was. Where in the hell was I? It looked like one of those basement lockups they use to keep expensive equipment from wandering away, the painted mesh going from ceiling to floor on three sides, the fourth being the basement wall made of mortared stone.
My head hurt, and I rubbed at the new hole in my arm and scooted back. The cage wasn’t very big. Maybe ten by eight, and just under six feet tall. We were definitely in a basement, one being used for storage by the amount of clutter stacked at the edges—no windows, low ceiling, thick stone walls by the absence of any other sound. The floor was old cement, and I could see a faint light from a bare bulb in the distance past the clutter. The light here was from floor lamps that looked like they belonged in the ’50s.
“Chris! The witch knows my name!” Jennifer babbled, her pretty little size 6 shoes backing up on the poured cement floor.
Chris turned from the machine she was working with, her expression cross, as if things were clearly not going well in calibration land. “Will you shut up!” she said harshly, the scratches Jenks had given her looking red and sore. “She probably heard it before she woke up, the same way you just told her mine, you idiot!”
Jennifer caught back her fear, her dark eyes squinting in anger from under her long eyelashes. “Fool,” Chris muttered, jotting down a number before fiddling with a dial and dropping a vial of clear liquid into the machine’s hopper and pushing a big black button.
The machine started humming, and Chris turned, stretching for a metal folding chair. Snapping it open, she sat in it, her back to me as she waited for the machine to cycle through. The man at the monitors grunted happily. Getting off the floor, he flicked a switch. One of the monitors blossomed to life to show a narrow empty stairway, a bare bulb with its paint worn away from the tread. Satisfied, he began working with another camera.
Jennifer hesitated, then sneered and flipped me off as if it was my fault. I didn’t get this. Chris was clearly the power-hungry bitch, but what was the gutter-mouthed china doll doing here? She’d been freaky scary when we caught her, but fringe organizations promoting species eradication usually didn’t mesh with women named Jennifer who had rhinestones on their shoes.
“I got enough to run a sample,” Jennifer said, setting the syringe beside Chris. “When we need more, I’ll just dart her.”
Like an animal? Not good. Not good at all. This wasn’t the first time I’d been locked up: Alcatraz, demon jail, Trent’s ferret cage, a hospital bed. If I could escape that one twenty years ago, then this one was only a matter of time. But as I looked over the bleak surroundings, warm and damp, I wondered. This was bad. Really bad.
“I’m Rachel,” I said to the lump in the corner.
“Winona,�
� the woman said, lifting her head from her seated fetal position just enough to see me. Her brown eyes were terrified. “Don’t touch me. Please.”
She sounded frantic, and I stopped moving closer. Her tasteful pair of slacks and a blouse were wrinkled by several days’ use, but expensive. Her low heels were functional. She was an office professional by the looks of it. Someone who would be missed right away. Either they were confident no one would find us, or she had something they needed that was worth the risk.
My head hurt, and I felt it carefully and found three sore spots. I only remembered being kicked hard enough to hurt once. My gut hurt, too, and I lifted my shirt and saw an ugly bruise just shy of my kidneys. A little higher, and Chris would have cracked a rib. Bitch. I reached to push my hair out of my eyes, finding someone had tied a knot it in. My face screwed up in anger as I realized it was a HAPA knot. Real funny.
My band of charmed silver slipped down as I worked the knot free, and my anger grew. I supposed I could break my hand and slip it off—and fry my brain in the process. I was a day late and a dollar short in talking to Trent.
Winona was crying, her brown hair falling over her drawn-up knees, and after I got rid of the knot, I inched closer. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Why do they want us?” she quavered.
The answer wouldn’t make her feel any better. “I don’t know,” I lied.
In the corner outside our cage were five rolled-up sleeping bags and several bags from a chain grocery store. Two locked army green boxes were stacked near them. There was no kitchen, but a beaker of soup was warming up on a Bunsen burner on a makeshift counter. My stomach growled, and I took that as a good sign. It was obvious they hadn’t been here long, but it was equally obvious that much of it had been waiting for them.
Someone likes to plan, I thought, and I rubbed my head.
The tabletop machine made a clattering of noise and spit out a small strip of curling paper. Chris tore it off and looked at it. “Spectrometer is good to go,” she said, popping open the little drawer and tossing in the empty vial. “Where’s her sample?”
“Here.” Jennifer took the needle off and handed her the end of the syringe with my blood in it. “Be careful.”
Chris’s eyebrows were mockingly high. She looked from the blood to me before turning her back on me. “I don’t think she’s really a demon, charmed silver or not.”
Jennifer leaned back against the card-table counter, crossing her ankles and trying to look nonchalant. “Me neither,” she said, her flippant voice giving her lie away. “We caught her easy enough. She didn’t do one demonic thing.”
My eyes narrowed and I leaned forward, curving my fingers through the mesh. “Let me out, we’ll see how demonic I can be.”
Ignoring my threat, Chris popped another vial into the machine and hit the button. “I think it more likely that Captain America is wrong about her.”
“What about the coven?” Jennifer’s shoulders stiffened. “They called her one. They put that on her.”
She was looking at my bracelet, and I sneered at her pretty little face, wanting to smash it.
“Propaganda,” Chris said simply, busy with the machine.
“Yes, but he was right about us needing to move.” Bending down with her hands on her knees, Jennifer looked at Winona as if she was an animal in a zoo, interesting but easily forgotten.
Chris grimaced. “I think he was the one who gave us away,” she muttered as she went back to her work.
Jennifer stood. “Maybe we shouldn’t have strung that guy up in the park. They weren’t looking so hard for us before that.”
“If we hadn’t, Morgan would never have become involved,” Chris said, preoccupied.
The man at the monitors, almost forgotten, made a noise of disagreement. “Eloy didn’t give us away,” he almost growled, his thick fingers manipulating one of the cameras. “Staying was a bad decision. Your bad decision, Chris. I’m not so convinced taking her was a good idea, either.” He glanced at me. “Even if she’s not a demon, she’s too violent and we’re not set up to hold two people.”
Chris never moved, focused on the machine. “I didn’t ask for your opinion, Gerald.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, deepening his few wrinkles as he scowled. “That putrid clot in the suit killed Kenny.”
Taking a deep breath, Chris turned, spinning smoothly on the metal chair. Her expression was mocking, and her hair was starting to float. She was tapping a line. Jennifer flicked her attention between them, clearly nervous. “Don’t you have more cameras to install?” the distasteful woman said harshly.
In a noisy motion, the man stood, his cameras tucked in the crook of his elbow as he stiffly walked toward the edge of the clutter. “You are a cold, unfeeling bitch.” I heard him hit something out of my sight with a grunt, and Chris smiled.
Looking smug, she spun back to the machine. “I don’t think Morgan’s blood is going to be any different from any other corrs we’ve taken,” she said, and I became more uneasy. They knew my name. They knew the coven had labeled me a demon. I’d thought that I could ride this wild horse, but it was running away with me and I couldn’t get the bit out from between its teeth.
The machine whined harshly and spit out another curling bit of paper. Jennifer grabbed for it, taking a step back out of Chris’s reach. Her eyes widened, and an awestruck “Dudes!” slipped past her lips.
“Give it to me,” Chris snapped, lurching to her feet to take it. Frowning, she dropped back into her chair, sitting sideways so that she only had to turn her head to see me. I could tell it was bad news for me by the way Jennifer was shifting from foot to foot.
“Look at her Rosewood levels,” the younger woman said, pointing down over Chris’s shoulder. “My God! She should be dead!”
Exhaling, Chris handed the strip to Jennifer. “I’ve never seen such a narrow spike. Hold off on pasting it in the data book. I’m going to run it again.”
But Jennifer had already pulled a worn theme book from a cardboard box and was leafing through it. I recognized it as one of the books Chris had saved from the industrial park, and I was wondering about their backgrounds when Jennifer taped the strip in, then signed and dated it.
Her brow furrowed, Jennifer studied the page. I could see about eight strips pasted in. Eight people, six of whom were probably dead. Her careful data taking was going to land her in jail for murder. “You should be dead,” Jennifer said when she looked up.
“That makes two of us,” I snarled, and Chris chuckled as she popped in a new vial and hit the go button.
“A Rosewood spike doesn’t mean she is a demon.” Chris stood and stretched, going to stir the soup with a glass rod. “It means she’s a freak of nature.”
“But it’s the increased level of the Rosewood enzyme that’s killing them,” Jennifer said, her finger on my printout. “Not necessarily the transformations themselves. She should be dead with what she has. Clearly she’s got something, maybe another antigen, that’s counteracting the first, allowing her to survive. If we can find out what it is, then we can keep them all alive—”
“Why?” Chris interrupted her. “We’re not a hotel.”
“No, you’re a butcher,” I said, ignored, and Winona trembled in the corner. “Oh, crap, I’m sorry,” I whispered, and she drew back from me.
“Keeping them alive isn’t the goal,” Chris said, making me angrier yet. “Getting closer to the ideal is. As far as I’m concerned, the shortened life expectancy is a boon. What would we do with them otherwise? Stack them up like wood?”
My God, this woman was unbelievable.
Jennifer dropped her eyes, looking uneasy as she leaned against the counter and hugged herself. Clearly she had some smarts if she was spouting off about antigens. Maybe I could work on her guilt and convince her to let us go.
The machine spit out another strip of paper, and after Chris read it, she set it on fire using the Bunsen burner. “I have a better way to find out if she’s a demo
n or not,” she said, watching the paper go up with a weird green flame from the ink.
“What?”
Jennifer’s voice sounded scared. Hell, I knew I was, and I scooted forward to the front of the cage, getting into the light. “Yeah, what?” I said boldly, but I wasn’t. They had at least three drops of my blood left in that syringe.
Chris sauntered to me, crouching until the hem of her lab coat brushed the dirty floor. It was demeaning, being looked at like that, and I stiffly got to my feet, trying to hide where I hurt.
“The coven put charmed silver on her,” Chris said as she rose as well, her eyes going to my wrist. “She can’t do ley-line magic, but her blood is still good. I’m going to try one of those curses again—using her blood to invoke it.”
Oh. Shit.
I looked at Winona, my thoughts zinging back to that monstrosity of a broken body found in the basement of the Underground Railroad Museum. That had been done with witch blood. Using mine might have even worse consequences. “Don’t do this,” I said, retreating from the wire mesh. “Please.”
Seeing my fear, Chris smiled. “If it works properly, then Morgan is a demon and we have a good source of blood to pattern the synthetic stuff on.”
“Don’t do this!” I said, then jumped when Chris smacked the cage and Winona cried out.
“And if it doesn’t work,” the woman continued as she held the syringe with my blood in it up to the light to estimate how much was left, “we can use Morgan to shift the tolerance for the Rosewood antigens forward that much more.” Chris set the syringe aside and smiled. “Like every other chubi we’ve had.”
I pressed into the fieldstone wall, fingering my band of silver. This was bad. Really bad.
“Um,” Jennifer said, shifting nervously as she slid from the table. “He said not to do anything until he gets back.”
“The hell with him.” Motions stiff, Chris strode to a cardboard box and began digging through it. “I’m not going to sit on my ass and wait. I’m the one doing the science, not him. If she’s a demon, I want to know. Where’s that damned book? The one with no title?”
