He shook his head and a strand of brown hair fell over his smooth, unlined forehead. “A...government facility. Sometimes they ran tests, but it wasn’t really a lab.”
My gaze fell to his neck. “And they used these collars at that facility?”
“Not at first. But a couple of years ago I woke up wearing one. We all did. They stopped locking the doors and cages, but that didn’t matter, because we couldn’t go anywhere they didn’t want us to be without being paralyzed by pain. Or actually paralyzed.”
I nodded. “There are needles at the back of the collar that stick into your spinal column. They register the production of hormones in your system and trigger either pain or paralyzation to make you do whatever the person with the controller wants. Or stop you from doing whatever they don’t want.”
The man listened, clearly interested in what was evidently new information, but his gaze grew more and more intent as he watched me. He was pressed firmly against the front of the cage now, seemingly unaware of the fact that the wires were digging into his nose, chin and chest. As if he were being drawn to me even more strongly than I was being pulled toward him.
“How did you get out of that facility?” I asked.
“One night, the collars just stopped working. All of them, all at once. Most of us escaped.”
My hand flew up and I gripped the metal mesh, part out of horror, part out of an uncontrollable urge to reach for him. “When was that?” I demanded as a suspicion began to sneak up on me. “When did the collars stop working?”
He shrugged awkwardly with his chest pressed to the front of the cage. “Months ago. Maybe a year. They didn’t give us calendars.”
“What season was it?”
“Um...” He closed his eyes for a second, thinking, but when they opened again, his gaze seemed almost hungry for my face. “Fall. It was starting to get cold at night.”
Understanding crashed over me and I stumbled back a couple of steps, ripping my fingers free from their grip on the cage. Gallagher and I had destroyed the system controlling Vandekamp’s collars in early fall, giving cryptids at the Spectacle free range of the facilities and uninhibited use of their species-specific abilities.
Could the system at this government facility have been run from the control room at the Spectacle? When we’d freed our fellow captives, had we freed this man and his fellow prisoners, as well?
If he was an innocent former prisoner, why did the furiae want him so badly?
“Delilah!” Footsteps pounded into the room at my back, and I turned to see Gallagher in the doorway. “We got Mirela and Lala. Let’s—” He frowned past me at the naked man in the cage. “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know.” I knew nothing about the man, other than that he was one of us, and that Gallagher and I had unwittingly set him free once. Fighting the pull toward the man in the cage, I crossed the room toward Gallagher and lowered my voice. “I don’t know who or what he is, but he’s wearing one of Vandekamp’s collars. I have more questions for him than we can afford to ask here and now. Can you get him out?”
“You want to take him with us?”
“Whatever he is, he can clearly pass for human. He’s no more of a risk than Miri and Lala are. Though—fair warning—you may have to keep me from killing him. The furiae wants him.”
Gallagher’s brows rose in an almost comical display of intense interest. He headed for the cage, aiming a formidable, suspicious look at the man, focusing on his eyes, which were often telling of a cryptid’s species. But this man’s eyes looked perfectly human. “What are you? Some kind of shifter?”
“Of sorts,” the man said. “Get me out and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“You certainly will. Wait right here,” Gallagher said as he disappeared into the hall. As if the man in the cage could simply waltz out on his own, if he wanted.
“How did you wind up here?” I asked the man in the collar as Zyanya wandered into the room.
“Why is he doing that?” Scowling, she waved one hand up the length of the body he still had pressed against the front of the cage.
“That is one of many questions I hope he’ll be able to answer for us,” I told her.
“I think I came here for you.” The man hadn’t even glanced at Zy. “I walked for days before I got caught. I felt this tug.” He pressed one hand to his stomach. “Like there’s a string tied to something inside me, and someone’s pulling on it. I think that’s you.”
I took a step back from the cage, startled by how familiar his description felt. But... “I’m not ‘pulling’ you.” Not intentionally, anyway.
Could the furiae be doing that?
“Stand back.” Gallagher stormed into the room again carrying a large red fire extinguisher. Claudio and Zyanya hovered in the doorway behind him, and beyond them, I was thrilled to see Mirela and Lala, looking thin and exhausted but blessedly whole.
I backed farther away from the cage, and Gallagher slammed the fire extinguisher down on the padlock holding the naked man’s pen closed.
The lock shattered. Bits of it flew all over the room. Gallagher plucked the last curved bit of metal from the cage door, and it swung open. “Let’s go.”
“Here.” Zyanya stepped forward with a white lab coat she’d evidently found in one of the other rooms. “This should work until we can find you some—”
The man stepped out of the cage and headed straight for me. That pull deep in my gut acted like marionette strings on my legs, carrying me toward him through no conscious desire of my own.
“Whoa.” Gallagher lunged between us at the last second, facing the man. My stomach collided with his back. “Don’t go near her. Ever. Or I will—”
My hand shot out around his arm, and clenched around the naked man’s wrist.
“No!” Gallagher shouted as the furiae’s rage poured out of me and into her target.
Gallagher wrenched my hand free, and the naked man reached for his own neck. His eyes widened as his fingers sank into his flesh. Then he ripped his throat out.
Blood sprayed everywhere, but most of it hit Gallagher.
Miri and Lala screamed. Zyanya stared in shock.
Claudio lurched forward and grabbed the dying man by the shoulders, gently lowering him to the ground as his mouth opened and he began to suck at the world, trying to breathe through the fountain of blood his throat had become.
Gallagher guided me back by both arms, heedless of the gore he was covered in. “Are you okay?”
“I’m so sorry!” The room blurred beneath my tears. “I couldn’t help it. I don’t understand what’s happening!”
“We have to get out of here.” Gallagher tossed his hat onto the floor next to the body of the now-deceased nude man, and blood began to run into it. More blood started to roll, drop after drop, down his shirt onto his pants. It beaded on the floor around his shoes and flowed like tiny, gory rivers toward his hat. “Zyanya, get everybody to the van.”
But she only stood there, staring at the body. “What’s happening to his face?”
“What?” Gallagher turned, and I moved to see around his massive arm.
The dead man no longer had brown hair and blue eyes. Now his hair was dark and his eyes were brown and set far apart from each other. His nose was narrow. His forehead smooth and pale.
He looked just like the other two men the furiae had killed through me.
“Glamour?” Zyanya asked, still holding the white lab coat. “Is he fae?”
“He said he was some kind of shifter.” Gallagher bent to grab his hat, though it hadn’t yet absorbed all the blood, and as he placed it on his head, the rivulets of blood on the floor reversed course, flowing toward him on their way to his cap. “That would imply that he’d actually changed his physical form, rather than mentally projecting the image he wanted us to see.”
“
Assuming he was telling the truth,” Zyanya said. “I don’t know of any shifter who can take on another human-looking form.”
“Neither do I.” Gallagher began to corral everyone toward the door. “Much less an entire species whose natural face is that one. That exact face, right there.” He pointed at the dead man. “Because the man Delilah killed last week looked just like that, after he stopped breathing.”
“This makes no sense,” Claudio whispered as we all stepped back into the hall. “They were truly identical?”
I nodded. “They could be mirror...” My mouth snapped shut as I realized what I was saying. What Rommily had said.
The reflection cannot be trusted.
Had she seen something about the identical shifters the furiae was killing?
“Delilah.” Mirela pulled me into an awkward hug, bending toward me over my huge stomach. “It’s so good to see you again. Even under such bizarre circumstances.” Her gaze flicked toward the room where we’d had no choice but to leave yet another corpse of my making.
“And such joyous ones,” Lala added as she took my arm. “No one told us you were pregnant. Who’s the lucky—?”
“Stop right there!”
I gasped at the sudden shout, but before I could find the source, Gallagher was in front of me, pressing me against the wall, the bulge of our child trapped between me and his spine. My pulse rushed in my ears, and the hallway suddenly felt too crowded. Too closed in.
“I’ve called for backup, and they’ll be here any minute.”
I looked around Gallagher’s arm and saw a man in a campus security uniform pointing a pistol at us. His aim shook slightly as he tried to decide who to focus on. Then Eryx pushed Miri and Lala gently behind him, and the cop decided.
He aimed right at the huge minotaur’s chest.
Huddled behind Eryx, Mirela and Lala exchanged an ominous look, and though neither of them had the white-eyed appearance of imminent premonition, they both seemed to...know something. Lala grabbed Miri’s hand in a white-knuckled grip.
The rush of my pulse became a roar.
“If you want to live, put your gun on the ground and step into the room to your left.” Gallagher’s entire body felt tense against mine. He’d gone so still that I couldn’t even feel him breathing, and his voice carried an inhuman thread of warning that set off alarms in my head. “Then close the door. We’ll walk right past you, and everybody gets to go home tonight.”
But the oracles obviously didn’t believe that was going to happen.
“You know I can’t do that. You’re guilty of breaking and entering. Destruction of public property. Theft of school assets,” the security guard said with a pointed glance at Miri from around Eryx’s left arm. “And I’m sure Cryptid Containment will be interested in just who you guys are and where you came from.”
“This is your last chance,” Gallagher growled, and I couldn’t tell whether or not the officer knew he wasn’t bluffing. That he literally couldn’t say anything that wasn’t true.
“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” Claudio added, his hands out in front of him, as if to illustrate that fact. “But we’re leaving this building. Right now.”
Slowly, so as not to spook anyone, the officer reached up for the radio clipped to his shoulder. “Be advised, I’m holding eight cryptids of various species in the genetics lab, at gunpoint. They should be considered both dangerous and aggressive. Send everyone you’ve got.”
“Okay,” Claudio said. “You got us. Everyone, hands up.”
We all complied, because this was clearly an attempt to get the cop to let his guard down. Eryx was the last to raise his hands, and the officer’s gaze followed them seven and a half feet in the air, his eyes widening when he realized just how huge the minotaur truly was. He took up half the width of the hallway on his own.
“Good. Now up against the wall.” The officer made the mistake of gesturing with his gun, and as soon as it was no longer aimed at him, Eryx charged.
Floor tiles shattered beneath his hooves. Breath puffed from his nostrils. The cop fired an instant before Eryx hit him with the power of an entire defensive line. With horns.
Lala screamed. I flinched.
The collision threw the officer back with such force that he dented the wall. Ceiling tiles dropped all around him. He tried to suck in a breath, but could only gasp ineffectually at the air. And when Eryx stepped back, I understood why.
The guard’s chest had been entirely caved in by the minotaur’s shoulder. Completely, visibly crushed. He took one more gasping breath. Then he crumpled to the floor, eyes open but unseeing.
For a moment, no one moved. No one even seemed to be breathing. Then Eryx groaned. He stumbled into the wall, clutching his stomach, and blood leaked between his fingers.
“Eryx!” I tried to push Gallagher aside, but he wouldn’t budge.
“Let’s go.” Gallagher tugged me forward, headed for the exit at the end of the hall.
“I’m fine. Help him!”
“My duty is to you,” Gallagher growled as Mirela grabbed the lab coat Zyanya still carried and pressed it to the wound in Eryx’s stomach. “We need to get out of here.”
“I’ve got her.” Zyanya took my arm and began gently tugging me toward the door. “We’ll get the van. You and Claudio get Eryx. If he falls, we’ll never be able to lift him.”
Gallagher was phenomenally strong, but the minotaur weighed a ton. Almost literally.
“Go,” I insisted, trying to pick up my own pace to prove that the baby and I would be fine without him for a few minutes. “Help Eryx.”
Gallagher growled. Then he spun on his heels and raced down the hall to help Claudio, who was bowing beneath the burden of even part of the minotaur’s weight.
“Can you walk?” Gallagher wrapped one arm around Eryx’s back, beneath his arms. “We need to get you to the van, and it would take a dozen of us to carry you.”
The minotaur nodded sluggishly as blood seeped through the coat Miri was still pressing to his wound.
Zyanya led me outside and around the dumpster to where we’d parked the van. I climbed into the front passenger’s seat and buckled the belt below the bulge of my belly as she backed out of the parking spot. Then she twisted in her seat to reverse the van around the dumpster, driving onto the sidewalk to park at an angle, as close to the building as she could get.
With the van parked, she jumped out of the driver’s seat, circled the vehicle and pulled open the rear doors. Mirela helped her fold down the last row of bench seats, to make more room in the cargo area, while Lala dug in the backpack we’d brought for anything that would work as a bandage.
Finally, Gallagher and Claudio emerged from the building, with Eryx slowly putting one hoof in front of the other between them, and together they managed to get him into the back of the van. Lala sat with him, pressing a spare shirt to the wound in his stomach; the lab coat was already soaked through with blood.
Miri, Claudio and Gallagher squeezed into the second row. “Go!” I said as soon as all the doors were shut. “But don’t speed. We can’t afford to get pulled over.”
“Take the back way,” Gallagher added. “The security guard probably called in a description of the van before he even came inside.”
“How did they know we were there?” Claudio asked.
“There’s a brand-new silent alarm,” Lala told him. “I overheard one of the lab techs saying that someone broke in a couple of weeks ago and stole tranquilizers, so they put in a new system.”
“How’s he doing?” I tried to twist in my chair, but my stomach prevented much of a movement.
Eryx groaned in reply.
“I can’t tell much yet,” Lala said. “We need to get him stretched out and cleaned off, so we can see the damage.”
None of us were medical experts, but we’d all gained a bit of tr
iage experience after nine months on our own. Especially after I’d been shot during our escape from the Spectacle. But I’d had professional—if secret—medical help, and we had no way to get Eryx to a doctor.
“Do we have any antibiotics left?” Zyanya asked as she took a corner a little too fast. “I can try to find some on the way home.”
“No.” Gallagher’s entire frame was tense. “Let’s just get him home and assess.” Because we’d have to break into a house or a clinic to steal medication, and that was an errand better run by just one or two of us, after we’d done what we could for Eryx at the cabin.
If more cops hadn’t already been on the way, we would have searched the lab for medication before we’d left. As it was, I didn’t realize until we were halfway home that we hadn’t gotten a chance to free any of the other cryptids.
Mirela stared out the heavily tinted van window, her jaw clenched. Her hands were clasped in her lap, twisting so hard that her fingers had gone white.
“Miri?” I asked.
She turned to look at me. A second later, she forced a smile, almost as an afterthought. As if she’d just then remembered that her unguarded expression was like a peek into the dismal future.
Because she knew the truth.
She’d probably known from the moment she saw Eryx, back at the lab. Maybe even longer than that. She could have known this was coming since the moment she first met him, years before.
Grief washed over me, so stunning that at first I couldn’t even process it. Eryx was going to die.
And if Mirela knew that, Rommily probably did, too.
June 1991
Grandma Janice closed the front door behind the last of the mourners and headed into the kitchen to put up the leftovers. Rebecca followed her. “Why don’t you go lie down and let me do that,” she said as she pulled a stack of Tupperware from the cabinet to the right of the stove.
“Thanks, hon, but I’d rather stay busy.”
Rebecca sat at the table in the dining nook, fiddling with the lace hem of her new black dress while she watched her grandmother stack the refrigerator full of casseroles and Jell-O salads as precisely as Grandpa Frank had ever loaded the trunk of his car for the road trips they’d taken, in an effort to give their granddaughter a normal life.
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