He rubbed his hands over his face. “Christ. You would, wouldn’t you? Just to drive me insane?”
“Yep. See, here’s the thing. I’m really not willing to do without you. No matter what. So is it settled? Can I safely shower without having to worry about you scurrying off somewhere?”
He nodded.
“Good. Because I’m really tired, really hungry, and—” I didn’t finish. We still needed to bury Mel. To grieve. Bleak loss sucked at me, and I hardened myself. I couldn’t fall into that now. Later. Now I had to be strong. We all had to be strong.
AFTER I’D SHOWERED and Price had disappeared into the bathroom, I checked the closet and found a selection of men’s and women’s clothing, all of it with the tags still on. Nothing fancy. Jeans and tee shirts and sweaters, mostly, plus underwear. The last was all basic cotton, but in a variety of styles and sizes. Jamie and Leo had been prepared for a wide range of visitors. I found an outfit that fit, and got dressed. The pants were a little long, but I turned them up. I pulled a sweater over a tee shirt and donned a pair of thick wool socks before returning to the bedroom.
I lay down to wait for Price, but almost instantly stood up again. I felt fidgety. I paced restlessly, looking out the window to see a world of white, and then paced again. All that had happened in the last forty-eight or so hours tumbled through my head.
I heard the water shut off, and a few minutes later, Price came out, a towel wrapped around his hips.
“Clothes are in the closet,” I said. “There should be something that fits.”
He disappeared inside and returned, wearing a similar outfit to mine. “Ready?”
Thunderous blows to the door interrupted before I could answer.
“Come on, you two! Come see the news!”
I ran to the door and flung it open, but Taylor had already fled back up the hallway and toward the stairs. I followed, with Price hard on my heels.
The scent of garlic and tomato sauce wafted up to us from the kitchen. It should have tantalized my hunger, but foreboding knotted my stomach tight. We found everybody else in the living room, watching the big-screen TV above the fire crackling in the brick fireplace.
On the screen was an image of violent destruction. Fires burned up mountain ridges in the background, and in the foreground, right behind the blond reporter, was a smoking black hole in the ground. It looked like a meteor had hit. The hole must have been the size of a football field. The ground around it was melted into slag. Black smoke billowed through the air. Emergency vehicles from every agency under the sun parked around the perimeter, lights flashing like a patriotic disco. It might have been a scene straight out of an end-of-the-world horror flick.
“Is that—?” I broke off.
“Think so,” Jamie said, never looking away from the screen. A wooden spoon in his hand dripped tomato sauce onto the wood floor. It looked like blood.
“Sh!” Taylor said. “Listen.”
“. . . targeted attack. We have no word yet on casualties, though we have learned that at least one hundred and twenty people are unaccounted for at this time,” the reporter said. “Again, for those of you just tuning in, this morning at around nine thirty a.m., a massive explosion and fire destroyed the Marchont Research Center, fifteen miles southeast of Diamond City. Sources have determined that the event was magical in nature and incinerated everything down to bare stone. Searchers have not yet located any survivors.”
“Who would do this?” Taylor asked. “There were people trapped in there.”
“Better question is who could do it,” Dalton said. “And why.”
Something in his voice caught my attention. I looked at him. “You already know.”
He met my gaze, his unworldly silver eyes ringed with blue. “So do you.”
“Jackson Tyrell.” When you watch the news later, know that he was behind it. Those had been Vernon’s words. I wasn’t the only one who remembered.
“Who is he? Why would he destroy the place?” Arnow asked.
She gone pale and her hands trembled. She must’ve known more than a few people inside.
“I don’t know,” Dalton said. “What I do know is that there are now no witnesses to what happened there. It is also likely the FBI will blame all of you for the destruction.”
“If they even know we escaped,” Price pointed out.
“If they do,” Dalton agreed.
“What are the odds that nobody does?” I asked.
No one answered.
“Hell,” Leo said, thrusting his hands through his hair. “I need a drink.”
“Price’s mother said her lunatic people were on their way, too. Maybe it was them,” Jamie suggested.
“They thought Price was some sort of demon because of his magic. It seems unlikely they’d use the magic they claimed to hate to do their dirty work,” I pointed out. I frowned. “There were maybe seventy-five people in that building. Where’s this hundred and twenty number coming from?” But then my brain caught up to my mouth.
“Crap.” I’d seen the gray trace on the ridges, overwhelmed by the other force moving down. Those bodies had likely been torched along with the remnants of the building.
“Crap?” Price asked.
I explained. Then we all exchanged looks.
“I’m not sure it had anything to do with us or Price,” Taylor said suddenly, she stared at the TV, her eyes shadowed. She’d not looked away from the coverage since Price and I had come downstairs.
“What do you mean?” asked Leo.
She shook her head once, slowly, her arms crossed, her hands gripping her elbows. “Level nine.”
I crouched beside her. “What about it? What was down there?”
She closed her eyes. Her face looked haunted.
I glanced up at Dalton. “What was down there?” I asked again, this time to him, impatience making my voice sharp.
Dalton scraped his bottom lip with his teeth, leaving behind white stripes. Finally he answered. “It seemed to be a research facility.”
“What kind of research?” Price asked.
Taylor opened her eyes. “Evil.” She shook her head. “There was hardly anything there. No computers, no papers. Like they’d been expecting us and cleared everything out before we got there. All but the burn room.”
“Burn room?” I prompted when she fell silent.
“It smelled,” Taylor said. “Like . . . meat.” She clamped her teeth together.
I recognized that look. Like she was holding back a scream and if she opened her mouth, it would come flying out.
“One of the rooms was an incinerator,” Dalton explained. He reached out to put a hand on Taylor’s shoulder, but pulled back before he touched her. He jammed his hands into his pockets. “The burn process had begun, but wasn’t so far along we couldn’t see inside.”
“People,” Taylor said. “Bodies stacked up like the Nazi concentration camp pictures. But they’d been mutilated and . . . modified.”
“Modified? What do you mean?” I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know. Price pulled me back against his chest. His warmth barely permeated through the sudden cold freezing my veins.
Taylor shuddered, and this time Dalton did lay a hand on her shoulder, almost like he couldn’t help himself. My eyes about bugged out. Was he showing feelings? Of a human nature? Was that even possible?
As for Taylor, she ignored him. “From what we could see, some had missing bits. Others were Frankensteined together with parts that obviously came from someone else. Some looked mutated, like their mothers had been guzzling a thalidomide and nuclear-waste cocktail. That wasn’t the worst.”
I waited for her to say what the worst was, my body tensed like someone was about to punch me. The silence stretched.
Finally it was Dal
ton who spoke. “There were children among the dead.”
Leo and Jamie swore, and Arnow’s expression went blank. Her eyes held a world of emotion I couldn’t read.
Taylor glanced around at each of us. Her eyes glittered with fierce, cold rage. Her voice was conversational. “They’ll have to be stopped.”
All of us nodded, even Dalton.
“We have to stop them,” she clarified.
“Of course,” I said. “We will.”
Because it had to be done, and nobody else would do it. Mel knew that. That’s why she’d gone into the compound with us. Why we all had. It was the right thing and necessary. It’s why Touray risked himself to help the people in the accident. Why he was determined to clean up Diamond City. His monkeys, his circus.
I looked at my companions. My family, the man I loved, and two people I’d never thought I’d ever be able to trust. Only somehow I did, at least for this. They weren’t going to let something this awful stand without trying to stop it, either. We were a team.
I felt a wild laugh bubbling up inside me. I clamped my teeth to keep it from escaping. My save-the-world to-do list kept getting longer: Rescue Touray, rescue Arnow’s friends, and stop whoever was doing Frankenstein experiments on people. Oh, and help Touray clean up the city.
I had to wonder, just when in the hell did we become the lone rangers of the scary Wild West?
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Acknowledgments
I have had a great deal of support and aid in the writing of this book—both professionally and personally—for which I’m very grateful. I want to thank everyone for being there for me, for cheering me on, letting me bitch and moan, telling me when I veered from the road or when I crashed, and for providing all the extra bits that go on behind the scenes of creating a book. I especially want to thank my editor, Debra Dixon, everyone at Bell Bridge Books, Brittany Dowdle, Lucienne Diver, Christy Keyes, Barbara Cass, Sue Bolich, Devon Monk, SFNovelists, Clay Cooper, Markus Harris, and Justin Barba. I cannot give enough thanks to my family, especially as I struggled through the tough times of the last couple of years. To those who I should have named but didn’t, know that I am grateful for your support, knowledge, and expertise. And finally, you, the readers, thank you for reading, for liking my books, for telling your friends, for spreading the word. You are the best readers ever.
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About the Author
Diana Pharaoh Francis is the acclaimed author of over a dozen novels of fantasy and urban fantasy. Her books have been nominated for the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award and RT Magazine’s Best Urban Fantasy.
Whisper of Shadows (The Diamond City Magic Novels) Page 28
