FoM02 Trammel

by Anah Crow

  The bus rumbled and lurched, and pulled away from the pumps, heading back onto the highway.

  Noah’s seatmate sat up a little, but Noah couldn’t see what caused it. The downside to having his face obscured was giving up his vision.

  “Relax there, buddy,” the guard said reassuringly. “Not much farther to go.”

  When his seatmate settled down, Noah realized he’d been holding his breath. Not much farther to go.

  Out the window, their destination looked like any other industrial park lined in grass and trees to make it seem less imposing. A curving two-lane road took them past parking lots and buildings that would have been at home on a university campus.

  The bus pulled to a stop in front of one of the lower buildings, one with a single row of parking spaces out front. Instead of cars, there were people standing in the parking spaces, some with white lab coats and others who looked similar to the men from Wildwood that Lindsay had called—

  “Hounds. Be careful, Noah.”

  No chance he was going to be anything but careful. The guards were coming up the aisle, waking passengers. Every once in a while, Noah heard a sharp hiss, like something from a compression canister. As he stumbled to his feet in response to a cuff from a guard, he caught a glimpse of what made the noise. It looked like a small can of pepper spray, but whatever came out couldn’t be smelled on the air. Where the person was sprayed, their skin went white like frostbite and they jerked like it was painful.

  Noah wasn’t sticking around to see more. It was effective, he had to give them that. Maybe it was like cold water to the face. He hoped that was all it was.

  Off the bus and on his feet, Noah felt a great pressure bearing down on him, the weight of magic.

  Elementalists were always more inclined to feel magic, even to see it. The air was thick with it, like he was swimming in honey. It was thicker here than it had been where he’d found Ylli and Zoey. It clung and flowed around him, drawn in by his power and Lindsay’s.

  A wild sound like a hyena’s hacking laugh coming from a human throat startled Noah, and he stumbled back into a cluster of other passengers, trying to stay close so he wouldn’t be singled out. Without warning, one, then two of the Hounds came at him, dropping from two legs to four, bodies and faces becoming more feral with every bound. He could see it in their mad eyes. They know.

  The scientists and guards were shouting, scrambling and scattering, trying to restore order. Someone screamed and the jumpy man who had been Noah’s seatmate bolted from the group. The motion must have triggered some primal animal instinct in the Hounds because they changed course and more of them broke free to join the chase.

  It was over in moments. Noah didn’t count more than seven strides before the Hounds took him down, no more than two heartbeats before the screaming stopped. Armed men in uniform flooded the parking lot.

  Some surrounded the new arrivals, including Noah, and herded them away as the rest attempted to bring the Hounds to heel. The howls from the Hounds sounded like the baying of hunting dogs.

  Noah looked back in time to see one break away from the scrum and come barreling at him. There was a light in its eyes that said more than language that it knew the truth of what he was, and he bit back his magic with every scrap of discipline he could muster. It leapt and would have cleared the guards except for the tasers that struck it, one after the other. Writhing, it hit the ground only feet away, and Noah could see the blood that covered its forelegs to the elbows and its long, feral face to the hairline. The sound of its teeth snapping and its claws raking asphalt was chilling.

  Noah crammed down his gut reaction and turned away, following the guards as all the passengers were shuffled through a pair of gray doors set in the side of the building. He didn’t want to let emotion get the better of him, for his own sake and for Lindsay’s. He was fine. “I’m fine. ”

  He kept telling himself that as they were led into what looked like the room where he’d taken the written exam for his driver’s license. The last thing he needed was for his magic to betray him now.

  There were white-coated scientists with clipboards that held forms to be filled out by the “applicants”, everything down to salary expectations. He watched the others, docile and obedient, and realized quickly that they didn’t give a damn what you put down. They did like you to sign on the dotted line. Alex King was happy to do that for them.

  It all felt like a slippery slope, as much as Noah tried to keep his mind on the goal, telling himself that the deeper he fell, the closer he was to winning. That kept him calm through losing his clothes in return for a hospital gown and having his head shaved.

  “Saves us from having to pick up clippers, ” he noted dryly, for Lindsay’s sake. He was weighed and prodded, and he was just starting to feel calm when a pair of technicians in vanilla jumpers came in with a tray of syringes.

  Vaccinations?

  “I’m going to guess it’s not tetanus shots in those. ”

  “No. Not tetanus.” Lindsay’s voice was flat the way it got when they were talking about something he didn’t like. The injection felt like fire going in and Lindsay hissed inside Noah’s head. “Nothing changes, does it? But you’re going to be all right, Noah. I promise.”

  The technicians went past him, working their way back. Noah turned his attention to the first men to get their shots and watched one of them swaying.

  “Yeah. I thought so. I think our broadcast is about to be disrupted. ” The room started spinning slowly. Noah turned his attention inward, closing his eyes to shut out the blurred room, and called up what heat he could muster. “Metabolism is just another kind of combustion, right?”

  “I’ll be with you all the way.” Lindsay felt miles away, but the words were something Noah could cling to as he fought to hold on to consciousness.

  The world turned into a stuttering slide show as Noah slipped in and out of consciousness. There were hands on him, and he was cold with something steel under his bare back. He was in a barn. No. Something huge and chilled, but he could hear animals. The rattle of metal on metal was a cage door being slammed shut. He was still moving, and they were talking.

  They left him and, with nothing to hold on to, he slipped into the dark. A howl brought him back up and he had the sudden impression of being in a dog pound.

  Hounds.

  Now, with his body limp and out of his control, he panicked. This can’t happen. They were back and he fought down his fear. Hands were on him, his legs and shoulders. He was hefted up and tumbled into a metal box. They were talking about him, but the words didn’t make sense. To him. They would make sense to Lindsay.

  Hybrid. Balancing strains. Inscribed cell cultures. Noah let himself fade until he was only a ghost in the back of his own mind, so Lindsay could listen. They were putting something in him, cutting and

  stitching, like he was a doll. When the door closed, he could feel that same fire again, creeping out from that point.

  “Help me. ” Noah needed to wake up. He needed something to burn away the poison leaking into his veins. “Don’t let me sleep. ” He needed to make sure they weren’t already doing something to him.

  “I’ve got you.” Lindsay’s cool fingers were on his forehead, except that they weren’t, and Noah could feel the pull of his magic being drawn up inside him. The heat of it flowed under his skin, pushing back the chill of the medication.

  Nothing was as terrifying as being helpless in the face of something awful. He was ashamed of not being stronger. Without knowing how, he was aware that Lindsay had been through this in some way. He could survive—Lindsay had.

  “I’m sorry this happened to you .” Anything else he might have felt was lost the next moment.

  Fever kept Noah from sinking into unconsciousness, but it distorted his perception until he felt as though he had been locked in the cage for days on end. The thought that he had been surrendered to the pound like a dog nagged him and became confused with the reality that his father had sen
t him to Cyrus.

  He knew Lindsay was with him and imagined Lindsay standing outside his cage, looking in.

  Finally, even if his mind couldn’t focus, his body acted, and he drifted into consciousness to find broken tubing clenched in his right hand and cool liquid pooling on his skin.

  I’m awake.

  His magic felt like a limb that had fallen asleep—only when pain came did he realize the magic working through his veins was his, but not in his control. Lindsay held it for him, separated him from it by some illusion he couldn’t understand, and kept it burning through his blood. The world grew clearer by the moment, like dawn had come.

  Opening his eyes, he found that he could see—he had only imagined that the lights were out. There was the rattle of a gurney and voices drew close, so he turned his back to the cage door and hid the broken IV lines under him. His body was burning off the sedative, and he could flex his muscles now, enough that he thought he could stand.

  I can do this. He reached out for his magic and touched it. As Lindsay let it go, it flowed back into him and sang in his veins like hundreds of tiny flames. He hadn’t known what having it truly absent—not merely parted from his will by Lindsay’s illusions—felt like, and he regretted all the times he’d wished for it to be gone.

  Adrenaline brought the rest of Noah’s senses back. “Let me go. ” He itched under his skin with fire and fear. It was a struggle to stay helpless. He could see the others when he dared look, all of them limp and unaware of what they’d consented to become.

  “Soon.” Lindsay’s voice was soothing, soft and cool like a touch. “Zoey is working on the cages—

  she’s going to release the locks to let you out. Watch for the lights, then go.”

  “I keep thinking I hear him . ” Noah shifted to press his feet against one wall, flexing his legs to work the drugs out of the large muscles. “If there’s anything you want saved from here other than him, tell me now. ” His outrage was deeper than his morals, it went down to his bones, down to everything written in his genes. When he let it loose, there wouldn’t be anything left of what distressed him.

  “Just the two of you.”

  “Soon. ” Noah wanted to go home.

  When the lights went down, Noah felt the door of his cage give way, and he grabbed it as he rolled out. He was on the second tier, so it wasn’t far to the floor; as soon as his toes touched, he let go and crumpled to the ground. He felt leaden, his limbs refused to answer him, and he grasped at his magic to burn off the remaining drugs.

  He had to move. Primal urgency forced him up to hands and knees. A cage door smashed him in the head as the man inside thrashed about. Pain and adrenaline fueled his magic and his head cleared enough that he could drag himself to his feet. Yelps and howls of creatures tasting freedom echoed through the room as the lights came up again.

  Noah took a few unsteady steps and tripped over a body. Of course. Everyone around him would be as drugged as he had been.

  “Come on.” Forcing his limbs to obey, he tried to turn the man over. His hands slid on cold, sweat-slick skin. “Wake up. We have to get out of here.” Noah flipped him over and stared down into empty, clouded eyes.

  “Noah, move.”

  Even as Lindsay’s frantic voice filled his head, something sent him sprawling. Someone stepped on him, a knee caught him in the side as he tried to get up. He staggered to his feet, slipped in something slick, and caught himself on the grating of another cage before he went down again.

  “Noah. Do something. Now.”

  His feet were sliding in blood. Half a corpse dangled from the top of the cages. Noah turned to see a huge Hound feeding on the man he’d tried to help.

  He couldn’t parse Lindsay’s orders but his magic understood. It rose up in him and washed him clean with fire. Not content with purifying his blood, the fire rolled out to cleanse his skin, then boiled outward.

  When Noah finally stood steady, there was nothing but ash on the floor at his feet.

  Anarchy churned around him, howls and screams rising until Noah felt them through the concrete.

  Where natural creatures needed a reason to kill, hunger or self-defense, Moore’s Hounds had been bred to hunt mage-flesh, to chase and to slaughter mercilessly. Freshly created, without inhibition, they turned on each other. The terrified staff, in fleeing, marked themselves as prey.

  Creatures passed above him, hunting each other from one row of cages to another in a fatal game of tag. Noah had no idea where to find Dane, but he was sure Dane simply wouldn’t fit in the cage he’d been in. He picked a direction and ran.

  At an aisle that cut across the rows, he stopped to flame a furred beast off of a screaming, struggling man. It was impossible to remain indifferent to the slaughter. The place had become an abattoir. A quick look around told him he was no closer to finding Dane than before. Everything looked the same—rows and rows of cages now open and spilling their half-mad contents into the aisles.

  A shadow flickered in the corner of Noah’s eye and he threw himself aside to avoid being tackled from behind by the man he’d just saved. Suddenly, he was aware of more than one set of eyes on him. He’d drawn attention to himself with the kill and now, with his back to the cages, he was being stalked. The man who had seemed so human while fighting for his life was wild-eyed, and the teeth he bared were long and jagged.

  “There’s no saving any of them. They’re gone . ” Lindsay’s voice rose up in the back of his head.

  It was hard for Noah to override his natural instinct to protect his own kind. But once he did, he wasn’t afraid anymore. Just sad. A wave of fire rolled out and swept away everything around him.

  Through the fire that cleaned the aisle ahead of him, Noah saw what had eluded him before. He’d gone the wrong way, his body automatically trying to go back the way it had been brought in. But this way there were computers and workstations, and other cages. Different cages. Once he had Dane, he could sweep the whole lab clean. He followed his fire, his bare feet seared by the heat held in the concrete floor.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Without his magic, Dane had been left to rely on his body and he was surprised to find out how efficient it was. The break Lourdes had given him had allowed him to become as close to perfectly functional as he could be without his magic. While he couldn’t hear Jonas’s heartbeat, the man’s breathing—and his humming—came through loud and clear. Sure, it was classical music, Baroque even, but Dane still wanted to ring Jonas’s head off the bars half the day.

  When Jonas was quiet, the techs’ and scientists’ conversations were audible. Dane was slowly piecing things together and receiving a crash course in magical genetic engineering. Moore was using some hodgepodge of runes and cells and science so she could inject the essence of being a Hound into her victims. They had to have the potential for magic first, but the treatment would cause a full manifestation.

  They were bringing in another batch of “recruits”, as Greer called them. Dane had no idea how Moore was finding them, had no idea that magic still ran so plentifully in the blood of mundane humans. It made his skin crawl to see the limp bodies loaded into cages and primed for treatment. Not all of them survived the preparation and the treatment brought fatalities as well.

  Dane had seen the failures when they were rolled past on gurneys, on the way to autopsy. One had died of “uncontrolled growth-plate expansion”. That was what Greer had said. To Dane, it looked like the man’s bones had exploded out of his flesh in all directions. Another spawned half a head from the neck and a leg from the middle of the back. Some were so deformed—even to the point of being puddles of flesh in buckets—that Dane couldn’t work out what had gone wrong.

  Every day, he watched for any sign of a flaw in the routine around him, something he could exploit and get free that way. Someone would come for him but he wouldn’t be Cyrus’s first priority. If he wanted out soon, he’d have to do it himself. All he’d managed to determine was that the locks on the cages were
electronic, controlled from the consoles in the lab area, and no one made mistakes.

  His own cage was locked with bolts and padlocks, maybe even with magic; Jonas’s cage looked the same. Moore wasn’t trusting their containment to the main system; she’d learned from his escape with Lindsay months ago in New York. He was certain it would take more than one cooperative person to unlock his cage—Lindsay couldn’t just ensorcel a single low-level tech into opening it up.

  “How are we today?” Greer came in and headed straight for him, looking positively sunny. She always came by, sometimes more than once a day. “Sorry I missed dinner last night.” It was surreal, the way she spoke to him like he was a roommate or a friend.

  “You didn’t miss much.” Dane talked to exercise his mind more than anything else. Jonas hadn’t been a good conversationalist before his brain was scrambled, he was worse now. “Chicken again.”

  “I know.” Greer gave him a sad look. “Beef shipment next week.” She was about to say something else when a gray-faced soldier came racing in like there were Hounds behind him.

  Dane wanted to hear, but she stepped away and the soldier whispered in her ear. It had to be bad; she went as white as her coat. She sent the soldier away with a gesture and hurried off to confer with her colleagues. He leaned against the front of his cage and watched.

  “Problems?” he asked, when her panicked scurrying brought her close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice.

  “One of you has terrible manners,” Greer snapped. There were tasers and sedative guns racked on the wall nearby. She clipped a small taser to her belt. Dane stifled his laugh so he wouldn’t tempt her to use it on him. He’d seen her in a mood before. Working for Moore suited the flip side of her personality.

  “That’s definitely Jonas,” he said solemnly. “My kids would never misbehave.”