by Beth Dranoff
“He came into the bar, the Swan Song,” I said with just the barest hesitation, eyeing the source of my pain. “Tried to buy me a drink, ask me out. I turned him down, but he left me his card in case I changed my mind.” I knew Demon Chick had seen him give me his card that night, so I had to keep the story plausible. Plus, guys were always asking me out. The allure of the bartender, I guess.
“And you are staying at his house why?”
Oh shit. They had better intel than I thought. But, poker face—I kept that revelation from showing.
“I changed my mind,” I said. As though maybe Ezra was going to contradict me. “Would you like to know the details of the positions we tried? How many times he made me come? Whether or not he enjoyed me going down on him?” I pictured Sam in my head to make my words more believable. The Ezra I’d known had had a prudish streak and avoided wanting to know too many details about my sex life. I was gambling that he hadn’t changed so much in such a short time. The twitch in his left eye answered my question. Score. Point for Dana. Finally.
“Next question,” he said. “Was your father part of the Agency?”
“You tell me,” I replied, bolder now. “You did the background check. Didn’t he work for your side?”
“Quite right, quite right,” Ezra said. More scribbling. To remember something he already knew? “So,” he said, “on the night in question, why did you intrude on the Feed?”
“What do you mean?”
“The night. The Feed.” I didn’t respond immediately, processing. Ezra smiled happily and shocked me again.
“You were outnumbered,” he continued, as though I wasn’t lying there trying to remember how to breathe. “You’re human. I trained you well, but how could you possibly have known you would survive against all those blood-crazed vampires?”
“I didn’t,” I replied through gritted teeth. “But I couldn’t leave someone there to die.” I caught his eye and tried to reach the Ezra I’d known with a look. “You trained us to always fight for truth and protect those who needed it. The guy, the sacrifice, needed my help. I couldn’t walk away.”
“How did you survive?” I had him now.
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “There was someone else, a homeless guy, who wandered by. I think he helped me.”
“Name?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice rising a notch in frustration, convincing myself of the truth of my words so I could sell it. “He helped me load the guy into my truck and then took off.” I stared at Ezra, daring him to disbelieve me.
He seemed to wilt slightly under my gaze. If I could just snap Ezra out of his compulsion...and then he pressed the button again. Oh. My. God. I couldn’t breathe, pain stabbing in on me from all sides. It felt like it went on forever this time, even though it was maybe only ten seconds. I was panting helplessly when it was over.
“Ezra,” I said, striving for calm, “why did you do that?”
His voice shook. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “I don’t know.”
“Mr. Gerbrecht,” a voice of mellifluous liquid butter intoned from the doorway, “how is our conversation with our guest going in here? Have we learned anything of use?”
“N-n-no,” Ezra stammered, flustered, pulling his glasses off his nose and cleaning them to cover his unease. “Alina, I don’t think she knows anything.”
Alina? A.k.a. Cybele, a.k.a. Demon Chick? What exactly had I done to piss any of them off so much?
“I’ll be the judge of that,” whoever she was replied. Oh goodie.
Alina stepped into the room and gave me a moment to understand the craptastic magnitude of my current situation. Fan-freaking-tastic. I was bolted to a bed, pain diodes stuck all over me, with a couple of loony-toons who got off on torturing me. Nobody knew where I was, and apparently these freaks thought I knew something I just didn’t.
The lights flickered. Alina’s eyes narrowed in irritation. “Storm blowing in,” she said, in response to my unasked question. “The wiring in this place is abysmal. Ezra, did you free the mice to nibble on the wiring?”
Ezra looked down and pretended not to hear her.
Alina laughed; it was chilling and chocolate fondue fountain sensual at the same disturbing time. “Maybe our friend Dana here would like us to let the mice loose on her. Or, hmm, perhaps snakes would be more to your liking?”
She gave me a lascivious smile and said a single word: “Serpentia.”
And I was covered with writhing, hissing snakes of green and red and brown. Oooohhhh shit!
I’m a city girl. Were these snakes poisonous? Was I about to die a venomous death? Was it a hallucination? That scaled skin whispering over mine as it wound through my arms and legs and around my throat felt awfully, inexplicably, real. Oh gods. This was it. I was going to die and they would throw my body into an incinerator and scatter my ashes across Lake Ontario.
My teeth started chattering. I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t want to die.
Alina grinned wider, showing fangs. Her horns curved upwards a bit more and started to glow. “Excrucia clavica,” she said.
The bones in my neck started to crack and snap. Pain. Was she trying to break my neck from the inside out?
“Argentia piedi,” she said, cackling gleefully.
I couldn’t feel my feet. It started with my toes, a creeping numbness that started traveling up. When it hit my ankles I could see: she was turning me silver. Sadistic fuck.
“Enough,” said Ezra. He sounded tired. ”Enough, Alina. You’ve had your fun.”
She turned slightly to raise an eyebrow at him. “Do you want to join in the fun, Ezra? You know you’re always welcome.”
“No thanks,” he replied dryly. “But a bar of silver snakes can’t tell us anything. Remember what happened the last time?”
Alina pouted.
“Come now, Alina. Turn the girl back,” he said.
Alina sighed, more dramatically this time, and waved her hand in my general direction. “Fine,” she said. “Retirnatai.”
And then I was myself once more, lying in a puddle of my own excrement. But whole, and alive. Stench and dignity aside, I was going to chalk this one up as a win in the Dana column.
Until the lights went out.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Wet sucking sounds. It felt like the sprinkler had gone off, but if so, the falling liquid was something thicker than water. I smelled Ezra’s mildewy paper scent standing over me and felt my bindings loosen. My right wrist was almost free when the figure standing over me was yanked back and away. Chewing sounds, a thud against the far side of the room, sticky, gloppy footsteps padding across the floor. I frantically scrabbled at the last of the bindings with my wet fingers. Too slow. Focus, Dana.
It was hard with all of the slithering, slaughtering sounds around me. I concentrated on my right hand first, willing the fur to come out and the claws to sprout. If ever a time to shift there was, this was it.
Nothing happened.
I clamped down on an overwhelming urge to growl and resisted—but only just. No way did I want whatever was snickering its way around the room to focus on me in any way. I felt bathed in viscous slime. I had to get out of here. I needed to shift. Now.
I closed my eyes and inhaled through my mouth. Slowed my breathing. Thought about pleasant things—licking an ice cream cone, Madagascar vanilla on a sugary waffle base; climbing into my parents’ bed on a Sunday morning. Nothing. I thought about Jon, our tenuous relationship that seemed to be more and more of the past than the future. A tingle, a cool breeze like the faintest of kisses on my lips, but then—too soon—nothing. I was running out of time. The snuffling and snorting was getting closer. I wanted to see Sam again. Sam. The memory of him had my nerves tingling, and the edges of my fingers vibrated with that now-familiar itch
. I followed the feeling, inhaling what I remembered of Sam’s scent, willing myself to Change.
Both my arms now ended in paws, sharply curved claws where my fingertips should be.
I yanked the bindings on my right wrist, hard. My right hand sprang free. I used the sudden freedom to slash down on my left side. Still couldn’t see anything but had to risk it. I sat up, undid my legs and looped my knees over one another to sit cross-legged on the bed for a moment. Had to get sensation back before attempting movement. I swiveled my head from one side to the other trying to make out shapes, sounds—anything to pinpoint the location of whatever was in the room with me.
Silence.
I twitched my whiskers and wrinkled my nose, opening my mouth slightly to inhale. All I smelled was myself.
The lights came back on.
I was alone in the room. Covered in blood that wasn’t my own. There, in the corner, was the source of the thud I’d heard just moments earlier. Ezra’s severed head, his eyes glazed and forever open. His body lay on the floor like a skinned bear rug, arms splayed out, legs akimbo.
I leaned over the bed and vomited all over his back.
My, wasn’t I a vision of glory and cleanliness. Maybe I’d head out and hit the town after this. Had to be someone out there willing to hang with a urine—and blood—and bile-soaked girlie, right?
Most excellent. Now I was teasing myself. Had to get out of here. Now.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, trying to avoid puke and body parts. I needn’t have bothered—the entire floor was bathed in blood. With a plop, I landed on the floor, swishing in the liquid as I flattened myself against the wall and headed for the door.
The hallway, institutional though it was, looked familiar to me. If its layout was the same as the place I remembered, there would be an employee shower around the next corner with clean scrubs in the closet beside it. All of these Agency buildings used a similar blueprint. My feet sploshed loudly, bloody footprints in an airless hallway. Head buzzing, I numbly pushed my way forward. Couldn’t give in to the shock. Had to keep going. One foot then another. I could do this.
Around the corner I found a supply cabinet but no shower. There was a mop and a pail and, wow, some of those paper footie things you might find at a spa. Incongruous, given the surroundings, but I’d go with what I could take at this point. I swiped a rag of questionable cleanliness and wiped myself down, throwing the bloody cloth into the bucket when I was as good as I was going to get. Grabbed a jug of bleach and poured it into the pail, stirring everything around with a mop. Two booties on my feet and another stack under my arm, and I was ready to go back out there. Well, almost.
First I backtracked, mopping up my footprints to the door of blood; couldn’t force myself to go back in. Then I retraced my steps, drawing on memories long buried to find my way out. I passed headless bodies, entrails slung like party decorations on walls, eviscerated corpses splayed helplessly where they had fallen. Some mouths still gaped open in surprise. I swallowed thickly and forced myself to breathe through my mouth.
At some point I’d shifted back to human, so I had to be careful about fingerprints. Even though Toronto’s finest men and women in blue were unlikely to ever find this place, I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been here. Too many questions. Too many nightmares.
The corridors wound up and around in a seemingly endless twist and turn of institutional wizardry. But I knew they had been designed and built by non-magic-wielding humans, and I knew there was an exit. The blueprints were still emblazoned in my head. It was part of our training to know these halls—how to get in and how to get out. Always a chance that something would go wrong. Always had to know how to escape if it did.
My training kicked back in as if it had never left, prodding me in the back, not letting me stop. Hours, days, minutes, seconds—it all passed by as I carefully picked my way through the carnage towards the sweet possibility of freedom.
Finally, the last door. Using my T-shirt to shield my fingers, I pressed in the override code and prayed it still worked.
But luck was a bitch and she chose this moment to spit in my eye.
“No!” I couldn’t bite back the frustration and I gave in, just for a moment, planting a solid kick at the door. The door barely even shuddered on the recoil.
I took a deep breath and tried the code once more. Still nothing.
I was locked in a morgue of decomposing bodies with a sea of cooling congealed blood, and at this rate I was going to be joining them. I clamped down the near-hysterical giggles pushing their way up and out of me, nowhere to go but out; too dangerous to be free and roaming the halls. Shadows darting in and out of shadows. Were they sweat-soaked memories or something else? No way to tell, remembering how to breathe, trying to separate the now from then.
A door slammed. And another, farther along the corridor. I paused for a moment then started sliding in the direction of the sound. Might be the source of my own death; might also be my source of salvation. Either way, I had to see whether there was anyone or anything else still alive down here. If I was really lucky, it was someone with sufficient access privileges to get us out.
I had to trust my thinning instincts. Nothing else to go on. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it reverberating in my throat. I swallowed thickly, around the lump, and pressed on. Five doors. Ten. Eleven. Playing counting games in my head. By the twenty-fifth, I could hear the sound of someone breathing, air rattling wetly. I gambled and pushed open the door.
On the far side of the room, a man was propped against a wall. In the moonlight streaming in through the barred window above him I could see he was young, acne scars still fresh along the sides of his cheeks. His red hair was curly and matted with blood dripping down along his ear from where his skull had caved in. No way to fix that. He looked at me, helplessly, begging me to save him with his eyes. I opened my mouth but no sound came out. As I watched, those eyes dimmed and went out.
From the hallway, beyond the closed door, the snuffling snorting chewing sounds started up again.
No time to grieve, no time to think. I looked down at the corpse and saw a pass card clipped to a cord around his neck. I looked up and saw sweet freedom taunting me from beyond the window. Three steps and I had the security necklace. Five steps and I was on the vent ledge, shaking the grill bolted to the wall. Fuck. In human form, I couldn’t wrench it out; but cat form would have been worse, even if I could have managed the Change again so soon.
The shaking rattled my new necklace and I realized that, along with the pass card, there were keys. I held them up to the light with red-stained fingers, begging Lady Luck for one more chance. This time she kissed my cheek and handed me a key with an edge that fit exactly into the bolts in the wall. I screwed out the last metal bits between me and beyond.
Claws screeched against the metal door separating me from my nightmare.
My luck held and the window opened.
I dove out and clanged the grill down behind me. Lady Luck must have been feeling guilty for torturing me earlier, because I was only three stories up and a drain pipe was within reach. I grabbed it and shimmied down, my underwear clammy and solidifying quickly in the sub-zero temperatures. Paper booties were useless for gripping but at least my damp fear didn’t freeze my skin to the metal pipe as I descended.
Finally, with a plop, I crunched down onto a pile of black-edged snow.
No alarms, no men with guns and Kevlar vests to greet me. Only the cold slap of icy hoar ringing the sides of satellite dishes, encircled by a five-foot-high chain-link fence. The same one that lay just blocks from where I worked. My prison a replica of the fluorescent-twisted corridors of my nightmares existing adjacent to my life without me seeing it. Could I have been held and tortured so close to the bar? Without anyone knowing?
Too many sounds, too many shadows; nothing but pape
r and a thin sheet between me and anything out there that might want a taste. My lower jaw shook and I clamped down to keep my teeth from clacking together. No luck—the adrenaline and cold pushed my chattering into the involuntary zone. I flattened my tongue and shoved what I could of it between my teeth, muffling the sounds. Each twitch tasting blood as my teeth jerked against my tongue.
I ran. Stumbled. Tried to breathe. Realized, heart racing faster than I could, the necessity of deceleration before I passed out. Don’t think about it don’t think about Ezra and Alina leaving you dead or dying or dismembered in a Dumpster or alley don’t don’t don’t.
I slowed my ice-leadened limbs as much as I dared, keeping the circulation moving while still pushing myself past my limits, hoping that shifter blood would protect me from frostbite. It wasn’t that cold out, right? Reaching the snow tunnel walls of the packed ice embankment where so much had begun; the white brick road pathway to my truck.
The light went on inside the cab as I pulled open the door. Shit!
I closed the door, making sure it locked, and the light went off again. Tried to remember how to breathe. Oh yeah. It’s that in and out thing involving oxygen. Right. At the periphery of my vision, shadows thickened and the drifts of snow stilled. Because tonight hadn’t been enough fun already, right? Sure, why not. Throw in some more creatures.
I hummed “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” from the Sound of Music under my breath, using the tune to clear my head and let my cold-numbed fingers work their wire-sparking magic to start my engine, keys or no keys. By the time I hit the final aria, darkness was a handful of feet from my front bumper and I was running out of adrenaline. Almost ready to give up and call it a life.
Then the engine coughed and caught. I revved the gas, only once to be sure it would respond, then shoved the truck into gear and slammed my nearly bare foot on the gas pedal.
* * *
I went to the one place nobody would look for me. Jon’s.
After a shower so hot it bled to cold, after a change from paper to full-on fabric attire, after I was wrapped in blankets and settled into the guest room with a hot mug of chai tea in hand, only then did Jon lean back beside me, waving his hand as if to say “speak.” Given that I’d arrived on his doorstep reeking of blood and guts—and other scents he considerately chose not to identify for me—he’d been remarkably patient.
