Paige knew that it would be pretty easy to come up with these allegations. After all, they were incarcerated and were probably being treated poorly. By the looks of things, each of them had been beaten or tormented in their own way. Several looked as though they had lost considerable weight since they had been placed there.
Paige went up to the command center. It was on the second floor — if one could call it a second floor. The two levels did not have full ceilings. The ceilings they did have were low, making the entire area feel constricted. However, from here, she had a full view of the entire cellblock without the benefit or necessity of any TVs and cameras. She located the one guard who had been mostly helpful. The other guards seemed full of self-righteous contempt which had kept them from assisting in the breakout. Paige had anticipated the guards not being helpful. After all, that was their job, keeping the inmates in.
However, Mike, for whatever reason, had been the one to show her how to open the cell doors without raising the alarm. She just hoped that he would continue to assist.
After a few moments of discussion, he was released of his bindings and allowed to proceed them out of the cellblock.
Since Paige had basically taken control of the detention facility, she felt it was fairly safe to allow those who wanted to go with her to do so. No one wanted to be left behind. Or, if they did, she was surrounded by too many bodies to see.
Mike led them down several wide, empty, uncluttered halls. They passed several double doors until they located one single door that had no name to distinguish it from the rest.
He turned to Paige. "Brace yourself. This is the only reason I'm helping you. I think we've gone too far."
Paige had some idea of what to expect. She wasn't completely dumb to this situation. She’d been in bad situations with terrible people before. Sven had been one of those who had introduced her to just how horrible living people could truly be. He hadn't been human by any definition of the word, but he was also the embodiment of evil.
What Paige saw in this area, frankly, wasn't nearly as bad as she had imagined.
That wasn't to say it wasn't bad however.
There was a big, open space with several beds that had been segregated off by blue rolling curtained walls. Each compartment contained a bed or a chair. Each of those held a person who was tied down.
Each person was also hooked up to several pieces of medical equipment, monitoring their vitals. It was evident that each person was undergoing medical procedure had a human monitor as well watching and waiting.
However, none of those scientists were currently there.
That was certainly a red flag. Paige knew that it shouldn't be this easy. For all that they had experienced a few scuffles, things were going a little too smoothly for her comfort. Something was about to happen. She just needed to know what.
She turned to the woman who had given her Lydia's name. "Where she?"
The woman was searching, scanning each of the faces. She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. "She isn't here."
Paige searched the area for another room or a door. "Do you know of another way out of here?" She asked Mike.
He shook his head. "Honestly, this is as far as I've ever come."
"Let's free these people. And let's see if we can find another way out of here." Paige went to the person closest to her — a man tied to a chair with sticks poking out of his fingertips. That was a form of torture that made her stomach queasy. "Do you know of another way out of here?"
As soon as one of his hands were free, he worked to pull the sticks out of his fingers, his face filling with pain and the monitor raising a few alarms of their own. He jerked his head toward the back. "They have a bunker. Heard them talking about it. It's well fortified, or so they say."
But how fortified? She had a lot at her disposal. A lot of power. A lot of people.
She went to the back and searched for the door. She located it fairly easily. It was, of course locked, but there were no magical protections around it. At least none that she could see. She switched to witch vision and then to shifter vision. But still, she could see nothing.
If this was merely a physical door, she should be able to take it down.
The man stood beside her, his fingers bleeding, but there were new things poking out of them. It looked a little like metallic claws. "I call dibs."
Great. They also had mutants. "Let's see if I can break in first."
Calling on her magic, she settled into it pretty quickly. She touched the door and felt it with her earth magic to see if there was anything special with the door. Just a metal door. She didn't even have to call on the other elements. She simply worked the hinges and the lock, humming them into different vibrations and frequencies, moving them the way she wanted. The pins of the hinges rose on the other side of the door, and the lock slipped out of place.
The door fell into the room.
Several people in lab coats jumped, releasing various sounds of startle meant.
All of them except for one. He was cool as a cucumber with the face of a snake, and he held a gun to a woman's head.
The woman was strapped to a chair with iron cuffs and a metallic crown of thorns.
The woman who had alerted Paige of Lydia stepped into the room with a choked sob.
"Jill, don't," the crowned woman said.
Well, at least now Paige had a name to go with the woman's face. Not that she was likely to remember it for very long. "Let her go." Paige didn’t release control of her magic. She kept it coiled within the center of her soul. She wasn't sure what she intended to do with it, but she did know that whatever she attempted to do, she would not be faster than a speeding bullet, especially when the barrel was right next to the woman's head.
The man sneered his ugly face. "You played right into our hands. You gave us everything we needed."
A chill swept down her spine. That was seriously not the things she wanted to hear. She hadn't considered that the president and DoDO might be watching them right now. That they might be looking to see their strengths and weaknesses in order to assess how best to take them down. "Care to share with the class what you have planned?"
"We're going to allow you to leave." The ugly man sneered. "Take the ones you already have and simply walk out."
"Okay.” Paige clapped her hands and smiled happily at him. "Thank you so much."
He frowned.
That's right, mother Fokker. "Yeah, I know. And that's the reason why we’re here. You know and I know that electricity is capable of disengaging the color. And that's the reason that you’re holding Lydia hostage. Now be a good villain and let her go so that you can live to see another day."
He gave her a disgusted look. "You think I’m the villain? You are the villains. You and these mutant powers. You threaten our every way of life."
"Oh, yeah. I can totally see that. We've been keeping you from going to work every day, or buying your groceries, or paying your rent or watching as much binge worthy TVs you possibly can in one afternoon. We’ve been such an abominable threat for the past — oh, I don't know — thousands of years? We haven't been the ones killing people in the name of God's. We haven't been the ones dropping bombs on entire cities. We've just been sitting around licking our buttholes — because that's what shifters do in shifter form. They lick their butt holes — while living pretty unremarkable lives so that we stay under the radar so that people like you don't get afraid because we're living next to you."
He appeared taken off guard.
Paige took a step closer as she spoke. She didn't know how she was going to get him to remove the gun from Lydia's head. But this woman was their surest way of getting out of there. At least, their surest way of determining what the next trap would be. The first one was obviously the collars, but what did Dodo have planned after this? "You haven't had to live in fear of being raped or murdered. Maybe an occasional bite? Sure. But that's no different than the average human killer. It's not li
ke we're taking our guns and shooting schools in grocery stores and churches. What exactly are we scared of?"
The man narrowed his eyes. "Don't come any further."
His hand shook on the pistol grip. And his finger was on the trigger. That wasn't good.
"Are you scared that we as different? Are you scared that we're going to eradicate humans from the face of the planet? Are you scared that we're going to imprison you? Or strip away your rights? Perhaps we’ll treat you like the cattle you apparently are. We’ll have fields of humans ripe for the slaughter. For vampires are werewolves who love human livers." She wasn't even sure if werewolves liked livers.
He pulled the gun away from Lydia's head and pointed it at Paige. "I said stop moving."
At least he had it pointed away from Lydia. That was something she could work with.
She raised her witch hand and knocked the gun away.
However, as soon as her magic hand began to move, he pulled the trigger. Time moved in slow motion. She saw the bullet coming toward her. In this small space, he really didn't have to aim. She tried to dodge, but she didn't have superhuman speed. The only reason she was able to slow this moment down was because she knew in that moment this was her last breath.
A dark cloud of smoke appeared in front of her and before it formed into a familiar face, the doctor was knocked to the ground and the bullet was shoved toward the ceiling.
Time sped back up again to the sound of people screaming. They weren't true screams. They were just short bursts of exclamation. Also, it was a little hard to hear over the ringing in her ears. Gunshots and small spaces were loud.
Bal looked at her like she was stupid and just shook his head. His lips moved, but she had no idea what he said. That gunshot had been really loud.
She and a few of the other people behind her moved to secure the scientists and to free Lydia.
Jill came forward and knelt beside the crowned woman, removing the metallic devices.
Slowly, Paige regained her ability to hear what people were saying. She pushed her way out of the bunker with Balnore by her side. Her demi-god protector was handy, but if they were being recorded, she didn’t want the President to know about him. She wanted him to be her secret weapon for as long as she could keep it that way. “We’re being recorded.”
“It’s not being transmitted,” he said, his low timber voice breaking through the ringing.
That was good news. “Then, we need to destroy the video. They can’t know what we’re capable of. If they do, we ruin any chance we have of saving anyone else.”
Bal nodded, his eyes going icy. “I’ll take care of it.”
Paige herded everyone else into Cellblock B, which was apparently the largest of the three.
Lydia said she had enough charge to send a cascading lightning bolt through everyone’s collars, disabling all of them.
And she did, but it was such an explosion that it also hit several of the people, including Paige.
The ringing in her ears wasn’t the only thing she had to worry about now. One of the bolts of electricity that had hit her had landed squarely in her chest and she was having a hard time breathing.
She turned to one of the Blackman witches and nodded. It was time, but she held up one finger. They needed to test drive this with one door and one person to see if there were any other booby traps.
The woman nodded and opened a door.
Paige reached for the first available person, not caring who it was. She asked him if he was okay going through.
He didn’t answer. He just jumped through the door.
Paige sighed heavily, glad she was able to take in a deep breath even though it hurt a little, and poked her head through. He seemed to be okay. “Make sure he’s not bugged,” she said to one of the people there.
One of the Eastwood witches stepped up and did a sweep with her hands while Tuck used a police-issued wand.
He nodded and mouthed something she could read because his mustache and beard hid his lips.
“He’s clean?”
He nodded again.
Great. She stepped back into the prison, raised a hand and made a circling gesture. “We’re clear.”
With that, the Blackmans opened several doors and the inmates streamed through.
The captured guards and scientists who were bound were led to the doors.
Paige stopped Margo. “What are we doing?”
“Taking them with us.” Margo’s words were like arrows piercing the ringing in Paige’s ears. “We’re not leaving them behind.”
“Our resources are already stretched.”
Margo shrugged, her scar pinching her eye. “I’m okay with killing them. Are you?”
Paige wasn’t. This and many other actions would define the war they were headed into. The President had shown them where she was willing to go, but Paige wasn’t willing to continue further.
Margo raised a dark eyebrow and proceeded to guide her captured scientist through the door closest to her.
Bal appeared beside her. “We need to leave quickly.”
“What did you do?”
He gave her an expectant look. “We’re destroying the evidence.”
“By?”
He gave her a grim smile and pushed her toward the closest door.
As explosions sounded.
“Quickly now,” he told the witches holding the door.
The door sealed behind the last witch as the jail exploded into a fiery ruin.
29
Paige’s brain kicked into work mode by the time they made it back. There was a lot of stuff to do. There were a lot of people to check in on and to make sure were okay. Their situation had changed significantly. They now had confirmation of just how far the president was willing to go. Frankly, it scared Paige more than a little.
She helped get the ex-prisoners a place to stay. The town was running low on easy places to put people.
It wasn't that they were running out of houses, or rooms to put them. They were running out of houses and apartments to give people without sharing. The newcomers didn't seem to mind as long as it was a house and they had some semblance of freedom.
What she really needed was a caseworker of some sort. Someone who could take what they were feeling and going through and help them assimilate to the new social standards. She knew that Troutdale wasn't normal society. It wasn't what they were used to.
But it was a lot closer to something healthy. At least, there was that.
The other thing they needed to do, however was to return their children to them. There had been no children at the prison. So, they were going to have to locate them. They were able to reunite mated pairs and siblings, but not their kids. And that was rather hard on a lot of these parents.
That was something Paige could understand. So, she devoted considerable bit of time working with the dryads to see what they could do to find a location on a site that held the kids. The dryads were still working on that when Paige was hit with a wave of fatigue. She needed to go home and see her own kids.
She realized it was a little cruel to be able to do that, to be able to leave these people who had been incarcerated through no fault of their own. At least, in most cases. To have their kids taken from them for no reason. And here she was rescuing them, putting them in a foreign environment, and then going to be with her own children.
However, she really couldn't care.
As soon as she touched down on her own porch, she shifted into human and opened the door. She heard Leah’s voice in the dining room helping Leslie with dinner. And she could hear Bobby talking with someone in the living room.
Talking?
When she stepped into the living room, she saw that Bobby had grown even more since the last time she had seen him.
He sat beside Mandy and was helping her read one of her books. Mandy's eyes were lit with surprise —literally. Flames danced in them. She helped him with some of the
more difficult words and giggled as she explained some of the actions going on.
Paige had to be a little thankful that Mandy wasn’t into reading raunchier things. As a teenager, she could have. She remembered some of the things she had been reading at the tender age of fifteen. She remembered reading Joanna Lindsay and being absolutely starstruck with the idea of love.
Crap, wasn’t Mandy having a birthday soon?
For crying out loud, that meant that Leah was too!
Great. Their sixteenth birthdays. This was a pivotal year for them.
As soon as Bobby saw Paige come through the door, his face lit with joy, and he pushed the book aside to jump up and run toward her.
Bobby was now almost the same size as Tyler. He didn't act quite as old, but he was tall. If Paige had to put a button on his age, she would say that he acted like a ten-year-old. Perhaps. She cupped his face and looked into his eyes. "Are you okay?"
He beamed grin at her and wrinkled his nose. "Yep. Mandy has been teaching me to read.”
Paige looked over Mandy in surprise and a little concern. "How long have you been at this?"
Mandy got up, shaking her head. "That little man is devouring everything I give him. Even the boring stuff, which I’d never give him because I don’t do boring stuff, but yeah. I have no idea what's going on."
All of Paige's mommy radars alarms rang inside her head. He looked to be perfectly fine, she needed to make sure of that. She took him to the workroom located on the other side of the staircase going up.
She didn't exactly know what she was doing. As far as being a kitchen witch, she kind of sucked at it. She wasn't good with knowing which herbs did what. She didn't know what color crystals did what. However, she fully realized that this was something she might want to seriously study. She had been incredibly lucky to date using her normal strengths in battle.
And maybe that was the key to being a battle witch. She just didn't know. She kind of looked at all of this stuff — all of these bottles of herbs and crystals and other ingredients she had no idea what to call — and saw limitations. In a battle, limitations weren't good.
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