Dead End

by Debbie Cassidy

  It slammed its hands onto the glass, its rheumy eyes rolling in its head as a low whine rose from its peeled-back lips. Could it be like the other creature we’d seen at sublevel three? Could the darkness have made us see something monstrous rather than something that could only be pitied?

  “What do we do?” Micha asked. “We can’t leave it like that. It’s in pain.”

  Every whimper, every cry cut through me like a knife. “We have to kill it.”

  “I’ll do it,” Lyrian said. “I’ll make it quick. Emory, open the door.”

  Emory hit the door release, and the creature tumbled out into the corridor, arms outstretched as if beseeching us for clemency, and Lyrian lit it up. The flames burned bright blue and then died, leaving nothing but ash.

  I turned away and began to walk back up the corridor. “The sooner we get out of here, the—”

  A vent burst outward and spat another monster into the corridor. And it was obvious from the growl and snap of this creature that it wasn’t about to cry and beg us to end its life. No … this one wanted to end us.

  Chapter 10

  Hunter

  How long? How long have I been here? Time has no meaning here, but there is chaos. I can sense it. I can feel it. Echo? Where are you? Why can’t I get to you? Something happened. Something that fills my gut with ice and makes my heart stop. But I can’t recall. Why can’t I recall?

  This is the gray, and yet, it isn’t. My body is here and yet it isn’t. I must get out. I must find my way back to Echo. I need to save her. I try to exert my will on my surroundings, pushing at the fabric of this place to reconnect with my limbs, with my form. There is resistance, which isn’t natural. Something is blocking me.

  My pulse kicks up even though I have no pulse. Oh, God. What is this? Who is this?

  Relax.

  That voice again. That metallic, grating fucking voice. “Who are you?”

  That’s an interesting question and one I’ve been trying to find an answer to for the longest time, and you, my friend, have given me hope. You’ve given me direction.

  What? “What are you talking about?”

  I suppose it won’t hurt to give you a peek.

  The gray parts and I am floating above the heart, detached and untethered. There are workers monitoring the machine and figures in the tower. The whump and whir of cogs tells me everything is okay. My mind begins to relax, and then a dark shadow darts across the floor.

  Me. It’s me. What the … “How?”

  I don’t understand it either, but it works. We work, Hunter. That is your name … My name now. I heard you so many times, felt your presence, but each time I reached out to you, you were gone like quicksilver from my grasp. I knew you’d return. You always return, drawn to the gray place just as I am. And now we are one. Now, I have the missing piece. I have a temporary body, and soon, I will have all the souls I need to survive, soon I will be whole.

  What does he mean? And then I feel his hold on me like claws digging into my mind. He is me, and I am less than I’d been before, while below, he is visible—a shadow, a shade once more as he takes down the workers, as he takes down the heart, and my scream … My scream echoes uselessly into the gray.

  Chapter 11

  The monster made of flesh, muscle, and teeth opened its mouth and screamed, and then it rushed me. Green arcana flooded my vision, and the monster didn’t make contact. It hit the shield created by arcana and bounced off it, but more of the same were spilling out of the vents, angry, hungry, and desperate for our flesh. The shield wasn’t going to hold them back indefinitely.

  “What now?” Deacon asked.

  He sounded calm and rational, but the look on his face was pure fuck-me-sideways. Oh, man.

  Keeping my eyes on the barrier, I took a tentative step back toward the others. “Valance, Lyrian, you guys might want to get your fire ready.”

  My head was throbbing from the exertion of holding the barrier as the monsters kept battering at it, not caring about the pain, not caring about anything except getting their next meal. How had they survived here so long? What had they fed on?

  One of the monsters turned on another that had bumped into it and sank his teeth into its neck; the others, momentarily distracted by the blood, stopped attacking the shield and fell upon the injured monster.

  Well, that answered my earlier question. “Guys …”

  Valance and Lyrian flanked me. “On the count of three, drop the shield,” Valance said.

  Thank God.

  “One, two, three.”

  I pulled back on the arcana, and the shield dropped, letting the monsters through, but they barely made it a step before blue and purple flames lit up the corridor, sinking its fiery claws into their skin and devouring them.

  The screams lasted less than five seconds, but they were godawful in their intensity and intent, scraping at the inside of my mind and eliciting nausea to roil in my stomach.

  The flames died, leaving nothing but ashes. Not even bone remained.

  Emory headed for the door and was about to hit the release when movement beyond caught my eye.

  “Stop.” I rushed toward him. “Look.”

  Bodies seethed outside the doors. More monsters, but these were bigger, wider, their hides looked tougher, and they weren’t attacking like hungry, crazed monsters. No. They were watching with intelligent eyes.

  “What the fuck are those?”

  Wilomena made a strangled sound. “Valance. Oh, God.”

  Her lover put his arm around her. “They did this to themselves.”

  “What are you talking about?” Micha asked. “What are they?”

  “I think they were once Arcana,” Wilomena said.

  “Like the creature we killed in the lab?” Lyrian asked. Then he shook his head as if disregarding his own assessment. “No. These are bigger. Stronger.”

  “The creature in the lab may have been a human or another kind of neph, but these are Arcana,” his mother said.

  “How can you tell?” Lyrian asked.

  “Look at their eyes.”

  Green like emeralds, the creatures’ eyes gleamed like shards of the precious stone. Lips curled to showcase razor teeth. But they remained still and waiting. We’d put the power on, and we’d probably let them out from wherever they’d been holed up, but unlike the other monsters, these were willing to wait us out because they knew … they knew there was no other way out but through them.

  “Fuck,” Lyrian said softly. “We won’t be able to burn them all. I need to recharge.”

  “Same,” Valance said.

  “I don’t,” Wilomena said. “I can help on the flame front.”

  But more were gathering as we spoke until the yellow-lit corridor beyond the doors was a mass of seething mutant Arcana bodies.

  Deacon rubbed his chin in thought. “If they are Arcana, then arcana won’t injure them, it will just feed them.”

  Shit, that put me out of commission.

  Wilomena pulled her dagger from its sheath. “Then, we fight.”

  Because what other choice was there?

  Wilomena took a deep breath. “Emory, Deacon, you get Echo out of here while Valance, Micha, Lyrian, and I keep the monsters busy. Get out and get the orgometal and the guardian to safety.”

  A fist squeezed my heart, and yes, it was at the thought of leaving my scalemate and kindred behind. “No way. I’m not leaving. We do this together.”

  “Agreed,” Gideon said.

  When had he slipped into the driver’s seat? It didn’t matter because we could certainly use him now. He looked taller, wider, and his face was doing that feral thing it had done when we’d had our moment in the bathroom and again in Emory’s lab.

  He shot me a wicked grin filled with promise and then rolled his neck on his shoulders. “Open the fucking doors, and let’s kick some mutant ass.”

  “Here.” Wilomena handed me one of her daggers. “Do not get killed.”

  Lyrian and Micha flanked m
e, and Gideon opened the doors.

  The Arcana monsters attacked.

  Blood spattered my face and soaked my clothes. It coated the inside of my nostrils with each breath, but I continued to fight. No arcana to help me, no shield and no blasts, just me, a dagger, and my supernatural agility. Flames lit the corridor to the left and to the right as Valance, Lyrian, and Wilomena did their thing. Deacon fought hand to hand, moving so fast he was a blur the monsters were unable to pin down, but it was Micha and Gideon who cut the thickest path through the carnage. The mutants were bowling pins, and Gideon was the ball, barreling into the fray like he was hurtling down the beach toward the frothing sea. Gideon played big tank to Micha’s smaller tank. Limbs snapped and necks cracked, and Arcana mutants finally fell.

  We tumbled out of the doors and ran up the stairs and onto the ground floor. Gideon slammed the metal obstruction back into place over the ground floor stairwell access, and Valance sealed it with heat, melting the metal so it fused with the metallic frame of the original door. What few monsters remained beat at the metal from the other side.

  “This won’t hold them for long,” Micha said.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here before they get free,” Deacon said tersely.

  He strode for the exit. Yeah, he wasn’t going to get any argument from me.

  As we climbed up the rise toward the wards, my mind was whirring. The mutants hadn’t used any arcana, which led to the conclusion that they could no longer use the power they’d once taken for granted, and that whatever had altered their DNA had taken that ability from them. Why hadn’t they tried to escape when the world first went to shit? The wards stopped people from finding this place, but they didn’t stop people leaving. It made no sense for them to have stayed unless … Unless they’d had no choice.

  I stopped as an awful thought hit me. “I think their own people did this to them.”

  “What do you mean?” Wilomena asked.

  “This was a secret facility used to create defense options for the Arcana, right?”

  “Correct,” Valance said.

  “Okay, so what if, when Genesis went rogue, they continued to work here. Experimenting on Arcana to try and create some kind of super soldiers?”

  Valance snorted. “Sounds about right. It would explain the lockdown for sure.”

  The scientists had evacuated, sealing up their experiments inside, but the experiments had survived. Oh, God. How had they survived, and what had they done to do so?

  “We should blow up the place,” Micha said. “End it for them.”

  He was right, it would be the humane thing to do, but I just didn’t have it in me. “Maybe once this is over, we can find a way to help them.”

  We reached the wards, and I pushed against the barrier, rearranging the runes to create a doorway, and led everyone back out into the world where a secret lab did not exist.

  We crested the rise just as Deacon called out a warning. A gust of air almost knocked me off my feet, but Deacon was there to grab hold of me. What the heck? Twin shadows fell over us, and then two huge dragons landed a few meters away from us. One of them morphed into the familiar figure of Bastian, Lyrian and Micha’s brother. He jogged over to us.

  “You have to come quickly,” he said. “We had a message from the Hive. They’re under attack.”

  Chapter 12

  The trip back to the Hive was a blur of adrenaline and stomach-churning dread. The truck had been abandoned for the faster mode of flight. Fuck the possibility of drones, there wasn’t time for caution because the Hive was under attack.

  I rode Lyrian while Bastian and Aidan flanked me. Valance and Wilomena were in dragon form behind us carrying Deacon and Emory, while Micha flew ahead in stealth mode.

  Damn, I hated that I couldn’t see him.

  How was this even possible? We’d find out soon enough because the forest was now in view, and … Oh, God … The air above it was filled with drones. So many drones hovering as if waiting, but for what?

  Flames shot out of Bastian’s and Aidan’s mouths, cutting across the sky to take down several of the closest drones. The rest turned toward us and attacked. Red lasers flew, and I countered with arcana, holding on to Lyrian for dear life with one hand and gripping like crazy with my thighs to stay on board.

  He had no choice but to swerve to avoid the laser, and some of my blasts went wide because of that, but I got in enough strikes to clear a path through the killer drones and down into the forest clearing. My heart surged up into my throat and beat like a frightened rabbit at the sight of the hatch, blasted open and charred. Flames still flickered on the earth surrounding the mouth to the Hive. They were inside. Genesis was inside.

  I was leaping off Lyrian even before he’d touched down fully. My legs pumped as I ran for the Hive, but an arm around my waist snagged me out of mid-sprint and pulled me back against a taut chest.

  “Stop.” Gideon’s voice was an undeniable command, and my limbs froze on instinct.

  The paralysis lasted less than a second because my brother was down there, Verona was down there, Finn was down there, so many people … “Get off me.”

  I fought to be free, but Gideon’s grip was unrelenting, then Lyrian was in my mind, soothing and calming.

  I sagged in Gideon’s arms. “I’m good. Okay. I’m good. Let me go.”

  He released me almost warily. “We need a plan.”

  “The plan is we go down there and blast some scuttlers to hell.”

  Deacon joined us. “Sounds like a plan to me, but you go in with a guard of your own. Gideon and the fire breathers can keep you safe while you take out Genesis’s minions. Do not stray from them. You got it?”

  Wilomena, Lyrian, and Valance joined me at the hatch while the others made up the rear.

  Pulse racing with a rush of blood, I climbed into the hangar.

  Silence greeted us. The kind of silence that accompanied a vehement exclamation, the kind that preceded death. The stench of blood and the residue of screams hung in the air.

  The Protectorate chamber was a mess of broken hunks of cement and glittering shards of glass. My boots crunched through debris as I made my way toward the guardian chamber. The lounge was trashed, the table broken, the sofas torn to shreds. Micha ran from room to room and then returned to the lounge and shook his head.

  No bodies.

  Was that a good thing? It was a good thing, right?

  My instincts, my arcana sixth sense told me that whatever had crawled through the Hive tunnels was now gone, but Deacon confirmed it a moment later.

  Jogging back from the tower, he met us by the destroyed plaque. “I checked all the feeds. The place is empty of Genesis’s minions, but there are a ton of dead bodies, and you need to see something.”

  We followed him up to the tower, where he accessed the feeds from an hour before. Chaos erupted on all the screens. Neph and humans running, but the machines that scuttled through the corridors were like nothing we’d ever seen before. They were mini tanks, and they weren’t killing humans, they were swallowing them whole.

  “What the fuck?” Micha leaned forward to get a better look at one of the monitors. “What are they doing?”

  My scalp prickled. “Harvesting. Genesis is harvesting humans.”

  Bry could be alive. Verona could be alive. They could all be alive. “We have to act now. We have the orgometal; we need to find a way to kill Genesis.”

  “Hold on one moment,” Emory said. “How the hell did they get in?” He tapped at the keyboard, bringing up an image of the hub and the heart. An hour and a half ago, everything was fine. The heart was glowing, workers milling about, and then a shadow flitted across the hub floor.

  My heart stalled. “Hunter?”

  Deacon swore softly under his breath.

  No. That couldn’t be right. Hunter wouldn’t … why would he? Puzzle pieces began to fall into place in my mind even as everyone else broke into a cacophony of exclamations and accusations.

&nbs
p; “Wait!” I held up my hand. “The shade child on the silver disc … what if … What if it was Hunter?”

  “What are you saying?” Wilomena asked. “That Hunter is somehow connected to Genesis?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that when I think back on it, he hasn’t been himself since he got back from the gray.”

  “The gray?”

  “It’s an in-between place he sometimes gets sucked into. He told me about it, that he gets pulled there and can’t always return at will. He was there for three weeks the last time.”

  Emory looked thoughtful. “It makes sense.”

  Micha snorted. “Well, I’m glad it makes sense to you, now maybe you can explain it to the rest of us.”

  “Genesis is a machine with an AI consciousness modeled on a shade’s mind. You saw how they kept the orgometal in the shade child’s vicinity. Maybe the metal somehow built a connection to that particular shade’s mind, and if that shade is Hunter, then maybe the gray is a representation of that shared consciousness?”

  “Oh, God.” Deacon was suddenly pale. “If Marika knew this, it would explain why she kept him locked in a warded room … Why she bound him.”

  “You think she was trying to mute the connection between him and Genesis?” Valance asked.

  He was right. “Hunter seemed himself when I freed him. He was his usual sarcastic self, but the last two times we’ve spoken, he acted differently. I put it down to the trauma of being in the gray.”

  “You think he’s still here?” Lyrian asked. “If he’s working with Genesis, surely he would have gone with him. We need to focus on the orgometal. On finding a way to destroy it so we can apply that to the real monster.”

  He was right. Hunter could be anywhere by now. My heart sank. The Hive was empty, the neph and humans in Genesis’s clutches. We had to focus on a weapon to kill him.