by C. P. Rider
The hyper-emotional state wore off an hour after I returned to my cell. If I thought about Lucas or Fiera or the children, it returned, but it wasn't as severe as it had been in the corridor. I wasn't throwing up when I thought about them being hurt anymore.
Although I understood why Fiera had done what she did, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about being connected to my kinder feelings again. Up to this point, I'd been pretty sure the only thing that had kept me alive and relatively unscathed was that I had protected myself unemotionally. Caring meant thinking first. It meant second-guessing smart moves. It meant hesitation when seconds counted.
I'd have to be vigilant.
At eight o'clock in the morning, a guard in a two-sizes-too-large uniform brought me a peanut butter sandwich on white bread and a bag of potato chips. He tossed me a water bottle and walked out. I read him, of course. He hadn't poisoned my food, but he wasn't a big hand washer, either.
I ate the chips, drank the sealed water, and left the sandwich on the plate. My appetite had not returned, and I didn't care one way or the other if I ate, except that I didn't want to be weak.
An hour after my unappetizing breakfast, Garrett Harris entered my cell. He was stone-faced and silent. He communicated by way of pointing to my sneakers and the door.
Guess the warden and I weren't besties anymore.
For a few moments, I considered spiking him. The trancer's command hadn't completely worn off, but if I pushed hard enough, I was confident that I could break through and spike. If I didn't fool around, the warden would be dead in seconds and I'd be back in Lucas's arms by the end of the day.
Lucas. Thoughts of him led to thoughts of Estie, Leah, and Milton. Fiera had assured me that there were others here, ruthless humans, who would carry on with the warden's duties upon his death. If I struck him down, I was afraid the first place they'd go would be to the children's room to exact retribution.
So, instead of spiking the warden, I put on my shoes and followed him down the hallway between the shifter cells. This time, I felt more compassion for the shifters trapped here. The stench of waste, blood, and unwashed bodies was atrocious, something I hadn't noticed coming in. I touched the minds I could, the ones not so far deep into their animal that I couldn't grasp their brains. In flashes of memory that pushed to the forefront of their brains as Warden Harris strode past their cells, I saw what he had done to them.
Sometimes I hated telepathy.
The young male shifter, Tellis, no longer sneered at passersby, purposely burning his flesh on the silver bars. Instead, he was collapsed on a cot, struggling to breathe after being forced to inhale silver dust.
We passed by Milton, Leah, and Estie's parents. They were in the same spot as before. Holding each other, their thoughts ran in figure eights as they plotted and planned and prayed for escape. For a way to save their children.
I wanted to tell them the children were okay, scared but unharmed. However, I had a feeling that would not go well for them with the warden, so I kept my mouth shut.
The warden led me through the security door with the keypad and turned left. We ended up in another cold corridor that led into four rooms. It was a similar setup to the lower floor, except each room here had a door that bolted from the outside. I stared at the back of Warden Harris's green khaki jacket and wished I could bash him over the head with something heavy.
"Where are you taking me?"
"To play," he replied.
"Cool. I like zombie video games, and I'm pretty good at Texas Hold'em."
We stopped outside of the farthest room on the right. The warden opened the door. "Go inside. Sit down. Shut up."
"No guarantee on number three," I muttered.
The room was smaller than it looked from the outside. Harris explained why. "The walls are a concrete aggregate. One foot thick and reinforced with steel rebar coated with pure silver. The door is built to withstand a tornado and a nuclear attack." He pointed to a narrow opening in the ceiling. "That is the sole air vent. It can be easily blocked."
"You're not really selling this place." I clasped my shaking hands behind my back. Once again, my body was afraid, but the emotion wasn't connecting with my thinking parts. I didn't force myself to concentrate on that, though, because I had a feeling not being emotional was going to serve me best in whatever situation the warden had planned for me.
"Bring in Greenfield," he yelled at someone I couldn't see.
I hadn't seen any staff since leaving my cell, but I had no doubt they were around. The sanctuary grounds always felt simultaneously crowded and empty. I wasn't sure how the warden managed that illusion, and his thoughts weren't telling me anything—except who he was sending into the room with me.
And what he expected me to do to that someone.
"No. I can't. I won't." Frustration and fear, in equal measure, thrilled through me. I choked the emotion back.
Harris spun around, stuck his face in mine. He was a lot less Denzel today, more Satan in a uniform. "Did you read me?"
"Yes. You're taking me to a scary room against my will, did you think I wouldn't?"
He laughed heartily. It was the beef stew of laughs, gut-filling and warm. The man could play Santa Claus at a mall if he were so inclined, though I wouldn't trust him around Rudolph. He might mistake the reindeer for a shifter. "That ex of yours doesn't know you at all, does he?"
Julio again. I crossed my arms over my chest.
"Roso said you had all these rules that you follow, rules that make you ineffectual and weak. He thought we'd have our work cut out for us in getting you to participate, but he couldn't have been more wrong, could he?"
When this was all over, I intended to spike my ex right into his brother's arms.
"Participate?"
"In our scenarios," the warden said.
"You mean torture sessions? Or are you talking about turning me into your own personal killing machine?"
He clicked his tongue at me. "Now Neely, we don't need to turn you into a killing machine. You're already one. We just need to point the gun."
"I am not a weapon." I gritted my teeth against the desire to spike him.
He smirked. "Tell that to my dead guards. Get in here, Greenfield."
A hulking man, six and a half feet tall, entered the room. His shoulders were hunched, neck bent forward, body covered with coarse black fur. A gorilla shifter. I'd never seen one before. This one was in hybrid form, but that didn't make him any less terrifying.
"I won't kill him."
The warden straightened his jacket cuffs. "Then you'll die."
The way the gorilla shifter glared at me, I believed it.
"What?" I started talking too fast. "You went to all that trouble to get yourself a spiker only to let this shifter kill me? Warden, I thought you were smarter than that."
He whirled around and gripped my throat in both hands. He dug in with his fingers and yanked me so close I could feel his breath on my forehead. "Do. Not. Call. Me. That."
I skated over his thoughts. It seemed Garrett Harris needed to think of himself as a white hat cowboy. He didn't like the implication that the sanctuary was a prison. His first thought was to his wife and how she would never understand his work, even if it was for the greater good.
Cognitive dissonance. Fiera was right.
And I'd thought I had a serious moral disconnect.
"Don't ever bring your wife here," I croaked. "If she sees, she'll leave you."
His teeth ground together. He spat his next words through them. "Get out of my head, spiker."
I coughed and wheezed, unable to draw a full breath.
One of the guards poked her blonde head into the room. "Sir? Is everything okay?"
Slowly, he opened his fingers, one by one, until he'd released me. "Yes. Let's proceed."
The gorilla shifter and I studied each other. I'd been drawing energy from him since the moment he'd shuffled into the room. I hoped I wouldn't have to use it, but if he attacked, I
wouldn't be caught unprepared.
A couple of years ago, I'd watched a documentary on apes, but I couldn't remember anything useful. Gorillas had a lifespan in the wild of around forty years, fifty in captivity. They used tools when hunting. They were endangered due to poaching and the Ebola virus—all interesting, none of it even remotely relevant to my situation.
"What are you?" His voice was low and raspy.
"Spiker telepath. My name is Neely. Who are you?"
"Aaron Greenfield."
The shifter wasn't being violent, but that didn't mean he wasn't setting me up for an attack. His thoughts were difficult to read, but his brainwaves were strong and easy to grip. His animal was very close to the surface, blotting out nearly everything human about him.
"I'm sorry, Neely." He twitched convulsively. "I have a son. If I don't do what they say…"
"Funny how we're supposed to be dangerous, mindless animals, but our captors are able to use our humanity to manipulate us." I glanced in the direction of the bolted door as I continued to draw energy from the gorilla shifter.
"Yeah." He shuddered. "I've been stuck in hybrid form for months."
"What? How?" That had to be why he was twitching and shaking. Hybrid form, while a useful state, wasn't a true form. A shifter could be fully animal or fully human for long periods of time, but they almost never remained in hybrid form for more than a few hours.
"Small amounts of silver are regularly pumped into my blood, preventing me from fully turning into my animal, and the human side of me is physically and mentally stressed to the point where he goes into hiding. It kills every shifter they try it on. I'm the first one here to last this long."
"Why do they want you stuck in hybrid form?"
"To weaponize me. They want someone capable of human reasoning with the strength and power of a shapeshifter."
"They do seem to be fixated on the weapon thing." I sighed.
Aaron's yellowed canine teeth jutted out of his wide, half-human mouth. "I'm sorry, Neely."
My smile faded. "I understand."
"I'll make it fast," he said, rising slowly, puffing out his chest.
I didn't bother standing up. I was already inside his brain. I'd known all along how this would end.
"Me too, Aaron."
He lunged. I spiked.
He was dead before he came within a foot of me.
Chapter Twenty-One
Fiera came to my cell a few nights later.
I lay on my cot and tried to make the world stop spinning. The warden had taken me to one of the locked concrete rooms that morning and told me to spike a weakened wolf shifter through the walls. When I tried to explain that I couldn't do it, he'd accused me of lying and threatened to harm the kids, so I had to spike until blood ran out of my nose to get the bastard to believe me. My head was still throbbing.
And that was only my morning.
"Cornelia? You awake?" the witch whispered so loudly every human within a half-mile radius could have heard her. She was dressed in blue again, this time in a cotton top and ankle capri pants.
"I am now. You whisper like you're participating in a scream contest."
"I've never been good at keeping my mouth shut if I don't have to." She said this in her normal voice as she dropped onto the cot at my feet and produced a folded piece of paper from her pocket. "Sorry, I haven't been around. I've been staying with the children more. This is from Estie. She wanted to give you something to make you smile. She said, and I quote, 'You didn't smile hardly at all when we watched the movie and it was funny.'"
My bracelet tinkled as I took the artwork from her. Estie had drawn a picture of us seated on her bed watching a movie about talking fish. It was the film from the other night. One brown-crayoned arm was wrapped around my back. A hug.
I felt something then, a tiny burst of happiness. It was welcome. "She's got talent."
"Amazing, huh? She's only four and a half years old, yet her understanding of perspective is astounding. You can tell by the size of your body in relation to the TV and to Estie."
I looked at the drawing some more, committing it to memory before handing it back to Fiera. We both knew I couldn't keep it. It might be found and used against me somehow.
Fiera peered into my eyes. "Are you okay? I heard you got sick earlier."
Yet another of the warden's stupid experiments. The only bright spot of the afternoon was when I vomited on his shiny boots. "Been better, to be honest."
"How bad was it?" she asked quietly.
"The warden and his medics pumped me full of silver using an IV. I was afraid they'd turn me into Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory before they were through."
"Bastards. Did it have any effect?"
I shook my head. "As you heard, it made me lose my cookies, but it didn't burn or weaken me."
Fiera slowly folded Estie's drawing into a tiny square and put it in her pocket. "You said your mom was a wolf shifter."
"She was. I'm not. If I were, wouldn't I have had a more serious reaction when they administered the silver?" I sat up on the cot. Opened and closed my mouth to get my jaw to relax.
"Maybe, maybe not." She lifted a shoulder. "Hey, did you hear about Gina and Hunt?"
"Who?"
"The medics you spiked the other day when they tried to gas you."
"Oh, yeah. Those two. What about them?"
"They quit. Apparently, you really scared Hunt. He left right after he woke up. He didn't even ask for his pay—just ran out of the building, got in his car, and sped out of the parking lot." Fiera's green eyes sparkled with impish glee. "Gina left, too, but I'm hearing it's not because she was scared, but because she didn't approve of the warden's methods regarding paranormals. She felt he was going too far. I wonder if you saving her and her baby from the gas had something to do with that?"
"If so, she sure as sugar didn't tell me." But it was a nice thought. An even nicer thought would be if Gina had alerted someone on the outside who could help, but that was unlikely, as she would be implicating herself.
"What else has Harris had you doing since I saw you last?"
I drew my knees up to my chin and wrapped my arms around my legs. "Spiking, mostly. The warden has me working on control."
"Control?" Her brows drew together. "What do you mean?"
"Yesterday he had me force an alpha wolf shifter into a state of unconsciousness. Not like sleep, like a coma."
One red eyebrow shot up. "How can he tell whether someone is asleep or unconscious? It's the same thing, isn't it?"
"He determines the severity of the comatose state by the level of pain stimulus it takes to rouse the sleeper." I shivered as I recalled what he'd done to the shifter. Even in my semi-numb emotional state, I had felt that wolf's pain.
Some of the horror must have shown on my face, because Fiera reached over and patted my foot. "I'm sorry."
"Thanks."
She sat up, rested her back and head against the wall behind the cot. "Is my spell is still working? Have you been able to feel when you need to?"
"It's working, but it's not as strong as before."
"Why do you think that is?"
I took a moment to steel myself. I had a theory that I hoped to heaven wasn't true because there wasn't much the witch could do about it if it was.
"It seems as if every time I spike someone, I become more anesthetized to emotion. Do you think that's why I'm not able to connect with the children without help? Is it because I'm spiking too much? Did I do this to myself? Dolores and Dottie once told me that spiking even ten people dead was a lot. And I've done more than that."
"I don't know." Fiera frowned at me, and there was pity in the look.
I rubbed my hand over my eyes. "I've been doing what you said, thinking about … you know, but I'm not sure I can keep doing it. It helps with keeping the kids' safety in the forefront of my mind, but it weakens me. I hesitate."
She scooted closer. "How do you mean?"
/> "Sunday afternoon I was nearly eaten by an alligator."
"Crocodile," Fiera corrected. "Walt is a crocodile. An alligator has a broader and shorter head."
"Whatever. They both have a shitload of teeth. At least I didn't have to kill him. They wanted me to put him to sleep. Apparently, their latest plan is to have me put other paranormals to sleep from afar so they can go in and grab them without human injury."
"I didn't realize you could do that."
"It's difficult to do on shifted paranormals, and hard to control with humans. To be honest, I was kind of surprised that I didn't kill Walt. I was operating on pure reaction after he tried to bite my toes off." I shivered. "The morning before, I had trouble locking onto a wolf's brainwaves, so they strapped him to a table and made me do it over and over until I got it right. On the plus side, I'm better at it. On the minus side, it was an overall unpleasant experience for Tellis."
"Poor Tellis." Fiera rested her head on her kneecaps.
"Is he okay? They wouldn't tell me."
"He's alive. Garrett Harris is a bastard."
"You're just noticing that?" I laid back down, stared at a cobweb on the ceiling. "I can't figure him out. What's his motivation? Sure, it's money, but it's not only money. It's for the 'good of humankind,' but he doesn't completely believe that, either. After our discussion on cognitive dissonance, I've searched his thoughts for what he truly values. His family, his religion—the man is a church deacon. He doesn't believe in murder, yet he sets that belief aside the minute he walks into this facility."
Fiera shrugged. "All that means is what he does here resonates at a level of dissonance he's grown comfortable with."
"True. Prestige is important to him, but not vital." I fluffed my pillow. "His wife and kids thinking he's a good man is huge to him."
"That's in line with the church thing."
"See what I mean? He's hard to pin down."
"What if he likes hurting people? It's a thrill for him. A power trip." Fiera asked.
"Maybe. You'd know him better than I would."
"Longer, maybe. Not better. You've been inside his head." She stretched out her legs, hanging her small feet off the side of the cot. It wasn't really a two-person cot, but she was small, and I was short, so it worked.
