Chapter Fourteen
I see you managed to get away," the man said, casually dropping an army-green satchel on the makeshift lab bench, right on Chris's notes. My eye twitched, and I shifted to stand in front of Winona as the woman shook in fear and shock. "Nice job fucking up a perfect exit plan, Chris. Where's Kenny?"
Interesting, I thought as I took in the spare, athletic, somewhat military-looking man as Chris ignored him. He was dressed in jeans and had an army surplus jacket with a pre-Turn logo, a black T-shirt underneath it. His boots were suspiciously clean, but I could see a hint of dried mud on them, telling me he'd wiped them down recently. His hair was brown and cut close to his head. Average build, average height, nothing to make him stand out except perhaps the hard determination in his eyes and his stance, which would make me believe he was an alpha Were if I didn't know better. No, this guy was HAPA, from his pre-Turn army boots tied with HAPA knots to the necklace of amber nuggets looking odd and out of place around his neck.
Gerald's face went red, and he shot me a glance. "A clot in a suit choked him to death. They almost had Jennifer."
"I saw. You left evidence of yourselves everywhere getting her free. Thirty more seconds, and I would have shot you both instead of the clots." He set his rifle atop the monitors and faced me. "That is a mistake," he said, meaning me.
Jennifer fidgeted, head down as she subserviently moved the man's satchel to the pile of sleeping bags in the corner and began to set up the camping cots. Gerald returned to his instruments, avoiding the rising tension between Eloy and Chris with a tired familiarity.
"I'm not going to take responsibility if you can't follow a simple order," Eloy said.
Chris looked up, pissed and still riding the high of having done that curse. "I'm in charge in the field. Not you."
"Sure." Turning his back on her, he came to stand before the cage. "Why are there two goats in the box?" he said as he crouched, looking at us. "I told you, one corr at a time. God, that is one ugly bitch." He hesitated, turning to Chris even as he crouched before us. "She's still alive?"
"It's Morgan. Her blood worked!" Jennifer said as she unrolled a bag on a cot, and Eloy's eyes flicked to mine, holding. There was no fear - it was worry laced with knowledge, and my heart pounded. He looked away first.
"She came after us, and well, why not take her?" Jennifer said cheerfully.
"That's Morgan?" he said, and I gave him a bunny-eared kiss-kiss. "Shit," he mouthed, and I smiled bitterly at him. Yep, that was the reaction I liked. "Taking her was a mistake," he said as he stood and strode to Chris. "I told you not to put that corr on display!" he exclaimed, his back stiff as she continued to ignore him, her neck becoming red. "This is exactly what I was trying to prevent. I told you - "
Chris looked up, slamming her pen down and cutting his tirade off in midstream. "Either you told me a deliberate lie or you're less informed than usual. I'm tending to go with the first because you have too much intel to not know the coven destroyed her magic."
"It's cut off, not destroyed," Eloy said, glancing at me. "She's dangerous, magic or not."
Chris shifted slightly, crossing her legs at her knees. "Morgan is helpless." She sniffed. "Her blood is good, though."
Clearly unconvinced, Eloy bent over her, putting one hand on her paper to prevent her from continuing her notes. "You deliberately disobeyed a direct order."
"I don't work for you."
Eloy's jaw clenched, and he straightened, clearly trying to keep from losing it. "This is a military operation, not your personal in vitro experiment! They're going to double their efforts to find Morgan. That I can adjust for, but we are not equipped to move two people without losses. They shouldn't even be incarcerated together."
"Relax, goat girl can't even stand up," Chris said as she continued to write her notes.
Pissed, Eloy squinted at her as Gerald and Jennifer quietly went about their separate businesses. "You have seriously jeopardized the entire operation for the last time, Chris. You're out. Both you and Jennifer. You have five minutes."
"Me!" Jennifer said, aghast, as she shook out another sleeping bag. "I told her not to!"
Eloy had his hand on the butt of his pistol. "I'm calling it in, and you're going to go back to the hospital where you belong. Using magic is a mistake!"
Chris slammed her pen down, standing to stare at him, eye to eye. "Look at that goat in there with her," she said, pointing. "Use your eyes. She's not dying. The curse worked with Morgan's blood, you cretin. As soon as we can synthesize it in quantity, we can wipe every last Inderlander from the face of the earth with one curse, and you tell me I've jeopardized the operation? That I've made a mistake?"
One curse. That's what the demons had twisted to try to kill the elves, and look what happened.
"I am the science here," she said confidently. "You are the muscle to keep the FIB and the I.S. off my back. If you can't do that within the parameters I set, I'll send you home and get another one just like you." Her stance stiff, she dared him to say anything, confident she had the clout she needed. "We don't need your kind anymore, Captain America," she said, pushing him out of her way and sitting down. "And you know it. Military idiots who use machine guns to open a jar of pickles. We are fighting magic with magic, and for the first time we are winning."
Hands slowly unfisting, Eloy walked with a heel-toe sharpness on the dirty cement as he went to the cots and sat on one. He frowned, his feet spread wide as he rested his elbows on his knees and assessed me, thinking. His eyes were too bright, too clever for my liking as they traveled over me, lingering knowingly on the bit of tattoo that he could see.
On the other side of the room, Chris confidently went back to work. She may have thought she had won and was in charge, but she wasn't. Scientists never won over the military. When push came to shove, she'd do what he wanted or find herself dead in a hole. He knew it as well as I did, and he didn't mind letting her think otherwise until the last moment.
Winona was making a breathy hiccuping sound, and I took her hand, thinking it felt too thick and short. At least she had fingers. "You're okay," I said softly, not liking Eloy's stare on me. "I'll get you back to normal."
How am I going to do that? I thought, but she nodded, her head suddenly falling forward as she forgot her head was top heavy now.
Jennifer finished with the last cot, her motions more sure as she started unpacking a small box of journals rescued from the last site.
"What were her Rosewood levels?" Eloy asked suddenly, and Jennifer jumped.
"Look for yourself, you lazy ass," Chris muttered, head bent over her notes, and Eloy's eyes narrowed.
"Excuse me?"
"I said, all you have to do is ask," Chris said sarcastically, pulling the data book closer and tossing the black-and-white journal across the space.
Eloy deftly caught it, propping the book on one knee as he leafed through it. "Peaked the chart," he said as he thumbed to the last entry. "She shouldn't be alive."
"Neither should any of you," I said. "Tell you what. Let me out, and I can fix that."
Chris slammed her pen down and half turned to me. "My God, doesn't she ever shut up?" Getting to her feet, she went to stir the soup, which made me all the hungrier. Her mood was shifting now that Eloy wasn't barking at her.
"And the other woman's levels?" Eloy asked, giving me a glance as he stood, book splayed open on his palm as he came to sit in Chris's chair - still playing the dominance game.
Expression mocking, Chris leaned over to flip back a page. "Here are her initial levels," she said, pointing. "We haven't gotten the new levels since her adjustment."
Her eyes flicked to Winona, and it was all I could do to stay quiet. Adjustment? She called that an adjustment? How about I adjust her right out of existence?
Eloy closed the book fast enough to make Chris's short hair shift. "Why not?"
Chris picked up the hot beaker with a Kevlar mitt and poured some soup into a black mug. "She didn't die, for one," she said as she shook off the mitt and blew on her soup.
"Thank God," Gerald muttered, almost forgotten at the monitors.
"We'll get the sample somehow," Chris finished, looking at me and sighing as if I was an errant child.
"Way to think ahead, Einstein," Eloy said, and she frowned.
"You're not touching Winona," I muttered. I had the sudden urge to use the bathroom. This might be a problem if I kept threatening them, but I couldn't stop myself.
Jennifer slid the last book away and turned, smiling brightly. "Want me to dart them?" she asked, eyes going to a box on the counter.
"No," Eloy said, exhaling softly. I didn't like the way he was looking at me, like I was an animal he wanted to study - but one too dangerous to keep for long.
"Yes," Chris said, immediately countermanding him. "At least she would shut up. I thought the whining and crying was bad, but this is worse."
"Let me try," Eloy said, and Chris leaned back on the narrow counter. The light from the single bulb in the center of the room made her expression hard to read. Eloy put his hand up as if asking for patience. "I'm sure I can reason with them," he said, the expression on his face empty as he looked at me.
"And I'm just as sure that Dorothy's flying monkeys are going to come out of your ass," I said, and Gerald rose with a stretch to get some soup, chuckling.
Eye twitching, Eloy stood before me, his hip cocked as if his feet were sore. He was inches from the cage. I could throttle him if I could get my hands through the mesh. "Will you let us get a blood sample from Winona?" Eloy asked calmly, as if he was reasonable and I was an idiot.
"No." I lifted my chin, feeling powerful though I was on the wrong side of the cage. They wanted something. Bad enough to give a little, maybe?
Gerald growled something, and Jennifer sniffed as Chris turned to watch, amused. "You really think asking her is going to work? Jenn, just dart them."
"Wait!" Eloy said, inching closer, his gaze becoming canny, as if he knew I'd been caged before and had escaped. I wasn't cowering in the back, but snapping at the lock, and he respected that even as he thought I ought to be exterminated.
"You stole Kalamack's machines," I said. Not a flicker of change marred Eloy's expression, but behind him, Jennifer's mouth dropped open in a sweet little O of surprise. Honestly, how had she gotten mixed up with these people? My lips quirked as I got my answer from her, and Eloy dropped back a step, clearly peeved by her lack of finesse.
"Will you ask her to stick out her arm so we can take a blood sample?" he asked again.
I edged closer to the mesh, mocking him. "You've been stealing machines and living off the back of civilization like the scum you are. Moving around like this isn't cheap, either. HAPA doesn't have that deep a pocket. You're a backwoods, ignorant fringe group that should have died out with the space program in the forties. Who's funding you?"
Eloy never dropped his gaze from my eyes, but I could see the tension in his shoulders. "HAPA is bigger than you think," he said. "Our people are everywhere." Behind him, Chris went back to her work and Jennifer took the second mug of soup, which Gerald had poured her. The hierarchy was being played out more clearly than if they had been lions on the savanna.
"Who is funding you?"
Eloy smirked. "If you don't convince her to let me take some blood, they'll put you to sleep."
Winona's breath caught. Put us to sleep, and then take more blood from both of us. "Why are you talking to me?" I said, disgusted. "She is her own person. Ask her yourself."
Eloy turned to her, his lip curling when he saw her face, but I hadn't won anything in our verbal pissing match. "Can we please have some blood?"
Winona awkwardly flipped him off with her thick fingers, and I almost applauded.
"Have it your way," Eloy said, and my heart pounded as he turned away. Jennifer made a happy sound, setting her cloverleaf mug down and starting for a box.
These people are nuts! I thought, then sighed when Winona scrambled in a crawl to the front and shoved a skinny, red-fuzzed arm through the wire mesh with frantic haste. "You don't have to do this," I said, but if I was honest with myself, I was relieved.
Winona shrugged. "Ah don' wan oo be spelled," she slurred, her face going almost black in embarrassment as she tried to speak. "Oh, dhit," she moaned, feeling her mouth. "Ah dink mih 'onge is 'orked."
I winced, drawing back from the door as a clearly disappointed Jennifer noisily dropped a dart gun back into the box. As Chris snorted, Jennifer got her blood-gathering stuff together and cautiously knelt before Winona to tie her arm off. Gerald, too, was watching, his back to the monitors and his arms crossed over his chest. Eloy's eyes never left me as he assessed the threat I posed. Maybe I should have cried in the corner like Winona.
"Thank you," he said, and Winona jumped when the needle slid in.
Jennifer undid the rubber band around Winona's arm, nervously sneaking glances at the woman's mutilated face. It really was horrific. Chris made a scoffing sound and dug her spoon for the last bits of soup. "Bloody waste of time. We should have just darted them."
"Got it," Jennifer said, and Winona pulled her arm back, her eyes widening as she discovered it was double jointed. She gingerly rubbed the spot since Jennifer hadn't thought to give her a cotton ball to stop the bleeding. I could see why. I might use it and the tourniquet I'd pulled off my arm earlier to escape with. God!
Jennifer got to her feet, and Chris set down her soup mug and met her at the machine.
"A few more blankets would be nice," I said. "You're down a man. We can use his."
Chris tossed the old vial out and dropped in a new one. "Don't open that cage, Eloy."
"Winona needs her clothes," I said softly. "And I have to go to the bathroom. You've got to have a way worked out by now. I'm what, the eighth person you've held?"
Winona gasped, and I mentally kicked myself. Chris hit the go button on the machine and turned, smiling beatifically at me.
"Wha appen oo da uhders?" Winona stammered, then took a breath and tried again. "What appened do da uh-thers?" she said more slowly, her brown, goat-slitted eyes showing fear.
I sat down beside her, my thoughts going to the woman they'd buried in the basement of the museum. "They died from Rosewood syndrome," I said, unable to give her the entire truth.
"My sisder died of th-that when she was th-three months old," Winona said, and I nodded. Her speech was getting better.
"You're a carrier," I said, giving Eloy a disparaging glance as he got the last dregs of soup. "That's why they abducted you."
The machine dinged, and Chris reached for the tape. I held my breath, wondering if Winona would be able to do demon magic. But Chris frowned, handing the strip to Jennifer to paste in her lab book. I exhaled, relieved.
"That's good," I whispered. "You're not a demon, Winona."
The woman pulled her hand from mine and hid her face in her arms, now draped over her thick knees. "Whoopie friggin' do," she said to the cold cement. "If ah look like this, you'd . . . dink ah might have some of da perks."
Perks? I looked at my band of silver. I'd never thought of demon magic as being a perk and to having been labeled as one, but the madness I was now wallowing in wasn't working, either.
Chris methodically cleaned the machine and ran a clear sample through to recalibrate it. "So are we good here for a few days?" she asked Eloy.
Eloy had put himself half in the dark on one of the rolled-up sleeping bags, again watching me. "Should be. I contaminated everything the FIB and the I.S. had before it got back within city limits. All they have now is a sample of dog spit. If they use it to make a finding charm, they'll lose an entire day until they figure out they're following a stray," he added, watching me for my reaction.
I shrugged at him, wondering if we would get any of that soup.
Eloy took his eyes off me, and I stifled a shudder. "We should be good for four days. Maybe longer. They'll probably try to find us using Morgan's hair. Good thing I put you so far from the city center this time." Tilting his head back, his Adam's apple moved as he got the last swallow of soup.
Jennifer leaned over her lab book and tore a strip of tape from a dispenser. "I don't understand how they found us this last time. Too bad we can't transform her, too," she said as she taped Winona's results down. "Change her so far that the charms won't recognize her," she added, her head tilted as she assessed the latest addition to her scrapbook from hell.
Arts and crafts. Would the woman's talents never cease?
"Change her?" Eloy said, looking alarmed.
"I'm not risking changing her blood by mistake," Chris said, and Eloy looked concerned as he eased down on a cot and stared at the low ceiling, his hands laced behind his neck and his boots on the sleeping bag. His military training was showing, and I wondered how he'd gotten through the armed services with the same attitude that got him into HAPA.
"They'll find us," I said, as much for myself as for Winona, and I mentally marked where Jennifer slid the lab book away. I wanted it when I got out of this cage. The floor was cold, and I shifted uncomfortably.
"Doubt it," Eloy said to the ceiling. "You really don't have any contact with the lines, do you?"
My brow furrowed, and I was silent for a moment. "Why?"
Getting up, Eloy went to talk to Gerald.
"Why?" I shouted, and Winona winced. Fear slid through me, and I turned to her. "Winona, you're a witch. Can you see ley lines with your second sight?"
She nodded, catching her head before it snapped forward this time. "We're underground," she said, looking scared.
I totally understood - you never knew what you'd see when you used your second sight underground - but I gave her hand a squeeze and she finally nodded. Closing her eyes, she seemed to relax as she brought up her second sight. Then she tensed. "Dere are two lines crossing not twenty feet from 'ere," she said, her eyes opening.
I exhaled slowly, hopelessness soaking into me. Eloy had picked this place well. Two lines crossing so close would make it difficult for charms to find us. The searcher would have to be almost on top of us. Add to that the fact that they probably wouldn't widen the search outside of Cincy's city limits for a few days. We were on our own.
Eloy looked back at me, cocky and satisfied. He didn't have to say a word.
Winona was looking at her hooves, unaware of how deep in the crapper we were, and I wasn't going to tell her. "I always thought my feet were too big," she said, her voice raspy but her diction clearer. A heavy tear brimmed and fell, making a shiny line on her dark, almost leathery face.
I leaned over to give her a hug, feeling her changed bone structure. "It's going to be all right," I lied. "I will do everything I can to get us out of here." That had been the truth, but it was just as true that we were in big, big trouble. We were on our own and pretty much helpless unless I could get the bracelet off safely.
I was starting to wonder why I had put it on in the first place.
