by A. D. Ryan
I stumbled and fell to my knees inside my cell, the stone floor scraping them even through my jeans. The heavy cage door slammed shut behind me, and the key turning in the lock echoed as I turned around.
Jason sneered at me before winking. “See you tomorrow, mutt. I look forward to seeing just how much you can handle with that collar on.” I grimaced at his underlying implication, but swore I wouldn’t put up as much of a fight if it meant I could avoid being sedated again.
I tried to push myself to my feet as he walked away, but the drugs made my limbs feel like I was caught in a pool of tar. I collapsed again as Jason disappeared from sight and tried to cycle through my memories of this place so far. I wanted to try and begin mapping out my escape route as soon as possible.
I didn’t get very far before I was interrupted by a small voice.
“You’re back,” Cordelia said, approaching her cage door from the shadows.
I smiled weakly; it actually felt lazy. When I remembered seeing her last as I was being hauled away, my smile slipped away and my concern replaced it. “Hey. How are you?” I was slurring; even I could hear it.
She shrugged. “I’m fine. It’s not like I haven’t been through it all before,” she confessed, meeting my eyes. Her expression remained sympathetic to my experience. “How are you? Wh-what did they do?”
I explained being in the room alone, and then what happened when they came in to force me to shift. I refrained from telling her how Jason tried to have his way with me; she was unconscious through that entire situation, and I didn’t want to upset her further. I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t already been assaulted, but just in case, I felt this deep desire to shelter her from the brutality of the situation. Cordelia hung on my every word, stunned into silence when I explained the memory of how the wolf essentially exploded out of me. “I had no control, and I actually blacked out…that hasn’t happened since the first few times I changed.”
Laughing without humor, she looked down at her fidgeting hands. “Lucky. I’ve been lucid through everything they’ve ever done to me.”
I inhaled a sharp gasp, and then my rage bubbled again. I understood that they were soulless creatures, but to experiment on a young girl…or worse? That was a whole new level of evil.
I felt the fog in my brain starting to clear, so I forced myself to stand. Cordelia looked up when she heard me, her eyebrows pulled together with confusion as I got closer to the bars without touching them. “I swear to you, Cordelia,” I began, feeling the strength and conviction behind my tone, “I won’t let them hurt you anymore.” Pausing, I craned my neck to make sure we were alone. “I’m getting us out of here. And soon.”
Chapter4 | hybrid
Days go by—four, I think. If I was paying attention to my sleep cycles correctly, as well as the number of times one of the freaks has come for Cordelia or myself, my guess seemed right. I hadn’t seen Jason since the day he’d tried to manhandle me and was stopped by whoever was calling all the shots. I hoped his leader had disposed of him of, but I doubted I’d be that lucky. When was I ever?
We were always taken one at a time, sometimes they’d come for me shortly after Cordelia had been taken, other times, I was taken first. One thing was consistent: we were always kept separate when locked in one of the white rooms, and I could claim to have been in every one of the four rooms down the main corridor. The foundation of each room was all the same: white cinderblock walls, two of them with deep scratches and dried blood from past prisoners, and the two-way mirror for observation, but they each held a different purpose.
Room One—what I called the first room I was in—was the main observation room. It held no furniture and was just a big empty space. I imagined it was meant to drive us mad with boredom, and it was small enough that they could corner us to force the results they wanted if they had to. Based on my personal experience, this room existed solely to witness the change. I hadn’t been in that room since the day I first woke up.
The second room I was lucky enough to endure housed a metal slab—yeah, just like the ones they put dead bodies on when conducting autopsies. In fact, the room was very morgue-like, and it, coincidentally, reeked of death. It wasn’t terribly sterile, but I doubted they cared if we acquired some kind of infection. Truth be told, our fast healing and advanced immune systems would probably fight off any infections we might get, which was a definite advantage to this lifestyle.
As I lay there, I imagined the room was used to dispose of their past test subjects. I shuddered to think how exactly they pulled that off. I hated thinking about Room Two in general, because they dragged me in there, dazed and drugged, before strapping me to the cold metal table and stabbing needles into my arms. They drew quite a bit of blood, and even through my hazy vision, I watched them store it in the fridge. It surprised me to see just how many vials they’d acquired, and from what appeared to be several different sources. How many wolves had they brought here before me? I could smell traces of them in the cells, but couldn’t distinguish just how many had come before Cordelia and me, or even how many had come between us.
In addition to the collection of blood, the room also housed spare parts stored in jars. There were arms that had been amputated mid-shift, fully changed werewolf heads sealed in jars of formaldehyde, and what appeared to be fully developed wolf pups. It sickened me to think that these might have been ripped from the womb of a pregnant wolf or even killed right after birth. I found myself relieved that our kind didn’t shift until they entered puberty, because I couldn’t imagine the horror of ripping a child from it’s mother like that…not that I would put it past these monsters.
I thought of Layla and hoped she was being kept safe and as far away from the search and rescue I prayed was happening. The fact that they kept all of these…trophies on display and probably used them for whatever demented research they were conducting made me want to burn this room to the ground first.
When I was put in Room Three, I hadn’t been sedated. It was a nice change, actually, and I made it a point not to struggle too much in hopes they’d view it as me cooperating or being weak enough from the silver they still laced my food with. I hoped this act would get them to let their guard down so I could make my move.
The room resembled the first, but this time there was a large, intimidating chair in the center of the room, facing the mirror. My escort pushed me toward it, and I balked before he forced me to sit. He fastened the thick leather straps around my wrists and legs. I struggled, but soon realized that there were thin strips of silver along the edges that burned the more I tugged at my restraints. They kept my collar on before leaving the room, likely to keep me from shifting and wriggling out of the chair.
I looked around as best I could, trying to determine the purpose of this room when one of my captors came in. He circled me a few times, like a shark circled its prey, and when he came to a stop in front of me, I noticed the long, gleaming knife he held in his hand.
Torture. That was the purpose for that room.
He didn’t ask questions, probably because they already knew more than they should; they’d been stalking us for as long as I’d been there, leaving little presents behind for us to find. Instead, he just administered a series of inhuman torture tactics to see what my reaction would be. He watched as the first few shallow cuts to my arms with a regular blade healed within minutes. Then he cut deeper, watching with fascination as the blood trickled down my arm and hit the floor. Those cuts took a little longer to knit themselves back together, but they did. The next blade he used burned when it touched my skin—silver—and the cuts took longer to heal. This pleased him, so he retired the knife before leaving the room and returning with an ancient-looking electronic device on a cart.
I had no idea what it was for, but he stuck two electrodes to my temples. Panic rose in my gut, and sweat formed on my forehead and chest. Before I could confirm my suspicions, a jolt of electricity shot through me. Tendrils of electricity licked at the metal spikes around
my ankles, wrists, and neck, and I clenched my teeth as I tried to stay lucid. My hands curled around the ends of the chair as my entire body convulsed, and then there was relief. I tried to catch my breath, my thoughts scattered and foggy. I had barely been able to fully grasp what just happened before he flipped the switch, and I went through it all again.
This time, when I came out of it, I could feel the fever burning through me, but I was forced to pull back when the silver nitrate was released from my collar again, burning my nose and throat when I inhaled it.
Breathing heavily, sweat poured down my face. “You son of a bitch,” I muttered breathlessly.
He responded by backhanding me with a closed fist. I thought my cheekbone might shatter under the force of the blow. This wasn’t the first time a man had hit me in recent weeks, and all I could think about was what happened to the last one who’d done it. Where his body was now, I had no idea, but when I escaped, this asshole’s body would be a pile of ash in my wake.
“You’re really in no condition to speak to me that way,” he reminded me, his voice affecting me like nails on a chalkboard.
“Fuck you.”
That response was met with a punch square in my gut. I saw stars with that one, and even fought the urge to vomit. When my vision returned, I looked up at him through my lashes and imagined ripping his arms off before shoving them down his throat and decapitating him.
“I heard you’re the bitch who killed Gianna.”
I glanced up at him like he was an idiot. “I’d do it again, too, if I could,” I shot back menacingly.
He slapped me again, this time on the other side of my face. At least my bruising would be even. “How many of our kind have you killed?”
I smirked, licking the trickle of blood from my bottom lip. “Not enough. You’re still here.”
This pleased him even less, and he flipped the switch again, this time leaving it on until I was barely skimming the surface of consciousness. My head slumped forward, forcing the spikes in my collar to pierce my neck a little, but I wasn’t strong enough to correct my posture.
“That’s enough,” a static-laced voice said. I forced my eyes open to find there was no one else in the room. Then my eyes landed on a walkie-talkie on the cart. He was communicating with someone on the other side of the mirror. “Move onto the next test and then take her back to her cell.”
My entire body ached, and my eyes were practically swollen shut while my jaw and cheek-bones were slowly knitting themselves back together beneath my torn and bruised flesh. I wasn’t sure how much more I could endure. It was the first time since I’d arrived here that I wished for death.
My torturer removed the electrodes, and then turned back to the machine and turned a couple dials. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I watched him fiddle with the knobs and switches, but soon a high-pitched squeal pierced my brain. My hearing has always been a little sensitive, often picking up on radio frequencies more than others, but this was far beyond anything I’d ever experienced before in my life. My brain felt like it was about to split in two, and the rest of my body tingled and shook with the pressure the high-pitched frequency put on my system.
The vampire didn’t seem to be affected by this, standing above me with his arms crossed as though he couldn’t hear anything at all. When I saw him reach toward the dial that could release me from this hell, I held out for relief, but he turned it the other way, intensifying the sensation so much that all I could see was white.
This went on for hours. I was certain that the last couple of hours were for his sadistic pleasure. The cuts on my arms and legs burned and were still healing, thanks to the silver bladed knife he’d used on me, and I knew that these scars would be worse than any I’d gained since becoming a wolf. I went back to my cell without a fight, too exhausted to struggle or put him through some tests of my own. They didn’t have to drug me to subdue me; beating and torturing me had done the trick.
I noticed Cordelia’s cell was still empty upon my arrival as I slipped in and out of consciousness. I was too weak to push myself up when he dropped me onto the floor of my cell; I’d lost too much blood, but I would heal. Of that, I was certain. Even though I knew it was a bad idea, I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me. I’d need my strength to keep planning and practicing…
When I awoke later—how much later, I couldn’t be sure—Cordelia was still gone. It worried me because she had been taken before me, so I expected she’d return before or around the same time as me. Dwelling on her absence was only driving me crazy, so I decided to focus on the plans of our escape. I still didn’t know when we’d make a break for it, but the plan was all starting to fall into place. I just needed to figure out their patterns and find a way to get out of this cage.
I was pretty sure they ran the experiments at night, or in the few hours before sundown, anyway. As vampires, they couldn’t go out during the day, and they had to hunt at night. That left a short window of opportunity to do what they had to with us. I planned to wait until one of them came for me. I’d grab the keys, break Cordelia out of her cell, and we’d make a run for it. Both of us had been eating light, and I could feel some of my strength returning, so I was certain we’d be able to fight our way out if we had to.
I just needed to master one thing…
I’d been at it every day since I awoke, always waiting until I knew I wouldn’t be interrupted. I’d hate to accidentally show them my hand before I was ready to play it…a pun that was totally unintentional, I assure you, but it applied just the same.
I knew that what I was attempting was possible; not only had I seen Nick do it, but I’d been close to succeeding without even having meant to before.
Sweat formed on my brow, rolling down over my temple until it dripped from my jaw and onto my knee as I tried to focus my transformation to one part of my body alone. My hands trembled, and I worried I was going to force an aneurism instead or pass out from a lack of oxygen as I held my breath through it all. Every time I felt I was getting close, the change would snap back like an over-stretched elastic, and it stung just as much as if that elastic had struck my skin.
I rubbed at my neck, the skin tingling just below the collar. The sting I felt wasn’t from some imaginary elastic band breaking; it was from the collar. I’d started to change, but the collar kept me in line. It was frustrating. I knew I was stronger when I accepted the wolf, but I needed it to work with me right now so I could maybe have an advantage during my escape. While I knew I was strong enough in combat, my human hands wouldn’t be able to penetrate a vampire’s chest in passing. Werewolf claws, however? Absolutely.
I tried to tell myself that controlling the change like that took practice; Nick had told me it took him years to master it. But I didn’t have years. At the rate their experiments and torture sessions were escalating, I’d be lucky to have days. No, I had to figure it out, and I had to figure it out soon.
The heavy iron door slamming shut startled me. The air reeked of my failure, but I hoped the vamps would just assume it was because I hadn’t been given the chance to bathe in days…
God, what I wouldn’t give for a shower, I thought to myself. It shouldn’t even be on my radar, given the situation I was in, but thinking about the little things in life helped to distract me from the horror.
I jumped to my feet and ran toward the front of my cage to find Cordelia being forced along. She looked to be alert, meaning they hadn’t drugged or beaten her, most likely. I breathed a sigh of relief, raising my eyes to her escort.
Jason Smith.
Like the predator I knew him to be, he grinned at me, licking his lips and baring his gleaming fangs. My stomach turned, but the growl that rumbled in my chest masked the visceral reaction I had to seeing him again. I blocked out the rage I still felt when I remembered his hands on my body, and I prayed for one minute alone with him.
Just one.
He didn’t look my way again after dropping Cordelia to the floor of her cell, and my m
ind reeled with the possibilities of what I might really be up against in my fight for survival. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this coven was better prepared than we’d suspected. Jason Smith was far too controlled for someone still in the first few months of his vampirism. From everything I’d been told or read, he should still be a ticking time bomb. But he wasn’t—not entirely, anyway. He was calm and collected. Sadistic, yes, but he didn’t exhibit any rage or an overly cocky attitude like Samantha Turner had in my apartment the night she died. A little over-zealous, sure, but his behavior was carefully controlled.
Someone was teaching him.
Cordelia groaned from her cell across from me, and I rushed back toward the bars. I wished I could somehow be in the cell with her, comfort and nurture her, but unfortunately, I was stuck in here…or was I?
I reached into my back pocket and grabbed the newest chunk of rock from my back pocket; I’d spent some time hitting the wall in hopes of loosening a few more weapons for our escape. I looked between it and the hinges. There was a good chance it wasn’t strong enough to push the pins out, but I had to at least try. I couldn’t just give up without attempting it.
“Cordelia?” I said softly, looking as far down the space between us as I was allowed. I couldn’t see or smell anyone other than Cordelia and myself. I was fairly certain we were alone, so I moved to the cage door and tried to jimmy the pins from the hinges. Again. Like every day before now.
Bits of rocks chipped away and showered down on my head, but I kept trying, hoping I could get it to budge, even if just a little. “Honey, talk to me. Let me know you’re okay,” I tried again, inhaling sharply when the pin moved. It didn’t move much, but it moved. I took the small victory for what it was and kept trying, suddenly optimistic.