“I AM GOD!”
Desiree shrank back, hunching against a physical attack.
It didn’t come.
Frank knocked politely, and ducked his head inside. “Sir? Everything in order?”
Klaus pulled himself together and smoothed his hair. “Everysing is fine. Why are you interrupting?”
“Sir, one of my men found something in the baths.”
Desiree’s heart skipped a beat, and she risked a cautious glance at Frank, who watched her in return.
“There’s a break in the tunnel wall,” he said. “It’s a serious hole in our defenses.”
Silence hung for a few seconds as the news fully sank in.
Then Klaus thumped the beaker down onto the table beside Desiree. His priorities had changed. “Show me,” he ordered, marching out after Frank.
After a brief conversation outside, which Desiree assumed included an allotment of orders and assignments, the guards split up and Arik stepped into the lab.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
Desiree nodded, the movement too jerky to convey any semblance of calm.
“What happened?”
She held up the beaker.
Arik scowled. “I meant with Dare.”
Right. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Arik blew a tired raspberry. “I’m supposed to watch you,” he said. “Klaus gave the order himself. You are not to go anywhere without an escort, and I’m supposed to make sure you do your job first and anything else second.”
“Yeah, I figured he might.”
“He wants a do-over.”
“Yeah, I guess I knew that, too.” One last dose of ZX-127 left. Klaus would want to maximize its use. “It’s going to have to wait. The subject is in no shape to repeat the experiment.” It wasn’t technically a lie. Just because he was aware and talking, didn’t mean he was fully recovered. Judging by his voice, Alpha still had a ways to go. He could recover fully by sunrise, but no one would be sure unless they opened his cell and checked on him. Desiree would stall as long as possible, do whatever was necessary to make sure she wasn’t the one sent to do it.
She looked over at Dare on the worktable. He’d need ‘round the clock intensive care, hand-feeding, and washing. The thought of touching him at all made her stomach clench, but she’d rather do that, than face Alpha again.
Arik followed her gaze. “I’ll see if I can get one of the women to care for him.”
“We need to get him out of the lab, anyway.” That table wasn’t made to be used as a hospital bed.
“Then what?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, eyelids drooping. Would she dream of Dare’s attempted rape, or of Alpha’s inevitable revenge tonight?
Arik pushed the beaker aside and perched on the table. “I mean, the tide is rising, Dez. You either sink or you swim. Right now. Which is it going to be?”
Desiree looked up at him. His brown eyes dared her to make a choice, and warned it might be her last.
30: Aiden
There’s a poster of Scarlett Johansen on the wall in front of me, Shawshank Redemption style. She stands there, all cocky with black spandex hugging her skin and red hair blowing in the wind, looking at me like I’m lagging behind the march on evil villains. Her mouth lifts up on one side in a teasing smile, and as the poster shifts in a stray breeze, her fingers curl in a come-hither gesture.
I get up. The world tilts, sending me off-course, and I slam into hard stone on my right. At least it’s not far to fall. I right myself to a chorus of helium-laced demonic voices laughing at me. I pay them no mind. Puppets on strings can only reach so far. As long as I don’t touch their curtains, they leave me alone.
Scarlett shines a flashlight in my eyes, merciless photons searing my retinas, but I reach out anyway, and just beneath the poster’s edge, I feel an indentation.
Pebbles give way. Rock turns soft. I claw at the moist earth, dig into it, and the more progress I make, the more feverish it makes me. The more the evil puppets rage. Scarlett floats before me, always just out of reach, coaxing me to keep going. So I dig harder, breathe faster, chasing after her to claw myself out of this freak show theater and its evil little prick inhabitants. I roar at them when they screech my name, lash out between mad bouts of digging, but just like my girl Red, they’re too far, safe behind an invisible curtain of apathy.
I tune them out. Lose myself in my mindless scramble to freedom. It’s just there, a few meters more. I can taste the dew at the back of my tongue, feel lush green grass beneath my hands. Just a little farther. I’ve dug myself half a world away already, it can’t be much farther now.
The smell of blood suddenly punches me in the nose, and I stop.
Comprehension is something I left behind long ago. Up is down, back is forward, cold is hot. My senses don’t make any sense, and time is one big warble of incontrovertible paradoxes that fuck with my mind.
I blink hard and look down at my shaking hands. I can’t see anything in the pitch-black of my tunnel, but I can feel it. Pain. Blood. My fingers are sticky with it, nails hanging by a feeble millimeter of flesh.
And I remember.
The long, winding tunnel shrinks to a claustrophobic granite cell. Scarlett waves sadly as she walks off into the black void, leaving me to my fate, and I stagger back against the solid support of a cold metal door.
One thing the docs won’t tell you, a warning you won’t find anywhere on the packaging: convert venom has one hell of a hallucinogenic side effect.
~
“Is he really in there?”
“Where else would he be?”
“There are, like, a hundred dozen cells down here!”
The whispering children’s voices were right at his back, making Aiden twitch. He pried open one eye, just barely, but it closed again too soon. His body was beyond tired; a boneless heap slumped on the floor with the incessant whump-whump-whump vibrating like a massager running out of juice. It sucked.
“Jake saw him before. He said he’s, like, ten feet tall!”
“Jake’s a ninnypuss.”
Aiden frowned, but a tickle of humor poked at the corner of his mouth. Blood, sweat, and moss hung in the stale air, but if his nose didn’t lie, there were four little human girls huddled outside his door.
One looked through the keyhole, breath huffing a soft whistle past the metal tumblers. “Hello,” she whispered.
“We should go.”
“No way! I wanna see the look on those guys’ faces. Trace will poop rodents when we tell ‘em we were here.”
“Oh, like they’ll believe us!”
Silence.
“What if we have proof?”
A childish scoff. “Like what, his hair?”
“Psst! Are you in there? Hullo?”
They weren’t going away. Even as whispers, their voices were too loud to allow for sleep. Dragged willy-nilly back to consciousness, Aiden turned his head to listen in.
“Can you hear me?”
“I can’t even hear you, Case. Speak louder.”
The girl pressed her mouth to the keyhole and breathed out a “louder” whisper. “How ‘bout now?”
A sigh. “It’s no use. He probably can’t even talk.”
“Why not? The others can. Some of them, anyway.”
“Don’t be stupid. Wolfen are animals.”
“No, they’re not! My dad says if you let ‘em, they learn to be smart, like us.”
“Okay, so can we go now? I don’t like it here.”
The girl by the keyhole turned away. “Are you scared?”
“Aren’t you?”
They giggled. “Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat!”
“Quit it!”
“Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat! Maybe you should go back to your boyfriend, scaredy cat.”
“You guys are mean, and I’m gonna tell!”
Laughter followed one girl up to the surface.
Aiden pulled his legs under him and winced, not so much
with actual pain, but with the memory of it.
On the other side of the door, the girls quickly shushed each other.
He waited to see what they would do next.
“Maybe we should go. She really is going to tell. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
A tentative knock.
“What are you doing?”
“Hello,” the girl said, a little louder. When Aiden didn’t answer, she got bolder, and knocked again. “Hello, anyone in there?”
“Great. We just wasted two hours on an empty cell.”
But Case refused to be discouraged. “Hello!” she shouted, and banged her tiny fist on his door.
“Come on, Casey, he’s not in there.”
“Oh, yes he is. Speak up! I dare you!”
Dare him, did she?
“Case!” The other girl gasped, stomping her foot.
“Shush! I wanna hear this,” the third insisted.
They shushed.
And waited.
If Aiden were a proper animal, he’d roar them out of the tunnel, scare the hell out of them. Teach those brats not to tease things that could bite, and get back to his delusions. But these girls had balls—big, hairy, brass ones—to have come down this far on their own, when even the boys were pissing themselves to step over the threshold.
So he didn’t roar.
Instead, he put his mouth up to the keyhole where the girl’s ear was pressed on the other side, and whispered, “Hungryyy…”
She screamed so loudly, it reverberated inside Aiden’s skull, inciting the others into a terrified frenzy of eardrum-piercing squeals as they raced for the door.
Aiden chuckled and stretched his arms over his head. Job well done. His joints popped, but nothing hurt anymore. Just to be sure, he stretched out his hamstrings, too, then turned his head far left and right. Except for the seasick sway to the darkness, he was back in one piece again. He got up and bent over, touching his forehead to his knees. Straightening again, he grabbed an ankle and stretched out his thigh muscles, then repeated with the other side. In the confined space, he couldn’t do full arm rotations, but bracing against the wall helped to stretch out his shoulders.
Two hundred sit-ups, four hundred one-armed push-ups on his knees—for lack of space to do them properly—and he almost felt Wolfen again. If only he had enough head room for jumping jacks. He’d kill for a nice long run right about now. Since that wasn’t about to happen any time soon, he yawned, scratched his stomach, and sat back down to do some whistling.
A commotion of agitated voices broke out topside, disrupting his tune. Aiden tilted his head to make out the words, but with several voices shouting over one another, he only caught a random word here and there.
“Shut up!” someone roared to quiet the crowd. “Now, one at a time, or I start knocking heads.”
The gaggle started quacking again.
It was marginally less annoying than before, but apparently that was all the cooperation the guard was going to get. “Uh-huh, and why the hell is it my problem that you can’t keep track of your kids?”
The voices grew louder, angrier. Something about a “dangerous animal,” a safe haven, and “trusting the guards to keep it contained.” Aiden finger-brushed his teeth while they yammered on.
“Like I said, not my problem.”
“Yeah? Well, let’s see what the boss has to say about it!” a brave, stupid man returned.
“Good idea,” the guard said. “Let’s go see him right now and hear what he has to say about a bunch of juveniles breaking into an off-limits tunnel and engaging a prisoner without permission or backup. Come on, I’ll even let you talk first.”
After a brief silence, some low-level grumbling prompted the guard to speak again. “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to go down there and check the area to make sure it’s secure. Cool? Good. Now here’s what you’re going to do. You will go home and have a nice talk with your children about not sticking their noses where they don’t belong. You will tell them that when we say off-limits, we mean no one goes in, for any reason. You will then sign them all up for two days of latrine duty, each.”
“They’re just kids!”
“Do I look like I care? I have a roster that needs filling, and it better have names on it by the time I get back. I don’t care if it’s yours or your brats’. As long as it gets done.”
Silence.
“Scatter!”
They did.
Moments later, the guard made his way down to Aiden’s cell and thumped his elbow against the door. “You still alive in there?”
Aiden recognized his scent. The dude who’d incapacitated him for his junk crunching. What was his name…? Arik. Yeah, that was it.
“Listen, about earlier. No hard feelings, right?”
Aiden scoffed.
“Shit’s turning ugly out there, you know. We’re all just trying to survive.” He huffed, and from the way his voice altered, Aiden guessed Arik was leaning against the wall by his door. “Boss isn’t making it easy, either. I mean, for any of us, but especially Dez. It’s like he gets off on torturing her, you know?”
“Can’t imagine what that’s like,” Aiden retorted.
“What I’m trying to say is, maybe we can help each other out.”
“What, like I scratch your back, you ice my balls? Thanks, but you’re not really my type.”
“I can get you out of here.”
“Yeah, I heard that before. Didn’t really work out for me as I hoped.”
There was a hesitation, and then the guard shifted closer, lowered his voice. “That was then. This is now. You didn’t see what I saw the night they came up to the walls. They were testing us. Pushing in to see how far we’d let them get. I don’t know how much longer Haven can hold, and I wanna be gone before it goes down. Here’s the deal: I get you out, you let me and mine go. You decide to make a ruckus to distract everyone else long enough for us to get away, I might even tell you how to get your females out—all fifty-five of them.”
Aiden’s back straightened at that. He didn’t make a sound. Maybe that’s what tipped Arik off. Words muffled with regret, he said, “They’re not well. I don’t know what good it would do. Hell, I don’t even think most of them can feed themselves, let alone make a coherent run for it.”
“You’ll never understand.”
Arik chuckled. “I watched my ten-year-old autistic daughter get dropped from the barricade. I heard her screaming when the converts tore into her. They told me it was an accident, like I was too dumbfuck to comprehend what they were doing while I was watching them.”
Not a lie. Too much raw emotion in that confession for it to be anything but the truth. But then again, the best manipulations were usually based on truth. “They killed your child, and you still work for them.”
A pause.
“Yeah, well. Seeing Annie go over the wall didn’t exactly put me in a sane state of mind, if you know what I mean?” Arik cleared his throat, shifted higher against the wall. “Let’s just say, by the time I came to my senses, there was Haven, and that was it. You know, besides the converts. Before you showed up, we didn’t think there was anyone left alive out there.”
“So you told yourself you’d get used to it, right? It would get easier with time, living with the people who killed her. Taking their orders like a good little pet.” Typical human. Blood only meant something when it got spilled.
“What would you have done?”
Aiden snarled. “Let me out, and I’ll show you.” Plenty of scores to settle up there, starting with Klaus and his bitch-spawn.
“Not yet,” Arik said. “First I want your word. Me and mine walk out al—”
“Klaus is mine,” Aiden said.
“Have at ‘em,” Arik replied.
“And I want Desiree.”
Another pause. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what you think I mean. The one-legged bitch dies.”
“Forget it. She comes wi
th me.”
Aiden raised an eyebrow. So that’s the way of it. The soldier and the cripple. How sweet. “That’s my deal. Her life for yours.” Arik was tough. He’d get over it. If his own offspring had meant so little, losing a girlfriend should prove no problem.
“Fine,” Arik growled, and Aiden’s ear twitched. Lie. “Just be ready when the time comes.”
“Oh, I will be,” Aiden promised. “Don’t you worry about that.”
When the guard departed, Aiden was left in the darkness with nothing but his thoughts for company. They weren’t particularly good thoughts. In fact, after a few minutes, they turned downright nightmarish, so he shook them off and did something else instead: he counted to a million.
By three hundred thousand twenty-seven, boredom made him lose count.
At five thousand two hundred and eight, the second time through, a curious sound reached his ears. Small, light footsteps. He tilted his head, listening to the soft, rapid heartbeat of a child approaching. What, she hadn’t had enough the first time? He held still as those little feet came closer and closer. She stopped in front of his cell.
Aiden readied his vocal cords for a nice, loud bellow, sure to satisfy, and terrify.
But just as he prepared to let it loose, something slipped through the gap under his door, and then the girl ran as if the hounds of hell were nipping at her heels. A frown creasing his brow, Aiden felt along the floor for the tribute. Couldn’t be what his nose was telling him. That made no sense at all.
Apparently, however, sense was not something human children subscribed to. The moment his fingers touched the offering and his brain accepted what it was, Aiden decided that when the time came to start killing, one little human girl might live to grow into adulthood. She’d earned her life with the greatest act of kindness anyone not of his kind had ever shown him before.
Aiden had said he was hungry.
So the little girl had brought him bread.
31: Bryce
We are potentially less than two hours from our goal. Two hours, and we’ll have the means for getting Aiden back—or so we hope. This should be the time to put my game face on, buckle down and punch it all the way.
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