Chronicles of Arcana (The complete collection books 1-4)

by Debbie Cassidy

“Fucksake, woman. This is what I do, so please let me do my job. Hit the button, dammit, or you’ll get us both killed.”

  With an expression of torment on her face, she did as she was told, winking out of existence.

  The guard on the ground groaned. He was coming round. I kicked him in the head, and then dragged him into the glass box and sealed him up. That should hopefully buy me some time. Now to find Eloise and the Others.

  ***

  Two more sublevels swept, and damn, this stealth shit was hard. Avoiding security cameras was a bitch, but I was a master at finding the blind spots. There was no sign of Eloise or the Others. My gut screamed at me to get the heck out of here, but I couldn’t walk away without scouting the last sublevel. A quick peek through the fire door window had my heart racing. Two guards stood chatting to the far left. Both were armed, both wore torso armor. This had to be it. The last two levels had been skeleton staff, but this was a positive sign.

  Okay, this was going to take impeccable timing on my part. The guards bumped fists, then one of them sauntered off down the corridor, taking a corner out of view. The remaining guard turned my way. I ducked, holding my breath. Please let him be headed past the fire door. Counting to sixty, I took another peek. The corridor was empty, but the guards could be back at any moment. I’d need to move fast and be prepared to fire to kill. These guys wouldn’t hesitate to pop a bullet between my eyes.

  Keeping low and moving fast, I headed down the corridor, peeking through the portholes into the rooms along the way to find nothing but empty offices and storage spaces. Shit. Why the guards if there was nothing of import down here? Scoping for a security camera, I took the next corner and nearly shit myself—four guards, big guns, and a massive steel door greeted me. It took less than a split second to take this in, and then I was backing up against the wall.

  This was it. The treasure was behind that door.

  But how to get in?

  Cool air brushed my cheek, and my brain clicked into gear, because an underground facility needed ventilation. I scanned the ceiling and the walls and spotted the vent. Pulse racing, I headed back the way I’d come. My heart pounded against my ribcage, because a guard could walk around the corner at any moment. Please let me make it to the office by the fire escape. The door had been unlocked and the room was empty.

  And here we were.

  Boot falls echoed down the corridor.

  I ducked into the room, shut the door, and slid down, back up against cool metal. The murmur of voices drifted by and then receded, but my eyes were already on the vent I’d be using to access the ventilation shafts to get around the facility. Why the heck hadn’t I thought of this before? Pushing up, I grabbed a chair and shoved it up against the wall under the vent. My dagger worked like a dream to pry the vent cover from the wall. It was on a hinge, thank God, so it was easy to push it up, and—oh, fuck—it was dark in there. Dark and closed and no, there was no time to panic. No time to talk myself out of it. I hauled myself into the wall and the vent swung down behind me, closing me in. Confined, trapped. My chest was so tight it was impossible to breathe. My head spun, and I rested my forehead against the ventilation shaft floor as panic washed over me. Fuck this. Fuck this fear. Eloise was counting on me. The Others were counting on me. There could be no falling apart.

  Move, Bastion. Fucking move!

  If someone came into the room, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out what had happened. There was a trail: the crushed catsear, the guard in the glass cell, and now this loose vent lid with a chair under it. There were too many ways to get caught. If Eloise wasn’t on the other side of the huge metal door, if the Others weren’t there, then I’d have to cut my losses and get out. Maybe I could reach higher ground while remaining in the vent and then use the transponder Greta had given me to get out. That’s it, plan and focus and the vise eases. Plan and focus and move and forget how tight this space was, how there was barely room to shimmy along using my knees and elbows to propel myself forward commando-style. No way to turn back.

  No, don’t think about it.

  Was I headed in the right direction? I fucking hoped so. Light filtered in up ahead. A hatch. I drew parallel to it to see the corridor I’d been in not long ago. Okay, definitely going in the right direction. The whump, whump of rotating blades filled the vent. Oh, shit. Please don’t be a barricade. But the way forward was clear; the blades were above me, set into a vertical recess, probably housing pumps and whatnot. The next hatch showed the guards by the steel door. Hope surged through me, killing the anxiety and fear at being trapped in such a small space. This was going to work. I was going past the doors into whatever lay beyond.

  The vent widened, and I was able to move faster. The band around my torso seemed to ease even more. I needed another hatch to drop me into the corridor beyond. Another whump of blades, this time directly up ahead. My heart sank as the dead end became visible, but then soared again when it became obvious that it wasn’t a dead end but an intersection. Which way? Right or left. Shit. I followed my gut and headed right.

  The sound of the blades faded away the farther I got, but there was still no sign of an exit out of the vent system. What if there wasn’t one? What if I was trapped? Shit, were the vents here wide enough to turn around and head back? Panic flared in my chest.

  “—considering extermination,” a male voice said.

  “No. They can’t do that,” a female voice replied.

  “Speak to the boss.”

  If I could hear voices, it meant there was a way out. The panic ebbed, and I shimmied toward the light filtering into the pipes up ahead. It was indeed a hatch out, but beyond it, in the pipe ahead, there was nothing but a dead end. Fuck, looked like this hatch was my only way out of the ventilation system, and there were people there.

  “Are you coming?” the female asked. “I need your backup.”

  “It won’t help. They can’t allow you to use any more of the Others on your chimera project. They need them to power the Treaty. That will always be a priority.”

  She made a sound of annoyance at the back of her throat. “A treaty that if activated will wipe out most of Arcana City as well as Draconi territory. This is the backup plan. Our chimeras would be powerful, more powerful than the Draconi. We could have an army of super soldiers to bring the Draconi to heel. The Treaty is an atomic bomb and you know it.”

  “But it’s the only assurance we have,” the man insisted. “Admit it. Your experiments have been a failure.”

  “No. I’ll admit no such thing. I’m so close. Look at him. He’s almost perfect.”

  The male snorted. “He’s unstable. Unreliable. A flight risk.”

  “But with some cerebral manipulation—”

  “You could kill him.”

  “Does it matter if they’re going to kill him anyway?”

  The man sighed. “Make your argument, if you must, but then extract as much seed as you can and put an end to this.”

  Seed? Did they mean ... Ew!

  The clip of heels was followed by the beep of a panel and then silence. What the heck had I just heard? They were using Others to power the Treaty. Using Others in experiments to create chimeras. It was wrong, so wrong, but if the man was right ... if we were vulnerable to Elora without the Others to keep the Treaty charged, to make it a threat to her, then setting the Others free would be essentially shooting ourselves in the foot. Until we figured out another way to keep Elora in check, the Others were our only hope. It also meant that the secret to getting into the Everdark was lost to me. Guilt and annoyance warred in my gut, but I tamped them down. We’d free the Others once we knew how Elora planned to attack the city and we took away her advantage. Until then, they were our only defense against her—an explosive, lethal defense. Oh, God. Lex and Noir and Tay ... I needed to get out of here and tell them what was really going on.

  If they had Eloise, then they had her hidden too well. It made no sense why they’d go to so much effort, and there was no way fo
r me to get farther into the building, not this way anyway. There was no choice but to abort the mission. The voice inside me that had been screaming at me to do just that for the past half hour sighed in relief. I needed to turn around, and to do that, I’d need to climb into the room and climb back into the vent.

  I peered through the latticed vent into the room beyond. A square, five-by-five room with a single chair was all that was visible from my angle. Fuck it. There was no other way to do this. Using my dagger to pry open the hatch, I slid out headfirst, hitting the ground with my hands and going straight into a roly-poly. I came to my feet to the sound of a slow clap.

  “Nice move.” The voice was deep, sarcastic, and male.

  I spun to face the speaker—tall, dark, and handsome in a chiseled way. He was dressed in a fitted black T-shirt and black jeans, his feet were bare, and—oh, yeah—there was a glass wall between us.

  He glanced up at the vent and pursed his lips. “That couldn’t have been comfortable.”

  He had no idea, but my perspiration-soaked body did. “No. It wasn’t.”

  I took a step toward him, eyes narrowed. There was something familiar about him, something about his face ... Oh, God. He was the boy Tay and I had caught in the newsagents, the one the elite team had captured. But no, that couldn’t be right, this was no boy. This was a man.

  He arched a brow. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “And you look very much like a boy I met recently. He had a speed issue.”

  “Oh.” His brows flicked up. “Sounds like one of the progeny.” He walked closer to the glass. “They’re all about the seed extraction in this place. Should see some of the movies they play in here.” He jerked his head toward the huge flat screen TV that decorated the back wall of his cell. He held up a hand. “Gets a little hard on the wrist if you catch my drift. Much easier to throw in a female now and then.” He swept a gaze over me. “You’d do.”

  My mind was whirring. Was he the chimera they were going to be exterminating? The one they’d genetically sewn together with Other DNA? “What did they do to the boy?”

  “Huh?” He held out his arms and did a slow spin. “In a cage here. Not exactly in a position to be in the know.”

  Fuck this. This was a waste of time. His fate wasn’t my problem. “Well, good luck with ... whatever.” I walked up the vent.

  “Name’s Quinn—well, it’s Subject Zero, but I prefer to be called Quinn, much more personal.”

  The TV screen behind him flickered and then the theme tune to my favorite show filled the room.

  “They’re gonna kill me,” he said. “Gas me probably.” He pointed up to the slender vents in his cell. “Probably later today.”

  Behind him, my favorite vampire slayer quipped and kicked. “You like the slayer series?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the screen. “Yeah. It’s pretty cool. Shame there’s no season five.”

  “What? There so is a season five. There are ten seasons in total.”

  His mouth dropped open. “What?” And then his face contorted in a snarl. “Those fucking lying, motherfucking bastards.”

  I bit back a smile. Maybe it was the fact that he liked the same show as me, maybe it was the fact that they were about to kill him, or maybe it was the colorful cursing that rivaled mine, but suddenly he was very much my problem.

  “Hey, Quinn? How’d you like to get the fuck out of here?”

  His perfect lips broke into a fang-flashing smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Chapter 11

  There was a keycard panel attached to the wall, but without a keycard there was no way of getting him out. Shit.

  “You got a stabby thing?” He peered through the glass at me all expectant-like.

  “You mean a knife?”

  “Yeah, one of those.”

  I pulled out my dagger.

  “Okay, now pry open the keycard panel.”

  “You know how to disable it?”

  “Might do. Just need to get a look at the insides.”

  God, he was a weird one. The dagger did its job, exposing the slender wires and memory board. I looked to Quinn. “Well?”

  “Nah, no idea,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  He chuckled. “Just joking. You need to cut the blue wire.” His tone was light, but his body language screamed tension—bulging biceps, taut thighs, fisted hands. He was worried, eager, whatever. He wanted out, and yeah, what the fuck did I know about the guy aside from the fact that he was an experiment, aside from the fact that he loved the dinky slayer as much as I did? Fuck it. That would have to be enough.

  “Okay.” Gripping the wire between forefinger and thumb, I used the dagger to slice through it.

  There was a soft beep and then the glass separating us slid into the ceiling.

  Quinn didn’t move for a long beat and then slowly, tentatively he stepped out into the room. He let out an incredulous laugh. “Fuck, this is real. You’re real.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  He turned to me and grabbed my shoulders. “Fuck, I could kiss you.”

  Finally, someone who used the F-word more than me. I bit back a smile. “Please don’t.”

  He released me and backed up, his lips flirting with a smirk.

  Time to get down to business. “Okay, we take the vents to an upper level, and then I have a transponder that can beam us the fuck out of the building.”

  His milk chocolate eyes gleamed. “Or we could just—”

  “Follow my instructions. Give me a leg up and then—”

  A shrill shriek shattered my eardrums and clicks and clangs reverberated in the walls.

  Quinn winced. “That’s the safety protocol coming into play.” He leaned in, his minty breath tickling my cheek. “Were you a naughty girl? Did you leave a trail?”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  He sighed. “Well, it’s just as well you have me. You see, that glass was my kryptonite. They have it coated with something, dunno what, but it nulled my power. But you got rid of that, and now we can have some fun.” He held out his arms. “Fancy getting the heck out of here?”

  The lights in the room switched to red, casting his sharp features into shadow. “How?”

  “Being a chimera in a box sucks, but being a chimera on the outside ...” He grinned. “Let’s just say I got skills. I’ll get us to higher ground and you can use your transponder thing.” He glanced at the door. “But we gotta jet. Now.”

  The door opened and a woman dressed in a lab coat carrying a gun burst in. Her eyes widened at the sight of me, her lips thinned, and then she fired. The pop of the gunshot filled the air and then I was hitting the wall, but not from the impact of a bullet, from the impact of a Quinn. I’d barely registered what the heck had happened before the woman was disarmed and yanked up against Quinn, her back to his chest, his hand gripping her throat.

  Her eyes were wide with panic but her voice came out sure and strong. “Stand down, Subject Zero. Do it now, and I’ll make sure the punishment is minor.”

  Quinn’s jaw flexed with indecision, and dark dread swept across his chiseled face. But then his eyes narrowed. “I’d look away now if I were you,” he said to me.

  “What?”

  And then he bit into the woman’s neck.

  Her scream was drowned out by the sirens, but mine was super loud in my ears.

  Quinn glanced up, his teeth still buried in her flesh, and rolled his eyes as if to say seriously? And then the woman began to moan, her eyes fluttering closed as she sagged against him. I clenched my hands into fists. Just a minute, give him a minute to feed and for her to weaken and then ...

  “Enough!” I stepped forward. “That’s enough.”

  He pulled away with a growl of frustration. The woman didn’t open her eyes but she moaned as if in protest. Two neat puncture wounds decorated her slender neck and blood colored Quinn’s perfect lips. His fangs gleamed wet crimson.

  “Do you want to get out
of here?” he said, his tone thick around his elongated canines.

  I swallowed hard. “Of course I do.”

  “Then let me feed. Our chances are better if I’m charged.”

  “You can’t kill her.”

  His jaw ticked. “Yes, I can. But I won’t. Not now. Not today, even though she deserves it.”

  He sank his fangs back into the wounds he’d made and finished feeding while I covered the door. I’d have to trust he meant what he said, that he wouldn’t kill the neph, because heck? What else could I do? We were trapped if he couldn’t get us out. Long seconds passed and then he dropped the woman on the floor and swiped a hand across his bloody mouth. A quick examination and yes, there was still a pulse. She’d live.

  “Ready?” He held out his arms.

  Really? He’d just snacked on a woman like she was a juice box and he wanted me to— Fuck, who was I kidding. If he could get us out of here ...

  I stepped into his arms.

  “Close your eyes.”

  And then we were in motion, at least that’s what it felt like from the way my stomach lurched to kiss my spine. My head felt fuzzy and empty for a moment and then almost too heavy.

  “One wall down,” Quinn said. “Several to go.”

  Exclamations, gunfire, and screams. Oh, God. What the fuck was happening? He held me tight, too tight, and my eyes felt glued shut and then my bones rattled as we came to a halt. Nausea surged up my throat. I hit the ground and spewed all over the white floor.

  “Transponder, now,” Quinn said.

  Hands shaking, eyes and nose burning from the after-effects of the bile, I grabbed the disc Greta had given me from my pocket—the one that would take me home. Quinn hauled me up against him.

  “There they are!” Boots and shots and chaos.

  I hit the button, and the world melted away.

  ***

  “Oh, crap.” I hit the ground again, ready to spew, while new sirens blared in my ears. Kitchen ... we were home in my kitchen.

  “Breathe,” Quinn ordered. “The nausea will pass ... I think.”

  “Wila!”

  Noir’s arms were around me and then a force of nature rushed across the room and slammed into Quinn, pinning him to the wall.