Strange Case, an Urban Fantasy (Hyde Book III)

by Stewart, Lauren

  Oh shit. She gripped the steering wheel so she wouldn’t crash, and then looked at Danielle, hoping she wouldn’t see the tears in Eden’s eyes. “Is that what did it? What changed me and made me into one person?” Could it change Mitch?

  “It’s just a theory based on the fact that, even if you inhaled a minimal amount of the condensed form, something dramatic should’ve happened. Death being the most likely but, obviously, that didn’t happen.”

  “We’re strong—people like me. We work differently.”

  “I know. Which means testing the theory would take years and years. And believe me, human testing a compound I know nothing about will never happen again.” After a quick explanation of what she was talking about, Danielle was quiet, regretful.

  Eden couldn’t lose any of them. Not her boys. It just couldn’t happen. Her foot punched the gas pedal even harder. There was nothing she could do for Landon now, but she could make sure Justin was okay. And maybe, just maybe, Danielle could help her do something for Mitch.

  “We don’t have years, Danielle. We might not even have tomorrow.” She told Danielle what Mitch told her that Ryan had told him.

  Awesome. Everything was riding on what could be a fatal game of Telephone. “Why would the less-concentrated dose Mitch took have a worse effect than the big one I did?” Although if there was anything worse than death, Ryan would be the one to come up with it.

  Danielle shrugged. “Every pharmaceutical has side effects. Most of the time, they’re undesirable but, occasionally, they’re not. So, yeah, it’s possible that a mega-dose of J-0026 would cause a different reaction. Or it could be the delivery method—the speed at which it’s absorbed by the body. Given that your metabolism and endocrine systems work so differently, anything is possible. But it’s not something we’ll know until we test it.”

  She held up her hand. “Let me repeat that so I’m sure you understand what I’m saying. Test. It.”

  “Who are we going to test it on? Our physiology is completely different than a human’s, and there are no Abnormal rats. So—”

  Ryan’s Abnormal. And a rat.

  “Do whatever you want to do.” Danielle chuckled bitterly. “Give the drug to whomever you want to give it to. But I’m not going to be there.”

  She didn’t have to be.

  The first thing Eden noticed was the loading door. It was open. Big no-no. Very wrong. Maybe Justin decided to air the place out.

  She ran inside calling his name, searching for him. The scent of blood was strong, even stronger than it was in a closed-truck with a bloody-Ryan.

  “Justin!” When she saw him lying next to the back of the truck, his name felt like a brick in her throat, cutting off her air. Inside the truck, there was loose rope, an overturned chair, empty cuffs, and slack chains.

  But no Ryan.

  As she slid onto her knees, the cement scraped through her pants and skin. Then she reached an area covered with something wet and slippery that shouldn’t be there. It was Justin’s, and he needed it. Inside of him.

  His face was splattered with red as if he’d been a painter’s drop cloth. His breath came in gasps, hiccups, just like Carter’s had when she’d woken up to find him beside her.

  But this was different—Carter was human, Justin wasn’t. He could heal in a way Carter couldn’t. He just needed time.

  “Justin, it’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.” She took his hand in hers without looking at it because all she would see was red. When she wiped his face, the drops smeared, spreading across his cheek.

  He opened his eyes, the corners of his mouth twitching as if he was trying to smile, as if he was happy to see her. As if this wasn’t all her fault.

  “I screwed up.” His voice was soft, scratchy, and barely audible.

  “No, you didn’t. Not at all.”

  “He was so strong, E. Like you are. Said he needed to piss…that he’d…” A tear dripped down, creating a thin line of normality down his bloodied temple. “I screwed up.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. Try to relax and let your body heal itself. Okay? That’s the best part of being what we are, so let it happen. Okay?” She sat down above his head, lifting it off the cement and cradling it in her lap. “Just let it happen.”

  Danielle stood a few feet away, her gaze moving around his body.

  “He’ll be fine,” Eden said, smoothing his hair from his face. She’d take care of him until he was better.

  Danielle shook her head sadly.

  “You don’t know us!” Eden yelled. “You don’t know what we can do!” When she felt his head press against her legs, she knew she’d scared him, so she dropped the volume of her voice. “We heal fast. He’ll be fine.”

  “How fast?” She raised her eyebrows in doubt, but her tone was kind.

  Not fast enough. Not with the amount of blood there was. And where he wasn’t bleeding out, he was probably bleeding internally. “Then do something, Danielle! Don’t just stand there. Do something.” Please. Because Eden didn’t know what to do.

  Danielle knelt down next to him, ignoring the pool of blood under her knees, and started her assessment. She spoke to him, asked him to keep talking to her. He tried, Eden knew he tried, but his words were fragmented. Each breath was laborious, his face distorting in pain, even though his lungs couldn’t possibly be filling. Not with air, at least.

  “Hard…to breathe,” he mumbled.

  “You have some broken ribs,” Danielle said. “One of them might have punct—” When Eden shook her head, Danielle stopped. He didn’t need a damage report. “You’re doing great. And...you’ll be fine.”

  “It hurts, E. Hurts…everywhere.”

  “I know, honey.” She took a deep breath so her voice wouldn’t shake as badly as the rest of her was. “It’ll be better soon. You’re gonna be okay.” She bit her lip to stop the whimper from coming out.

  His eyes met hers upside down. “He said he would tell me”—a shuddered breath—“if it was me they”—and another—“used. I screwed up. Sssssorry.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t give yourself so much credit. I was the one who screwed up.” Why didn’t she send him back to Florida as soon as she found him? Why didn’t she kill Ryan before he had the chance to do this?

  Mistake after mistake after mistake. And she’d left Justin behind to pay for all of them.

  “He was so strong, E.”

  “I know. It’s not your fault, honey.” She looked away quickly, not wanting her tears to fall on him, to be another weight on his broken body. He’ll heal. He has to. She pushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “When you’re better, I’ll do your hair if you want. But you’ve seen how bad I am at cutting, so we’ll leave that to the professionals. What color do you want?” She waited, not looking down because she was afraid to.

  The silence bit into her, ripping into her skin, muscle, bone. Through all of her armor. And it held on, its jaw unyielding, tearing her soul apart and leaving a scar she’d carry for the rest of her life.

  It hurt. And she deserved it.

  Eden caressed his head. Softer now, so she wouldn’t hurt him.

  Because he shouldn’t hurt anymore.

  He shouldn’t…hurt.

  Chapter XXXVII

  Life isn’t always pretty. Fights are never pretty. And death? Well, death is really fucking ugly. No matter how necessary, how deserved, how inescapable, it’s motherfucking ugly.

  But at least it hadn’t been either of them. Once the guns were empty and the fighting got more intimate, Mitch and Landon had barely been touched—knocked around a bit, but nothing too dramatic. And then…

  Shit, and then…

  What the fuck just happened?

  Two against seven. And only two were still vertical.

  Like always, Mitch and Landon made a good team—counting bullets that were aimed at them and men who were doing the aiming, taking turns covering each other so they wouldn’t waste ammo, and keeping their enemies engaged until the fight be
came hand-to-hand.

  And oh, what a hand-to-hand it was.

  Mitch wondered if the guilt would set in later, once the adrenaline died down. Or if carnage was just something cops got used to—seeing it as much as they did. Was causing it any different?

  “You kill a lot of people when you were a cop?”

  “A few.” Landon’s voice was steady, controlled. Even more than normal. ‘Compartmentalizing’ is what a shrink would call it. During a long bout of psychotherapy for dealing-with-multiple-totally-deserved homicides.

  “This many?” Mitch asked.

  His nod was slow. “But not all at once.”

  In the time it took Mitch to down one of them, Landon had taken out the rest. Like a dance, a rhythm unlike anything Mitch had ever seen, the cop had pulled them down one after another after another. No gun, no mercy, no pause, not even to breathe. The stoic look on his face never changed as he did what he had to for survival.

  The guy had skills, but this was something else, something foreign. Abnormal. A gift from the drug he’d injected earlier—had to be. At least there’d been one benefit to it—Landon had gotten them through a situation they never should’ve made it out of.

  Human trials. Great idea. But was it worth whatever had changed inside the cop?

  “Newman was the guy who tried to shoot me in Florida. And who nabbed Danielle and me in the lab.” Landon was staring at the last man he’d taken out. The one he’d spent the most time fighting. The one who, when Landon asked, “Did you kill Tara Somers in Atlanta?” answered, “Was that her name?”

  The one who’d been smiling all the way up until Landon snapped his neck.

  “I thought he’d be harder to put down,” Landon said. “But he wasn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch said slowly, starting to seriously worry about his friend’s mental health. “We should get out of here.”

  They needed to make sure the women were safe and to get Landon to the hospital so the stupidity of pumping poison into his veins wasn’t wasted. But neither of them moved, as if their minds were too busy processing what was in front of them to send a message to their leg muscles.

  Wonder how long it will take? Maybe he should say something to get their brains functioning again.

  “Now that we finally have a moment together, cop, let me run something by you.”

  “Not another fucking joke. Please, Turner, it’s like torture.”

  “If it weren’t for my bad jokes, you’d have given up on me long ago.” Neither one of them moved. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. Whittley says that a smaller dose of the stuff that brought me back will keep Hyde down permanently.”

  “Sounds great,” he said. “Where are the strings attached?”

  “No strings but a few fatal flaws potentially. First I have to figure out if Whittley even knows how to tell the truth. Then I find out what dosage to use. And, even if I get past those two hurdles, it might not work for me at all. But it was the other shit he mentioned that really bothers me.”

  Now more than ever. Because of what had just happened—seeing Landon access something unnatural, evil maybe, but also being able to control it. If he hadn’t, Mitch would probably be lying on the ground with the dead guys. Maybe over—his eyes darted across the room to an empty spot of floor space—there.

  “You gonna tell me before I die of old age or what?”

  “Whittley said I’m looking at it wrong—this thing between me and Hyde. That I have to accept him—the good, the bad, and the oh-so-very-ugly, or I’ll never be in control.”

  “Kind of like what Eden did with Chastity?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Although not even Eden knew how it happened. “But Chastity wasn’t half the pain in the ass Hyde is. So…”

  Landon looked at him long and hard. “For an occasionally intelligent guy, you’re really stupid. Hyde has more control than you do right now, and there’s a big possibility that you’re gonna die any second. So why don’t you try everything you can before that happens?”

  Good question. The idea that Hyde was really part of him had always given Mitch headaches and heart palpitations, so he’d stopped thinking about it. Looking at Hyde as a separate entity kept him sane, helped him deal…planted him in a perpetual state of fear. “Shit. Like you said, I’m stupid.”

  “Maybe you should become a Buddhist and meditate on it.”

  “I tried meditation. All that happened was I got pissed off and my ass went to sleep.”

  Landon shrugged heavily, as if everything was finally settling onto his shoulders. “Maybe what you need to accept is your inner ass.”

  “I’m pretty sure I already do.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he said, his eyes never leaving the bodies. “Turner? This…what I did…it was just, wasn’t it? A fair fight? It was so…easy. I keep thinking that it shouldn’t have been so easy.”

  Mitch understood—it wasn’t the physical ease of killing so many men that bothered the guy, it was the lack of conscience while he did it. Cops worked on instinct, especially in high-stress situations, but they still felt. They still thought. Landon was slowly realizing what being Abnormal was like.

  “It was either us or them, cop. And you were on the right side. No doubt at all.”

  Surrounded by the enemy, even though they were all dead, didn’t make Mitch feel all that better. But seeing his only friend fall to his knees made him feel a whole lot worse.

  “Damn it, cop!” He grabbed what he could, but Landon was going down. And all Mitch could do was make sure he went down slowly. The asshole couldn’t live through that and then die by cracking his head open on the concrete.

  “Why the hell did you let me chat if you have a hole in you somewhere?” He frisked him, pulling his hands away every few seconds to look for blood. “Where’d you get hit?” He didn’t find more than a few scrapes and a busted lip. “Tell me what’s going on, asshole!”

  “I’m not feeling very well.” His face was blank, his lips pale.

  “It’s that goddamn drug.” Had to be.

  “Get me to a hospital. They need to take my blood. Make sure they take lots of it.”

  “Fucking humans think they’re immortal,” Mitch muttered, hauling him up with both arms. Then he slipped his arm around the cop’s waist and followed the signs towards the nearest exit.

  When he felt his ass vibrate, he adjusted his hold on Landon and took out his phone. “Eden texted: ‘At warehouse. Hurry’.” Great news. As long as he didn’t think about what she might do to Whittley. But between Danielle and the kid, hopefully they’d be able to keep her from gutting him.

  Mitch typed one-handed. ‘No new holes. Don’t kill anyone. B there soon.’ Before he went through the same door he’d shoved Eden out of, he shifted to take more of Landon’s weight. He knew the cop was trying to hold himself up, but that meant expelling energy he didn’t have. The guy was in the red, gas tank below empty, cupboards bare.

  “How you feeling, asshole?”

  “Like Carter probably did. Right before he—”

  “No way, cop. That’s not going to happen. You’re stronger, more stubborn, and an even bigger pain in the ass than Carter was. Plus, I need you around—you’re the only one who laughs at my jokes.”

  “I never laugh at your jokes. And I’m not sure you get a say.”

  “Of course I get a say. And I’m saying—if you die, I’ll beat the shit out of you so badly, you’ll come back to life.”

  When Landon’s laugh turned into a hacking cough, Mitch regretted opening his mouth. He dragged the best asshole he’d ever known outside, taking more and more of his weight with each step. When they neared a streetlamp, Landon winced, closing his eyes against the light.

  “See?” Mitch said. “If you can’t handle this light, you won’t be able to handle the white one, so don’t go looking for it.”

  “I can’t do this, Mitch.”

  Hearing his name—the one he thought of himself as, the one Eden called him—brought
a certain tragedy with it. Because the only times Landon used it were when he really needed to get through…or when he thought someone was about to die.

  “Keep your idiotic thoughts to yourself,” Mitch snapped. “I’m trying to focus here.”

  Landon’s feet dragged, slowing them down even more. “Mitch. I. Can’t. Do. This.”

  “Then be glad I can.” They both grunted as Mitch almost picked Landon up. He was strong, but Landon was too. And muscle weighs a lot. “You couldn’t have worked out a little less?”

  “Say something nice,” Landon said softly. “Hopeful.”

  “I don’t do hopeful very well, you know that.” But he’d try—if Landon was listening then he wouldn’t be dying. “About that pony you want…”

  “What about it?” His voice was so damn weak.

  “Shut up. I’m thinking out loud.” Mitch didn’t want him to waste his strength shooting the shit. “I decided the pony was a bad idea. ‘Cause you weigh a fucking ton and you’d crush a pony. So then I thought about one of those big motherfuckers—the ones that pull the Budweiser trucks. I figured I’d get one for you and one for me. And we could ride around in circles getting wasted.”

  “They don’t come with the beer, asshole.”

  “I told you to shut up,” he snapped, frustration weighing him down more and more. “But then I remembered that you stopped drinking. Which I think is great and I totally support.” He saw a busy road up ahead. Hopefully he could find a cab or hitch a ride from the kind of considerate stranger who didn’t really exist anymore.

  “So,” he continued, “as a symbol of you being on the wagon, I thought I’d buy just one of those horses and get you an actual wagon. One that was strong enough to hold the five hundred pounds you weigh. What do you think?”

  Landon didn’t answer.

  So Mitch freaked the fuck out.

  “Cop?” He felt his legs go weak under him, but he couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let them both fall. Not after everything they’d been through together. “Landon, answer me!” The volume of his voice got louder and louder with every word, every syllable, until he was screaming. “Answer, cop!”