Mel softened his face and glanced over his shoulder at her, but it couldn't have been very convincing when he had me pinned to the wall by the neck. "She's lying," Mel said. "They fabricated some story to prove her parents' innocence, but it's just denial."
Mel's hand shook at my throat. He was losing control of this situation, and fast. He sounded desperate, like a man who already knew he was caught. And despite the sharp pain of Mel's tightening hands, I couldn't help but smile a little.
Mel must have seen, because he moved his hand up to my mouth. He pulled me from the wall with the other arm, twisting me in front of him.
There was no time to gloat. If I could play Aida against Mel, I'd have one more person on my side. If she could get her parents to listen to reason, it would be seven shifters against one.
This time I peeled my lips apart beneath Mel's fingers and bit him, hard. He muffled his own yell, but withdrew his hand, shaking it. As he did, I looked up at Aida, forcing a look of sympathy onto my face. She deserved my pity, after everything Mel had dragged her through, and if she hadn't dragged me and my parents through the mess, I might have been able to feel it instead of just act it. "I'm sorry he did this to you, but you have to help me fix it. You can talk to your parents. You can tell them the truth. He set us all up."
Mel recovered, and twisted my arms behind my back so hard that jolts of pain shot down my spine. I doubled over.
"You can't believe her," he said. His voice was pleading, but Aida didn't cave.
She spoke quietly. "That's why you wanted to work with them for so long. It wasn't to gather evidence. It was to pin the rest of your murders on them." She glared at him, betrayal in her eyes. "And I helped you."
"Honey," Mel said. "Think about it. She's desperate." The softness in his voice was so convincing, I wondered if he'd talked himself into his own lies, or if he was just that strong an actor.
I twisted my face toward Aida. "He has a gun," I said. And in the brief glimpse I caught of her, a look of fear crossed her face. I recognized that look—I'd seen it in the park, when she'd stood in front of me, insisting that I didn't want to mess with Asylum.
Guess what, Aida. Your husband is worse.
My vision started to darken, but even in the dim light, I saw Aida's shoes step forward. "Let her go," she said.
Yes. I had her. I squirmed against Mel's grip, but he held me tight. I kept pushing against his grasp, because if he felt he had to hold onto me with both hands, he wouldn't be able to reach around for his gun.
"Mel," Aida said. Her voice control skills shone. She held her tone perfectly even, almost robotic. I guessed that underneath it, she wanted to scream. And at that moment, I actually did feel sorry for her. It wasn't her fault that she married a monster.
"Let go of her," she said. "It's over."
"No," Mel said. His voice was ice. "You're going to let me up the stairs."
My heart pounded in my throat. He'd given up pleading. Now he was just going to force his way out, with me as his leverage.
I blinked hard, fighting to keep alert despite the shooting pain in my back and arms. What should I do now? Stall them here until the Carmines came up the stairs? But if my parents won that fight, they might be the ones to come this way. How would Aida react to them?
I needed her good and firmly allied with all of us. Me. My parents. Kalif.
I choked words out. "It's too late. Kalif has the proof of what you did. He's negotiating right now to deliver it to the Carmines." Mel twisted my arms further, and I fell to my knees. My face hit the floor, and pain radiated into my jaw.
Mel's hand slid around my neck, locking down on my throat. I felt his fingers grasp for my windpipe, for the pressure points that would knock me unconscious.
For half a heartbeat, I waited for Aida to stop him. And she did step closer, her feet shuffling on the ground near my face.
When she spoke, her careful, collected tone was gone. Instead, she broke into hysterics. "Kalif's talking to my parents?" she said. "He's here? They know that he exists?"
I twisted my neck, trying to keep Mel from getting a good grip. His knee hit my back as he fought to hold me still.
And as my vision turned into a bleary cloud of white lights, I heard her say one last thing: "We can't let them get to him." And she pushed past Mel and me, yanked open the door, and ran down the stairs and into the fog.
Twenty-three
My pulse pounded in my ears as Mel's hands tightened around my throat, bearing down on my windpipe. My head swam, but two thoughts were clear to me. One: Aida had abandoned me to the non-existent mercy of her murderer husband. All sympathy I might have had for her disappeared with her. And two: Mel was absolutely going to kill me. If not right here in the hall, then somewhere else, somewhere he was certain my body would never be found.
My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I buffed up the muscles in my neck until they bulged, trying to keep Mel from cutting off the blood flow at the pressure points, but he just enlarged the muscles in his hands, clamping down tighter. I couldn't scream for help, and even if I could, who was going to help me? Everyone else was dealing with the threat downstairs. A threat so compelling that Aida left me for dead.
Mel's knee sunk further into my back, and my brain fuzzed, my thoughts flowing together into a slippery ooze. My pulse banged in my head; I gagged on my own saliva. Mel pinched off my windpipe, cutting off air as well as blood, and my lungs sucked frantically, trying to draw breath.
And at that moment, eyes dark and lungs starved, I remembered my training. I focused all my energy on shrinking, so my body collapsed out from underneath Mel, growing smaller inside my clothes.
Mel kept his grip on my throat, but when my muscles stopped bracing against his, he lost his balance, crashing on one knee to the floor next to me. And with all the strength I had left in my oxygen starved body, I pushed against him, twisting and rolling away.
But I was disoriented while Mel was fully alert. He caught me as I rolled onto my back, slamming my shoulders to the ground with his forearm. My lungs gasped for air and my vision began to return—spotty, as if I were seeing through an old black and white television. It was enough, though, to see Mel's hand as it struck toward my throat, as if to crush my windpipe.
I jerked my head to the side, taking the blow to the side of the neck. I expanded my knee again so it was larger than normal and brought it up to strike him in the groin, but he had both his knees on one side of me, to prevent me from doing exactly that.
My knee slammed against his hip instead and knocked against the gun under his shirt. I brought it up again, this time hitting the gun just below the holster. I felt it slide down his side, dislodged by the blow. Mel went to reach for it and I twisted away from him, forcing him to grab me by the shoulders or lose his grip. He slammed me back to the ground. The back of my head knocked against the hard floor, and I winced.
The whole room seemed to spin around me, but I heard the clank as the gun hit the floor. Mel shifted his hips toward it; he'd heard it, too. But his hands were occupied and mine were free. I reached toward it, enlarging my hand just a bit to close my fingers comfortably around the handle.
Mel's hand clamped down on my wrist, jerking hard on my arm, but in doing so he let go of my shoulders, losing his leverage. I pushed away from him, scrambling backward, and brought the gun up to point it at his face.
I'd never shot a weapon before, but my dad had given me some basic instruction in case I ever found myself at gunpoint. Most importantly, I knew how to turn the safety off, which I did, immediately. Holding the gun in two shaking hands, I braced myself against the wall. I was only a few feet from Mel. If he moved to disarm me, I could shoot him, and even with my inexperience, I was pretty sure I could handle point blank.
"Don't move," I said. "I'll kill you." And I was surprised to find that I meant it.
My dad always said there was no such thing as self-defense for a shifter. We were in the business of deceit—if those lies found u
s on the wrong end of a gun barrel, we had no business killing to cover for ourselves. But I hadn't deceived Mel. I hadn't influenced him to kill those people, or to cause my parents to take the fall for it, or to corner me down here in the dark.
Mel made those choices, not me. And I wasn't willing to die for them, or to leave my parents to that fate.
He crouched on the ground, arms at the ready to fend me off, though I didn't want to be one inch closer to him. I had my back to the door downstairs, which meant both that I could protect my parents from Mel if they came up the stairs, but also that the Carmines and Aida would be at my back if they did. Mel's sneer reappeared on his face as he looked at how I was holding the gun.
"You have no idea what you're doing with that thing," he said. "Put it down and I'll let you live."
Right. He sounded so sure of himself, like he had the upper hand. And maybe he did. We were less than two yards apart. Maybe he could disarm me before I pulled the trigger.
My best odds of surviving to help my parents and Kalif were to hang on to the advantage I had. "Go confess now," I said. "And I'll let you live."
Mel wavered for a moment, as if trying to decide what to do. I squared my shoulders, steadying my aim. If he thought he could disarm me safely, he'd have done it by now.
A thud came through the door to the downstairs, like the one my body might have made when Mel forced me to the floor. Mel flinched. It took all my willpower not to turn around. His fingers flexed as he stared over my shoulder at the closed door.
"Fine," he said. "You win."
I wasn't stupid; I didn't lower my gun one inch. But Mel still took me by surprise, and did the last thing I expected his ego to allow of him.
He spun around and ran up the hallway in the direction Aida had come. I pushed off the wall, following him for several steps. He was going up the stairs, and as far as I knew, both my parents were still downstairs. If he was running away, should I let him go? My head spun. Shooting a running man in the back wasn't self-defense by any standards.
I took a few steps toward him, and my foot kicked something loose on the floor. I bent down to grab it—my cell phone had fallen out of Mel's pocket during the scuffle, probably at the same time I dislodged the gun. I clutched it. I could let Mel go and call Kalif, so he could talk me through whatever was going on downstairs.
But as Mel arrived at the doorway ahead, he reached for the eye scanner. He grabbed it with both hands and yanked, and I heard the crunch as it detached from the drywall. Then he moved through the door and shut it behind him.
I blinked. We had to use the eye scanners to get out as well as to get in; even with the door codes on the cells, the Carmines were wisely paranoid about prisoners escaping. Without the scanner on this side, Mel would be able to lock the door on the other side, and my parents and I wouldn't be able to reopen it to get out.
This place was a fire marshal's nightmare, and it was about to become my prison as well as my parents'. Mel's pride wouldn't let him just run. He was going to seal us in behind him, maybe because he was afraid we would follow, but no doubt also to be sure that my parents and I couldn't escape from whatever Aida had run toward.
We can't let them get to him, she'd said. They were her parents—Kalif's grandparents. Why would she be afraid of them? Why keep him a secret?
I heard a thump near where the scanner would be on the other side. Mel was going to enter the eye codes to lock it. And once the door was locked, I was finished.
I ran to the door. I jammed on the handle, but Mel had it stuck tight. It was metal core; it would take quite a bullet to go through that.
I held the gun out in front of me, aiming it at the wall, a few feet from the door, where the scanner would be. Don't hide behind drywall, Dad had told me. Bullets go right through. How long would it take Mel to enter the eye codes? Could he have done it already? I couldn't let Mel lock us down here. I couldn't. My father would understand, wouldn't he?
With shaking fingers, I pulled the trigger. I jumped at the noise. A dark hole appeared in the paint, cutting right through the drywall and into the other side. I heard a shout on the other side of the wall. My body seized up, but my hand kept squeezing, as if detached from my body, until the gun gave a sickening, empty click.
No more noise came through the wall. My stomach turned. The floor seemed to sway, and I swallowed saliva and bit my lip to keep from vomiting. Had I killed him?
I didn't want to look; I didn't want to see. But I had to know. I had to confront what I'd done. When I jerked the door open, I expected to see Mel dead on the floor. Instead I found a streak of blood splattered across the thin carpet, and I saw Mel's back as he hobbled up the stairs and out onto the main floor of the building, dragging one leg, his pants bloody through the knee.
I swallowed, hard, my limbs shaking. The gun in my hand was empty. There was nothing more I could do. Someone with experience might have saved some bullets, but I hadn't thought about that until now.
And though I couldn't be glad he was getting away, I also couldn't help the feeling of satisfaction that followed as I watched Mel Johnson run away from me. His face was turned away from me, but I was certain he wasn't sneering, now.
I gave myself a moment to smile. I couldn't take longer than that, though. I still had a job to do. My parents were still locked in a secure facility, with shifters of unknown allegiance.
I checked the gun barrel to verify that it was empty, then jammed it into my pocket. No need to leave it lying around for someone else to find and use against us. Even an unloaded gun could be used as a threat.
Another thud came from downstairs, followed by the sound of a door slamming. No doubt they'd heard the gunshots down there, and possibly upstairs as well. Did Aida think I was dead? With how quickly she'd left me here, I wasn't sure she would care. I braced against the wall, waiting for an invasion from either direction.
None came, so I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Kalif.
He answered on the first ring. "Jory?" he said. "Are you with my dad?"
"No," I said. "I got away from him."
Kalif was quiet for a second.
I wiped blood from my chin. He knew his father might have my phone. Now I had to prove to him that this was really me. "Ask me anything," I said. "But do it fast."
Kalif paused. "Our first kiss."
I smiled, and my lip stung. "In Andrea's car, leaning against the gear shift. Very sexy despite my horrific timing."
Kalif laughed. "Good enough for me."
I wasn't sure if he was talking about the kiss or the evidence of my identity, but I agreed either way.
I took a deep breath. There was so much to tell him, and so little time. I stuck to business. "My parents are down in the basement with both the Carmines. I need to go after them. We can use the fog for cover, but our position might be better if there were witnesses. Could you shut off the fog and trigger the alarms to bring down security?"
"No," Kalif said. "Their security people kicked me out of the system, and it wasn't safe to stay put. And witnesses will be hard to come by. The Carmines set off their company active shooter protocols. The building was pretty empty anyway, but everyone who's here today is hunkered down in their offices."
I closed my eyes. That meant they'd be expecting gunshots. I wondered if the Carmines set up this protocol on purpose, in case they had to pull guns on prisoners.
If so, that meant they were prepared to.
"How do you know that?" I asked. "You should have gotten out of here before you called them."
Kalif sighed. "I'm hiding in the bushes. A couple of employees ducked out and ran for their cars. I heard them talking about it."
I grit my teeth. "Go! Can't they, like, triangulate your cell phone or something?"
He didn't answer the question. "I'm not leaving you here."
"Thank you," I said. "But you're an idiot."
"Tell me," Kalif said. "If it were me inside, would you leave?"
I chewed on my lip,
and winced at the blood.
Of course I wouldn't.
I heard a beep on Kalif's end. "What was that?"
Kalif was quiet for a moment. "Text from my mom." He swore. "She's down in the basement with you."
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
"She says she wasn't in on the murders. Like I'll believe her."
"No, it's true," I said. "You should have seen her face when she realized your dad was kidnapping me."
There was another beep.
My lip ached from the permanent indents I was gnawing into it. "Jeez," I said. "Silence your phones. All of them."
"Will do," Kalif said. "My mom wants me to get out of here, too."
"Your mother and I agree on exactly one thing."
Kalif didn't respond to that either, but at least I didn't hear any more beeping. "She says the Carmines want to pose as your parents and come after me, as if they're trading me them for my information. If she's on our side, maybe you should—"
"She's not," I said flatly. "When she heard you were in trouble she left me for dead. Your dad had his hands around my neck and she ran off to keep your grandparents away from you."
Kalif sputtered. "My dad had his—"
"He's gone now," I said. "But if you see someone limping away with a bullet in his knee, you might want to steer clear."
A stunned silence followed.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'll fill you in later, but right now I need you to get out of here so I can deal with my parents."
It took him a second to swallow that. "You need me. If I don't distract them, they'll come after you."
"No," I said.
"Think. It's the best plan."
I waited for a better one to come to me, but it didn't. Still, the danger to Kalif was too great. "Your mother said it's dangerous for your grandparents to get their hands on you. They didn't know you existed, she's that afraid of them. Think about it. You know too much. We can't let them use you against us."
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