Secret Unleashed sm-6

by Sierra Dean

  I was escorted to another room, though this one lacked the coldness of my former chamber. It wasn’t fancy, more like a cheap motel room or a military barracks, but it had a bed and a shower, and in one of the drawers someone had left clothes. Real clothes.

  “Dawn is getting close. You’ll stay here through the day, and tomorrow evening you and I will have a chat,” he told me. “The collar is quite safe in the shower, if you were concerned.”

  Once I was alone I bathed quickly, scrubbing off over a week’s worth of dirt, sweat and dried blood. Evidently, only parts of me had been cleaned in preparation for my surgery. I lathered soap over every inch of my body, hoping I might be able to wash away the entire ordeal. I succeeded in scrubbing off the top layer of my skin. Washing my hair, I was relieved to see it had stopped falling out, and I hadn’t lost an alarming amount while I’d been starved.

  I toweled off and greedily brushed my teeth, wanting those small day-to-day luxuries I’d been denied for so long. Once I was clean I returned to the main chamber of the room and rifled through the drawers. The clothes hadn’t been selected for me personally, so there was a generic assortment of items.

  I avoided the scrubs and picked some black sweatpants with a drawstring waist and an army-green T-shirt. There were no undergarments provided, so I went without, though I’d have loved a bra to combat the cold temperature in the room.

  I found a pair of socks, and just having my feet bundled felt good. I didn’t want to put my boots back on until I needed to. I sat on the bed, a metal-framed twin, and looked around my new temporary home. The bed and dresser were the only furniture, and there were no mirrors in either the bedroom or the bathroom. I did another tour of the space and noticed there were no electrical sockets or phone jacks. There was no glass in the space whatsoever, and the bed was bolted to the floor. The shower curtain hung on a flimsy plastic rod, and the sink was just a basin sticking out of the wall with no exposed pipes.

  They had this place locked down like a mental hospital. With the exception of the green Oral-B toothbrush, there was nothing in the room I could use as a weapon. And unless my biggest foe was tartar deposits, the toothbrush wasn’t of much use to me.

  I went back to the bedroom and lay down on top of the thin blanket. Compared to my former accommodations, this might as well be the Ritz-Carlton. Even the flimsy mattress felt like memory foam compared to a concrete floor.

  The full weight of my exhaustion pressed down on me, holding me into the mattress like a giant hand. I had to think about my plan, figure out what I would do the next evening after seeing Holden, but my body didn’t care. Plans weren’t going to happen tonight.

  I fell asleep thinking of the last bed I’d been in and imagining Holden’s arms. I made a silent prayer I’d be in those arms again tomorrow.

  An unfamiliar man was standing over me when I woke up, and my immediate reaction was to slap him.

  The response was instinctive, and I was thankfully so weak it didn’t do any serious damage, but he still seemed surprised, hollering, “Ow. I thought you said this one was incapacitated.”

  He rubbed his cheek and glared at someone on my opposite side.

  “No, I said she wasn’t at her full strength. You’re the idiot who got in her face. You know better than to approach the subjects.”

  “She was sleeping.”

  “She’s part vampire, and you didn’t check the sun chart. Idiot.” The other person was a woman. The nurse who I’d slapped wasn’t Geoffrey, the man I’d threatened the day before. I wondered if he’d requested a transfer off Secret duty or if it just wasn’t his shift yet.

  Both nurses stood back from me now, looking uncertain of how to deal with my potential violence.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sorry at all, but if they thought I was going to start attacking people, they’d move me back to my cell. “You surprised me. I’m so sorry.”

  I tried to sound contrite, which wasn’t something I was naturally talented in, but it came across genuine as far as I could tell. They didn’t know me well enough to understand how rarely I was remorseful about violence.

  The female nurse didn’t look too forgiving, even though I hadn’t touched her, but the male nurse said, “I shouldn’t have gotten so close.”

  Was he…apologizing to me? I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just stared at him.

  “The Doctor will join us shortly, but he requested we take a few notes before he arrives. Do you mind?” he asked.

  Would it matter if I did?

  “What kind of notes?”

  “He wants to see what progress you’ve made after yesterday’s procedures.” The male nurse was holding a clipboard and pen.

  I imagined stabbing him in the throat with that pen. “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing big.” He was treating me like I was a nervous patient he was trying to soothe instead of a walking, talking experiment. “Blood pressure, heart rate, and um…we need to check for scarring?” His gaze drifted to the front of my shirt.

  “No scarring.” This wasn’t entirely true, but they wouldn’t see the kind of scars one would expect to find on a human.

  “We need to check,” the woman said.

  I stood up and pulled my shirt off, bracing my hands on my hips and glaring at her defiantly. In spite of the thin pink lines on my chest—which the female nurse was noting on her clipboard—I said, “No. Scarring.” I turned to the male nurse who was blushing furiously—I was starting to think he must be new—and asked, “Is that enough, or do you need to touch?”

  “Th-that’s enough,” he stammered. “Thank you.”

  I tugged the shirt back over my head and plopped onto the bed, holding my left arm out to them. “Do whatever you came to do.”

  They set about checking my temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and a half dozen other bizarrely normal things, as if I were a human patient recovering from surgery in a real hospital.

  “What do you get out of this?” I broke the silence when it became too much for me to just listen to them work. “What does he tell you about us that lets you justify your actions to yourselves?” I stared right at the new guy, who fumbled while writing something on his clipboard. He couldn’t look at me.

  “He tells us not to listen to you for starters,” the woman informed me.

  “Because he doesn’t want you to figure out we’re real. We’re people.”

  “You’re not a person.” She took the blood pressure cuff off my arm and rattled off the numbers to her partner. I continued to watch him instead of her, his fingers trembling on the pen.

  “He thinks I’m a person,” I observed.

  “He doesn’t know any better yet. But if you talk to him like you talked to Geoff yesterday, he’d come to the conclusion pretty quickly. Why don’t you tell us about how our families are disposable?”

  I shifted my attention to her, noting the way she fixated on the bridge of my nose. She’d been here a long time if she was willing to stare that close to my eyes.

  “You’ll all get what’s coming to you,” I whispered. The male nurse’s pen clattered to the floor.

  I could go for it. My strength was still up from the previous night’s feeding, enough I felt confident I might be able to take these two out. My gaze was transfixed on the pen, wondering how quickly I could kill them both and get through the door. How fast would security come down on me?

  How long would it take before the collar blew?

  The fucking collar.

  I swore internally as loud as I could. Instead of going for the pen, I sat perfectly still and looked at the nurse again. “You dropped your pen.”

  He scooped it up, and I asked, “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  Judging by the aggravated sigh the other nurse let out, I assumed they weren’t supposed to engage in personal conversations with us. That made sense, considering I couldn’t have been the first one to threaten an employee’s family.

&nbs
p; “Me too,” I told him. “I bet this is your first real job. Good salary? Health benefits too? I’m guessing you’re thinking about how bright your future is with this real medical job on your resume.” The female nurse grabbed him by the arm and started dragging him towards the door. “But you’re not doing good work here. You think we’re the monsters? You’re the monsters.”

  They left, and a moment later the door reopened. This time the familiar figure of The Doctor filled the frame. Tonight he was dressed up, wearing a nice pair of slacks and a velvet tuxedo jacket in a rich blood-red color. On another man it might have looked ridiculous, but he owned it somehow, appearing fierce and regal.

  He scared the shit out of me.

  Before now I’d thought the only person I could be so afraid of was Sig. But what had me afraid of Sig? The idea he had the power to kill me? He and I shared blood. He loved me in a demented way, and I’d spent such a long time being afraid of him I hadn’t really noticed.

  The Doctor didn’t love me. Not unless Madame Curie loved polonium. I was a discovery to him, and the awe and adoration on his face whenever he looked at me was nothing more than a gross fascination with what my existence could mean to him.

  Fortune and glory. Wasn’t that the ultimate goal?

  I was his polonium. His insulin or his skeleton of the first homo sapien. The Doctor had no interest in me as Secret McQueen. He didn’t care about my history or my life. He just wanted to glean what he could.

  That made him scarier than anyone I’d ever known. Because I couldn’t reason with him or barter with him. He already had what he wanted from me, and that was my body. I needed to convince him my body was more valuable alive than dead for the time being.

  “Are you going to take me to Holden?” I asked.

  “We made a deal, did we not? Do I strike you as a man who does not live up to his word?”

  “You strike me as the man who held my…heart…” I struggled with the words, suddenly short of breath as I recalled the experience. “Someone who held my heart in his hands while I was still awake. That’s the man you strike me as.”

  “And what a fine, strong heart it is.”

  He was totally unmoved by my words, further convincing me words would not be the key to unlocking my prison. A damn shame, too, since one of my greatest skills was talking.

  The Doctor held out a dress. It was the same color as his jacket, which explained why I hadn’t noticed it strung over his arm when he’d arrived.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a dress.”

  He didn’t tell me to wear it, didn’t give me any long-winded explanations of why he wanted me to put it on. He just held it out, and I took it. That might have been the thing about him that bothered me the most. The way I obeyed.

  Six years working with the council hadn’t broken me.

  Two years with Lucas and his pack hadn’t broken me.

  Nine days with this man and I would have come if he snapped his fingers.

  I didn’t want to obey. I loathed myself for not putting up a fight, and I knew my wolf was thinking of me as a traitorous coward, but I was doing what I had to do. I’d long believed there were two options when it came to survival—fight or flight.

  Now I knew better.

  There was a third option, and no one talked about it. Fighting was brave and running was smart. The final choice was neither and both at the same time.

  Confronted with the end of my life, I didn’t go down fighting.

  I kneeled.

  I bowed to my goddamn captor. Rolled over and showed him my belly. It disgusted me how easily I’d let it come to this, but the sad, honest truth was…I didn’t want to be hurt anymore. I was standing on a thin line between sanity and absolute madness, and for the moment I was still myself, but I wasn’t sure how long that would be true if I had to see what my own internal organs looked like again.

  Wasn’t I already flirting with a very dangerous version of myself? Who was this woman who threatened strangers for doing their jobs? Who was I to imagine taking a life because someone had measured my blood pressure?

  Who was I?

  Maybe the scary truth about this place wasn’t that they studied monsters. Maybe this was where monsters were truly made.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Doctor was a consummate gentleman.

  He held doors open for me, pulled out my seat at a lavishly set dinner table, and waited until my beverage was poured before helping himself. I stared at the wineglass, wondering if he expected me to drink it, and whether I’d be punished if I didn’t.

  The dress he’d made me wear was pretty, and under normal circumstances I’d have been thrilled to receive it. It was knee-length chiffon with a swishy hem and a sweetheart neck. My collarbones stuck out, showing how much weight I’d lost while being here.

  The blood-red material made me seem paler than I did normally, but without a mirror I couldn’t tell if it made me look sick. I couldn’t imagine I was very attractive.

  Thankfully the dress fit tight in the waist, meaning I didn’t have to worry about it slipping down without straps. He’d even provided me with shoes, a nice pair of flats so I couldn’t contemplate using the heel as a weapon.

  I played with the dress’s hem and stared down at the empty plate in front of me, wondering what kind of experiment this might be.

  “Can you eat?” he asked.

  Ah. So this was going to be the old “see if a rat will eat a cupcake” scenario. He knew I needed blood to live, but now he’d see how I responded to human food, was that it?

  “I can.”

  “What can you eat?”

  I lifted my gaze from the plate and met his. I hated that he could meet my eyes fearlessly, yet I got squeamish from his attention after mere minutes.

  “What can you eat?” I wasn’t necessarily trying to be defiant, but I wanted him to know who I was. I was not a meek and cowering puppy. But I would flinch if he came at me.

  “Touché.” He took a sip of his wine, and I watched his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed with each swallow. I could almost see the quivering pulse in his artery, could practically taste the flavor of his blood laced with the wine.

  “What do you prefer to eat?” he asked, maintaining a polite tone.

  My stomach growled, a comically timed response that made him chuckle. “Steak,” I admitted. If I was going to pretend to be a willing participant in his fact-finding mission, I might as well play along for a while. “My werewolf half can get sustenance from meat, but the closer to raw it is the better. Wolves don’t eat their kill off a barbeque, and I guess our internal wolves are no different. I can eat anything a normal human can, but I don’t gain anything nutritionally from it. Blood and meat, that’s it.”

  I half-expected him to start taking notes, but he set his wineglass down on the table and regarded me with quiet contemplation for a moment. “Internal wolf?”

  Mine growled at him, but thankfully the sound was something only I could interpret.

  “You’ve never asked a werewolf about it? How it works?”

  “I’ve observed the mechanics of it a number of times, but most of those subjects were not as forthcoming as you.”

  “Shocking.”

  “Please, go on.”

  “I can’t speak for others, only myself, and for obvious reasons my experience may be different from theirs. I…coexist with my wolf. She is her own entity, has her own thoughts and her own personality. I can feel her as if she is a part of me, but she is independent as well. If that makes sense.”

  “And why do you believe this to be different from the experience of others?” He seemed utterly fascinated. I don’t think Jane Goodall would have been this thrilled if her gorillas walked up and started talking to her one day.

  “I was born with active lycanthropy.” I wasn’t going to get into the finer details of how werewolves turned one another. He didn’t need to know about the Awakening ceremony, or the hierarchy of the werewolf pack. But
any idiot who had seen a creature feature would know it’s not normal to be born a werewolf.

  “Born?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is such a thing even possible?”

  I held my hands up in front of myself as if to say, Well?

  “Remarkable.”

  “It’s rare but not unheard of. It…” I stopped, not sure I wanted to tell him any more details. If I told him babies were only born with active lycanthropy when the mothers experienced physical trauma, what would he do with that information? To me it was just a known fact, but in this man’s hands I could picture a dozen pregnant werewolf mothers being abused in God knows how many ways, trying to turn their babies into wolves. “It’s rare,” I concluded.

  Now that my mind had gone down this new track I didn’t want to tell him anything. If he knew how I’d been created, what was to stop him from bringing in those pregnant werewolf mothers and force-feeding them vampire blood?

  I was suddenly dizzy.

  What if that was his ultimate goal? Not research or scientific understanding, but reproduction? Did he want to study me so he could learn how to make more of me? I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a mass-produced army of vampire/werewolf hybrids.

  For one thing, they’d be a pretty ridiculous army. Couldn’t go out in sunlight, couldn’t shift without the presence of a pack, basically…strong but not stronger than vampires. All of the weaknesses, only half of the perks. Story of my life.

  Why would anyone want more of me?

  Maybe if I could make him understand the negatives outweighed the positives, he wouldn’t want to do it. But if he hadn’t yet conceived of the idea, would I be giving it to him?

  Or worse yet—for me anyway—would I be handing him a list of all the best ways to hurt me?

  My plate became the most fascinating thing in the room again.

  “I can’t give you more blood today, I hope you can understand why.” Why did he have to sound like Mr. Nice Guy all the time? It made it difficult for me to think of him as a villain. And he was a villain.