by Anya Breton
Besides being fuzzy, there was something else wrong with my head. Stirring a little brought a definite throbbing at the back of my head. I reached a finger back to lightly press near the pained area. It passed over a knob as big as my fist.
The bastard mailman had hit me over the head while I was unconscious! I supposed I deserved it, considering I'd shot him six times. But he was so going to pay for that.
"Hello?" I called out softly.
"Shhh," someone whispered from above and to the right. It was a feminine, breathy response.
"Why?"
"They shock us," she answered.
Oh, how lovely. But I didn't have time for this. I was on a deadline.
"Let me out!" I screamed, because hey, it was what any normal person would have done. "What the fuck is th...?"
The bolt of electricity hit me with unforgiving speed and vigor. Every muscle in my body went rigid while the charge rode them. Unfortunately my tongue had been in between my teeth when it had hit. I'd nearly bit the tip of it off. There was blood, a good amount of it, sliding over my lips and warming them. The pain momentarily stopped my plan of distraction. However, I could already feel the wound healing within my mouth. Ah, the wonders of being the daughter of a god.
"Let me out!" I howled again.
"Shut up!" Someone below and to the right hissed.
I ignored her to yell, "Let me out!"
Zzzzap! I was ready for it this time but that didn't mean it felt good. My tongue thanked me for my fortitude. "Show your face, you fucking coward!"
And he did. The door off to the left side opened to let in a bright white light that made me squint. A short guy in blue and gold mesh tracksuit shuffled into the room.
He sneered at us from within the cone of light, "Which one'a'ya bitches is makin' all tha racket?"
I snarked back, "Which asshole wants to know?"
Tracksuit let out a hearty laugh at my expense. He apparently thought I was in no position to be insulting anyone. He'd have been right with anyone but me.
He sauntered forward to gloat in my face. A stupid little smirk perfected his douchey soul-patch covered look. "Yer fatter'an tha girls Michael usually brings in. He musta gone slummin'."
"He wasn't complaining when he stuck it to me," I shot back.
Tracksuit closed the distance to grab me around the neck. "He fucked you?"
Uh oh. Apparently Michael wasn't supposed to sample the merchandise. Maybe he should have told me that little bit of trivia before he'd knocked me out.
But I was wasting precious time now that Tracksuit's polyester covered arm was touching my skin. I'd never tried to send my power through my neck before. I suspected it could be done but now wasn't the time to experiment. My hands snaked around his wrist before he could pull back. I locked them tight. One touch against his skin was all it took for his eyes to shoot wide. Tracksuit flailed in an effort to knock me off but it was already too late for him.
He screeched in pain and managed to shove away using the weight of his stumble backwards. A half second later he collapsed to the ground, clawing at the black that was spider-webbing up his veins from where I'd touched him. The disease was already to his neck and steadily filling his corneas with black. I watched his chest rise one last time without feeling a bit of remorse.
He'd shocked us for the horrible crime of making noise and was helping someone keep us captive. Add to that his painful grasp of the English language and an atrocious choice in fashion and I'd say I'd done the city a favor. But none of my co-captives thanked me.
What must have been two hours later the body of Tracksuit hadn't decomposed into primordial ooze. He looked dead. It was a rather ordinary kind of death, unlike most of my other kills. The only items of note about his corpse were the massive black sores at his neck that were oozing with thick black blood.
I finally felt guilt because his lack of decomposition meant he'd been a vanilla human, a bad human, but human nonetheless. The things that I did weren't supposed to harm humans. They were supposed to keep them safe.
I supposed Tracksuit had long since given up his right to safety when he'd taken up with the Dungeon crowd. Why was I letting myself get worked up over this? Perhaps it was because there wasn't a whole lot to do in a three by three cage but think. Thinking of something more productive would be a better use of my time.
It was actually a good thing that Tracksuit had been human. I'd fully expected backup to rush in as soon as they realized I'd fucked up their guy. But here we were, two hours later and no one had made so much as a peep. Not even from my co-captives. They were probably under the impression they'd get shocked again if they made a sound. Though I had a feeling I'd killed the trigger-happy electro-maniac.
An Eminem tune began playing from somewhere near the floor. It was a tinny sound, like a song played over a crappy speaker. Tracksuit's phone was ringing. Maybe his boss was checking up on him. The ring tone silenced briefly before starting up again and then again. Whoever was calling was certainly persistent. I was beginning to think maybe Tracksuit's girl was phoning him.
More guilt over murdering some chick's boyfriend had me gnawing on the edge of my lip. Damn it. I couldn't afford this right now. And for crying out loud I was in a cage! Remorse should have been the last thing I had to contend with.
Yet I understood why it was there. It was the whole comic book character mentality, with great power comes responsibility. I had great power; I was supposed to be using it wisely.
I already knew what I had to do before I could look into stopping the demon summoning. I had to free all of the women Michael had lured before something worse than being stuffed in a cage happened to them. Completing the task might redeem me just a little.
"Is he dead?" Someone whispered from the bottom left.
"Shhh," another hissed, from the bottom right.
"Yes," I answered at full volume because I knew if there wasn't someone within hearing distance then we were most certainly under surveillance. There was no point in whispering.
"That shithead felt me up every time they let me out to use the bathroom." The childlike voice from the bottom left had gone cold and mean.
Oh my god. The bathroom. I hadn't smelled anything in the room that would make me think these girls were doing their business right in the cage. But now that she'd mentioned it, I suddenly realized I had to pee, really, really badly.
Alcohol usually hit my system quick and passed right through me. Michael had made me drink a glass of rum with whatever drug he'd given me. I wasn't really built for straight up hard liquor. My body was reminding me of that.
"How many of them are there?" I asked to give myself something else to think about than my full bladder.
"There was him," Bottom-left replied, "A huge asshole who can barely speak English and a sleaze bag in a nice suit but he's never alone."
I was betting the sleaze bag in the suit was Chet. "The one in the suit, how many does he usually bring with him?"
"It's the huge asshole you have to worry about. He's rough. He likes to make girls scream." Bottom-left didn't seem to recall what I'd done to our tracksuit-clad keeper a few hours ago. She did remember the question I'd asked without my having to repeat it. "He has four guys as big as the other one with him at all times."
Four. Damn it. I needed my gun.
A door crashed open somewhere further in the building. I hadn't heard the steady thumping of bass at all during the two hours I'd been there nor had I heard it just now when the door had been open. That meant we weren't being kept in the Dungeon. I wasn't sure that was a good thing. I at least knew the area around the Dungeon. We could be in Vermont for all I knew.
The big guy Bottom-left had warned me about burst into the pound-for-women. He took one look at the body on the ground before fixing his eyes on us. I knew without being told that this guy was a Rhino. I couldn't see the horn necklace he'd be wearing around his neck but I could almost make-out the horn on his face that was ordinarily hidden from
humans.
He was an ugly thing by any standards. He had a nose as big as my hand on his industrial-bucket-sized head. There seemed to be little palate to speak of. Where his nose ended, his lips picked up in a puckered frown that was almost eclipsed by the bulbous shape above it. Like the others of his kind he had the body of a professional wrestler -- that is to say if that wrestler had been crossbred with a mastodon. His shoulders were the width of my Mini Cooper, his colossal head was slightly bowed beneath the ten-foot high roof and his fists were as big as my skull. I would die in a stand-up fight with this thing. I could not get in a stand-up fight with him.
"Who did?" He snarled in a low, rumbling voice that put the Alpha werewolf's to shame. His stubby index finger pointed to Tracksuit's body on the surprisingly clean laminate floor.
"She did!" One of my fellow captors shouted.
I was trying to place the location of her voice when the Rhino started forward. Oh crap! I pulled back, pressing myself into the corner of the cage and bringing my legs up beneath me as close as I could. I wasn't going to let this thing grab me so he could no doubt smash me into the metal bars until I either passed out or died without putting up at least a little fight.
That seemed to be just what the Rhino wanted to do. He'd shoved his meaty fist through the bars. It only made it a few inches in before the bulk of his arm stopped him. He twisted it with an angry push of air through his nose but got no further. The goon's black eyes stared savagely at me. I was beginning to wonder if Tracksuit had been more than a co-worker.
The Rhino pulled his fist out only to shove it through a different bar with no more success. He switched arms, failing that he let out a growl of outrage. I heard a jingling of keys and wondered if the Rhino was going to be really stupid. If so, I might not have to work all that hard after all. But no, he couldn't be that much of an idiot. Things never went that well for me.
While I watched in stunned silence, the Rhino lifted a large key ring from the waistband of his pants and shoved a key into the lock on the cage door. I held my breath, mentally calculating the moves I was going to make to break free of the behemoth. But the lock didn't turn for him. He exhaled roughly, lifted another key and wiggled it in. Oh, lovely. The dumb ass didn't even know which key would open the door. For all I knew he might not even have it.
He tried two more, letting out increasingly frustrated breaths in between each one.I contemplated if I'd be able to unlock my own door after his corpse was decomposing on the floor. In the end I decided to let him get it open first.
His minuscule lips lifted into a sick smile of pleasure when the lock made a distinctive clicking sound. He'd found the key, finally, after twelve tries. That expression told me that I was going to pay for making him go to all the effort.
I remained pressed to the back of the cage in a ball shape. The Rhino struggled with the cage latch for a few seconds before the metal door swung open. I took a deep, steadying breath as I stared into the eyes of a killer. There would be no remorse when this one died.
Given his massive stature I would have thought he'd have arms long enough to reach the two and a half feet back to me. I'd have thought wrong because the top of his head hit the edge of the cage when his sausage-like fingers were still inches away from me. He shoved the other arm inside as if that would help matters. This time it was his Mini Cooper shoulders that smacked into the front of the cage. He let out an exasperated snarl just before trying to squeeze his entire upper body in with me. This was going to take all night, or at least until he figured out that he needed something long and sharp to jab at me.
In an effort to speed this up, I lifted my hands to curl around his bare arms. They were rough like an animal's hide, which I supposed made sense given what he was. I had a brief moment of stomach fluttering doubt that my power wouldn't work on him. I'd never plagued a Rhino before. Then I saw the black weaving its way up his leathery skin.
He jerked so violently that the cage damn near buckled beneath it. His unmanly shriek within the metal cage sent vibrations through the confined space. The shrill sound pierced my eardrum and made my eyes momentarily roll back into my head. I shook it off because I had a feeling I was going to have to worry about...
The Rhino gripped my arm to yank me forward. I spilled out of the cage onto floor because of my legs couldn't support my weight yet after being cramped in the confine space. The Rhino's hacking breath halted long enough to grab me by the leg again, lift me by it and use me like a baseball bat...only there was no ball, there was only a wall. He smashed me head first into the cream-painted cinder blocks. Stars burst behind my eyelids.
He pulled me back to repeat the action, this time slower but I didn't doubt that it would still hurt. I needed him dead. I willed it to happen, willed my dark power to flow down to my foot and into the swollen hand that held it. The Rhino let out another scream that ended in a fit of coughs. He dropped me mid-swing. I continued forward, slamming into the wall with a rib-crushing momentum.
The Rhino was down for the count, working hard on breathing instead of worrying about killing me. I lay where I'd come to rest for several minutes, biting my lip to keep from making pained noises. I knew I should move now that our second captor's breath had nearly stopped. He had keys and I didn't want to search a pile of stinking ooze for them.
I said a silent prayer for fortitude. This was going to hurt. I might be able to heal wounds faster than any Were or vampire but I always felt the pain for far longer.
Rolling onto my stomach allowed me to get up in stages. First I slid back to my knees, which though tender were surprisingly strong. Then I pulled upward into a full kneel. With the help of the wall I got to one foot, wavering sickly from what was probably a full-blown concussion. I rested against the wall for a half a minute until my stomach protested. Instinctively I bent over, saw there was a waste bin there, and puked the rum, drugs and half a ham and cheese sandwich on top of the Twinkie wrapper it held.
"Let us out," someone whispered. It sounded suspiciously like the girl that had sold me out.
I silently muttered, bitch. She could wait. My stomach was still rolling from the bit of spring training I'd partaken in. And there were more important things to do first -- like scope the place out. I wasn't going to parade the group of...
My eyes swept back over the pound-for-woman to find that there were five women in the dozen cages the bastards had. They were in varied poses. One had her arms clenched around the bars with her face pressed to it as close as she could get. She stared at me with determination in the pale eyes that peered beneath frizzy wheat colored hair. This was the one that had sold me out and she looked like she was willing to do a whole lot more to get free.
A young woman who couldn't have been legal drinking age cautiously watched me from the side of her cage, one of the cages that had been below mine. I suspected she was the one who had asked me about Tracksuit's death. She'd be the first I'd let out. Another woman sat in the middle of her cage, knees pulled up in a yoga pose with her hands rested on them like a Zen master. She'd be the second to last because I suspected she could handle waiting. The others were understandably freaked and silent. I'd make judgment calls about them later.
I nodded to them all but immediately regretted it. It had hurt. If I got brain damage over this someone was getting resurrected by a necromancer so I could kill them all over again.
I tested my legs to see if they could hold my weight now. The pins and needles sensation would have been harder to bear if I hadn't had worse pain elsewhere. I shook it off, passing my weight from my right hip to my left and back until it was more bearable. Then I started for the Rhino.
The keys were surprisingly easy to find. He'd dropped them on the floor beside the cages once he'd gotten my lock unfastened. My lips turned down when I realized that I could have rested a little longer.
To keep the cluttered key ring from making too much noise I stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans. "I'll be right back," I told the women and then I starte
d for the door.
"Don't leave us!" The sell-out shrieked behind me.
I suddenly wished I'd been given the power to make people unconscious because she was going to alert someone before I could get them all out. I hurried through the pound door into an exterior room. There were three narrow windows high on the left wall as if we were below the ground in a basement. Little light was coming through them.
It was still night. Maybe I hadn't truly spent two hours in the cage. I'd guessed but usually I wasn't half bad at judging time.
The fact that it was night out wasn't necessarily a good thing. There could be vampires on Chet's payroll. My power didn't work on vampires. Could I get the women out and then stall until daylight?
First things first, I had to find the exit.
We were definitely in a basement. The exterior room I came upon when leaving the pound for women was long and narrow, too long to be a residence. It was thankfully empty of everything but old furniture, machinery and canvas-covered items I probably didn't need to know about. From the smell, coating of dust and look of the walls I guessed we were in one of the older buildings in the city. That didn't narrow the location down much.
I crept through the room to the door at the other end. With my hand stretched in front of me, ready to plague at a moment's notice, I whipped the thing open only to find the next room empty. Throwing caution to the wind, I rushed through it to the next door. It too was empty. The door at the other end looked a bit more promising. The casing was made of thick metal, the handle was larger and sturdier, and there were several heavy locks.
My hand went to the keys in my pocket in case I'd need them to get the locks unfastened. When the handle turned easily and I stepped out into the cool, night air I thought that this was far too simple.
Of course that was when someone proved me right by pouncing on me from the shadows.
CHAPTER FIVE
I didn't scream and it wasn't because of the cool hand muffling my mouth. It took a hell of a lot more than someone jumping out of shadows to frighten me. More than that, I was calm.