“Don't move,” he said and cleaned up the gash on my forehead before he began stitching it. I felt every poke of the needle, every thread as it stitched together the skin, but I neither flinched nor acted like I felt anything.
Once he was done stitching, he covered his handiwork with a piece of medical tape. He passed his fingers over the length of the tape once, his blue aura flashing white briefly, like a pulse. I felt a tingle of magic on the gash, and the sharp pain on my forehead dulled some. He took hold of my twice-dislocated shoulder and jerked it back into place. I bit my lip to keep myself from gasping out loud, tasted blood. His hand probed the area around my swollen shoulder, his aura flashing white once, twice, four times. The tingle of magic pulsated with the pain, each time dulling it further.
I gave him a thankful look, knowing what the voiced gratitude could do to either of us. He gave me a hand up, stayed long enough to ensure I'd stay vertical, then stepped away. I was then roughly ushered inside the dark interior of the second SUV by the guard who had barked at me. With some satisfaction, I noted two guards changing the tires of the first SUV Logan had shot some yards back. My satisfaction, however, was short-lived. When the security guard slid the door of the van open, I found Logan slumped unconscious in the backseat, his hands bound, his lips bleeding, blood covering the lower part of his shirt and darkening the seat of his pants.
That gave me pause until I was shoved from the back, and—not able to help myself—I turned around and found myself glaring at the barrel of the tranquilizer gun.
“In,” barked the guard.
So in I went.
I examined Logan as best as I could but, like him, I was shackled and couldn't do much.
His lower lip oozed sluggishly, but I didn't think that the tiny cut was the source of all the blood on him. As it was, I couldn't find any bullet holes either.
Kincaid and the guard climbed in and took the seats opposite us. Both wore the golden, starry button of The Elite on their lapels. Both were armed with shotguns, aside from the tranquilizer guns.
The door slid shut with an ominous electric whir.
Another guard—also from The Elite Team—climbed behind the wheel and started the vehicle.
So that was it, I thought, as we began moving. I was going back to the PSS.
Kincaid's blue-grey eyes met my accusatory ones for the briefest second before shifting to a point above Logan and me.
“Let him go.” I waited until his eyes met mine again before adding, “You're not here for him.” He just stared at me for a moment, then turned to look out the window.
“Come on, Kincaid, you got me. Let him go.” He didn't answer. He just stared out the window at the morning desert, looking bored. If it were anyone else, I'd say he wasn't listening.
“You heard about what happened in 1872,” I urged on. “You don't want there to be a repetition. Let him go.” That got a reaction. Kincaid turned and looked at Logan, his gaze piercing.
“Shut up,” the other guard sneered. “You're nothing but a freak and we're returning you to your cage. If he was stupid enough to aid a monster, then he's as bad as you.” Kincaid gave him a hard look, effectively shutting him up.
Kincaid had arrived at the PSS when I was sixteen—or at least he'd been assigned first to me when I was sixteen—and I suspected he'd stopped many unpleasant things from happening to me since. Some I was aware of, others I knew I wasn't.
Even Dr. Maxwell had been able to sneak goodies to me with more frequency after that too. Other staff and guards didn't sneer or look disgustedly at me when Kincaid was around. I also suspected he'd vouched for me when I began taking my driving lessons. He had been one of the twelve Elite that had formed my escort team whenever I had a lesson, one who had been missing—along with the best seven Elites that fortunate day, called on to an emergency on a sub-level.
I ignored the glowering guard and turned back to Kincaid. “His friend knows he's with me. He disappears, his friend will call his clan for reinforcements and come looking for him. It won't be long before they connect the dots and find him.” I knew I was giving away Logan's other nature, but if they thought he was an ordinary human, he was expendable. This way I was giving him a chance.
I don't know if Kincaid was listening to me or just didn't want a repetition of the destruction and slaughter that had happened in 1872, back when the PSS had been still a brand new research facility for the paranormal and was still in the early stages of a critical research on anyone who had even a marginal psychic ability. They captured or kidnapped anyone above their standard of “ordinary”, running experiments and tests with no consideration whatsoever to the person's life or emotions. They killed and maimed without any qualms, justifying their acts by telling themselves that it was all for the greater good of the nation and the environment they lived in; telling themselves they were just making a better and safer world. Until they captured the wrong were. Somehow, his clan managed to track him to the facility, somewhere on the wild side of Montana, and they descended upon the place like hungry, rabid wolves on a nest of rabbits. They killed and destroyed everything in their wake and, when they found their kin just on this side of the grave, the clan went berserk and buried the entire facility under a tumultuous amount of debris, dust, and blood. Following that incident, rules and laws were erected, both for the safety of the scientists and the preternaturals.
Like I was saying, I don't know if Kincaid was listening to me, but I watched the wheels turn in his head and pressed my point. “Come on, Kincaid. You don't need him, you have me. Let him go.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
By the time Logan came to, we had arrived in Forebay, approximately an hour's drive from Sacramento, and I was still pleading his case.
He awakened alert, his eyes furious and hard, a contrast to Kincaid's indifferent ones. I presumed he'd be able to do the empty act if he wasn't that furious. It told me that he was capable of hot, furious, impulsive anger.
“You alright?” I asked.
He inclined his head, his eyes checking me out. “You?”
I shrugged my shoulder and the movement had me grimacing with the sudden burst of pain. Although it subsided quickly, I made a note not to shrug again.
My eyes skipped back to his blood-soaked clothes, but before I could ask, he said, “It's not mine.” His eyes moved to my bandaged forehead.
I looked back at Kincaid, who was watching the exchange.
“I have orders to bring him in,” Kincaid finally said.
I stared at him, thinking furiously. His orders came from the head of security, a man named Johnson Marc, a former SEAL. Marc's orders came directly from Dr. Michael Dean. If Kincaid had orders to bring Logan in, then Michael Dean had given the order. Damn.
But then again, hadn't the PSS offered Logan the lucrative job to capture me?
We were getting closer to Sacramento, but my mind was too preoccupied to really take in any of the familiar scenery.
“Why? What could they want from him?”
“It's none of your business,” the guard beside Kincaid said. I ignored him, looking at Kincaid instead, who was pointedly looking at Logan.
My heart skipped a beat. I had put Logan in this situation. It was my fault, because he had helped me, attacked The Elite back in the hotel. I looked down at my fidgeting hands and tried to think.
I glanced at the familiar runes carved around the blocking bracelet, tracing the symbols with my eyes.
I learned from Dr. Maxwell's journal that the left hand gathered magic, or power—energy—to be released by the right. In my case, the thin band was supposed to prohibit me from gathering any magic, or from accessing my other nature, except that it didn't work on me. A fact I'd kept a secret all the years I spent in the PSS. I looked at Logan's left wrist and found he had one as well. Did it work on him?
Of course it did. I knew for a fact that it'd prevent him from shifting and cut down his strength to less than a quarter. I've read this mentioned in Dr. Maxwell's
journal too, the experiment done to a were fox. I looked up at him, and he was looking out the window as if none of my conversation with Kincaid mattered. He looked bored and unaffected by the situation, but the tension in his shoulders gave him away. Besides, I had seen the hot anger in his eyes.
“Where are we going?” I asked Kincaid. There was a base on the outskirts of Sacramento, a military camp in a place called Elk Grove; I had been taken there before they transferred me to the headquarters in Seattle the first time.
“That's none of your business. Shut up already or I'll make you,” the guard snapped.
I bared my teeth at him, annoyed enough to spit a smart retort. “Yeah? What're going to do? Huff and puff and blow my head off? I'm the monster, remember? So fuck off, if you haven't noticed, no one is talking to you.” Several things happened at once then. The driver, who up until then had ignored us began wheezing and laughing. The asshole guard's face grew red, either with rage or embarrassment or both, and he raised the butt of the shotgun to club me with it. Logan's hand shot up, swiftly taking hold of the stock, his finger encircling the trigger as if it was a part of the weapon—and aligned his aim straight at the guard's neck. Kincaid batted Logan's hand aside just as he squeezed the trigger, blowing a web hole on the window of the passenger side. If Kincaid had been even a millisecond late, the asshole guard would have been dead.
The driver, who had been laughing just a second ago, pressed the brake with such force that Logan and I went flying to the front, Logan at Kincaid, me at the asshole guard.
Ignoring the twinge of pain from my head and shoulder the sudden movement brought, I took advantage of the situation and hit the security guard as hard as I could with my hands shackled, and saw his eyes roll up as he went limp. The driver, meanwhile, grabbed a tranquilizer gun and turned on his seat to aim it at Logan, who was wrestling Kincaid for the asshole's shotgun. The available ground was small and Kincaid was on top, so the driver didn't have any clear shot at first. I saw Logan point the shotgun at Kincaid's chest awkwardly, and even though it might not be aimed at an artery or anything fatal, any bullet point blank with a shotgun was bound to kill. I wasn't an expert, but I knew that much. I shouted at Logan not to shoot and threw myself across the seat, pushing the driver's tranquilizer gun away from them with my right hand and jabbing my elbow on his face. He grunted, trying to get leverage, and I hit again and again until the hand with the tranquilizer gun went limp. Another shot went off, and with dread I turned to look. The metallic smell of blood was everywhere, old and new. My elbow was covered with it.
Logan was still on the bottom, Kincaid's hands around his throat, his knuckles white with the pressure. In turn, Logan was trying to throttle Kincaid with the link of the shackle, his eyes bulging from lack of air.
Neither Kincaid's shotgun nor the asshole guard's shotgun were anywhere to be seen.
Before I could do anything, or think about doing anything, the side door opened, and there was a snip-snip-snip sound, followed by a familiar cold sting in my arm.
I looked down and found… a red dart protruding from my forearm. Logan had one on his shoulder; even Kincaid had one on his arm. I had forgotten all about the other van. The last thing I saw before drowning in blackness was Kincaid collapsing atop Logan.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The bitter taste in my mouth made me dread opening my eyes. Nothing good ever happened to me when that bitterness was present. My brain told my body to prepare for an awful torture. My heart began skipping beats, my muscles bunched up, and my breathing became rapid and shallow.
There are no experiments, I told myself. No one is going to hurt me. I repeated the mantra over and over, until the risk of a panic attack was gone.
There will be no experiments… I gave myself this last vow before opening my eyes.
This time, there were four guards on the seat opposite mine, and two more in the front. They had tightened the watch. In front of me, two of the guards had tranquilizer guns, aimed and at the ready. I knew from experience if I so much as twitched in a suspicious way I'd be shot again. To their left, Kincaid sat slumped, still unconscious; to their right, the asshole guard glared at me with a huge shiner. I winked at him and blew him a raspberry.
Beside me, Logan mirrored Kincaid's position.
We had reached Sacramento a good while ago.
Because I had no idea what I could possibly do in this situation, I turned to watch the city I had grown up in and loved so much but hadn't seen in ten years.
It was raining outside. It had been raining the day the PSS had come knocking ten years ago.
People skipped puddles, others hurried about, some strolled as if the sun was out and shining. There were new buildings everywhere, but I remembered most everything. I remembered that cracked sideway that was still cracked, and Luigi's Italian restaurant was still in the same place. Nostalgia gripped me so hard, my heart ached.
Why? Why me? What gave those people the right to cage me like this? Where were my rights?
Something must have shown on my face, because the two guards tensed to shoot. Kincaid's aura flashed briefly, catching my attention, but he didn't shift from his slumped position, even when we hit a pothole. I returned to the familiar scenery outside, noting that we were probably heading towards Elk Grove, to the military base.
We were really close, no more than half an hour away depending on the traffic, which, considering that we zigged-zagged back and forth onto back roads to avoid it, was nil.
How dare those people act like my life meant nothing more than that of a rat?
I glanced back at the guards about to destroy the rest of my life, because I knew if I went back to the PSS there was no way in hell I'd get a second chance to escape.
Kincaid's aura flashed again, and a jostle and pothole later, I noticed his eyes were slightly open. Another flash, another jostle, and his eyes closed. No one noticed. He remained slumped, his breathing even, seeming for all purposes to still be unconscious.
Except, he was not.
When his aura flashed again, the SUV ran another pothole, jostling everyone. The driver cursed under his breath, holding the steering with both hands. The two guards with the tranquilizer guns gained their balance quickly enough, their aims firm and true.
“Watch it, man,” the guard on the passenger seat—the previous driver—complained, bracing his head on a broad hand.
“I know. It's like these holes are appearing out of nowhere,” the driver replied in frustration. “It's this damned rain. Cut my visibility short.”
This time, I kept my eyes ahead, and readied myself for the next “pothole”.
When Kincaid's aura flashed, I tensed.
The next pothole was a big one. And I didn't wait for anyone to gain back their balance. I launched myself to the right—away from the range of the tranquilizer guns—hit the asshole as I went with my elbow again, grabbed hold of the gun of the nearest guard and shot the other one with it point blank. Each guard had at least a hundred pounds on me, and a few years of combat training. If I hesitated or gave in a fraction, I was done. So I didn't. Without a thought or pang in my conscience, my talons were out and striking at the neck of the other guard. All that in a few seconds of jostling. That was when the driver noticed something was wrong. He yelled something, braked hard—sending the passenger guard as far as the seatbelt allowed him to go. Before I knew it, his tranquilizer gun was aimed at me and he was squeezing the trigger.
But the dart never came. From my peripheral, I watched Kincaid's aura flash and hold. He was doing something to the gun. The guard squeezed the trigger twice more in quick succession, his eyes narrowing at it before I had enough sense to get moving and strike him first.
Like I did with the guard in the back, I struck him in the neck. This time though, my talons went as deep as his vertebrae before my conscience screamed in protest. I pulled my gory, bloodied talons away, my stomach churning with revulsion. My horror, along with my brief hesitation to strike again, c
ost me.
The passenger guard grabbed my bloodied wrist—gore and all—and twisted hard. I bent with it, though somewhat awkwardly since both my hands were linked, realizing too late that I had just exposed my back to an enemy. It was either that or let him break my wrist.
I should have let him break it.
Because I had given him my back, I didn't see the blow coming. Just an explosion of light before the darkness.
* * *
When I came to, I had a mother headache playing football with my skull and all her cheerleading daughters dancing and applauding. Half my upper body was slumped on top of the dead driver, the other half on top of someone's head. The passenger side was empty, the door left ajar. There was an egg-sized lump on the back of my head, sticky with blood. Behind me there was a commotion. I forced myself to move despite the nauseating dizziness, and found Kincaid fighting off the passenger guard. He must have gone to check on his fellow guards and found Kincaid waiting for him. Logan lay motionless on the floor, where he had probably fallen when the driver braked. The passenger guard brushed my leg and I seized the opportunity by hooking the links of the shackle around his neck and squeezing hard. Despite the roiling of my stomach and threat of the bile in my throat, I kept a firm grip, suffocating him until his legs stopped spasming and his hand fell limp to his sides.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kincaid helped me move the bodies from the car into a small ditch beside what looked like a closed warehouse. Luckily, we had been on one of those deserted back roads when the fight happened, and so far, we were the only ones on it.
Logan was still unconscious, probably the result of a double shot of tranquilizers. He was slumped on the front passenger seat, looking as if he was asleep.
Kincaid had undone both our shackles in silence, but the blocking bracelets were still on, and that was something only the scientist could undo without backlash. That was fine by me, but we had to find a way to undo Logan's.
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