by Rob Cornell
Her face felt as though someone had smashed her nose in with the butt of a gun.
Oh, yeah. That’s exactly what had happened.
As she came to, it didn’t take long for her to remember the whole cluster fuck. The crash. The pair of Ronald Reagans. That weird fish weapon.
Ree.
Something obscured Jessie’s vision, giving her mind’s eye the perfect black screen to project these memories in vivid detail. Especially that moment where she knelt beside Ree’s bullet riddled body, listening to the wet wheeze coming out of one of the wounds, and that scratchy gasp he kept making as if he was breathing through a mouthful of gauze.
Then his knee exploding when that old fucker shot Ree while he was down for no good reason.
She willed the visions away. Time to focus on the here and now.
First observation—they had blindfolded her. Besides the blackness, she could feel scratchy fabric tied tight around her head. The pressure made her temples pulse from the cut to her circulation. The blindfold also squeezed down on her nose, giving a constant feed of pain jabbing into the center of her face.
Second observation—they had her hands bound behind her, her arms wrapped around a padded seatback, like an office chair from the feel of it underneath her. They also had her feet tied together, but she could otherwise swing her legs freely. She kicked backward and felt the post supporting the seat. She lowered her heels and kicked again. Her shoe knocked against a caster and the chair shifted a couple inches.
They had put her on a chair with wheels, and she had enough range of movement with her legs that she could theoretically shove herself around across the floor. Of course, for all she knew she would push herself down a flight of stairs.
Obviously they weren’t too worried about her getting away by skating on the chair.
Neither did they care if she moved at all. Which meant they were probably watching her.
Leading her to observation number three—she heard faint breathing, steady and calm. From that she thought she could feel the presence of someone standing not too far behind her. Could have been her imagination filling in the blanks.
Like it mattered anyway.
She was blindfolded. Tied up. And her brain felt like it had been pickled.
She couldn’t even smell anything except for the metallic tinge of the blood impacted up her nose.
Her lips had a tacky crust over them that had to be her blood. A trickle ran down the back of her throat—probably more blood—but her tongue felt as dry as a sidewalk in the sun. She worked up as much saliva as she could and peeled her lips open. Her coagulated blood had a texture like Jell-O left in the fridge for too long.
A check with her tongue offered a small bit of relief—she had all of her teeth.
She cleared her throat, bringing forward some of the trickle in back. The penny flavor confirmed that her busted nose was draining back there.
Great.
“Hey,” she said. God, her voice sounded like she had the worst cold in world history. The one word came out like a strangled honk. “Hey. I’m awake. Can we get on with the dastardly plan?”
A minor change in the rhythm of the breathing, but otherwise whoever was with her didn’t respond.
“Look, there is a whole army of government agents tracking me by now. They’re going to rain down on you any minute now. Why don’t we skip all the shooting and screaming, huh?”
Nothing.
On a whim, she decided a different tack.
She took a deep breath, centered herself, and whispered, “Return.”
Nada.
So whoever was watching her was mortal. Good to know.
“Come on,” Jessie said, voice pitching up in frustration. “What’s the point of all this? Are you trying to bore me to death?”
More silence from Mr. or Ms. Breath.
She had no intention of waiting for the other Doc Martin to drop. This watcher of hers didn’t want to interact, she would force a reaction of some kind.
She planted her heels to the floor, then pushed her legs straight.
The chair coasted backward, casters rattling. Without any visual markers, a wave of vertigo came over Jessie as if she floated through outer space. As she rolled along, her feet held up off the floor, the chair swiveled, totally throwing off her sense of balance and space. This was the professional level equivalent of getting spun around under a piñata.
Something stopped her coasting abruptly. Not a wall. She didn’t so much as collide as just stop. But she felt pressure against the seatback. She guessed that her watcher had grabbed the chair to stop her.
“Nice to finally meet,” Jessie said.
A soft grunt. Barely audible. But a reaction nevertheless.
“I’m guessing you must be a lackey,” she said. “Why don’t you run and get your boss so we can get the party started?”
“Ain’t no lackey. Ain’t got no boss.”
The edge in his voice told Jessie she’d poked a tender spot. Which also tipped her off to an opening.
“Sure you have a boss. Who told you to stand here and watch me, and…” she waited a beat. “…commanded you not to talk to me under any circumstance?”
“Ain’t got nothing to say no how.”
Despite how messed up her day had gotten, Jessie smirked. If she had to go down, she’d go down pissing off everyone she could with her acerbic wit. (What Ree had referred to as her attitude problem.)
Don’t think about Ree.
The slick feel of his blood on her hand as she leaned over his body to grab his gun snuck under the wall she tried to slam down between her and the memories.
“But even if you did have something to say, you couldn’t. Boss’s orders.”
Her chair shook. He’d given it a hard shove, but hung on to keep her from rolling away. “Shut up.”
“Are you allowed to tell me that?”
The chair spun in a one-eighty before snapping to a halt. Her head whirled in the darkness.
The breath she had only heard before she felt brush her cheek now.
She waited, but he only let her hear his angry breathing. He was trying to hold back. More than just words. A violent energy pulsed from him.
Pissing off someone in a duel of words was one thing, but she had a feeling his comeback wouldn’t come through his voice.
“Easy,” Jessie said, dialing down her sarcasm without coming across as a total wimp. She hoped. “Take it easy.”
The coarse skin of his palm slid down her cheek and to her throat where he gave a gentle squeeze, his touch a strange mix of tension and tenderness.
“That’s the only way I take anything,” he said, with the creepy lilt of a serial rapist. His version of romance, of course.
She almost said that out loud, but choked down the words before they spurted out her smartass mouth. She kept that troublesome mouth shut.
“Been a lot of time since I had a sweet piece of—”
“What the hell you doing?” a familiar man’s voice asked. The old dude who had shot Ree.
Killed Ree, Jessie. Might as well face facts. You got all your real friends and family killed. Now you’ve started in on the kinda-friends.
She closed her eyes behind the blindfold. Barely noticed the difference in the quality of dark.
Her watcher’s hand slid off her neck and left behind a rash of gooseflesh across her throat.
“She’s mouthing off,” her watcher said.
“I told you to leave her alone. That so hard to understand, nigger?”
Hearing the N-word made Jessie cringe. She didn’t care what kind of creep her watcher was, there were plenty of better insults than bigotry. It said more about the old guy than it did his lackey.
The guy was a certified prick.
But she already knew that. It was hard to judge anyone who shot a person in the leg after he was already down and bleeding to death as anything but. Actually, prick didn’t go far enough. A few choice words tried to tap off her lips. She did all she could
to hold back. With her heart racing the way it was, she’d probably fumble them anyway.
“I don’t take orders from you,” her watcher said.
The old guy chuffed a laugh. “Since when?”
“This whole thing’s gone to hell. Whole crew’s gone expect for us because of your stupid ass plan.”
“Great.” The old guy made a disgusted noise from the back of his throat. “Why don’t you tell her exactly where we are and what we have planned next?”
“She ain’t going nowhere.”
“Get the fuck out of here, Sambo. I need some time alone with her. Go watch the other one.”
The other one. He must have meant the woman that had been tailing them before the armored van crashed into her car.
“What if I don’t wanna?”
The tension between them had become palatable, like a fog in the room, thick and humid. Their spat unnerved Jessie more than her watcher’s threats had. If they killed each other, and they really were the only ones from their crew left, where would that leave her?
Assuming she didn’t get caught in any cross fire.
“Are you serious?” the old guy said. “After all we been through, you’re going to pull this shit with me? Are you forgetting why we’re here? We ain’t the only ones left. We got one more, and he’s going to set this all right when he comes.”
Her watcher switched back to Mr. Breath. Each exhale had the same angry force as when he’d gotten into Jessie’s face. She expected him to lunge at the old guy any second now.
Instead, she heard footsteps move away. Then a door slam shut with a loud metallic smack.
A long sigh came next, and Jessie could tell it came from the old guy. It had a weary, resigned sound.
“Well, now,” he said in a good-old-boy kind of way, like he was going to offer her a glass of iced tea and a seat on his porch. “Let’s get to it.”
“Like I said to your friend, the Agency can find me no matter where you think you’ve hidden me. They’ll be after me any minute. And I’ll make sure you get the same treatment you gave Ree.”
The old guy chuckled. Jessie half expected him to say, Aw shucks. “That the weird-looking fella’s name? What is that? Chinese? I had a hard time deciding if he was a nig or a chink.”
A sour taste filled Jessie’s mouth. “You are some kind of special bastard, aren’t you?”
“Naw, I ain’t all that special. Got a bit of the touch. Dreams and such. And I’ve learned a few tricks from a mutual friend of ours.”
Warmth pressed against Jessie. The old guy’s body heat as he leaned in close. She squirmed against her bindings. She didn’t want to be anywhere near this monster. She preferred the filthy threat of her watcher to the clean evil that radiated from his leader.
“Now you,” he said softly. “You are supposed to be real special. Though I don’t see it. But he does. So I don’t give a good god damn about you. He can have you.”
Jessie was certain she didn’t want to know who this he the old guy kept referring to was. She had to know, though. She had to know as much about what was coming to see if she could find any angles to get out of it.
She licked her lips, still rough with dried blood.
“Who?” she asked.
His body heat drifted away. A bone or two creaked as he stood straight.
She could picture a nasty grin on his face, probably with yellow teeth, fangs maybe, devil horns. No. Mortal monsters didn’t need those kinds of trappings.
“Why, Gabriel Dolan, course.”
Jessie’s heart froze. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel her arms, her legs. The darkness behind her blindfold somehow darkened even more.
It’s going to happen again.
Those words took on a horrifying relevance.
Jessie had never seriously wished for death.
She did now.
Chapter Forty-Four
THEY HADN’T EVEN RESTRAINED her. Just locked her in a metal-walled room with a Plexiglas window at least four inches thick, riddled with scratches, as if something had tried to claw its way through. Earl had spent a good hour staring at her through the glass, arms folded across his chest, a deadly look in his eyes.
They had also stripped her. They thought they could demoralize her. Make her feel vulnerable and cold—the room’s temperature couldn’t have been much warmer than an October evening in Chicago. Her teeth chattered. Her body shivered.
But Elka’s kind did not wear down easily. They could have never survived the Great Hunt if something as simple as nakedness and a cold room could break them.
So, despite her quivering and exposure, Elka stared back at Earl with matching venom.
Neither of them flinched during the stare-down.
Then, without any preamble, Earl turned away with a bored ease, and walked out of sight beyond the window’s frame.
Elka finally allowed herself to sit. She had to take the floor. There wasn’t any furniture in this zoo cage. She tried to ignore the brown and greenish stains marking parts of the concrete floor. She found a clean spot by the back wall, sat, and leaned her back against the wall. The steel chilled her twice as hard as the air.
She ground her teeth and ate the cold, fueling herself for the battle of wills Earl had set into motion. Torture would come soon enough. He would push as hard as he could to get her to shift and gain access to what he needed from her.
Once he had that, she was in for a long, painful death.
She didn’t care about the pain or the death.
She would not let him defile her, take what was most precious to her people. If he wanted to kill her, he would have to do it while she remained in her human form, denying him any chance of getting to her horn.
A while after Earl left, Tony strutted into view on the other side of the glass. His eyes looked like a pair of black holes, seething with emptiness. It made his smile all the more unnerving.
Elka spared him a single glance, then directed her gaze to a series of close cracks on the floor that look vaguely like a footprint the size of a Frisbee. She could only imagine what kinds of things Gabriel Dolan had used this trap to hold while he, what? Observed? Experimented? Tortured? All leading to an inevitable exploitation of whatever power they possessed.
Earl was following a wicked tradition, and doing so well enough.
It won’t do him any good, she reminded herself. I won’t give in.
A dull thump drew Elka’s attention back to the window.
Tony stood with his fist raised over his head. When he had her attention, he pounded the glass with the heel of that fist a second time. His eyebrows rose over his black eyes. He looked like a rabid animal. He bared his teeth.
His effort to intimidate her only went as far as the thick glass between them. Just as she couldn’t do a thing to him out there, he couldn’t hurt her while she was in here. The faint scents of sweat, blood, and waste clinging to the floor and walls bothered her far more.
He must have noticed his lack of effect. His lips curled down and hid his teeth. His eyebrows drew close together. He punched the glass, this time with his knuckles. The sound barely made it through the window’s thickness. The fact that she heard it at all meant he’d hit pretty hard.
He showed no sign of pain in his hand, though.
No surprise. Elka knew firsthand how hard Tony could hit.
She reached up and touched her face where he had struck her in the van to knock her out. The spot was still tender, and she must have had an ugly bruise there. But she could already feel her enhanced metabolism healing the damage. He would have to hit a lot harder to do anything permanent.
Elka made a show of rolling her eyes and shrugging to send the message that his threats didn’t faze her one bit.
His face tightened into its scowl. He sidestepped toward the slab of metal that formed the door into her cage, keeping his gaze locked on her.
There was one difference between his impotence on the outside and her protection inside. On her sid
e, the door was smooth steel that matched the walls, only visible because of the thin rectangle of seams outlining it. On his side he had the button that triggered the electric lock, and a handle to open the door.
He wouldn’t dare. Earl surely had given the order to keep his niece’s killer off limits to anyone but himself.
Tony reached toward the door. A short buzz sounded, then the latch snicked.
Slowly, the door swung inward.
Tony pushed it all the way open and stepped inside the cage.
His hand went to the knife sheathed on his belt as he drew closer to Elka.
Elka stood, hands in fists at her sides. The cold made her shiver, which made her look weak to him. They had fooled her into joining them. Had ambushed her to capture her. But no matter how tough Tony thought he was, she had proved both with Kit and with Whisper that when it came to a one-on-one face-off, they didn’t stand a chance against her.
Poor Tony was too wrapped up in his scary self-image—or too stupid—to figure that out for himself.
He drew his knife.
Elka, in turn, gave Earl exactly what he wanted. She shifted into her true form.
Too bad Earl wasn’t there to take advantage of it. He wouldn’t have made the same mistake as Tony.
When she reached full transformation, Tony jerked to a halt.
He had his hand on his knife like a cowboy at a high noon showdown in the town square.
Elka lowered her head, eyes rolled up to look down her muzzle, the tip of her horn aimed right for Tony’s heart. All he wore was an army green tank top and a fresh sheen of sweat as he realized, too late, his mistake.
Now it was a quick draw contest.
Tony made his move, whipped his knife free, almost had it raised enough to take a stab.
Elka had the advantage of having her weapon already naturally drawn. She drove forward, ran him through, lifted him off his feet once she had him skewered. She was about to shake him off when he hooked his arm around to the side of her neck and jammed in his knife.
Elka reared up on her hind legs. Pain speared clear down her flank. He had missed her throat, but he had cut a tendon or two which made her head go slack when she came back down on her front hooves.