“You were saying?” she asked when his eyes opened again.
It seemed harder for him to talk now. Thea wondered whether she’d done any permanent damage. But it was too late to start caring. And she’d gone too far—let herself go too far—to pretend she regretted it.
“The Ninth Disorder,” Philip said in a weak voice.
“What is that?” Thea asked.
“Named after Hex Nine,” he said. “That was the iteration that caused almost all of the cases, although I think Hex Eight was responsible for a couple of them.” He seemed to get distracted, staring into the middle distance.
“Philip!” Thea clapped her hands.
He blinked at her. “Thea. I remember you. I hate you.”
She had gone too far, after all. He was half-delirious. She would have to be patient. Not for his sake, but for the sake of her answers. Thea took a deep breath to calm herself, then said as matter-of-factly as she could, “Do you remember that I’m the one who caused all the pain you’re in right now? Because I’ll cause more if I have to. But I’d rather not.”
Fear passed over Philip’s face, then his eyes went almost blank. “What were we talking about?”
“The Ninth Disorder.”
“Right. They thought they caught them all. The cases of it, I mean. Before the lab broke up. But they didn’t know about Boyd.”
He seemed like he might be losing consciousness again. “Philip.” Thea tapped his cheek with a wing—gently this time.
“What didn’t they know about Boyd?” she asked.
“That he’d contracted the Ninth Disorder,” Philip said. “Aren’t you listening?”
“Tell me about the Ninth Disorder,” Thea said. “What is it?”
“Did you really think it would be consequence free?” Philip asked.
“What would?”
“The hex,” Philip said. “Try to keep up.”
Even when he was out of it, he was an asshole.
Philip shook his head. “You think you can just toss around a hex that powerful, that uncontrolled, over and over and over again, and it’ll just go away? That it won’t leave something behind?”
“So this Ninth Disorder is like, what, some kind of residue?” Thea asked. “A side effect of being exposed to the superhex?”
Philip shook his head again. “Not a side effect. A disease.”
Thea’s stomach twisted.
No. He’s lying. He has to be.
Langdon said there were no sin diseases.
But Langdon hasn’t had a chance to study the superhex. He hasn’t spent time with it the way Philip has.
The way I have.
“Only a small percentage of people exposed to the hex got it,” Philip went on. “And then they developed this thing they gave everyone. Kind of like a vaccine, I guess, except you inflicted it more like a hex. But that only worked if you didn’t have it yet.”
Thea found her voice again. “And what if you did have it?”
“They never found a way to counteract it. They eliminated it by more brutal measures.”
“Meaning they killed everyone who had it, or seemed like they might have it.”
“Everybody but Boyd. He would have been the first case, I guess. At least, they didn’t find out about it until he was already gone. Guess nobody thought of him.”
“So why not just kill him a simpler way?” Thea asked. “Arrange a car accident, a fake robbery? Something you could be more certain would end with his death, for one thing? Plenty of people survived what happened at Hemlock Heights.”
And plenty of people didn’t.
Philip started to say something, but it came out as gibberish. His eyes were closing again.
It didn’t matter. Thea had already answered her own questions. Or rather, Talbott Lexington and his Aunt Laurel had answered them for her.
Boyd had started to get this temper lately… I swear to you Wanda was hitting on Boyd… Cindy just couldn’t be bothered with any of it.
They were Daddy’s monsters. And Mommy’s, too, and Miss Wanda’s.
But Cindy Lexington and her friend Wanda had never been at the lab. And according to what Philip had just told Thea, Hemlock Heights had never been exposed to Hex Nine, or any version of the superhex.
At least not directly.
“Holy shit,” Thea said aloud, although there was nobody left awake to hear her. “The Ninth Disorder is contagious.”
Philip had regained consciousness one more time, as Thea was readying to leave. She’d thanked him for his cooperation, and told him she was taking his laptop with her, just in case it proved even more useful than he already had.
In return, he’d actually mocked her for not killing him.
But now that she was outside flying, the cool air rushing over her face and chilling the sweat on her neck, Thea was grateful she’d managed to rein herself in.
Not that she’d ever seriously considered killing him. It didn’t matter what Philip told Megaira. Giving away company secrets and losing company property were going to get him in a lot more trouble than her.
No, there was no need to kill him.
Torturing him had been a lot easier to stomach than she would have thought, though.
Easier to stomach? Who are you kidding? You fucking liked it.
Bloodthirst.
The Ninth Disorder.
Did she have it?
Thea couldn’t deny she’d gone too far in Marigold’s apartment. But she’d pulled back. And she felt sick about it now. Surely that was a good sign?
And what the hell, it was only Philip, right? And okay, a little bit his girlfriend too, but Thea hadn’t really hurt her. It wasn’t like she’d just preyed on the innocent.
Anyway, it didn’t matter. Justifying her own behavior and wondering whether she had this mysterious disease would have to wait. Thea had a more urgent matter to deal with.
Judging by her behavior at the diner, Dr. Forrester almost certainly had it.
The doctor had never lived at Hemlock Heights. There was no reason to think she’d been exposed to Boyd recently.
There had been that little metal closet, at the lab, that should have protected her from too much exposure to the hex. But something must have gone wrong.
And the disorder was contagious. Dr. Forrester had a son. She’d recently split from her husband and moved to a new place.
Thea didn’t much care for Megaira’s methods, but she could agree that this hex disease needed to be contained.
She landed on the roof of a building and tried the door to the stairwell. It was locked, but crouching beside it gave her some shelter from the noise of the wind and the city below. (Which city? Thea didn’t even know where she was.) She called Holgersen.
“I need Dr. Forrester’s address,” she told him. “Unless you’re willing to break about fifty laws and go and get her for me right now.”
“I’m not willing to break any laws at all,” Holgersen said calmly. “Much less fifty of them. Nor am I willing to give you her address.”
“You might be, when you hear what I have to say.”
A disease accidentally created. A neighborhood destroyed to stop its spread and cover it up. It all sounded like tinfoil-hat-level conspiracy theory. And that was pretty much how Holgersen reacted to it.
“Look, even assuming I trust you—”
“Assuming you trust me?”
Holgersen didn’t rise to that bait. “Based on your description, I have no reason at all to trust this Philip character.”
“No, but—”
“Thea, I have no justification to take this woman into custody just because she yelled at a waitress. What do you even expect me to do with her?”
“I expect you to give her to me,” Thea said.
Holgersen laughed. “Are you on something? Have you been drinking? Both?”
Nope. Just torturing, but that was its own kind of high, I’m sorry to say.
“Listen,” Thea said. “Bringing her back to th
e colony and turning her over to Langdon and his team is the only chance she’s got. Maybe they can figure something out.”
And maybe they can’t, and they’ll have to kill her.
Maybe I have it, and they’ll have to kill me.
Thea pushed the thoughts away. There would be time to panic later. Right now she needed to get off this roof—it was starting to rain—and to Dr. Forrester. “No human hospital or institution is going to be able to help her,” she added.
“We have absolutely no indication that she wants help,” Holgersen said. “But I’ll tell you what, if she contacts me to ask for help, you’ll be the first one I call.”
“She’s a danger,” Thea said. “She could be spreading this thing. And I have no idea what kind of course this disease runs. What if it just escalates until it’s like the full-blown hex? Do you really want what happened at Hemlock Heights to start happening all over the county? All over the country?”
She took the silence as a good sign, an indication that he was considering her words, so she let it stretch out. Until it went on too long.
“Holgersen?”
Had she lost the signal? Thea looked at her phone.
No. He’d hung up. And judging by how many seconds ago, he hadn’t heard a word of her last little speech.
“You fucking jerk.”
Thea actually reached back her arm to fling the phone, but caught herself in time. She called Cora instead.
“Why did I even waste my time with that fucker?” she asked herself as it rang.
“What fucker is that?” Cora asked.
“Never mind.”
“Did you get it?”
“Yeah, I got it. I got an earful, too.” It was raining harder. Thea shrank closer to the wall and said, “I’ll catch you up later, but for now I really, really need you to find the address of Dr. Denise Forrester. She just moved not long ago, so you’ll need something recent.”
“How important is it?” Cora asked. “Like, how risky and illegal should I be willing to go?”
“I’m sorry to say this, and I’ll understand if you hang up on me, but I really need you to go as far as it takes.”
“I’ll call you back.”
Blessing her friend for not asking questions or hesitating to help, Thea put her phone on vibrate, then took a Velcro strap off Philip’s laptop case and used it to fasten the phone to her bra, right up against her chest where she’d be sure to feel it when Cora called.
She flew back up and breathed in deeply, waiting for the homing signal. It took less than a second for her to feel it, and Thea started to fly.
Hopefully she would have the address before the signal brought her all the way back to Hexing House, but she had an entire country to cross, and considering the diner Dr. Forrester had chosen to meet Thea in, the doctor was likely to live somewhere in Forest County. Thea would be heading in the right direction.
The miles went quickly, but it wasn’t long before Thea’s wings and limbs started feeling heavy with fatigue. Now that the adrenaline of her confrontation with Philip had worn off, her wounded shoulder and leg both hurt like hell.
She felt her phone vibrate while surging at high speed over what she guessed was probably the middle of the country. Sure enough, when she slowed down, she saw nothing around her but prairie.
Thea landed in a soybean field and answered Cora, who gave her an address to put in her navigator.
“Thanks,” Thea said. “Can you do one other thing for me? I need you to let Langdon know I’ll be bringing him something in maybe a couple of hours. It’s important.”
“Something, or someone?” Cora asked. “Am I to gather from all this that you’re actually going to kidnap the doctor?”
Thea gave her the briefest possible summary of what was going on.
“Shit,” Cora said. “I’ll let you get to it then. And I’ll let Langdon know. Maybe Alecto too, huh?”
“Probably best to warn her,” Thea agreed.
She got to Dr. Forrester’s townhouse a scant hour later, but hesitated before she went in. It was after two in the morning.
This needed to be done quickly. Every hour Dr. Forrester was among others was an hour she could be infecting somebody else, and Thea had no idea just how contagious this disease was, or even how it spread. How many people had Boyd given it to? Talbott had only mentioned two others, and he didn’t seem to have gotten it himself.
But weighing against the urgency of the situation was the fact that most of the time, it was the mothers who got custody of the kids in a divorce. If Dr. Forrester’s son was inside, surely there was a kinder way to take his mother away from him than attacking their home in the middle of the night?
Oh, look who’s worried about being kind, all of a sudden. Welcome back.
With a sigh, Thea flew up to the third floor and peeked in the windows, trying to guess which bedroom might be the doctor’s. She wished Elon was with her. He would have found a way to break in, probably within seconds.
It took Thea more like twenty minutes, before she finally managed to slash a vent cover just below the roofline, and sneak in like a squirrel breaking into an attic. It was a tight space to squeeze through, and her wings were scraped up pretty badly by the time she pushed past the water heater and out of the utility closet she found herself in.
Thea waited a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, then crept around the top floor. Unfortunately, the doors were all closed.
The first room she checked was crowded with furniture too big for it: an enormous dresser, an armoire, a four poster bed. Things that must have been moved from a larger house. This had to be the master.
Be with you in a minute, doctor.
There were four other doors: a laundry room, a bathroom, an office, and another bedroom, much smaller than the first. The walls were painted some dark color, and glow-in-the-dark stars were scattered over the ceiling. Thea could make out a small form sleeping on the bed. She closed the door behind her and went back to the master bedroom.
Thea put a hand over Dr. Forrester’s mouth and waited for her to wake up.
As she expected, Dr. Forrester thrashed and tried to scream, but she was easy to hold down. And Thea was pleased—very pleased—to find that she felt no anger, no urge to hurt the doctor. She didn’t enjoy the fear she sensed in her, or the wide whites of her eyes in the dark room.
Mostly, Thea just felt drained. Empty and sad.
“Don’t scream,” she whispered. “It’ll be worse for your son, you understand? I don’t want to hurt either of you. I don’t even want him to know I’m here. So let’s work together and not wake him up, okay?”
After a few seconds, Dr. Forrester nodded. Thea lifted her hand an inch, and when the doctor didn’t scream, removed it entirely.
Dr. Forrester sat up. “What do you want?”
“I want you to call your ex-husband and have him come and get your kid, or stay here with him until morning, or something,” Thea said. “What you tell your ex, and what he tells your son, are up to you. But you’re coming with me.”
Dr. Forrester stiffened. “The hell I am. Who do you think you are?”
“Don’t,” Thea said. “You need to try to keep yourself under control. I know that’s hard, and I know you’re surprised to see me and this is stressful for you. But think of your kid. What’s his name?”
Dr. Forrester frowned at her, but she answered the question. “Julius.”
“Julius,” Thea repeated. “Think of Julius.”
“I’m always thinking of Julius.”
Thea nodded. “That’s how you got into this mess.”
“What mess is that?”
Thea sighed. “Come on, you know there’s something wrong with you. It’s the middle of the night and your kid is in the next room, so let’s not play games. I’ll try to help you. But you have to come with me.”
Dr. Forrester laughed, and Thea’s belly tightened at the noise. She glanced at the door.
“If we’r
e going to argue, can we at least go downstairs?” Thea asked. “And why am I more worried about Julius waking up than you are?”
“Because I’m the one who knows him,” Dr. Forrester said. “He’s a very sound sleeper.”
“Call your husband,” Thea said.
“Ex-husband. And you are the last person I’d go with, for any reason.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the Ninth Disorder?”
It was hard to gauge her reaction in the dark, but Thea thought she heard a slight intake of breath. Dr. Forrester’s voice was calm though, when she answered. “How did you find out about that?”
Thea was getting impatient. “From someone I beat the shit out of a short while ago, so maybe stop testing me and do as I say?”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. It’s contagious. Did you know that? Did you—”
Thea stopped speaking, and stared at Dr. Forrester.
Of course she knew that, you idiot. She was one of the doctors—the chief doctor?—in that lab. How could she not know?
“You bitch,” Thea said softly. “You would know everything about it, wouldn’t you? Which means you also knew all along that that’s why they killed Boyd.”
But Dr. Forrester seemed genuinely surprised. “Boyd? But he was gone before—”
“So they thought,” Thea said. “Now they think maybe he was the first case. They did what they did to Hemlock Heights to contain the disease. He was spreading it to his neighbors.”
Dr. Forrester was shaking her head. “No. That’s not… that’s not what’s happening here.”
Thea looked into the doctor and felt the cloud gathering again. “Calm down,” she said. “And be reasonable. You could give this to your son. Haven’t you had enough of him being sick?”
Dr. Forrester laughed again. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know more than you think.” It was on the tip of Thea’s tongue to add that she might have it, too, but she wasn’t ready to show weakness to the woman who had experimented on her for weeks.
There was still unfinished business between her and the doctor. Thea felt a small swell of wrath, but she was able to push it away.
She was only trying to save her son back then, and she’ll do the right thing for him now. Keep working that angle.
Lasting Fury (Hexing House Book 2) Page 10