His lip curled. Son of a bitch.
Jerking the light up, he caught glimpses of heavy cabinets, metal structures, and empty storage spaces. Canvas covered bulky platforms, and cobwebs clung to every corner, some industriously spun across the sheer walls, filaments tucked into the narrow cracks between metal panels.
Bolts set iron support beams into the ceiling, and more cobwebs and grime shrouded any hint of lights.
This was a waste of time. If there was anything here, time or looters had long since made away with it. Whatever GeneCorp meant in Alicia’s fractured consciousness, he wouldn’t find it here.
Anger propelled him across the metal reinforced room. It dug in with razored claws as the light swept over filthy canvas coverings. Gripping the edge of the nearest in one hand, he whipped it off, muffling a sudden coughing fit as a dusty cloud erupted into the air. Batting at the air in front of his face, he surveyed the bulky skeleton of an old-time computer system.
“Shit,” he muttered, letting the canvas drop. Three of the five monitors were nothing more than jagged glass teeth in a matte black frame.
There was nothing useful here. Hell.
What did this leave him with? The knowledge that it wasn’t the coven’s fingers he’d long sensed reaching through the backbone of a city too corrupt to notice.
Why did the Church operate with witches?
Creak.
His thumb moved over the light switch, and the flashlight flicked out. He turned, jaw set, ears straining.
Watch out!
Rubber squeaked behind him. Something rustled, a rasp. Suddenly, he reeled as something bulky and solid slammed into him. The flashlight spun wildly, clattered to the wall, and rebounded in a flurry of ringing echoes as Caleb sprawled.
He leaped to his feet, rotating. Fists ready.
Nothing moved in the darkness. Sniffing the air like a hound, he eased away from the computer table, moving as quickly as he dared. His heart slammed in his chest, his ears.
Squeak.
There. He launched toward the sound.
“Oof!” A masculine grunt. His knuckles cracked on bone, slammed into something fleshy that gave way under another muffled, gritty sound.
Caleb reached for clothing, a shirt, an arm, anything he could grab and use for leverage, but his assailant thrust hard, straight-arming him in the chest and sending him staggering backward.
His back collided with a metal edge. Pain spiked a knot into his spine, gouged deeply by the imprint of the gun he’d tucked there. Glass tinkled as it scattered, and something decompressed under his hip. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the building, a motor revved.
“Oh, shi—” Large hands folded into his lapels, twisted under his chin, and wrenched him around. Power surged through wires long since caked over, thrumming through the metal plates under his feet. Bank by bank, row by row, lights powered on overhead, flooding the giant room in ghostly fluorescent light.
Too powerful for the old connections. Glass cracked, sparks exploded. Embers burst overhead, arced wildly, and Caleb slammed an elbow into Tobias’s sneering mouth.
Half the lights abruptly flickered out, but it was more than enough illumination to harry the large man as he stumbled backward, blood streaming from his lip.
Wordless, Tobias scraped his forearm across his mouth. Squaring up, he lowered his head and charged.
Caleb met him head-on, sidled at the last second, and drove his elbow into the bigger man’s spine. The witch stopped on a goddamned dime, spun and slammed a jab like four tons of brick into Caleb’s nose.
Blood spurted. Cartilage crunched, a sick sound that filled his ears, and he croaked a harsh curse as he blocked the follow-up left cross.
A power current popped overhead, sizzled, and sent sparks streaming to the ground. Tobias sidestepped easily, coming at Caleb with a snarl that—despite the adrenaline, the rage, the pain—twisted his mouth into a smile.
The man bared his teeth, swung hard.
Caleb raised his arm, elbow bent, and caught what felt like a tank in the crook of his arm.
Thank you, Naomi.
He snapped his forehead forward, rebounded off the harsh bridge of Tobias’s nose, and sent him staggering.
Caleb held his head, lurching back. Son of a bitch, that hurt.
The man didn’t take time to nurse it. He lunged after Caleb, grabbed a fistful of his hair, and spun him around. Caleb braced, pain twisting at his scalp. “You fight,” he gritted out, struggling to throw the man off balance, “like a goddamned girl.”
Words he ate as Tobias slammed his head against the metal computer frame. His knees buckled.
Taking advantage, Tobias wrenched him around and threw him against the wall. Caleb crashed into it with enough force to make the room gong like a bell, ricocheted, and collapsed in a shapeless tangle of muddled intentions.
The room spun. Gravity flipped over as he struggled to push his hands under him, dumping him onto his left shoulder.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, an insane witch laughed and laughed.
Get up!
Gritting his teeth, Caleb pushed himself to his feet. He spent too many precious moments fumbling for the gun; Tobias closed on him, knocked the gun from his stunned grip, and sent it clattering across the floor.
Caleb lurched as Tobias slammed an uppercut into his stomach. Heaving, flailing for something to grab, to hang on to as his guts surged into his throat, he struggled against the man’s chokehold.
The Church couldn’t have her.
He’d fucking promised.
“Too bad,” Tobias said in his ear, and half pushed, half threw him into the shadows of an empty door frame.
His temple slammed into the edge, sent sparks shooting across his field of vision. As Caleb struggled to right himself, his hands grabbed at bolts of what felt like paper, massive metal wheels. He shook his head clear, spun.
Too late. Something surged into existence as suddenly as a light, whipped up into a burst of magic that knocked him ass over elbows and sent him careening into a glass pane that shuddered with the impact.
What the hell was that?
He twitched, shocks arcing through his system. His nerves. Move. He had to move.
Get up, get up!
His body ignored him.
Tobias unfurled a ream of cable and kicked him over to his back. Caleb clenched his teeth, straining to force his limbs to move, damn it, but the man only slammed a boot into Caleb’s chest and ground hard.
He wheezed. “Fuck!”
As if he didn’t feel the pain Caleb knew he’d inflicted, as if the blood dribbling down his chin was nothing, Tobias tied his hands together and dragged him up with one meaty fist in his collar.
Caleb spat blood to the floor. “You can’t have her,” he croaked. His leaden feet squeaked along the floor, boots screeching. Tobias dragged him down a second hallway, his black eyebrows knotted above a hell of a bruising eye.
He palmed open a door and all but tossed him inside. Caleb wrenched himself around, barely managing to land on his side instead of his face.
Pins and needles swarmed his skin; the nerves struggled to come back to life. He grunted wordlessly. Painfully.
Tobias nodded to the wide screen inset into the far wall. On it, the same room they’d just vacated glowed eerily blue. “Too late.”
Caleb stared, transfixed as two figures slipped into the room on the screen. The image flickered, diagonal feedback rippling across it.
“You stay here,” Tobias added flatly. He withdrew a small square remote from his pocket. “If we’re lucky, it ends with her, and you don’t have to worry no more.” He depressed the button.
Caleb stared at the screen as small green lights flicked on in every wall.
Juliet glanced up at the security camera, her brow furrowed. Her wet hair clinging to her cheeks. The feed rippled.
His heart lurched into his throat. “No.” You promised. He wrenched at the cables around his wrists. “You can�
�t have her. You son of a bitch!”
“But we do.” Tobias stepped out of the room. The door clicked shut, and tumblers fell into place.
Caleb twisted on the floor, gaze pinned on the screen. As the green lights shimmered—as it spread into a net that meshed across the whole chamber, glided over Juliet’s puzzled, upraised hands—Caleb slammed his feet against the wall. Over and over.
“Juliet!” I’m sorry. “Run!”
“Juliet?”
She shook her head. The laser lights curved across her skin, shockingly green. “I don’t know. What is it?”
Silas’s back bumped hers, his shoulders rigid under the strange green net. “I feel like my skin’s trying to crawl off and the rest of me wants to go the other way. But it’s not the light.”
“No.” She turned her palms over, studying the play of light. “There’s powerful magic keeping this place empty. I can just sort of . . . catch it, on the fringes of my mind.” She waved through the green mesh. “I don’t know what this is. Is it security? Some kind of—”
“Match, confirmed. Case subject One-Three-One-Zero-Zero-Nine.”
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Pleasant, masculine, and precise. Juliet grabbed Silas’s arm, her heart slamming. “What is this?”
He grabbed her hand. “Move to the wall.”
“What if—”
“Now!”
“Main systems offline. Generator damaged. Video playback malfunctioning,” the agreeable voice said. “Audio playback resuming. Case logs, December fiftee— December— Dec— teenth— Lab . . .” Click! “Lab assist . . . — Ia Pa— Nadia— Assistant . . .” It fell silent.
Juliet spun as the lights dimmed to a muted white glow. The grid faded away, lasers peeling off into green pinpricks arrayed along each wall. She turned again, met Silas’s eyes across the darkened room. “What do we do now?”
“This place looks abandoned,” he said quietly, turning to keep an eye on both exits. He backed up, holding out an arm to keep her behind him. “There’s no reason the system should still be— The hell?”
Hidden speakers whirred, clicking through several octaves before a high-pitched beep cut through them. Juliet clapped her hands over her ears, hunching as something shrieked stridently, like gears grinding against metal. “—latest batch of subjects have shown remarkable potential, especially given the rapid breakdown of thirty-six fifteen.”
A new voice?
Slowly, Juliet lowered her hands. She stared up at the ceiling, gaze flitting across the shadowed rafters as the woman’s youthful, level tones continued. “The leaps made in a single generation prove Dr. Lauderdale’s theories. There’s no chance that the committee will fail to reup the grant this year. We’ve made so much progress since incorporating stronger genomes from the Holy Order’s orphanage program—” Kzzzt!
The sound shattered the woman’s dialogue, and Juliet dug her fingers into her temples. “I know that voice,” she said, half to herself.
But Silas’s head cocked. “Where?”
“I don’t know.” She knew he didn’t like that answer, but she could only shake her head as he turned.
“Playback resuming,” said the computer voice. “June— June— Lab assist . . .” Click!
“—in a matter of months,” the faceless woman continued. Her voice, exuberantly youthful and polished to an educated gleam, thrummed with excitement.
It wrapped around Juliet’s senses, tugged alarmingly. How did she know it?
Why?
“Test case thirty-six forty will blow their minds.” The words echoed through the shadowed room. Eager. Confident. “We’ve already seen these subjects achieve remarkable test scores. The spread of ages falls between six months and five years. Thirty percent of the subjects are routinely scoring at the top of Krakowski’s Scale. That’s eighteen percent better than only ten years ago. Such a milestone! This latest batch of embryos is promising to be even more efficient. The new incubation racks seem to increase projected success.”
Test cases. Subjects.
Embryos.
Her hands fisted. “It’s true.” Silas slanted her a look caught between wariness and confusion. “It’s all true,” she said, voice shaking. “I’m just a . . . I’m a—”
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said grimly. His features set into hard lines as the speakers fuzzed, voices overlapped in a sudden cacophony of recordings.
Suddenly, a man’s voice crackled to life over the line. “Dr. Laurence Lauderdale, log entry. October first of the same year,” he said, his voice low and soothing, somehow. Quiet.
Every hair on Juliet’s neck lifted. Her stomach knotted violently. “My God—”
“Whoa, easy!” Silas caught her as she swayed, lowering her to her knees and steadying her with both hands at her shoulders. Her skin prickled, as if a thousand spiders crawled across it.
“For the purposes of the committee’s review, I have included visual documentation.” He spoke gruffly, in that familiar halting tone of one who was painfully aware that he spoke into a machine. “Subject One-Three-Zero-Nine-Eight-Four has shown remarkable sensory capabilities that extend well beyond her physical location. Genetic composition includes”—papers ruffled—“an imported subject bearing an active witchcraft allele—for the purposes of this project, we have nicknamed it the Salem genome—and one of the specimens provided by the Holy Order.”
The air felt suddenly too . . . full. As if they weren’t alone anymore; as if it filled with bodies her eyes couldn’t see. Living bodies.
No, not living. Souls. Memories. Hers?
“Turn it off,” Juliet whispered.
Silas lunged to his feet, helplessly surveying the canvas-covered structures. “I don’t know how.”
“The subject in question appears to have an ability that mimics that of—well, in laymen’s terms, we shall call the donor her mother—however, extensive testing proves that the subject’s visions, as it were, are more readily apparent. In short, she is capable of what parapsychologists have termed remote viewing, although it lacks finesse or control. It’s worth noting at this point that all other subjects bearing the Salem donor’s genetic composition have atrophied.”
“Turn it off,” Juliet repeated, hysteria welling in her throat. Her head. It rode on the back of whispers suddenly clamoring to be heard.
From people she knew didn’t exist.
See us.
Clapping her hands over her ears, she groaned. “I don’t want to hear this, I don’t—”
Silas kicked the bank of computers. “Come on,” he rumbled, slamming both hands down on the various keys, knobs, buttons comprising the face. “I can’t!”
“It seems only by combining the stronger evolutionary composition of a Mission donor will the Salem genome stabilize under duress—”
“What the fuck,” Silas roared, face tilting to the ceiling.
Remember us.
Juliet shook her head. “No, no, no!”
“—which, until now, has been the obstacle resulting in the loss of eighty-six percent of our trials. That said, case study thirty-six forty-three is our most productive yet—”
Eve!
Silas’s fist crashed into the dashboard. Electricity arced in a blue stream, crawling up the metal plates as Juliet screamed.
The voice slowed to a crawling drone, each word stretched across an impossibly deep pitch. The speakers fuzzed loudly, clicked twice, and fell silent.
“Malfunction,” said the pleasant computerized voice. “Playback paused. Scanning damaged sectors.”
Juliet gasped for breath. Rocking back and forth, she struggled to breathe, to think through the sick knot in her chest.
She felt nauseous. Wrong. Her temples throbbed.
Silas clung to the edge of the computer desk, staring at it in blank disbelief.
For a long moment, neither spoke. Then, slowly, Juliet pulled herself to her feet. “I think . . .” Her voice cracked. She cleared her t
hroat, tried again. “I think we found it.” Found them.
His head dropped. “Mission donors,” he repeated, almost as if he felt as numb as Juliet. As confused.
Betrayed.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” His gaze hardened. “I’m damn well going to find out. Embryos, incubation racks. How long has this gone on?”
“I wish—” Her eyes widened. “Silas!”
The figure moved out of the shadow, too fast. Too sudden. Silas straightened as a gunshot cracked, deafening in the metal-wrapped chamber. He staggered.
Juliet screamed.
Blood sprayed, a gory flower picked out by the fluorescent lights, spattering the bank of half-shattered computer screens.
“Silas!” Juliet sprinted for him, only to shriek out a ragged curse as Tobias hooked an arm across her chest.
The gun never wavered in his free hand, still pointed at Silas as he collapsed to the grimy floor.
Blood spread like a black stain beneath him.
Juliet squirmed frantically, fingers digging for purchase, for anything she could sink her nails into. Cloth, flesh, his eyes, anything. “No!” she sobbed. “No, Silas, get up . . . Get up!”
Tobias hauled her back toward one of the doors. She wrenched at his grip. Her flailing elbow slipped past his guard, slamming into his sternum.
His grip slipped.
Twisting free, she sprinted toward Silas’s inert body. He was so pale. Was he breathing?
Was he bleeding to death?
“Fuck, you’re a hassle,” Tobias bit out, seconds before he tackled her to the ground. She hit the unforgiving floor on her chest, wheezing as the air whooshed out of her in one painful squeeze. Briefly stunned, it was all she could do to fight back as he snagged her wrists in one hand, her waistband in the other, and bodily lifted her off the ground.
She watched Silas until tears blurred her vision. “Wake up,” she wheezed, panting with the effort. “Get up, oh, God . . .” Jessie. Jessie was going to be devastated.
She’d never forgive them.
A door creaked open. She squirmed hard, her knees slamming against the floor. Pain spiked her kneecaps, lanced through her arms as he forced her past the threshold.
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