All Things Wicked
Page 27
Juliet straightened, planting her hands beside her as she struggled to her feet. “I’ll leave,” she said immediately. “Anything I can do to—”
Jessie’s fingers settled over her shoulder, same as Silas’s had before. “You don’t have to, Juliet. Matilda made sure of that.”
Juliet frowned. “What?”
Silas reached for the satchel, upending its contents over the grave. Three syringes fell out, making Juliet flinch, and a sheaf of papers. Real papers, yellowed with age and frayed at the edges.
A plastic card sliced through the air, tiny metal links glinting from one edge, and landed at Juliet’s feet.
She picked it up with shaking fingers. On one side, a strong-featured woman with long red hair smiled out of a small photograph. Over it, the word GeneCorp had been emblazoned in thick orange and black. “Matilda Lauderdale,” she read slowly. “And an ID number.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Dr. Laurence Lauderdale was a man,” Jessie said, as if reading her thoughts. “Was he her father? Her husband? A brother? I don’t know. Is he even still alive?”
“Matilda was old,” Silas rumbled.
“Which means maybe not,” Jessie allowed, and she picked up the capped syringes. In each, a brownish-colored liquid oozed slowly. “Among everything else I could see, I saw this, hidden behind a panel in the house. I saw the ID, and these. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but she explains it here. Listen to this.”
Juliet’s fingers tightened on the card, its plastic edges biting into her flesh.
She didn’t want to listen. She didn’t want to hear what the woman who helped GeneCorp had to say.
She didn’t care.
But, oh, God, she did. And the memory of the tortured voices in that lab needed closure. Peace.
“Okay,” she whispered.
Jessie smoothed out the papers. “The genetic composition for each child is destabilized by the very nature of its origins,” she read. “Although progress has been recorded, Nadia isn’t looking at long-term stability. Why should she? She’s too focused on pleasing the doctor, and my concerns are going unheard. Or at least unanswered.”
Juliet closed her eyes. “She calls us children. Not subjects.”
“It goes on like this,” Jessie said after a moment, “talking about how she’s positive that our bodies won’t be able to sustain the demands that the magic puts on it. She talks about you, too.” The witch continued on before Juliet could say anything. “She talks about how she worked on you specifically. How she spliced your—”
“I don’t want to know!” Juliet flung out her hands. The ID card slid through her fingers, slapping against the gravestone loudly.
Jessie stilled beside her. Then, slowly, she put down the papers. “Juliet.”
Tears filled her eyes. Juliet shook her head hard.
“She talks about how she read at your cradle. She says that your potent genetic composition could be enough to stabilize all of the children.” Jessie paused, then translated softly. “You are the key to saving us. Your DNA or something holds the sequence that will keep us from dying young. She named you Eve.”
“Why?” Juliet said, the word breaking on a sob that made Silas’s eyes widen. His big body tensed. “Why does it matter? Stabilize them so they could keep torturing them? So they could fill them full of drugs and carve out bits of their brains and—” She jammed her fingers against her mouth as the sobs wrenched through her.
Jessie slid an arm around her shoulders, grip tight. “Shhh,” she soothed. “No, honey. You’re like . . .” She gestured expansively. “You’re made of everything we are. You’re the best of us. Matilda made you so she could free us. She tried to unlock the genetic codes of your magic, peel out the bits that made it so the others could live, but she was caught. She only got half the data.”
Juliet turned her face into Jessie’s shoulder, clenching her eyes shut.
“You were less than a month old when Matilda went on the run. These are the only batches of the serum she could make.” Jessie cupped her chin in one hand, raising Juliet’s eyes to hers. They were steady, golden brown, and filled with tears. But calm. Reassuring. “She wanted us to use it.”
“More testing,” Juliet said, but it lacked heat.
“I think,” Silas said carefully, in the cautious tones of a man surrounded by weeping women, “that she wanted to fix everything.”
Juliet eyed the syringes in Jessie’s hand. A shudder slid down her spine. “I hate needles,” she muttered.
“I know.” Jessie’s mouth quirked. “Funnily enough, so do I.”
Juliet swallowed hard. Swallowed the fear, the tension. The deep, raging fury that couldn’t all be hers. Squaring her shoulders, she said, “This will fix us?”
“No,” Jessie said, cupping Juliet’s hand in hers. “But it’ll make sure that our magic doesn’t kill us anymore. We can’t be fixed. Just . . . stabilized.”
Juliet nodded slowly. “It’s a start.”
“Silas?”
He took the syringes Jessie offered, taking a deep, long breath. “I hope she knew what she was doing,” he said.
“Reassuring,” Jessie replied wryly, and tipped her face up for his kiss.
To Juliet’s surprise, as he turned to her, his eyes were kind, and he touched her cheek. “You’re a good kid, Rosy. A good person. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Her smile was wan. “Just . . . stick me before I have a total freak-out.”
“Close your eyes,” Jessie encouraged, and held Juliet’s arm for the needle.
Her mind screamed. Her body stiffened, and Silas’s hand closed over her other arm to hold her as a sound strangled in her throat. They were going to shove a needle in her skin. In her body.
They were going to—
She sucked in a breath. “Where’s Caleb?” The needle punctured through her arm, and Juliet all but climbed out of her skin. “Is he here?” she demanded.
“Easy,” Jessie said softly. “He’s not here.”
“Where?” she gasped. Her arm burned, like liquid fire being pumped into her vein. “Does he know?”
“And done,” Silas rumbled, smoothing a thumb over the tiny hole.
Juliet opened her eyes, her breath coming too fast, too hard.
Jessie’s expression was torn. Hesitant.
The liquid, whatever it was, traveled up her arm, burning everything in its wake. Her skin throbbed, her muscles contracted hard enough to make her grit her teeth. Juliet clamped her hand over her arm and closed her eyes. “He’s gone,” she said tightly. “Isn’t he?”
“Yeah.” Jessie’s fingers, smooth and cool, cupped her cheek. “Breathe, honey. He left while you were recovering.”
She nodded. Once. “I . . . thought so,” she managed, just as darkness came crashing down around her.
“It’s okay, this is expected!” she heard Jessie say, and then nothing.
The computer screens glowed, luridly bright as Caleb sat back in the chair. He watched the feed play, tinny voices and a cacophony of constant, rhythmic beeps undercutting the silence of the forgotten chamber.
It had been two days since they’d escaped from this building.
Two decades, he thought grimly, since his sister and Juliet and God only knew how many others had escaped the first time.
There should have been more activity here. Missionaries, Church people, hell, he didn’t know. Someone. There’d been four teams—whatever a team was made of—arrowing in on this spot just two days ago.
But nothing had moved in the twenty-four hours since he’d begun his vigil. Everything was empty, quiet.
Including his head.
Cordelia was gone.
Babies cried through the tinny speakers, but he tuned it out. He’d already watched it play through twice. Now he let it unfold again, background because anything was better than the echoing thoughts within his own head.
The ring glittered warmly in the monitors’ cold light.
Do your own dirty work.
The gold winked at him, warm from his pocket. Warm like the woman who had worn it; the woman who had loved her sister so much that she’d given up everything for her. Her life. Her secrets.
Her magic.
Screaming and yelling poured through the tiny speakers, and his glance flicked to the monitors again. A woman with short blond hair plastered herself against a wall as orderlies hurried by, smoke billowing from somewhere out of the security feed’s view.
As it had each time, Caleb’s chest squeezed at the image of his mother. So much younger than he remembered, but there. Right in front of him.
And still so out of reach.
His fingers clenched on the ring.
“She was pretty.”
Adrenaline slammed into his body, but Caleb forced himself to tamp it down. Willed himself not to move even one muscle as the voice licked out from the dark.
He curled the ring into the center of one, white-knuckled fist, his eyes steady on the monitor.
“Get out,” he said curtly.
It hadn’t worked the first time. Caleb didn’t expect it to work this time, either.
Juliet stepped out from the shadows and into the pale light afforded by the screens, her hands in the pockets of an oversized sweatshirt. She ignored him, her gaze fixed on the feed.
Even in his peripheral, even drowning in clothes too big for her, she was beautiful.
Caleb’s heart pounded. Adrenaline. The scare she’d given him by sneaking up, that was all.
God, what a liar.
He didn’t need Delia’s voice to tell him that.
“Was that her?” Juliet asked, her voice soft. Oh, fuck, gentle. “Was that your mom?”
He didn’t trust himself to speak. He nodded once.
“You look like her,” she observed. “You and Jessie both have her fine structure. And her hair.” She glanced at him. “You have her eyes, though.”
He flinched. “What do you want, Juliet?”
She went still beside him. Then, slowly, she took one hand out of her pocket and rested her fingertips on the desk beside him. Lightly.
Cautiously.
“You left.”
Guilt kicked him between the eyes. Again. “The data Jessie tried to take was corrupted,” he said, his tone even. Calm. Everything he fucking well wasn’t. “I thought I’d come back here and see if there was anything left.”
Alarms rang out, causing Juliet to visibly jump, but they only echoed from the feed as it played. She shook back her hair from her eyes, and he hated the fact that he wanted her closer.
That he wanted to search her gaze, to soothe the hurt he knew she must be feeling.
Would only feel stronger.
The silence stretched between them, thick enough to choke on. Too heavy with everything he knew he should say, and couldn’t.
She’d find out.
Right . . . about . . . He closed his eyes.
“Oh, my God.” Three words, edged on a strangled sob.
Caleb didn’t have to look to know what she saw. He opened his eyes anyway; forced himself to turn his head and study Juliet’s shocked profile.
She was pale, but thank God, not as pale as she’d been when he’d left her in that bed. Not as fragile.
But hurting, still.
She raised a shaking hand to touch the closest of the screens. Between her fingers, a young child crept between six-by-six-by-six-foot cells. Her closely buzzed hair was blond, lighter than the color it had turned when she got older. A bar code blackened the skin at the back of her head, lightly dusted with golden fuzz.
She glanced up, around. For a brief, shattered second, her dark green eyes met the camera’s.
Met Juliet’s.
Her knees buckled.
Caleb reached for her, unable to keep himself from trying, but she stiffened, bracing her hands on the desk. Her jaw tightened. “I don’t understand,” she said raggedly.
“She was there.” Every nerve screaming to take her in his arms, to soothe her, Caleb forced himself to drop his hand. It fisted with the other against his thighs. “Delia was one of the children in that lock-up.”
Visibly trembling, Juliet watched as smoke hovered near the ceiling. As children of all ages clambered out of cells suddenly unlocked, some grabbing infants, others sobbing for help.
And the little girl eased between two incubators, reaching down into the open top to gather a tiny bundle into her arms.
Tears slid over Juliet’s lashes.
Caleb’s jaw clenched so hard, pain shredded through his temples. She had to see this. She had to know.
But God, it killed him to see her cry.
Chaos filled the screen; alarms and screams, crying and shouting and orders. He assumed the rushing noise he heard behind it all was the fire that had scarred the interior corridors they’d passed through earlier.
It would take this room, too.
Without warning, Juliet sank to the floor. She landed on her ass, lips parted on a sob, tears tracking silver down her cheeks. “She was there,” she repeated brokenly. “She was a witch, like me? Why? Why didn’t she—Oh, God, why didn’t she tell me?”
Caleb dropped to the floor beside her, reaching out.
She flinched, and he froze.
Then, slowly, he lowered his fists to the floor. He couldn’t touch her. Not again. But maybe he could give her the closure she needed. “She didn’t tell anyone,” he said quietly. “Believe me, she didn’t let on in any way. Nobody knew, Jules. Not Curio, not me, not . . .”
“Not me,” she whispered. Juliet fisted her hands against her mouth, struggling to hold back the keening sound he knew was building inside.
He knew, and he felt it, too.
He kept talking, faster now. Intent. She had to understand, before she broke. Before it shattered her forever. “When she came to me, I thought she was just some ho . . .” He hesitated.
“Prostitute,” Juliet said around her white knuckles. “She was never . . . She didn’t care.”
“She was your sister,” Caleb said fiercely. “She was just some powerless sister to a witch I knew”—she flinched—“and I didn’t have any time for her until she offered me a deal.”
The remaining blood drained from Juliet’s face. “Did you . . . ?”
It took him a moment. “Oh, Christ, no,” he growled. “Fuck. What do you think I—” Am?
Her sister’s murderer, obviously.
He dragged a hand down his face as the feed speakers crackled. “I never slept with her,” he said from between gritted teeth. “She was dying, Jules. She knew it, and I think it was the same thing killing you and Jess now.”
“Before,” she whispered.
Caleb slashed a hand through the air. “She made me promise,” he said over her. Get it out. He had to get it out.
The whole story.
Her pain.
“If I harvested her heart’s blood, then I had to promise to get you out of the coven.”
Her eyes jerked to him, wide. Shimmering pale and green with her tears. “What?”
“She made me promise,” Caleb repeated, and sat back on his heels. “I already had a plan for the coven. I’d made connections, set the timetable. All I had to do was get you away from that damned gathering, and then it’d be done. I wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of it.”
Her eyes narrowed, even as a tear trickled down the smooth line of her cheek. “What rest of it?”
He took a deep breath.
“Caleb, what else did you promise?”
And let it out on a hard, angry sound. “I was never to tell you.”
Her fists clenched. “I don’t care if—” She stopped. “Wait, what? That was it? She made you promise never to tell me? Tell me what? That she was a
witch?”
“None of it,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t tell you about the ritual, about her deal to secure your freedom, about her voice in my goddamned head—” He lurched to his feet, swiping a hand through the air. “Nothing. Ever.”
“But why?” she demanded, and in the question, he heard every wound, every hurt. Every empty, aching, sleepless night.
He shuddered. “I don’t know.”
In the feed beside him, fire licked at the edges of the room. The girl with the wide green eyes carried the baby, almost too big for her little arms. She picked her way over tangled wires and melting cords.
Juliet covered her mouth with one hand, muffling her tears.
“I never realized she was a witch until now,” Caleb said quietly. “I didn’t know how unusual it was to have a remnant of that person stay in your head until—” He caught himself, bit off his words with a vicious, angry curse. She didn’t need to know how much of Cordelia he’d carried around.
How often he’d heard her voice when Juliet had nothing.
He stalked away from the computers. Away from Juliet, hunched over the hole he knew filled her chest. How could it not?
She’d spent her life being lied to.
And he hadn’t helped her. Ever.
But someone had. Since the beginning, Cordelia had guided things. Manipulated things. Just as bad as that red-haired witch in the trench. As bad as he did. Connivers, the lot of them.
Cursing savagely, silently, he spun again and closed the distance between them. She was damn well going to see this.
He wrapped a hand around her arm, jerking her to her feet. “Look at this,” he said, every word a growl.
She shook her head, hair sticking to her damp cheeks in lines of faded black ink.
He shook her hard enough that her eyes widened. Hoisted her closer to the monitors, until they all but filled her vision. Until she had no choice but to see.
The child they knew as Cordelia held the bundle close to her chest, coughing as she scurried away from the flames. She cradled the baby’s head in one hand. “There, there,” she said lightly, even as the world turned to flame and chaos around her. “It’s okay, baby. We’ll be safe soon.”
The screen fuzzed as fire ate at the camera, but Caleb wordlessly jerked Juliet closer to his side as the second monitor showed the six-year-old carrying the infant down the hallway. Orderlies fled. Screams filled the speakers; trapped subjects, injured technicians, he didn’t know.