“Hard to say,” Peter said. “Thirteen stories down, on an angle. . . should be close now, I’m getting some fresh air.”
Almost as he spoke, the light around us changed. Although still dark, there were now layers to the darkness, and even better . . . “Fresh air,” I said. A year without it, and the smell had never been so welcome.
“Hurry.” I pushed Peter and dragged the other two. We had to get the hell out of here.
Now.
There would be no other chance. I’d seen Bear for a reason, and Eligor had done what he’d done for a reason. Everything had aligned for us to make this one big push. We would not get another chance like this.
I felt it in my gut, every instinct driving me to action.
The ramp opened and we stepped out of the darkness completely. I did a quick turn, assessing where we were. A small bunker, a truck to the left, a road out to the right. For the first time, I let go of Eligor. I ran to the truck.
Locked.
I moved to the passenger side, checked that door. Locked as well. I lifted an elbow and smashed through the glass, then climbed through the opening and settled myself into the driver’s seat. The dog got in beside me and woofed. As if she wanted to hurry me up too. There would be no keys in the truck waiting for us. I was sure of it, but I checked anyway. Nothing.
I bent down and ripped off the cover underneath the wheel and found the wires I was looking for.
Pete and Cowboy jumped into the cab of the truck. “Hurry, they’re on us!”
I didn’t lift my eyes from my task as I ran the wires across one another and the engine tried to roll over. “Shit, where’s Eligor?”
“Just standing there,” Cowboy said.
“We need him!” I snapped.
“No, we don’t!” Peter snapped back.
The engine caught and turned over. I threw the truck into reverse and hit the gas pedal. Gravel and rocks spat out all around the truck as I spun it around, then jammed it into first gear. I leaned out the window. “Eligor!”
“Go,” he said, not looking at me. “Go. They will track you through me.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I hit the gas and released the clutch. The truck peeled out and we shot away from Eligor and the facility that had held us. I ran the truck until I was in the highest gear, moving as fast as I could.
“Jesus, slow down!” Cowboy yelped as I took a hard corner, the truck tires squealing against the hot asphalt.
“No.” But even as I said it, it struck me that I probably shouldn’t be driving. I could feel Eligor still, whether or not he realized it.
“Peter, take the wheel.” I scooted out of the way and the Magelore did as I asked. My body started to shake, and I found myself watching through Eligor’s eyes as the ones who had followed us swept out of the tunnels.
Eligor straightened his back even as he dropped to his knees.
But his eyes, and subsequently mine, were locked on the main figure that strode out of the cave. He was taller than every other person present, mostly humans to be fair, and his dark red cloak swirled out around him on a breeze that I couldn’t feel, a breeze that stirred nothing else.
“What are you seeing?” Cowboy asked.
“Shh.” I absently slapped a hand over his mouth.
Eligor didn’t look away from that man.
That is the boss. He is dangerous. He will come for you, Phoenix. I . . . am sorry for my part in this. He would have found you for sure if I’d stayed with you.
“Eligor, run,” I said. “Fight, do something!”
I am doing something. You know what I am, so you know what he is, and what he is capable of. I thought . . . that he was right about the abnormals. We have no other tokens of yours, so we will not be able to connect to your mind again. And I am going to cut you off. He touched his pocket and I found my hand moving to my own pocket. I pulled the silver wings that Bear had given me there. He’d slipped them in at some point.
The boss stepped toward him. Long, white, curling locks flowed over his shoulders, and eyes the same blue-purple as Eligor’s stared down at the much smaller man. “Ernest, what have you been up to? Did you fall in love with our captive?”
“No,” Eligor said, but the denial fell flat even to me. Even now, after what he’d seen me do, he thought I was worth saving.
That I wasn’t the evil monster I’d been made out to be. That I was meant for more than the facility would do to me.
I gripped the dash of the truck.
Dinah trembled as she no doubt picked up on my emotions. “Do we need to go back?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, but I need to see how they overpower him. It will help us.”
“Smart,” Dinah said. “You were always too smart for your own good.”
The boss stepped up to Eligor, reached out and touched the miniscule man in the middle of the forehead, then drew his finger back with a twist. Something sticky and long went with him. Like glowing spiderweb. I could guess at what it was. Or who it was. The essence of Eligor.
His last thought was simple. He has all that I am now. Do not trust me.
“Eligor?”
Nothing. Either he was dead and what was left of him was wrapped up in that web shit, or he really had cut me off. Either way, we weren’t going to get more help from him. I blinked and rubbed at my eyes as I came back to the present.
“So . . .” Cowboy leaned around the dog who’d plopped herself in between us. “Any idea where we are?”
I shook my head. “We drive until we find something. And then we drive until we hit a hospital. If we can’t use your EMP pulse, then we need something else to derail the tracers.”
And then I was going to find my family. But in order to get to them, I would have to navigate the new laws about abnormals. Which meant I needed to learn why we were being targeted.
“Dinah,” I touched her handle, “how was Easter taken?”
“She was sleeping,” Dinah said. “She’d eaten at a place, a restaurant in London—”
Peter cut her off. “I was nowhere near London. I was coming back from a job in Montreal. Pulled off the side of the road to sleep.”
Cowboy nodded. “I was sleeping too when they took me. Like I said, I’d been out on the range for almost the whole year, keeping myself hidden. That week before I was caught me and my boss, we’d been driving cattle for a week and finally had a break back at the ranch. Texas, to be exact.”
They both looked at me. “I was in Montana.” They didn’t need to know why I’d been in the hospital. I’d spent the last year forcing those memories down deep to protect my loved ones. Because even if I had never fully understood what the facility wanted from us, I’d known they would use every tool at their disposal to force us into line.
Including hurting those we loved.
Trapping them.
Torturing them.
An image of my son, the one I’d seen in the darkness, danced through my mind. It struck me that he must have been chasing something. I could see that now in the way his knees had been splayed on the ground.
“I heard that you and that Irish bastard Fannin took up together,” Peter said. “Were you with him when you were taken?”
My jaw ticked and my heart hurt at the thought of Killian. Of how he’d let me down. I didn’t think he’d betrayed me; he wasn’t that man. But he’d let me go so easily. It felt like a betrayal.
Twice. I’d been fooled twice by men that I’d stupidly given my heart to.
“Yes, he was there when I was taken,” I said.
“Fuck, then they got you both.” Peter shook his head.
I mimicked him, shaking my head. “No, they didn’t get him.” And this was the part that hurt, the rage and betrayal I’d had to stuff down into the currents of the river inside my mind to keep from doing as Peter had done, flinging myself at every opportunity to escape. “He let them take me.”
8
We drove for nearly two hours with no more than a handful of
words exchanged between us.
It seemed that my little bombshell that Killian had allowed me to be taken was enough to keep the two men quiet. Peter at least knew of Killian, how in the abnormal world, he was known for his sense of justice, and his willingness to fight for those who weren’t strong enough to fight for themselves.
It was one of the things I loved about him, and the thing that hurt the most about him just letting me go without a fight.
“I’m not going back there,” Peter said as we finally found a road with a sign pointing to the interstate.
“You want me to kill you?” Dinah asked. “If the time comes?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“Me too,” Cowboy said.
Dinah grumbled. “Damn it, and who gets to kill me? Huh? Nobody ever thinks about the gun’s feelings on this topic, do they?”
I laid a hand over her. “Do like Eleanor.”
I’d had two guns at one point. Dinah and Eleanor. Eleanor had held the soul of my mother, and when she’d been forced to shoot at me, she’d deliberately backfired, killing herself instead of me.
A sigh grumbled out of her. “My point is that no one in the last year has so much as wiggled my trigger.”
“You’ve misfired before.” I put heavy emphasis on that one word. Dinah was not supposed to be able to shoot without having someone pull her trigger, but she was, for lack of a better explanation, trigger happy. She’d shot on her own enough times that I knew she could.
Another grumble, but she went quiet after that.
The clock on the dashboard said 10:01 p.m. There was no radio.
“There.” Cowboy pointed at a sign as we came up to it. A hospital was a few miles away. “What do you think the chances are we can get in and out?”
I looked at him and shrugged. “Not bad.”
“Liar.” Peter laughed.
The silver-gray dog lifted her head to stare at the Magelore and let out a low grumble. I put a hand on her head, and she calmed immediately.
Cowboy cleared his throat. “I’ve tied her to you. She’s not trained, but she’ll always understand your commands. And she’ll always come back to you. Even if something happens to me. She’s your dog now, through and through.”
I nodded. “Any idea on her breed?”
“Cane Corso, and pit bull, I think,” he said, running a hand over her head. “She was used in dog-fighting matches. She’s tough and had more than a little bit of a mean streak in her.”
Peter barked a laugh. “A fitting pair.”
I’d already surmised that much from the little I’d seen of her while I was down there. No one had been able to get close to her, and I wasn’t sure why they’d kept her. She sure as shit wasn’t a therapy dog. Then again, she hadn’t been there long.
“They fed the bad ones to me,” Peter said. “She can smell that I’m a predator. That’s why she don’t like me. That mush you brought me was bullshit, but they never told you that, did they?”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “I knew what they fed you when I didn’t. The only reason I brought you that fucking mush was me trying to get through your thick skull to make you see we could work together.”
I lifted a hand and touched the bite on my neck. It had healed, but I would always have a weakness for him now, for believing him. That was the way a Magelore worked, manipulating everyone around them.
“You really married?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes. Though I’ve no idea if she’d still be waiting. Human, not abnormal.” He shot a look at me. “Some of them have a thing for abnormals, turns them on.”
I didn’t care about that. “Don’t call her. Don’t think about going to her. Not yet. We don’t know how tied your handler is to you still.”
“I’m not a fucking moron,” he growled. But I heard the defense in his voice. I looked at Cowboy.
“Same for you. No phones, no nothing. Not even your mother can know you are out.”
“No one for me to call,” Cowboy said flatly. “Family is all gone ’cept for a cousin that now I’m thinking might have got a payday for handing me over.”
I stared out the front window and twisted the rearview mirror so I could check it every few minutes. Lights came into view and we were suddenly on the interstate with other cars around us.
“Two more exits, then the hospital,” Peter said.
“Hurry,” I said, rubbing at my neck. “They’re on us already.”
“Shit, can you see them?” Cowboy twisted around in his seat to look.
“No. But they are. I can . . . feel them.”
They both looked at me, but neither questioned me. Because as weird as that sounded, it was our world. And I wasn’t lying. There was a sense of being hunted that you only knew if you’d been hunted repeatedly. The tracers were already doing their job, almost humming under my skin, only for me it was everywhere. The hum was everywhere.
Peter took the exit we needed and drove quickly through a series of suburbs before the hospital came into view.
“Carlisle Hospital,” Cowboy said. “Doesn’t actually say where we are.”
I snorted. “You didn’t look at the license plates on the cars? We’re in Pennsylvania.”
Which was good, not too far from New York in the scope of things. I needed answers, and I was going to get them one way or another. I’d start at Killian’s bar in New York to see if there was any clue as to where he’d taken Bear.
Peter pulled into a parking lot and we filed out. “Leave the windows down,” I said, and looked at the dog. She needed a name.
“Wait. Guard,” I said, and she sat and gave me a look that said it all. She thought it was foolish but would do as she was told. I smiled and tucked Dinah into the waistband of my loose uniform pants. At least the crappy clothes would help me blend in with the hospital staff. Same with Peter. Cowboy, on the other hand, looked like shit, his pants and shirt ripped and his wounds obvious.
“Follow me.” I pulled Cowboy toward me, sliding his arm over my neck and mine around his waist. He startled a little but settled into letting me help him.
“You know where you’re going?” Peter asked.
I didn’t bother to answer him, and Dinah snickered. “He asks as if you’ve been here before. Shut up, Magelore, and follow the boss lady.”
“She always this mouthy?” he muttered.
I smiled, and even if it was tight, it was at least real. “She’s been nice, so far.”
The doors to Carlisle Hospital slid open and we walked through. It was a big hospital, which would work in our favor. The staff in a smaller place would notice visitors, but in a bustling hospital like this, no one was likely to acknowledge that we’d walked through the doors.
I started to the left and the elevator bank that waited for us there. Peter kept up and the three of us—four if you counted Dinah—stepped in. A young doctor slid in as the doors closed.
“Oh man, almost got the pinch there!” He pushed up a set of glasses on his nose and straightened his overcoat. He had short dark hair and a smooth face that made me think he was barely out of his teens. Young, so young and fresh and he had no idea who and what he stood next to in the elevator. His nametag read Dr. Lee.
“I’m a new nurse,” I said. “What floor is the X-ray machine on?”
“Oh, that’s the subbasement. You’re going down for that.” He hit the appropriate button and flashed a smile at me. I made myself smile back.
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
I waited for him to ask what we needed the X-ray for, but he didn’t. I’d take a bit of luck thrown our way.
He got off on the third floor and then we were headed back down. The doors opened on our floor and we stepped out.
“I don’t really need the help now,” Cowboy said.
“It’s part of the image,” I said. “I’m a nurse, you’re a patient.”
“Sexy nurse helps wounded cowboy,” Dinah mused. “Not as kinky as I like it, but su
re, we could run with that show.”
I rolled my eyes, but secretly had to fight a laugh. “I missed you too, Dinah.”
“Bitch, you didn’t have wax stuck in you for the last year,” she said. “I’ve gotta make up for lost time.”
“I had someone monitoring my every thought,” I said. “I win the shit year award.”
“Fine,” she muttered. “You win this time.”
Peter stayed close behind me, guarding our rear. I didn’t look back at him. I didn’t have to.
We were in this together, the three of us, for good or for bad, till death did we part.
That thought did make me smile, which was good since we’d reached the nurse’s desk. She looked up as we drew close, and her smile answered mine.
“Which doctor sent you down?”
“Dr. Lee,” I said.
She frowned as she looked over her paper. “I don’t see it here. Maybe he hasn’t had a chance to send the order down.”
We didn’t have time to sweet-talk her, nor did I have the inclination, so I moved around the desk and pulled Dinah out, pressing her against the nurse’s back. “Move real quiet. You’re going to help us run the machine now.”
Her back stiffened and I helped her stand. She had boxed blond hair that wasn’t fooling anyone with the dark roots, and her body was less than firm. Early fifties was my guess. I didn’t hold those things against her, but they assured me she was no threat. No FBI agent in hiding. No monster in the closet.
“I can’t do X-rays,” she said. “We need a tech.”
I motioned at her to pick up the phone. “So call a tech.”
Peter took a step back and then another. “The elevator. I can jam it.”
“Wait till the tech gets here,” I said.
The nurse picked up the phone, her hand trembling so hard she could barely lift it. I watched her dial through and pressed the button to put the call on speaker phone. She swallowed hard.
“Easy,” I leaned over to see her name, “Lacey. Easy. We won’t hurt anyone, but we need the X-rays. Nice and simple.”
She nodded jerkily, and the phone clicked through. She stuttered through her request for an X-ray tech to come down to the subbasement, but the guy on the other end didn’t seem bothered. A few minutes later, he strode out of the elevator.
A Savage Spell (The Nix Series Book 4) Page 7