by R.E. Packer
Chapter 25
I woke up with my head spinning, feeling nauseous. It felt like a mule had kicked me in the neck. I opened my eyes, hating the bright overhead lights and the antiseptic smell that stung my nose. I tried to sit up but couldn’t move my arms. I looked down to see they were strapped to the table. Looking closer I saw wrist cuffs made of silver or some other polished metal. I was still having trouble focusing my eyes but the metal cuffs looked like they had runes carved in them.
The whispered voice of a man contrasting with a brash female voice drifted across the room to me. A white lab coat floated around almost out of view behind my head. Instruments beeped and clicked as he pressed buttons. What had to be the world’s thickest glasses shot into view. His eyes flitted over toward a woman as she swaggered toward him. She had an unruly mop of hair, dark circles under her eyes and her face was so pale that under other circumstances I would have been worried that her blood pressure was low.
“It looks like we have what we need to catch your new friends. Maybe once I take care of the old crones you and I can get to know each other better,” Vivian Tutino said, smiling sweetly at me and giving a wink.
A pressure built in my head, not exactly a headache, which I was still nursing from whatever drug they knocked me out with, moved like an abrasive worm in my mind trying to dig through my subconscious. I immediately put up a mental barricade and the worm retreated.
Vivian grunted.
“Is he one of you or is he human?” a soldier asked as he marched toward us. His silver hair was in a buzz cut and his square jaw thrust outward. When he came near, a look of annoyance crossed Vivian’s face.
“He was human, but something has changed in him,” Vivian said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, Colonel, that he has somehow gotten magic. According to our mutual friend, a lot of magic,” she said.
“How did you get magic? It’s not like it’s something you can just give to someone.” she said with a perplexed look on her face. She put her hand on my arm, squeezing it, which sent a chill up my spine.
Colonel Yourke’s hard eyes evaluated the situation at a glance. His thick neck swiveled from me to Vivian.
“Inject him with the serum and be done with it.”
“If we do that the real targets might flee, and we might need him as leverage. You’re underestimating the Elders. Besides those cuffs drain any magic he has. He created them.”
“Are you sure he won’t get loose?”
“He made them,” she said again as if that explained it. “The spell on them will fizzle out any magic like it was never there,” she said.
“Besides, no newborn pseudo witch or whatever it is he has become is stronger than me. And Hopewell is damn sure is not stronger than him,” she said. “No offense, honey,” she said sweetly.
“I need to go rest now before they come. I haven’t slept in three days,” she told the Colonel as she stood and headed for the door. She slowed her pace as she passed the Colonel. Her eyebrows knit together, then her face clouded. After a few seconds, anger lit in her eyes, replacing the fatigue. Grunting, she continued on toward the door.
The colonel didn’t show that he knew anything was going on. But I’ve seen that look on her face before. She was trying to get into his head. And she wasn’t able to. Very interesting. The Colonel seems to be more than he appears as well.
“Neat trick,” I said to the Colonel trying to gauge his response.
He snorted, then pulled a chair over to where I was strapped to the table.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“Why should I?”
“I know you are a decent guy, you work for Langhorne Securities, you don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you live in the same shitty little apartment that you moved into with your sister when you came to the city. And your last client was Gwendolyn Keane.
We’ve been ordered to make sure you’re not a threat. We know the witches are dangerous. What we don’t know is how that affects us.”
The man in the lab coat, who had gone largely unnoticed was still attending to one of the many machines in the room until the colonel dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
When the man left, the colonel closed the door behind him. Then he did the same with the door on the other side of the room, behind me, where I couldn’t see.
He came back over and sat down.
“Personally, I don’t think the witches want any trouble. Tutino claims they are extremely dangerous and are hell bent on attacking the US of A. What if I said we can let you go if you help us capture the witches?”
His tactic caught me off guard. My mind felt like it was about half a quart of coffee short of being ready for this conversation.
“I thought you said you didn’t think they were dangerous?”
While I was talking I tried to take in the table more closely and see what it was that held me in place. The metal bands were chained to the table by thick links of chain that could hold a gorilla in place. My feet were held down by nylon straps. The table itself was made of metal.
The machine next to me had blinking lights and a flashing number for my pulse. If I got loose they would know when I pulled the sensors off. I couldn’t hear any other voices even though I suspected there were other people in nearby rooms, so noise wouldn’t be a problem.
“No, I think they probably are. I think Tutino got that part right. I said I don’t think they want to cause trouble,” he said.
“But you want to capture them anyway?”
“Of course. They have a unique gift that could benefit this country. We aren’t the greatest superpower in the world for nothing.”
“Since you know who they are, you should know there’s no way in hell I would go against them,” I said.
The colonel didn’t look surprised.
“I figured as much,” he said. “Too bad, it might have kept you out of this mess.”
He got up and headed for the other door, that Vivian didn’t go through.
When they captured me I remember a man stopping me from using magic. I might be a toddler when it came to using magic, but I could tell he stopped my magic as easily as I could if he stopped me from breathing. A part of me still felt like I was trying to breathe with a heavy weight on my chest. Who was he and why wasn’t he here with Vivian Tutino?
I craned my head to look over my shoulder, making sure I was alone, then slid my butt over as much as I could toward my right hand. I always kept a boot knife tucked in my right boot, if I could get to it I might be able to use it to pry off one of the chains that held me captive. After a few minutes of inching my jeans up over my boot, I was met with disappointment, my knife was gone. They must have searched me before they’d tied me to the table. Of course they would have.
I took a deep steadying breath, to calm my nerves. Keep your head, Hopewell. I still had one ace up my sleeve. I turned onto my side putting my shoulder in a position that I wouldn’t be able to hold for long. I reached behind my back to the hidden blade that fitted neatly into my belt, and breathed a sigh of relief as I felt the hard steel.
The chain looked impossibly thick to get through, especially when I was using a pocketknife. The ring on the table that it was locked to had a small spot well that I thought I might be able to break off… eventually.
After 20 minutes of working on the weld I didn’t feel any closer to being free but I had chipped the blade at least once.
Nobody had come back into the room yet, proof that no cameras monitored my activity. Apparently the bait isn’t as important as the game being hunted. And I was the bait.
I finally got the blade to get a bit of leverage between the edge of the table and the ring that held the chain, after already breaking the tip of the blade off. I put more pressure on the weld and the blade flexed. Applying even more force I waited for the blade to snap, when I heard a crack my heart sank before seeing it was the weld that had broken, not the blad
e. Just a tiny piece but it was something.
Sweat kept running into my eyes and I shook my head trying in vain to fling the stinging sweat away, frantic now to get loose before they came back. I pulled harder on the blade and another small piece of metal sailed to over me and hit the wall to my left.
The weld on the ring was almost thin enough to break with the knife blade when the door opened and two lab techs walked in followed by Colonel Yourke. The lab techs headed to the computers near the door they came through They obscured my view from the colonel as he spoke quietly to them.
I didn’t know if he saw me hide the knife under my leg or heard the sound of metal on metal when the blade hit the table.
When they continued going about their business, I knew they hadn’t seen me hide the knife.
“Secure any data to the off site location,” the Colonel said, not paying me any attention. He had a more frantic look than the last time I’d seen him.
The techs sat in front of the computers typing rapidly.
“It will take about 10 minutes to move all the encrypted data to the remote datacenter,” one of the techs said.
“Hurry and get it done, then get the hell out of here. All hell’s about to break loose,” the Colonel said.