Page 56 of A Touch of Treachery (Section 47 #3)

DESMOND

O nce again, I drifted along in the black void of unconsciousness for quite some time. And once again, sensations slowly intruded on that peaceful bubble.

Low voices talking. Rough hands grabbing my arms and legs. Air flowing over my body. My back hitting a hard cushion. Tight bands cinching around my wrists and ankles.

That last one finally roused me to wakefulness. My eyes cracked open, and this time, I found myself staring up at a gray tile ceiling. I tried to roll to the side, but I couldn’t move. The fog dissipated from my mind, the world snapped into focus, and my gut twisted with dread.

I was strapped down to the chair in Henrika’s lab.

Thick, wide plastic bands anchored my wrists to the chair arms, while matching bands lashed my ankles to the metal footrest. I jerked forward, but my bonds were tight, and all I could do was wiggle around in the chair like a rabbit caught in a snare, going nowhere fast.

The sound of clicking keys caught my attention, and I stopped struggling and looked to my left. Henrika was standing at a worktable, typing away on a laptop.

“Don’t worry, darling,” she said, grinning at me. “We’re going to start with the easy stuff first.”

Footsteps scuffed on the tile, and Bryce came into view, now wearing blue medical gloves and a white lab coat that matched Henrika’s garment.

“Since when did you become a scientist?” I groused.

“I do whatever is necessary to get the job done, Dez,” Bryce replied. “Unlike you.”

He rolled a metal cart over to my left elbow. Instead of hammers, pliers, and other torture tools, some disinfectant wipes, a roll of gauze, and a long piece of rubber tubing covered the surface, along with several empty glass vials and a syringe with an alarmingly large needle.

“Bryce is going to collect some blood samples,” Henrika said. “Nothing too painful. According to your file, Section medics take your blood all the time, so you should be used to it.”

She was right. Section medics did take my blood all the time.

Standard operating procedure for cleaners, especially if we were exposed to toxic gases, chemicals, or other hazardous materials on missions.

Although given my galvanism, most of the time all I had to do to make myself better was grab the nearest source of electricity and channel it through my body, speeding up my own natural healing process.

But I didn’t dare do that right now, which was why my jaw and ribs were still aching from Bryce’s punches.

Bryce grabbed a pair of scissors, cut through the left sleeve of my sweater, and shoved the fabric aside.

Next, he swabbed my skin with a disinfectant wipe, tied the rubber tubing around my upper arm, and shoved the needle into the bulging vein in the crook of my elbow.

He was none too gentle about it, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of wincing.

He filled the vials with my blood and handed them to Henrika. Bryce plucked out the needle, stuck a cotton ball against my skin, and wrapped some gauze around the wound.

“What? No superhero bandage?” I asked in a snarky voice.

“Not today, tough guy,” Bryce sniped back.

I growled and struggled against my bonds again, but they remained as tight as before. I couldn’t lay a single finger on the former cleaner. Bryce laughed and moved away.

Next, Bryce dragged over portable X-ray and ultrasound machines and scanned my body from head to toe. The resulting images appeared on monitors around the lab, and Henrika paced back and forth, tapping a pen against her lips and studying them all in turn.

“You’re in remarkably good shape for a cleaner,” she said. “No broken bones, no torn ligaments, no major internal damage. Of course, your face is a mess, and your ribs are cracked from where Bryce hit you earlier, but those wounds are already healing.”

“You know enduros heal faster than other paramortals,” I lied. “Plus, Section 47 has excellent doctors and access to advanced biomagical medicines just like you do. Say what you will about Section, but they take care of their agents.”

Bryce snorted. “Yeah, they patch us up so we can go right back out and get hurt all over again.”

Henrika kept studying the scans. “Maybe Desmond’s good health is due to Section’s benevolence and his own enduro power, or maybe it’s something else.” She jerked her head at Bryce. “Let’s move on to the next test.”

Bryce went over to the industrial refrigerators along the wall.

He put on a fresh pair of gloves, opened a refrigerator door, and carefully drew out a syringe filled with a red liquid.

Bryce brought the syringe over to Henrika, who took it from him with her bare hand.

I frowned. Why wasn’t she wearing gloves?

Was she immune to whatever hazardous thing was in the syringe?

Henrika held the syringe up to the light and shook it, as if checking the liquid’s viscosity. My nose twitched, and a faint, familiar scent wafted over to me—sweet, sticky honey mixed with the stench of rotten eggs.

My hands clenched into fists, and sweat beaded on my forehead, despite the cool, recycled air. That syringe was filled with Redburn.

Henrika noticed my unease and let out a delighted laugh. “Well, at least you fear my formula.”

This time, I couldn’t hold back a shudder. “You’re a brilliant scientist. You could have invented anything you wanted. Why not come up with a way to help people instead of hurting them?”

Henrika let out another laugh, but this sound was more bitter than mocking. “I had a similar conversation with Charlotte last night. But you already know that.”

Yes, I did, but I would have the exact same conversation with her a dozen times over if it would keep her from jabbing that syringe into me.

Henrika sighed, as though suddenly weary, and her green aura flickered with the same dull emotion. “I did try, you know.”

“Try what?”

“To be good. To make some great medical breakthrough that would help people. I tried—for years, I tried .”

“What changed?” I needed to keep her talking, but I was also genuinely curious.

Henrika shrugged. “Someone approached me with a special project, and I discovered I had a knack for dreaming up ways to destroy things. Poisons to wreck internal organs. Acids strong enough to dissolve bones.” She waggled the syringe of Redburn at me.

“Explosives that will reduce even the strongest paramortal to a pile of messy parts.”

I ground my teeth to hold back another shudder.

Henrika placed a drop of Redburn on a glass slide, then added a drop of my blood. I tensed, but nothing happened. No bangs, no booms, no explosions of any kind.

“Curious,” Henrika murmured, staring at the slide through a microscope. “Normally, when Redburn comes into contact with blood, skin, muscles, and bones, paramortal or otherwise, it immediately starts burning through and disintegrating the tissue. But your blood seems to be stronger than most . . .”

She kept talking, muttering scientific ideas and theories to herself that I didn’t understand and frankly didn’t want to.

While Henrika and Bryce worked, I glanced around, searching for a way to free myself from the chair, but my wrists and ankles were securely fastened.

I didn’t see any guns. No knives or other obvious weapons.

I would have been more than happy to break a glass vial and cut Henrika’s and Bryce’s throats with a shard, but all the vials were out of my reach, like everything else.

But I was a cleaner, and I was good at making my own weapons, so I quit looking at the objects around me and focused on my own supplies, such as they were.

My clothes and boots were still intact, except my left sleeve, which Bryce had cut to draw my blood.

The gun and knife I’d had in the clearing were gone, and my pocket watch was also missing.

I had no weapons, and I was well and truly stuck, like a fly in a spider’s web, and Henrika could do whatever she wanted to me . . .

Unless I used my galvanism.

I might be in the middle of the lab, but I could still sense the electricity humming down through the walls, along the floor, and up into the thick cables that hooked into the back of the chair so it could be raised and lowered and tilted up and down.

Thanks to the knockout gas Henrika had dosed me with earlier, the current felt much weaker than usual, which was my first problem.

My second and most pressing problem was that I just didn’t see a way to use my power to escape. The thick plastic bands around my wrists and ankles were manual, not electronic, which meant I couldn’t use the chair’s current to open them like I could do with a door locked with a keypad.

And then, of course, my third problem was the instant I used my galvanism, Henrika would realize that was how I had survived being blown to bits by her bombs.

I wasn’t about to give the sadistic bitch any information she could use to make her monstrous formula even deadlier.

Not after suffering through all those explosions on the beach.

Not after watching my best friend die in my arms. Not after taking what little energy Graham had left to save myself.

I would rather die in this chair than help Henrika hurt anyone else.

Henrika stopped muttering and snapped her fingers at Bryce, who went back over to the refrigerator and drew out another syringe. This one contained a bright, shimmering pink liquid that looked like the color of cotton candy, strangely enough.

Bryce gave the syringe to Henrika, who nodded with satisfaction. She also handled this syringe with her bare hands, as though she wasn’t afraid of the contents at all.

“What is that?” I asked.

Henrika walked over and held the syringe up where I could see it.

“I’ve been tinkering with my Redburn formula.

Explosives are loud and messy, and sometimes my clients want a cleaner, quieter, and more discreet method of eliminating their enemies.

So I’ve been working on a way to condense my formula down into a poison. You saw my first test earlier today.”

She was talking about the scientist she’d injected with Redburn and killed in the woods. A disgusted, angry snarl rumbled out of my throat.

“Don’t worry. This is a mild, modified dose, unlike what I gave Ethan. Designed to test a paramortal’s reaction to Redburn without killing them.” Henrika flashed me a wicked grin. “And since you seem to be so very durable, Desmond, you are the perfect test subject.”

More cold sweat beaded on my forehead. I jerked on my restraints yet again, but they remained as tight as before. Henrika ignored my flailing, rammed the syringe into my upper left arm, and pushed the plunger down.

Henrika jerked her head at Bryce. “Start recording. Now.”

He hit some buttons on the laptop. A camera dropped down from the ceiling, the lens swiveled in my direction, and a light on the side turned green. I struggled against my bonds yet again, but I was as secure and helpless as before.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Henrika advised. “Any activity increases your heart rate, thus pumping the poison through your body even faster.”

She was right, so I stopped struggling.

Henrika and Bryce watched me closely. For several seconds, nothing happened, and the only sound in the lab was my harsh, raspy breathing.

A strange, warm sensation erupted in my arm at the injection site.

The odd, unnatural warmth spread across my chest and zipped down into my legs, even as it slithered up into my neck.

With a sudden surge, the warmth reached my brain, making it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Sweat beaded on my forehead and trickled down my face, and my skin became hot, clammy, and unbearably tight.

“Fascinating,” Henrika murmured. “Most people would have been burning up by now, but Desmond’s temperature has only shot up a few degrees.”

A few degrees? I felt like a lobster being boiled alive in a pot of scalding water.

“It seems you were right, and I was wrong, Desmond,” Henrika said, a thoughtful tone creeping into her voice. “You do have far more enduro magic than I expected, but we’ll see how long your power lasts before the poison takes full effect . . .”

That was the last thing I heard before the slow burn ramped up into a raging inferno. Liquid fire rushed through my veins, and I screamed.