Page 261 of Alchemised

The air was so thick with dust, it was almost impossible to see anything but the gleam of metal. There was a horrifying crunch and squelch and something came flying through the debris and hit the ground. The lich’s head.

“Come on,” Soren’s voice barked from amid the choking dust. The rest of them moved forward. Soren was favouring his right arm and Sebastian was bleeding at the temple, but they were mostly unscathed. The huge corpse that had been Atreus Ferron lay at their feet, gouged all over with deep wounds that would have killed anyone who wasn’t already dead.

“Shouldn’t we get the talisman?” Helena asked as they all stepped around it.

“There’s no time to search a corpse that big,” Soren said as he stumbled forward and shoved the door open.

There was Luc.

They all froze.

He was strapped down on a medical table, a mask fitted over his nose and mouth attached to several tubes. There was a cluster of people around him, swathed in surgical gowns.

His torso had been sliced open, peeled back to expose all the organs, but they were blackened, almost necrotic.

“Fuck!” said a woman’s voice, and she glanced over towards them.

They were clearly trying to finish what they’d been doing when Atreus knocked to warn them.

Two people lunged across the floor and through a door on the far side without a backwards glance, leaving the rest.

The room exploded into violence.

Soren had been waiting for this moment. He shot across the room, his weapon sweeping into a long curving blade. He killed everyone violently. There was nothing quick or clean about it. Warm blood spattered across her face as Helena went for Luc.

Despite being strapped down, his hands had been pierced through with spikes of nullium that Helena instantly recognised by the telltale way they were dissolving into his blood.

Her fingers trembled as she reached out, looking for a pulse, not sure if her resonance would work. She pressed her fingers below his jaw and gave a small sob of relief. He was alive. Drugged and cut open, but alive.

She ripped the mask off his face as Purnell twisted a nozzle on the tank, cutting off whatever they’d been using on him.

What had they done?

Her hands shook as she searched for a talisman inside him, but she felt no signs of lumithium or any other metal. His organs were darkened, as if he’d been poisoned with something, but there was no time to try to heal it all.

She closed the incisions, working carefully, aligning everything. Purnell was prying the spikes from his hands, her breath coming out in rapid pants as she struggled to get them loose. There was a stark look of terror starting to creep across the girl’s face.

The veins and arteries in Luc’s arms had been constricted, the gas administered keeping his heartbeat impossibly sluggish. The combination had kept his resonance inactive while allowing the now dead scientists to use their own on him. He was also conscious, but just barely.

Soren and Alister were trying to force open the door that two attackers had attempted to escape through, without success.

Helena worked as fast as she could, speeding up Luc’s metabolism and forcing his damaged kidneys back into action, making his heart beat more rapidly once Purnell had the spikes out. Helena shoved a decoction into her hands, ordering her to wash the wounds and get them wrapped in gauze.

Then her ring burned.

Pain like fire ran up her left hand. She gave a choked gasp as she kept working. The sensation barely faded before it burned again.

“Is he alive?” she dimly heard Soren asking, his voice shaking.

“Yes. Just give me a minute,” she said, touching Luc’s face desperately. “Come on, Luc. Do you hear me?”

Her ring burned again.

Alarms started. A deafening ringing that filled the air.

“We’ve got to go!” Soren yelled over the din. “Fuck. We’ll just carry him.”

“Luc, wake up.” Helena shook him.