Page 116

TWENTY-TWO

Sorsha

I woke up curled into a ball, my knees pressed to my forehead, every muscle still tensed with the memory of the electric shock that had knocked me out, as if it had happened only seconds ago. Even my hands had clenched tight to my chest. And, nestled against my palm?—

Footsteps tapped toward me. I jerked my hand up to swipe it over my mouth and tentatively raised my head.

I was locked up in a cage like the ones I’d seen in Company facilities before: a solid metal floor rigid against my shoulder and hip, bars gleaming all around me in the stark light. But they mustn’t have been silver or iron, which wouldn’t have affected me anyway, because Tempest was now resting her hands against those bars as she peered between them at me with her catlike eyes.

With her that close, the razor-edged chill of her innate power walloped me harder than it had in our meetings before. My pulse hiccupped, a tickle of my inner heat flaring in response.

I directed that first jolt of flames into my cheek. The sensitive skin stung, but the sphinx didn’t give any sign that she’d noticed anything amiss. Her plump lips had curved into a smirk.

I didn’t have much room to straighten out my posture. The roof of the cage stood only a foot above my prone body, and I couldn’t have stretched my legs toward the walls without banging my feet on the bars. Tempest and her Company lackeys must have had quite the time squeezing me in here.

More fire stirred in my chest. If she thought I was simply going to lie here quietly?—

“Throw your power around if you must,” the leonine woman said. “It won’t get you anywhere. I’d vanish into the shadows before I got more than a sunburn, and nothing else in here will smolder.”

My gaze slipped beyond her to the wider room. Sweet twinkly trash cans, she wasn’t kidding. The entire space looked as if it were constructed out of steel, from ceiling to floor and every piece of furniture in the place. There wasn’t much of that anyway—a lab table behind Tempest and a smaller table laid with similarly glinting instruments next to it.

I really didn’t like the look of those.

The flames in my cheek had smoothed the lump there into a thinner mass that tucked against my gums. I flexed my jaw and decided it was safe to speak. “Where’d you get this place—from the set of some low-budget alien horror flick? I’ll skip the probing, if it’s all the same to you. With the way you treat your guests, it’s a wonder you’re not more popular.”

Tempest chuckled at my sarcasm, her languid voice turning the sound sultry. “You could have been a proper guest if you hadn’t attempted to incinerate me on our second meeting. But look at all I’ve done for you regardless! I had this entire space constructed just for you, my darling phoenix.”

Well, that was certainly some level of obsession. I shifted my weight, my arms already starting to ache from the awkward position I was lying in. “Any particular reason I’m getting this star treatment? I’m assuming it wasn’t just so you could taunt me.”

If she’d wanted me dead, I’d already be kaput. She’d had me helpless while I was knocked out. Instead I was here, so clearly she needed something from me… How exactly did she think she was going to get it?

Hopefully not with that spread of torture tools, but knowing how her Company tended to operate, I suspected those hopes were worth about as much as the ashes I’d like to leave this place in. It wasn’t so much a matter of whether I’d face a version of those extra-terrestrial bodily excavations as how soon.

“You met one of my instruments,” the sphinx said. “I suppose you didn’t learn enough from him to connect the dots. That’s quite all right. The less you know, the easier it’ll be to take it from you.” Her smile somehow turned even sharper.

Psychotic bitch. A fresh flare of anger erupted within my ribs, and flames crackled across my back. I gritted my teeth, biting back a hiss and yanking the fire inside me as well as I could.

Tempest cocked her head with a twinkle in her eyes as if she found my erratic powers highly amusing. “Just FYI, in case you get any ideas of martyrdom: if you start letting off too much smoke, your cage is rigged to douse you with rather a lot of water. You’re not getting away from me by that avenue either.”

I had no hope at all of getting through to this maniac in my current state, but I couldn’t help prodding at her non-existent conscience anyway. “Does it really not bother you even a little that you’re helping people who hate you and every other being like you? How are you winning when getting what you want depends on years of giving them what they want?”

“Ah, but once I have this, so many more mortals will sicken and fall than ever enjoyed carrying out my business. This realm will never recover. Forever is worth quite a lot.”

“So then what? You get to sashay around, gloating about how horrible things are for eternity?”

Her eyes glittered piercingly. “I’m sure I’ll find plenty of ways to occupy myself.”

More frustration was trawling through me, dredging up flames with it. “They think you’re all monsters, and you’re proving them right.”

“Who says they’re wrong? I’m a monster. I’ll own that. And no one is going to stop me from being just as monstrous as I please.”

She stepped back with a sway of her hips. The dress suit she wore today wasn’t quite as extravagant as her robes from our previous meetings, but she’d still managed to find or manufacture one with diamonds stitched in patterns across the collar of the jacket and the hem of the skirt. They sparkled against the deep violet silk. She waved a hand that was just as sparkly with all the rings it was laden with.

“It’s time for you to give me the last piece I need to make this scheme come together. Isn’t it lovely that you’re the one making my apocalypse possible? I’ll leave my lackeys to it. Oh, and before you get any ideas about them, I should mention that it’s not only your cage fitted with water pipes.”

She vanished into the shadows under the larger table just as at least a dozen sprayers clicked on overhead. In an instant, a deluge filled the room, as if a thunderstorm had broken over it. The heavy drops rattled across the tables and gurgled down a drain I hadn’t noticed in the far corner of the floor.

The angle of the spray meant plenty of it leapt between the bars to splatter my skin and clothes, but getting soaked was the least of my worries. The door opened just long enough to admit five figures wearing plastic visors to protect their eyes from the worst of the spray. In seconds, the downpour drenched the rest of them, from their hair to their tan uniforms.

The burliest three of the bunch advanced on my cage. I braced myself, ignoring the growing throbbing in my cramped muscles. The moment one of them unlocked the front of the cage, I whipped my legs forward—and discovered my ankles were bound together with just half a foot of chain between them.

I still landed a kick, but it didn’t hit quite as hard as I’d meant it to. One of the other burly dudes grabbed my legs before I could haul them back. I punched and thrashed, not really expecting to prevent whatever they were going to do but intending to extract every bit of discomfort I could for the indignity and the pain they were no doubt about to inflict on me.

My inner fire wasn’t any help. As the thugs manhandled me over to the waiting table, water rained down on me. All the furious heat that wanted to leap from my body instead sizzled against my skin, scalding me briefly before more spray washed the boiling liquid away. Maybe a few flecks gave my captors a blister or two, but nothing that made them so much as wince.

They shoved me down on the table on my back, wrenching my arms into place at my sides. Steel cuffs snapped over my wrists, ankles, waist, and finally my neck. The edge of that last one dug into the tender skin at the top of my throat, an ache forming there when I swallowed.

The deluge was still pounding down on me, blurring my vision and filling my ears. I let my lips part just slightly to drink a little down in sips. I wasn’t going to be able to fight anyone if I let myself get dehydrated as well as imprisoned. Lord only knew when Tempest might decide to feed me.

The two figures without quite as much beef on them stepped up on either side of the table, rivulets slicking down their visors. One held a scalpel from the smaller table, the other a syringe. “Preparing to take samples while subject is conscious,” the first one said, her voice warbling through the falling water. “Bags labeled A.”

As she pressed the scalpel to my forearm, I bit back a yelp. A stinging sensation rippled over my skin. It felt as if she dug out a sliver of my flesh—she dropped a solid scrap of red into a baggie. Then she tugged up my shirt to slice into the muscles over my ribs.

My heart thumped harder. She dug the blade right between two of those ribs, and the pain splintered right through my chest. I couldn’t quite hold back a strained whine.

I hadn’t been able to shake Tempest’s resolve, but these people—they weren’t ancient monsters with no concept of morality. They were my fellow fucking human beings.

I tipped my head so I wouldn’t drown by fully opening my mouth and spat out the words. “I’m a person just like you are. I think and feel just like you do. I’m not some mindless beast that goes around ripping apart innocent people. How can you think it’s okay to torture me like this?”

The lab techs kept working without so much as a blink. You’d have thought they were deaf like the man in Crete if they hadn’t been talking to each other.

“Shin bone,” the man reminded his colleague, and she reached to pull up my pant leg. My ankle jarred against the cuff with the instinctive urge to wrench away. An even deeper pain radiated up through my leg.

“I was born in Austin, Texas,” I said into the rush of artificial rain. “When I was a little kid, I loved ice cream and watching the bats fly over the bridge. I went to school—I learned all the presidents’ names, how to write an essay, and that we’re supposed to treat each other with respect even if we have personal differences. I’ve fallen in love. I’ve had my heart broken. I’m human , for fuck’s sake. You’re carving up a person.”

Not that it was any more okay when they did crap like this to a shadowkind. But my captors clearly didn’t give a shit how much like them I was. They’d happily destroy me just as they’d destroyed so many other creatures—even their own people, when they’d thought their opponents were getting too close to the truth—just for the chance to exterminate a whole realm of beings, most of whom hadn’t done any more damage than the average human.

How could they hold so much hate? How could they let it burn out every bit of compassion in them?

Or maybe human beings weren’t all that compassionate to begin with. I wasn’t fully one myself, was I? Were all mortals capable of turning this sociopathic if given a nudge in the right direction?

“Listen to me!” I shouted, my voice breaking with a cry as the scalpel slashed the tip off my baby toe. Rage whipped up inside me and surged from my body—only to meet the falling water with a hiss of dissipating steam. My tormenters stepped back just for a second as the scalding droplets cleared, but for all the notice they gave me, I might as well have been a malfunctioning radiator rather than a living, thinking being.

Thinking for now. As they closed in on me again, the man raised his syringe. “Now to take the unconscious samples. Bags labeled B.”

“No!” I said, managing to choke back a sob.

He jabbed the needle into my neck just below the cuff. Darkness unfurled over my mind. My awareness narrowed and spiraled down, down, into cool blackness—but not quite so fast that I missed one last remark the woman made, with a sigh as if slicing and dicing me was cramping her style.

“This had better be enough to get that cure.”