Page 34 of Triumph of the Wolf (Magnetic Magic #6)
“He got enough.” Her hoarse voice made it sound like she hadn’t spoken for days. If those bindings had magically kept her as a wolf, that might very well be the case. “That machine had no trouble pumping it out of me.”
She drank more as she lifted a hand to look at it. Her fingers were shaking.
“Do you know where my friend Jasmine went?” I pointed to the other cage. “And was there a young man here too?” Remembering that Izzy had met Bolin at her brother’s networking event, I added, “Bolin. Your daughter wanted him to turn into a bear.”
“Is Olivia safe?” Izzy lunged forward and gripped my arm. “Nothing has happened to her, has it?”
“Nothing that I’ve heard about. Your brother is keeping an eye on her and searching for you.”
“Thank the moon.”
Izzy released me and dragged her bare arm over her face. As much sweat glistened on her skin as on mine, and her eyes remained glassy, showing the vestiges of whatever drug remained in her system.
“Bolin?” I prompted, though she might have been too out of it to notice if he’d come by. “And Jasmine?”
“I didn’t see a man, but the other wolf—we were stuck in our lupine forms and never able to speak and share names. She escaped just a little bit ago. She was desperate. Drugged. We both were. When we heard gunfire, she must have thought the mad scientist was going to fulfill his promise.”
“What promise?” I asked grimly.
“He kept saying…” Izzy groped in the air with her hand.
“In my wolf form, I didn’t grasp it all, but he kept saying he hadn’t meant to take us but that he could use our magical blood, and he was keeping us alive instead of just…
exsanguinating us because they were coming.
That was what he said again and again. He wanted them to come, to be lured by his bait, and had a plan all worked out.
But I wasn’t the bait.” Her mouth twisted. “I was an accident.”
“You shouldn’t have been hanging out at Sylvan Serenity, peeing on my bushes.”
Izzy surprised me by looking ashamed by that. “I thought… I wanted you to know…”
“You were irked with me and planned to kill me?”
“I felt obligated to avenge Raoul.”
A howl came from a far corner of the building. From up on one of the catwalks? The echoes in the vast space made it hard to tell, but I thought the voice sounded young, that it belonged to Lykos.
Had Duncan caught up with him? Or was Lykos trying to lure Duncan to him? Into his trap?
“Do you still feel that way?” I didn’t want to linger and chat further but also didn’t know what to do with Izzy. Would she help me find my allies? Or club me in the back of my head when I was distracted?
“I…” Izzy looked from me to the cage and back. “You could have left me there.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever this place is…” She looked toward a distant wall in the direction where the Space Needle had been visible in the night sky. “Even if I’d escaped from the cage somehow, which didn’t look likely after however many days I was stuck in there, I don’t think I could have escaped this place.”
“Maybe not.” I shrugged, realizing I had no idea how to get back either. I didn’t even have a magnet to wave at frog houses if we found one in the garden.
Maybe when I rejoined Duncan, we could find Abrams and wring the location of the exit portal out of his throat.
“My daughter needs me.” Izzy’s gaze slid to me. “I can’t… vendetta right now. Maybe, as a responsible mom, I never should have taken up that mission.”
Had time in here to think about it, had she?
“Being a responsible parent is tough sometimes.” I knew that well.
“Yes.”
A distant accented voice reached our ears, raised to carry throughout the building. “Show yourself, Drakon! Come up here to face me, or I’ll kill the female wolves. I’ll kill your female. We have her, you know.”
“The hell he does,” I growled.
Abrams sounded like he was at the far end of the building, back in the direction we’d entered from, but in the maze of vats and machinery, it was hard to tell.
Wherever Duncan was, he didn’t answer.
“Will you help me find my friends and get out of here?” I asked Izzy.
Whether it was wise or not, I offered her the rifle. Right now, she couldn’t likely turn back into a wolf, and without her fangs and claws, she was little more than a naked human woman.
“Yes,” Izzy said firmly, taking the weapon. “I’d love to shoot someone.”
“As long as it’s not me.”
“I’ve learned my lesson on that. Just being near you is trouble.” She grimaced, probably having figured out along the way that she’d only been kidnapped because Abrams’s men had been after me. “If anything, I should stay far, far away from you.”
“Isn’t your home in Arizona? I hear it’s nice.”
Izzy snorted. “Aside from getting cactus thorns in your paw pads and melting under the unrelenting summer heat.”
A clang and a muffled grunt floated to our ears, just audible over the gurgling of a nearby vat. Had that been Bolin?
“Follow me.” I would have to trust Izzy at my back and hope I wasn’t being a fool.
Heading in the direction of the noises, I turned down an aisle I’d already visited, but I halted after only a step. Two of those awful bugs were in the center. They swiveled toward me, vapor puffing out of their orifices.
I reached for the gas mask hanging around my neck, but Izzy didn’t have any such protection. And who knew what drugs already bogged down her system.
“We’ll go that way.” I pointed toward another aisle that ran between hulking machinery and vats linked by thick pipes.
The bugs skittered toward us. Izzy eyed them and didn’t argue, jogging off after me.
Not far down the aisle, we reached another open area with counters filled with computer monitors and keyboards as well as lab equipment. The spot also held the first ladder I’d encountered, metal rungs leading up to a section of the catwalk, a railing running along only one side of it.
“This place can’t be OSHA approved,” I muttered.
“What?” Izzy asked.
“We’ll go that way.” I pointed my sword at the ladder.
From the catwalk, we ought to be able to see much more—maybe even Duncan and Lykos.
Izzy paused to look into a couple of cabinets and grab a white lab coat.
When I reached the top of the ladder, that portion of the catwalk deep in shadow, I crouched and peered about, hoping to spot Duncan. Though the view was more open than below, some of the vats and machinery rose higher than the railing, so I couldn’t see the whole building.
A soft clank sounded, the rifle bumping the metal ladder as Izzy climbed.
“That’s quite a look,” I noted as she joined me, her borrowed white lab coat cinched about her waist, her feet and most of her legs bare, and the rifle in her hands.
“No need to take a photo. My daughter would be highly embarrassed if it appeared on social media.”
“Isn’t embarrassing one’s children a staple of parenthood?”
“Well, yes, but I might be embarrassed about this too.”
“Fair.” Staying low, my instincts promising that more danger lurked up here, I crept toward a perpendicular catwalk, one that looked like it might run the length of the building.
It had railings on both sides, but there were gaps in places, with tiny platforms sticking out to allow access to the open vats.
Another grunt came from the same direction we’d heard one from before. A thud followed. It sounded like a fight, and I thought I detected Jasmine’s aura, but the magic all around us continued to make it hard to trust my senses.
As we crept along the catwalk, the area—the entire building —fell silent. Even the gurgling from the various vats seemed to soften.
I reached the intersection and peered around a crane at the corner, cables and mechanical arms partially but not entirely blocking the view. I froze to stare.
Halfway down the long building, on a platform with several catwalks attached to it, Duncan crouched as the bipedfuris.
Faint light from below cast eerie shadows over his furry, muscular form, making him appear devilish and scary.
Not far behind him, his clothes were draped over a railing along with a rope dangling down with a cylinder attached. One of his magnets.
Across the platform from him, Lykos also crouched. He was in his wolf form, hackles up and fangs on display as he looked at Duncan. But he also threw glances backward, toward someone egging him on.
Abrams.