Chapter 7

The door handle jiggled on the room I'd trapped us in, a room full of animals that reeked with stress, shit, and cat spray. The cats began to yowl and the dogs took up a chorus that filled the room with more noise than I could handle after a year of near silence.

"Cowboy, hurry up!" I yelled over the din of animals losing their ever-loving minds.

Cowboy grimaced and took a step, then his eyes brightened. "In the floor!"

I didn't question him. If there was something in the floor, we were going for it. I dropped to my hands and knees, dragging Eligor with me. "Sweep with your hand. Look for some sort of pattern change."

He did as he was told. I'd give him that much. Not to say I wasn't considering killing him once we were out of here.

I deliberately let that thought roll through me, but he didn't so much as flinch. "You staying out of my head now?"

"If they can still read me, I need to stay out of your mind." He didn't lift those strange blue-purple eyes from his task.

I scooted across the floor, my hands finding a track that I could just get my fingernails into. "Here."

Peter dropped next to me. "Good thing you got me." He dug overlong, thin fingernails under the edge of the lip and heaved the panel up, showing off a deep dark space.

A ramp led down, but no lights. I tugged in the dog and Eligor, then Cowboy next, and Peter last. He lowered the panel and we were plunged into complete darkness.

The sound of water dripping filled my ears, the howls and cries of the animals above us muffled with the closing of the door. "Peter, you're up."

"Make a chain," he said, "or I'll lose you."

I reached out and he took my hand, his skin cool. "Cowboy?"

"I got the short one's hand."

Peter tugged us away from the ramp, and then we were moving forward, quickly. The ground was flat and rose on a steady uphill grade.

Minutes passed. No pursuit came, but it would take them a while to figure out we'd found this tunnel. Maybe thirty minutes if we were lucky.

Thirty minutes.

"Cowboy, can you still feel the animals?"

"Most are dead," he said, a pain in his voice, a pain that I'd felt myself when my dogs had died. "I don't understand how they could be killed so fast."

"A gun," Dinah said. "A big one with a scatter spray."

I shook my head though no one could see the movement in the dark. "No, there were no gunshots."

"The boss could have done it," Eligor said. "He is the most powerful of us. I thought he'd left, which was why I felt safe coming to see you—"

"What are we going to do once we're out?" Peter said. "We all have trackers in our bodies, I'm sure of it."

"Agreed," I said. "More than one would be my guess. Kid here can do an EMP pulse, but I think that will be too obvious and they could reverse engineer where it came from."

Eligor was quiet a moment. "I don't know how many you have, but you are correct that you have them."

The female dog bumped against my leg, keeping close. I wanted to run a hand over her head, to feel her there. But there was no letting go of my companions. Peter didn't slow, and he didn't take any turns. We kept moving on an incline, step after step. I wasn't surprised. The exit would need to be far enough away from the building itself so they were not connected, that there was no seeing one with the other. The time was ticking, and I knew we were on the short end of it.

"A hospital then, and an X-ray machine," I said. "We need to pinpoint all the tracers in us and take them out before we can do anything else. A scalpel should do it."

"There's a hospital in the facility," Eligor said. "With human doctors and nurses."

Peter gave a sharp laugh that echoed down the tunnel. I squeezed his hand hard enough to grind the bones against one another. "Quiet."

"Come on, Nix. I couldn't help it. Does he really think staying in this shithole is a good idea?"

Cowboy's breathing was labored. "How much further?"

"Hard to say," Peter said. "Thirteen stories down, on an angle. . . should be close now, I'm getting some fresh air."

Almost as he spoke, the light around us changed. Although still dark, there were now layers to the darkness, and even better . . . "Fresh air," I said. A year without it, and the smell had never been so welcome.

"Hurry." I pushed Peter and dragged the other two. We had to get the hell out of here.

Now.

There would be no other chance. I'd seen Bear for a reason, and Eligor had done what he'd done for a reason. Everything had aligned for us to make this one big push. We would not get another chance like this.

I felt it in my gut, every instinct driving me to action.

The ramp opened and we stepped out of the darkness completely. I did a quick turn, assessing where we were. A small bunker, a truck to the left, a road out to the right. For the first time, I let go of Eligor. I ran to the truck.

Locked.

I moved to the passenger side, checked that door. Locked as well. I lifted an elbow and smashed through the glass, then climbed through the opening and settled myself into the driver's seat. The dog got in beside me and woofed. As if she wanted to hurry me up too. There would be no keys in the truck waiting for us. I was sure of it, but I checked anyway. Nothing.

I bent down and ripped off the cover underneath the wheel and found the wires I was looking for.

Pete and Cowboy jumped into the cab of the truck. "Hurry, they're on us!"

I didn't lift my eyes from my task as I ran the wires across one another and the engine tried to roll over. "Shit, where's Eligor?"

"Just standing there," Cowboy said.

"We need him!" I snapped.

"No, we don't!" Peter snapped back.

The engine caught and turned over. I threw the truck into reverse and hit the gas pedal. Gravel and rocks spat out all around the truck as I spun it around, then jammed it into first gear. I leaned out the window. "Eligor!"

"Go," he said, not looking at me. "Go. They will track you through me."

I didn't need to be told twice. I hit the gas and released the clutch. The truck peeled out and we shot away from Eligor and the facility that had held us. I ran the truck until I was in the highest gear, moving as fast as I could.

"Jesus, slow down!" Cowboy yelped as I took a hard corner, the truck tires squealing against the hot asphalt.

"No." But even as I said it, it struck me that I probably shouldn't be driving. I could feel Eligor still, whether or not he realized it.

"Peter, take the wheel." I scooted out of the way and the Magelore did as I asked. My body started to shake, and I found myself watching through Eligor's eyes as the ones who had followed us swept out of the tunnels.

Eligor straightened his back even as he dropped to his knees.

But his eyes, and subsequently mine, were locked on the main figure that strode out of the cave. He was taller than every other person present, mostly humans to be fair, and his dark red cloak swirled out around him on a breeze that I couldn't feel, a breeze that stirred nothing else.

"What are you seeing?" Cowboy asked.

"Shh." I absently slapped a hand over his mouth.

Eligor didn't look away from that man.

That is the boss. He is dangerous. He will come for you, Phoenix. I . . . am sorry for my part in this. He would have found you for sure if I'd stayed with you.

"Eligor, run," I said. "Fight, do something!"

I am doing something. You know what I am, so you know what he is, and what he is capable of. I thought . . . that he was right about the abnormals. We have no other tokens of yours, so we will not be able to connect to your mind again. And I am going to cut you off. He touched his pocket and I found my hand moving to my own pocket. I pulled the silver wings that Bear had given me there. He'd slipped them in at some point.

The boss stepped toward him. Long, white, curling locks flowed over his shoulders, and eyes the same blue-purple as Eligor's stared down at the much smaller man. "Ernest, what have you been up to? Did you fall in love with our captive?"

"No," Eligor said, but the denial fell flat even to me. Even now, after what he'd seen me do, he thought I was worth saving.

That I wasn't the evil monster I'd been made out to be. That I was meant for more than the facility would do to me.

I gripped the dash of the truck.

Dinah trembled as she no doubt picked up on my emotions. "Do we need to go back?" she asked.

I shook my head. "No, but I need to see how they overpower him. It will help us."

"Smart," Dinah said. "You were always too smart for your own good."

The boss stepped up to Eligor, reached out and touched the miniscule man in the middle of the forehead, then drew his finger back with a twist. Something sticky and long went with him. Like glowing spiderweb. I could guess at what it was. Or who it was. The essence of Eligor.

His last thought was simple. He has all that I am now. Do not trust me.

"Eligor?"

Nothing. Either he was dead and what was left of him was wrapped up in that web shit, or he really had cut me off. Either way, we weren't going to get more help from him. I blinked and rubbed at my eyes as I came back to the present.

"So . . ." Cowboy leaned around the dog who'd plopped herself in between us. "Any idea where we are?"

I shook my head. "We drive until we find something. And then we drive until we hit a hospital. If we can't use your EMP pulse, then we need something else to derail the tracers."

And then I was going to find my family. But in order to get to them, I would have to navigate the new laws about abnormals. Which meant I needed to learn why we were being targeted.

"Dinah," I touched her handle, "how was Easter taken?"

"She was sleeping," Dinah said. "She'd eaten at a place, a restaurant in London—"

Peter cut her off. "I was nowhere near London. I was coming back from a job in Montreal. Pulled off the side of the road to sleep."

Cowboy nodded. "I was sleeping too when they took me. Like I said, I'd been out on the range for almost the whole year, keeping myself hidden. That week before I was caught me and my boss, we'd been driving cattle for a week and finally had a break back at the ranch. Texas, to be exact."

They both looked at me. "I was in Montana." They didn't need to know why I'd been in the hospital. I'd spent the last year forcing those memories down deep to protect my loved ones. Because even if I had never fully understood what the facility wanted from us, I'd known they would use every tool at their disposal to force us into line.

Including hurting those we loved.

Trapping them.

Torturing them.

An image of my son, the one I'd seen in the darkness, danced through my mind. It struck me that he must have been chasing something. I could see that now in the way his knees had been splayed on the ground.

"I heard that you and that Irish bastard Fannin took up together," Peter said. "Were you with him when you were taken?"

My jaw ticked and my heart hurt at the thought of Killian. Of how he'd let me down. I didn't think he'd betrayed me; he wasn't that man. But he'd let me go so easily. It felt like a betrayal.

Twice. I'd been fooled twice by men that I'd stupidly given my heart to.

"Yes, he was there when I was taken," I said.

"Fuck, then they got you both." Peter shook his head.

I mimicked him, shaking my head. "No, they didn't get him." And this was the part that hurt, the rage and betrayal I'd had to stuff down into the currents of the river inside my mind to keep from doing as Peter had done, flinging myself at every opportunity to escape. "He let them take me."