16. Mia

Chapter sixteen

Mia

I snickered as I hopped out and reconvened with Aiden under the car. I purred and rubbed against him again, making him huff at me in annoyance. I checked both ways and then darted across the street, trusting Aiden to keep up. We needed to make this as quick as possible.

Once we were safely off the street, we made our way toward the back of the house, following the fence line until we reached a spot where it looked like a dog had dug a hole under it. We slipped under the fence and hid in the bushes, giving ourselves a moment to adjust to our surroundings.

We continued to the house, seeing no more guards patrolling back there. I slunk through the shadows, Aiden following behind me as I looked for an open window we could reach. I also peeked into the basement windows as I went around, and while it looked like there was a cell of some sort, I couldn’t get a good enough angle to see if anyone was in it.

Finally, we reached the front porch, where a window had been left open. I jumped up on the window sill to check it out while Aiden went around to lumber up the steps.

I poked my head inside and heard Aiden grumbling behind me as he climbed the boxes beneath the window to climb through it. I was surprised that the inside didn’t look how I expected it to.

It didn’t look like a home at all. Walking through the front door, you entered a lobby similar to the clinic’s. There was a single door leading out of this room. I checked for security cameras and then hopped through the window.

Aiden followed me, and we both shifted back into our human forms. “This is weird, right?”

“Beyond weird,” I agreed.

I opened the door and found myself yet again in another small room, but the top half of the opposite wall of this room was made of glass, and a staircase sat to my right. There still weren’t any cameras, which surprised me. I would have thought Parote would have been more cautious. I approached the glass wall and tried to look through it, but it was all dark. Curiouser and curiouser.

“What about this?” Aiden asked, pressing a button on the wall.

It activated the lights in the room on the other side of the glass, and I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Rows upon rows of people lay in hospital beds, hooked up to machines. There had to be at least fifty people crammed into what was left of the house.

“What the fuck is this?” Aiden whispered.

“I don’t know. The guild doesn’t have any record of this,” I replied. “It must be worse than anyone could have imagined.”

Noticing a sensor on the ceiling, I walked toward it, and a portion of the wall slid open with no more than a whisper.

I glanced at Aiden, and he nodded. We walked inside the room and approached the first bed. A man around the age of twenty occupied it. I couldn’t tell if he was in some sort of medically induced coma or if the machine was keeping him alive.

I picked up the file at the end of the bed and flipped through it. The file didn’t have a name, only a patient number. Patient number 023 was a snake shifter. He received phase one of the drug, and if I was reading it right—and God, I hoped I wasn’t—he was contributing DNA and other matter toward the development of the new drug. Parote was using his patients to develop a designer drug that he could use to produce specific abilities in those who took it.

My mind spun at the implications of what I’d read as I replaced his chart and moved to the next bed. All of these people trusted him. This wasn’t what they wanted.

A strangled cry echoed around the room, and I turned, looking for Aiden. I hadn’t noticed he had wandered off. I found him three rows away, sobbing over a bed. Tears filled my eyes as I ran to him, knowing what I would find.

“Annie, no,” Aiden sobbed as he cradled her seemingly lifeless body in his arms.

This was bad, and as much as I wanted to comfort him, I knew I first needed backup. We couldn’t handle all of this on our own. It was too big.

I pulled out my phone and dialed a number. “Evangeline?” I said when she answered. “Mia! What’s wrong?” she asked, worry coloring her voice.

“I need your help,” I admitted.

“Tell me where he is right now, and I’ll kill him for you,” she replied.

“That’s not what I need your help with,” I said quickly. I rattled off the address. “There is a car parked down the road with three of my mates in it. Can you grab them and teleport in?”

“What’s going on, Mia?” Evangeline asked.

“It’s better if you see it yourself,” I replied. “It’s bad. So fucking bad.” “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

I hung up the phone and approached Aiden, wrapping my arms around him, and cried. “Tell me there is a way to make her better, Mia,” he pleaded.

“I don’t know, Aiden,” I croaked. “I just don’t know.”

The smell of brimstone filled the air, and I turned to see that Evangeline had arrived with our mates. My mates looked relieved to see me until they saw Aiden.

They rushed to our side and were speechless when they connected the dots and realized who was in the bed. They each shared a moment of comfort with Aiden before splitting up to see if their loved ones were in the room.

Despair filled me. If they were here, then they knew what happened to them. If they weren’t, we still needed answers. Either way, all of these people belonged to someone. Countless people were looking for answers, and I didn’t even know where to begin giving them the answers.

“Thanks for coming so quickly,” I said to Evangeline as she joined me at the foot of Annie’s bed.

“What the hell did you stumble onto, Mia?” she asked.

“From what I can gather, he’s using them to create designer drugs that will give paras and possibly humans extra abilities,” I responded. “Are they alive?” I asked, looking up at her hopefully.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t have my angel abilities like that anymore.” Evangeline looked back at Rylan. “Do you think he’d agree to a consultation?”

“I’ll ask,” Rylan replied, lifting his phone to his ear.

“Where is Parote?” Kase asked.

“He’s still at his office. As far as I know, his guard outside doesn’t know we’re here yet.”

Jett nodded. “We’ll take care of the guard and then collect the good doctor.” He and Kase left in a cloud of smoke.

Another tortured cry reached me, and I saw Rome and Theo restraining Hollis. “He found his brother,” I murmured. I squeezed Evangeline’s arm and then rushed to them.

“Let me go!” Hollis raged, steam billowing from his nose, and his skin turned bright red.

I rushed forward and jumped onto him, wrapping my arms around his neck and legs around his waist, clinging to him like a baby monkey.

“I’ve got you, big guy,” I crooned. “I need you to calm down. I know it’s hard. I know you want to tear through this house and destroy everything in sight, but I need you not to do that. We need everything to remain as it is to bring closure to the rest of the families. And I’m going to need your help to do that. Somewhere around here, Parote has to have a computer system. We’re going to need your help matching patient numbers to names.”

I felt his shoulders slump. “Let him go,” I ordered. As soon as Rome and Theo released him, his arms wrapped around me tightly, and he fell to his knees and sobbed into my neck. I rubbed his back as his cries filled the room, catching Aiden’s attention. I smiled sadly as he stumbled toward us and knelt beside Hollis, putting an arm around his shoulder.

Shifting to the side so that I was straddling both of them better, I wrapped an arm around Aiden, too, and clung to my grieving men. Tears fell as I looked up at Rome and Theo questioningly. They shook their heads. The answers they were looking for weren’t here.

“We’re going to check out the rest of the house,” Rome said quietly.

“Be careful,” I replied. I didn’t want to know what other horrors this house contained, but I knew it had to be checked.

A few minutes later, Evangeline approached us. “You don’t need to stop, but I thought I would let you all know that Lucifer should be here any second so that you aren’t surprised when he arrives. He will check the patients for us and determine if there is any hope for them.”

Hollis and Aiden began to slowly untangle themselves from our embrace at her words. They didn’t want to miss what Lucifer had to say. This was their last shred of hope, and it was about to be reconciled.

We stood and walked back to Annie’s bed, where Rylan stood. Before we arrived, Lucifer appeared; his large frame and impressive wingspan made the room feel even smaller.

He wasn’t what I expected, especially when he saw me and winked briefly before sobering and approaching Annie’s bed. He laid his hands over her and closed his eyes as he concentrated.

He opened them again and looked around before moving to another bed and repeating the process. After checking a few more, he returned to us and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but all of the souls that used to reside in these bodies have long since moved on.”

Hollis and Aiden took the news far better than I expected them to, simply embracing each other.

“Thank you,” I said to Lucifer.

He looked around the room, profound sadness reflected on his face, before looking at Evangeline and Rylan. “I assume the soul of the person responsible for all of this will be coming to see me very soon,” he said sternly.

“He will,” I replied. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“Kase and Jett went to fetch him,” Evangeline said.

“Excellent,” Lucifer purred, sending shivers down my spine. “In that case, I’ll hang around and give him the VIP experience to Hell.”

My phone rang, and I answered it when I saw it was Rome. “You have to see this,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“The basement. The second floor is filled with more beds like the first,” he replied. “Did you find your friend?”

“No, but we found something pretty exciting in the basement. Hurry down,” Rome replied before hanging up.

“Rome said the second floor is more of this,” I said, waving my hand to the room, “but he wants us to go to the basement because they found something. There are stairs on the other side of that wall,” I saw, walking toward them.

“Stairs?” Lucifer asked. “We don’t need stairs.”

Before we could react he had wrapped his arms and wings around me, Aiden, and Hollis and teleported us to the basement. Evangeline and Rylan followed us down, and as I turned toward a crying sound, my jaw hit the floor.

“Is that?”

“His daughter,” Rome said softly, wrapping his arms around me from behind as Theo and his daughter embraced through the bars of the prison cell she was in.

“She’s been down here all this time?” I asked. “It would appear so,” Rome replied.

I jumped when a teeny, tiny Lucifer appeared on my shoulder. “Why is she still in the cell?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back, “are you usually this much of a creep?”

“Yes,” Evangeline and Lucifer said at the same time as he returned to his normal size, thankfully by my side and not on my shoulder.

Lucifer walked around the cage, inspecting it before shrugging, grabbing two bars, and tearing them out of the basement floor. “Problem solved,” he stated.

The woman ran from the cell into her father’s arms for a proper hug. As he held her, Theo held his hand out to me, and Rome gave me a little nudge forward.

“Jacqueline, I would like to introduce you to my mate, Mia,” Theo said.

Jacqueline turned toward me, tears still glistening in her maroon eyes. I held my hand out to shake hers. “It’s nice to meet you, Jacqueline.”

She looked at my hand and then my face before brushing my hand aside and hugging me.

“Oh, ok. You’re a hugger. That’s ok, so am I,” I said, patting her back. The sweet family moment was broken by the sudden appearance of Kase and Jett, holding an unconscious Parote between them.

“Where do you want him?” Kase asked.