Mine, page 28
Blade looked at her, and her alone. “If you want him to live, I will give her to him.”
“What the fuck are you talking about,” Gus snapped.
“She will cure him.” Blade’s eyes were steady and sure as they held hers. “His cancer will be gone, over a period of weeks. As if it never was.”
Gus started talking to C.P. Phalen in a hard, cutting voice, the word “security” getting used a number of times: Where is security. When is security coming. Why did security let this crackpot in—
Blade ignored the commotion. And so did Lydia.
“He will be as you knew him then. The man he once was. That is what you want most in the world, is it not.”
“What is… it,” she whispered.
The symphath in the red robing stepped even closer to the bed, and she made sure she kept herself between the two, protecting Daniel with her body.
“She is a love of mine. I bred her.”
It was a scorpion. In the little glass box… an albino scorpion stared out through the portable prison, its tiny pincers and curled stinger so small, Lydia had to squint.
“Her venom is the way to kill his cancer.”
Lydia’s chest constricted as all her breath left her. “A… cure?”
“Yes. She is a very special member of her breed, and her sting works in humans, for their disease of the cells. It will cure him—as long as we get it into him now. If he becomes much sicker, he shall not be strong enough to handle it.” Blade held out the little box to her. “If you want him back… I will give her to you.”
“Why would you… help us?”
Blade’s eyes traveled over her face as if he were memorizing her features. And then he said, with evident sorrow, “I have my reasons. That is all you need to know.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“Allow me to show you how I am so certain.”
Without warning, her mind became filled with images that were like memories, except they were about events she had never seen or experienced. She saw… decades of… things, all around the scorpion and its venom… and people. And it was from the point of view of someone… else…
Blade, she thought. These were Blade’s memories.
When the deluge stopped, she put her hand to her temple and tried to rub away the ache that had sprung up there. Just as C.P. had been doing as she’d walked in.
Gus spoke up, loud and clear. “This is insane, get the fucking guards and—”
“Give it to him,” Lydia snapped. “Right now.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT.”
As Gus laid down the law—because someone clearly had to be reasonable in the middle of this shit show—the man in red turned to him.
Before the guy could start blabbing, Gus put his palm up. “This is bullshit. There are so many reasons I’m not going to allow you to have my patient stung by—”
The smile that came back at him was cold. “You are not involved in this business.”
“The hell I’m not. I’m his fucking doctor.”
“Then why are you getting in the way?”
“You come in here, with a goddamn arachnid in a bug box, making like you’ve got a Nobel Prize in your palm, and you’re accusing me of getting in the way? And spare me any hocus-pocus, Google doctor talk. When it comes to cancer treatment, that kind of venom is only a facilitator. Chlorotoxin is not a compound that actually kills the tumor cells. It just helps our modalities get to where they need to be—when appropriate.”
“Ah, but I told you,” the man intoned. Like he was the voice of God or some shit. “She is a very special member of her species, cultivated over generations for—”
“Just give it to Daniel,” Lydia said sharply. “Now.”
Gus pivoted around. The poor woman was leaning over the bed, her hand gripping Daniel’s, her eyes rapt as a convert’s—and he told himself not to lose his temper completely while Daniel was lying there two inches from a coma, and C.P. Phalen was doing absolutely nothing to stop this, and Lydia, as a grieving partner, was getting seduced by a snake oil salesman.
Scorpion venom. Administered by a sting. Was this where they were all ending up?
“Okay, everybody has to leave now,” he announced. “Lydia, you don’t need this distraction—”
“It’s not a distraction!” She turned to the man. “Blade, I believe you! This explains everything. I saw the light at dawn that means you are my future, but it wasn’t in the way I thought it was! You save Daniel and you give me my future—”
Stepping between them, Gus went on man-to-man defense, putting his hands out in front, prepared to shove the red-robed SOB from the room. “I’m going to ask you one more time to leave. And then I’m going to take you out by your asshole because nobody else seems to—”
Before he could get any further, he was forcibly picked up and displaced out of the way. For a split second, he thought it was Daniel, somehow back on his feet. Nope. It was Lydia, and she was stronger than he was—and not just because he was still healing.
Pinning him against the wall, her eyes glowed with a yellow light so bright, he felt the burn in his face—
The wolf. From the forest.
The conclusion came to him with a certainty that made no sense. Yet for some reason, it was clear to him that she was… somehow… what had come out to find him and Daniel. Who had taken them to the footprints. Who had protected them through acreage.
And she was prepared to kill him if he didn’t get the fuck out of the way.
That was also clear.
Her voice, low and threatening, threaded into his ears with the growl of an animal: “This doesn’t involve you.”
Gus shook his head. “He doesn’t want Vita. What the fuck are you doing putting poison into his—”
The explosion registered from someplace off in the distance, the loud boom! muffled, but the detonation close enough so that a quaking hit the patient room like a ton of bricks. As a crack spidered across the ceiling and then ran down the wall, the hospital bed rolled around, and a table rocked on its legs. All at once, he and Lydia and C.P. threw their hands out for balance, while the man in red sank down into his thighs and held that little glass box to his chest.
In the aftermath, as dust filtered down from overhead and alarms started to blare everywhere, “Blade” looked over at Gus, then indicated Daniel with a nod of his head. Calmly. As if he’d expected the bomb.
“It will work. My scorpion will save him—”
Popping sounds now. Out in the corridor. A scream.
The door to the patient room opened, and a guard leaped inside, clearly to give them an update. Except… no. There was something wrong with him—in the center of his forehead, a small, sooty black mark was precisely triangulated between his eyebrows. And before Gus could look too much at the smudge, the man collapsed to his knees and fell face-first into the tiled floor.
The back of his head had been blown off.
“You have to do it now,” Blade announced. As if some guy hadn’t just dropped dead of a gunshot wound right in front of the group. “He’s come for me.”
“Who’s come?” C.P. demanded as more shooting was traded out in the open area.
“The man who abducted you,” he said with a nod to Gus, “is actually trying to kill me. He must have seen me approach the house. I am afraid, in retrospect, I could have been far more discreet. It’s a bit of a family dispute, don’t you know.”
What, like someone hadn’t shown up at fucking Thanksgiving?
But whatever. The reasons didn’t matter at this precise moment.
The attack everybody had been waiting for…
… had finally arrived.
* * *
“Barricade the door,” someone said.
“Get his gun—” somebody else chimed in.
“What are you doing—”
The voices talking over each other, along with the sound of a bomb going off, were partially what woke Daniel up. The other half of it was a sixth sense that Lydia was in trouble: More than the noise or the evident panic, the inner core of him came alive to protect her.
As he forced his eyes open, he couldn’t understand what was happening: It looked like she was standing in front of Gus and seemed to be holding him against the far wall. Meanwhile, Blade was off to the side, dressed in one of Candy’s Santa robes, apparently, and Phalen was by the foot of the bed, a hand resting at the base of her throat like she was either going to throw up or scream—and was trying to stop the reaction.
Distantly, he heard the unmistakable exchange of gunfire.
“Weapon,” he mumbled. “Get the guard’s weapon.”
Well. What do you know. That had been him talking a moment ago, spitting out good advice about securing an available gun. Too bad everyone in the room was arguing with each other and didn’t hear him.
As adrenaline flooded his system, Daniel shoved the oxygen mask off and put everything he had into a holler: “Get that goddamn service weapon!”
His yelling got their attention, but before anyone could react, another explosion went off, and this one was closer than the first. With more dust floating down from a crack right above his bed, and the stench of burning plastic coming through the HVAC system, he knew they were all going to die.
Unless they got out before this attack—which he had known all along was coming—reached the patient room.
“Help me,” he said to Lydia.
The second he reached for her, she backed off of Gus and rushed over. “Daniel—”
“Listen to me,” he told her. “You have to get out of here. This room is a deathtrap with no escape—”
“I’m not leaving without you!”
Rumbling, somewhere near. Like a load-bearing wall was collapsing. “Then take me with you, but we gotta move.”
“Let us go then.” Blade bent down and stripped the guard of his gun—and a knife. “With speed.”
Daniel glanced over at the man. And then started ripping things off of himself, IVs, wires, blankets. “Take one side of me, will ya?”
“I need to be able to shoot—”
“I’ll do it,” Gus muttered as he lunged for the pillow and ripped the case off. “But let me wrap your vein up. You’re losing blood already.”
After he tied off the inside of Daniel’s elbow, Lydia and the doctor humped him to his feet, and it was a bad shuffle to the door.
“Where’s Phalen,” Daniel said just as they were going to step out.
“I’m right here,” the woman answered from behind. “And we need to go to the northern tunnel. It’s the best access point I can get us through. Left. Go left.”
Out in the smoke-filled hall, Blade led the way because he was the one with the weapons—a gun he’d evidently had with him plus the dead guard’s. Phalen, meanwhile, brought up the rear, and she was good with the navigation, steering them down the corridor in the opposite direction from the open area where the workstations were. Where the shooting and the explosions were.
Fuck. Researchers and medical staff were dead or dying…
At the end of the hall, there was a steel reinforced door, and Phalen elbowed her way forward to enter a numerical sequence on a keypad. For Daniel, everything was a blur, but he was aware enough that as they filed in and closed the heavier barrier behind their group, he thought they might have half a chance.
The tunnel ahead was lit with low-energy ceiling fixtures, the illumination dim and blinky, as if some of the power sources had been attacked or at the very least threatened by what had been detonated. He did what he could to keep up, but soon enough, Gus and Lydia were holding all his weight up by his armpits, his bare feet tickling the cold concrete floor.
At the far end was another steel door, and Phalen went ahead again.
He wasn’t sure where they were going to come out, but if they couldn’t get to a vehicle, they needed more weapons and a good barricaded position—
“It’s not working. Goddamn it, the master code’s not working.”
He glanced around Gus’s bare chest. The woman was viciously stabbing at a keypad, the little red light in the corner persisting every time she hit the # key.
“Fuck,” she said as she wheeled back around. “We’re trapped—”
Yet another explosion vibrated through the earth, and he looked up overhead. The sprinkling of concrete dust was not good news—supports were weakening throughout the subterranean lab.
He glanced at Lydia. She was terrified, but keeping it together. Gus was the same, his eyes bouncing around, but his grip steady. God, Daniel hated that he was so physically weak and they had to carry him—
“I shall go back and ensure all of your safety.”
As Blade spoke up, Daniel narrowed his stare on his old boss. “You can’t hold them off. You know what’s out there, and it’s not human.”
“As I said, I am the one they want.” The man held out the guard’s gun, handle first. “Take this, Daniel. You are the only one among them who knows how to shoot—”
Phalen snatched the weapon out of the man’s hand. With a quick series of shifts, she put the nine millimeter through its paces, checking how many bullets were in the magazine, cocking it, taking off the safety.
“No, he’s not the only one.”
Blade chuckled. “I beg your pardon, madam. Hold your position. I will attempt to get them out of the lab.”
“How,” Daniel spoke up.
“They will follow me. You all are incidental—”
“How do you know that?” Daniel held on to his Lydia a little more tightly, and thought about what he and Gus had found out in the forest, those footsteps that came from out of nowhere. “There are a lot of different people down here.”
“My cousin is the one who has invaded this facility. If I leave, he will be forced to follow. Then you may come out.”
Daniel cursed under his breath. Maybe the guy was right, maybe he was wrong.
Either way, they didn’t have many choices.
THIRTY-EIGHT
BEFORE BLADE DEPARTED the group, he focused on the wolven. She was standing by her male, supporting him in so many ways more than just the physical, his arm draped over her shoulders, her body strong enough to hold him on his feet.
Going over to her, Blade held out his hand. “This is for you. Do with her as you will.”
The female went still and glanced down at the glass container. For a moment, he thought she was not going to take his gift, but then she snatched the scorpion from his palm. As her fingers brushed his skin, his blood rushed through his veins, but he knew that he was the only one who felt anything—and a now-familiar sense of weary sadness made it easier for him to turn away and start running.
She did not thank him. Or if she did, he didn’t hear it.
“Wait,” the blond woman called out. “I need to spring the lock for you.”
The owner of the lab was mercifully light on her feet as she joined him, and when they reached the portal through which they had entered the tunnel, she was quick with the passcode. After a pause, during which he knew they both held their breath…
The lock released, and she looked up at him. “Fuck it. The master code is seven-nine-two-one-five-five-one. Use it on any keypad. Good luck—and thank you.”
Blade inhaled deeply through his nostrils, confirming, even through the smoke, that which had been readily apparent out on her terrace. Leaning in, he said softly, “It will work on you, too. Be well.”
He did not look back as he stepped out, but he made certain that the portal was re-secured before he faced off at the remarkably dangerous hallway: If Kurling or one of his machines happened to pass by the head of this offshoot, and utilize their super-keen eyesight, Blade would be a sitting duck, nothing but rooms with flimsy doors offering a momentary cover.
Dematerializing in this environment was not advisable, as it was too dangerous to re-form when one was not certain of obstacles. Besides, he was too amped up to concentrate.
Ditching his red robes, he was fleet of foot in his combat garb as he put his back against the wall and headed down past the room Daniel had been in, zeroing in on where alarms were going off and fresh smoke was curling up. As the lights overhead flickered, the strobing effect made his vision dance, but he got to the end with alacrity. Stretching off to the left, the vast open area of equipment and workplaces had been hit with some lower-end explosives, the kind that were more noise than structurally damaging. They had certainly laid waste to the previous order, however, the blown-up equipment, shattered glass, and puffs of fire making it look like an action movie set after the final showdown.
There were moans, too, of injured staff members.
Unfortunately, this was only beginning—and at least one or more stairwells, somewhere, had been properly bombed. That was the only reason they could have felt such shock waves in that patient room.
Hurrying on his way, heading to the right, Blade’s nose stung from the chemical burn—
The robotic soldier came out of a boardroom made of sheets of glass, and Blade had the advantage of first sight. Raising the muzzle of his gun, he let off one round directly into the thing’s chest, the bullet entering the torso—but barely having any effect other than to announce Blade’s presence.
The return fire was instantaneous, and accurate to a rattling degree. As Blade ducked, a bullet went into the wall right where his head had been.
No torso, big-target aiming for these things.
As another bullet sizzled by him, Blade had to ration his counter-firing as he jumped behind a support column. He could spare only one trigger pull in response, and the humanoid ducked easily, the lead slug penetrating through one of the floor-to-ceiling glass panels, the entire wall shattering and crashing to the ground.
Which brought the other soldiers unto him in an efficient fashion.
The units came from every direction, and Blade broke cover and bobbed and weaved to avoid getting shot. Still, something went into his shoulder, but he ignored the blaze of pain—and given that he didn’t know the layout of the lab, there was no strategy to his route as he kept going.
