I can do this. He reached out for his magic and touched it. As Lindsay let it go, it flowed back into him and sang in his veins like hundreds of tiny flames. He hadn’t known what having it truly absent—not merely parted from his will by Lindsay’s illusions—felt like, and he regretted all the times he’d wished for it to be gone.
Adrenaline brought the rest of Noah’s senses back. “Let me go. ” He itched under his skin with fire and fear. It was a struggle to stay helpless. He could see the others when he dared look, all of them limp and unaware of what they’d consented to become.
“Soon.” Lindsay’s voice was soothing, soft and cool like a touch. “Zoey is working on the cages—
she’s going to release the locks to let you out. Watch for the lights, then go.”
“I keep thinking I hear him . ” Noah shifted to press his feet against one wall, flexing his legs to work the drugs out of the large muscles. “If there’s anything you want saved from here other than him, tell me now. ” His outrage was deeper than his morals, it went down to his bones, down to everything written in his genes. When he let it loose, there wouldn’t be anything left of what distressed him.
“Just the two of you.”
“Soon. ” Noah wanted to go home.
When the lights went down, Noah felt the door of his cage give way, and he grabbed it as he rolled out. He was on the second tier, so it wasn’t far to the floor; as soon as his toes touched, he let go and crumpled to the ground. He felt leaden, his limbs refused to answer him, and he grasped at his magic to burn off the remaining drugs.
He had to move. Primal urgency forced him up to hands and knees. A cage door smashed him in the head as the man inside thrashed about. Pain and adrenaline fueled his magic and his head cleared enough that he could drag himself to his feet. Yelps and howls of creatures tasting freedom echoed through the room as the lights came up again.
Noah took a few unsteady steps and tripped over a body. Of course. Everyone around him would be as drugged as he had been.
“Come on.” Forcing his limbs to obey, he tried to turn the man over. His hands slid on cold, sweat-slick skin. “Wake up. We have to get out of here.” Noah flipped him over and stared down into empty, clouded eyes.
“Noah, move.”
Even as Lindsay’s frantic voice filled his head, something sent him sprawling. Someone stepped on him, a knee caught him in the side as he tried to get up. He staggered to his feet, slipped in something slick, and caught himself on the grating of another cage before he went down again.
“Noah. Do something. Now.”
His feet were sliding in blood. Half a corpse dangled from the top of the cages. Noah turned to see a huge Hound feeding on the man he’d tried to help.
He couldn’t parse Lindsay’s orders but his magic understood. It rose up in him and washed him clean with fire. Not content with purifying his blood, the fire rolled out to cleanse his skin, then boiled outward.
When Noah finally stood steady, there was nothing but ash on the floor at his feet.
Anarchy churned around him, howls and screams rising until Noah felt them through the concrete.
Where natural creatures needed a reason to kill, hunger or self-defense, Moore’s Hounds had been bred to hunt mage-flesh, to chase and to slaughter mercilessly. Freshly created, without inhibition, they turned on each other. The terrified staff, in fleeing, marked themselves as prey.
Creatures passed above him, hunting each other from one row of cages to another in a fatal game of tag. Noah had no idea where to find Dane, but he was sure Dane simply wouldn’t fit in the cage he’d been in. He picked a direction and ran.
At an aisle that cut across the rows, he stopped to flame a furred beast off of a screaming, struggling man. It was impossible to remain indifferent to the slaughter. The place had become an abattoir. A quick look around told him he was no closer to finding Dane than before. Everything looked the same—rows and rows of cages now open and spilling their half-mad contents into the aisles.
A shadow flickered in the corner of Noah’s eye and he threw himself aside to avoid being tackled from behind by the man he’d just saved. Suddenly, he was aware of more than one set of eyes on him. He’d drawn attention to himself with the kill and now, with his back to the cages, he was being stalked. The man who had seemed so human while fighting for his life was wild-eyed, and the teeth he bared were long and jagged.
“There’s no saving any of them. They’re gone . ” Lindsay’s voice rose up in the back of his head.
It was hard for Noah to override his natural instinct to protect his own kind. But once he did, he wasn’t afraid anymore. Just sad. A wave of fire rolled out and swept away everything around him.
Through the fire that cleaned the aisle ahead of him, Noah saw what had eluded him before. He’d gone the wrong way, his body automatically trying to go back the way it had been brought in. But this way there were computers and workstations, and other cages. Different cages. Once he had Dane, he could sweep the whole lab clean. He followed his fire, his bare feet seared by the heat held in the concrete floor.
Chapter Fifteen
Without his magic, Dane had been left to rely on his body and he was surprised to find out how efficient it was. The break Lourdes had given him had allowed him to become as close to perfectly functional as he could be without his magic. While he couldn’t hear Jonas’s heartbeat, the man’s breathing—and his humming—came through loud and clear. Sure, it was classical music, Baroque even, but Dane still wanted to ring Jonas’s head off the bars half the day.
When Jonas was quiet, the techs’ and scientists’ conversations were audible. Dane was slowly piecing things together and receiving a crash course in magical genetic engineering. Moore was using some hodgepodge of runes and cells and science so she could inject the essence of being a Hound into her victims. They had to have the potential for magic first, but the treatment would cause a full manifestation.
They were bringing in another batch of “recruits”, as Greer called them. Dane had no idea how Moore was finding them, had no idea that magic still ran so plentifully in the blood of mundane humans. It made his skin crawl to see the limp bodies loaded into cages and primed for treatment. Not all of them survived the preparation and the treatment brought fatalities as well.
Dane had seen the failures when they were rolled past on gurneys, on the way to autopsy. One had died of “uncontrolled growth-plate expansion”. That was what Greer had said. To Dane, it looked like the man’s bones had exploded out of his flesh in all directions. Another spawned half a head from the neck and a leg from the middle of the back. Some were so deformed—even to the point of being puddles of flesh in buckets—that Dane couldn’t work out what had gone wrong.
Every day, he watched for any sign of a flaw in the routine around him, something he could exploit and get free that way. Someone would come for him but he wouldn’t be Cyrus’s first priority. If he wanted out soon, he’d have to do it himself. All he’d managed to determine was that the locks on the cages were electronic, controlled from the consoles in the lab area, and no one made mistakes.
His own cage was locked with bolts and padlocks, maybe even with magic; Jonas’s cage looked the same. Moore wasn’t trusting their containment to the main system; she’d learned from his escape with Lindsay months ago in New York. He was certain it would take more than one cooperative person to unlock his cage—Lindsay couldn’t just ensorcel a single low-level tech into opening it up.