“How are we today?” Greer came in and headed straight for him, looking positively sunny. She always came by, sometimes more than once a day. “Sorry I missed dinner last night.” It was surreal, the way she spoke to him like he was a roommate or a friend.
“You didn’t miss much.” Dane talked to exercise his mind more than anything else. Jonas hadn’t been a good conversationalist before his brain was scrambled, he was worse now. “Chicken again.”
“I know.” Greer gave him a sad look. “Beef shipment next week.” She was about to say something else when a gray-faced soldier came racing in like there were Hounds behind him.
Dane wanted to hear, but she stepped away and the soldier whispered in her ear. It had to be bad; she went as white as her coat. She sent the soldier away with a gesture and hurried off to confer with her colleagues. He leaned against the front of his cage and watched.
“Problems?” he asked, when her panicked scurrying brought her close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice.
“One of you has terrible manners,” Greer snapped. There were tasers and sedative guns racked on the wall nearby. She clipped a small taser to her belt. Dane stifled his laugh so he wouldn’t tempt her to use it on him. He’d seen her in a mood before. Working for Moore suited the flip side of her personality.
“That’s definitely Jonas,” he said solemnly. “My kids would never misbehave.”
“We’ll see about that.” Greer’s look was purely venomous, and Dane missed having his fangs to bare.
“You should be hoping they might,” she added. “When we get a stable cultivar, we’ll put the primary stock in storage.” She left him with that and headed down the aisles of cages, off to whatever crisis was distracting her from work.
Dane tested the cage again. Every day, he felt weaker. He didn’t know what storage meant, but it was going to be worse than this. If he thought for a second that Moore would buy it, he’d take Jonas’s old place in order to get out, but there was no way he could mean it enough to pass any test she’d give. Lourdes might lie for him, but Moore wouldn’t be satisfied with her word alone, not if she’d taken Jonas away.
Snarling with frustration, he pushed off of the front bars hard enough to bang his head on the back ones.
“Let it go.” Jonas was slumped against the near side of his cage, staring at the back wall. “At least they might put us to sleep after this. I can’t sleep.”
“You sleep all the time,” Dane reminded him. Jonas looked fine on the outside, but he wasn’t right in the head. Some magic healed the spirit as well as the body. Neither of them was that fortunate.
“Sleep tires me out. I’m always running.”
“Well, go to sleep in your sleep,” Dane said reasonably. Being cruel to Jonas wasn’t fun anymore.
Moore fucking ruined everything. “Close your eyes and dream about sleep.” If Jonas slept, he’d be quiet, and Dane could eavesdrop.
There was a rumble as gurneys came in the wrong door. Dane shuffled forward on his knees to see.
Bodies. Mature Hounds in uniform. The trainers didn’t put uniforms on them until they were reliable.
Had the others tried an assault on the place and failed? There weren’t that many bodies. Dane’s heart beat so hard he was afraid it was going to damage itself. It slowed as the gurneys came closer, and his fear turned to malicious glee.
The Hounds didn’t look human anymore, most of them. Their bloodied bodies were half-feral, and many of them showed the marks of teeth and claws. Bad manners indeed. Now he understood.
Had to be Jonas’s fault, though. He hadn’t been here long enough for “his” Hounds to be in uniform.
Besides, from the complaints he heard, “his” were even more trouble than the ones they’d made from Jonas’s magic. It was comforting to know he was ruining Moore’s plans by proxy, if he couldn’t do it himself.
He saw Greer returning and amused himself by making up dialogue for her and the others as they ran about in a panic. Good thing for them Moore wasn’t here.
Dane grew bored and Greer wasn’t coming over to entertain him, which was disappointing. He closed his eyes, but something fluttered—dark and light and dark and light—and he sat up to look.
Everyone was frozen in the moment, then the lights went out again. All through the vast space, there was a single clang made up of more small sounds than Dane could count. But he knew what it was. Every cage unlocking. Every one but his and Jonas’s cages, of course. Before he could inhale to laugh, there was chaos.
The lights came back on in time for Dane to watch a half-feral Hound launch itself into the middle of the lab area. It was clumsy, still learning its new body, but even its flailing was impressive as its claws sliced through plastic and steel and cables as easily as if they were movie props.
“Hey, Jonas. Look.”
The staff were brutally outnumbered—Moore never planned for failure. As their tasers failed to stop the Hounds, panic set in and they tried to flee. Jonas perked up for the first time, squawking at the sight of a Hound gutting a technician and spraying a pristine row of white computers with blood. Nothing amused Jonas like a good bit of gore.
Dane caught a glimpse of Greer through the chaos, walking toward the near exit at a sedate pace, head high. Smart girl. The Hounds didn’t give a damn about her since she wasn’t running or fighting; they were all instinct and she had nothing they were programmed to hunt. Good. If she was alive now, he could kill her later, personally. Her and the weather mage.
The sounds of fighting and killing and dying were a chorus louder than Dane’s dreams, intense enough to make the cage bars hum with it. The possibility of getting free was exponentially larger than moments ago, but Dane couldn’t focus to think it through. Jonas was now rattling his cage and howling like a banshee. If Dane had been on the outside, he might have fought his way into Jonas’s cage just to shut him up. He had to think.
If they got out, they’d only be human in a sea of teeth and fangs and madness—their lack of magic made them less attractive to the Hounds right now, but he’d have to keep Jonas from taking a swipe at one of them. The rattle of a machine gun increased the danger. The soldiers didn’t have a chance against this
many, but they were going to try, and Dane and Jonas both had an uncanny resemblance to the things the soldiers were here to kill.
A familiar sound got him in the gut, a sound that terrified the animal still lurking in him. Fire. There was a terrible wailing that cut off into nothing, and the fire roared down from between the rows of cages, cutting so close that Dane had to get back from the bars or be singed.
“It’s him.” Jonas’s voice was raw, but Dane heard the anticipation. “You don’t get to kill me anymore.”
The fire died and Dane was looking out on a half-destroyed landscape, everything in a wide swath was reduced to ash and concrete.
“Let’s go.” Noah came walking up the aisle, into Dane’s view. He was bare naked and whole, like he’d come up out of his own fire that way, whole except for the remains of tubing under the skin of his chest. “Hold your breath.”
Dane did what he was told, pressing back and holding his breath as Noah’s flaming hands tore the front of his cage open and left it hanging from the hinges, dripping molten steel.
“Let’s go,” Noah said again, and like that, those hands were back to flesh. Dane let them pull him out of the cage and hold him up as he found his feet again.
“Where’s—”
“Here,” Noah said, cutting him off. “Just not in person. Are we bringing that too?”