Fields of Blood (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 2) (23 page)

I threw up an arm. “
Lahm à dionadth.
”

Even though I couldn’t see it, I felt the shape of the barrier around my forearm. Sadie crashed into me, knocking me flat, but the shield held. She roared as her claws scraped across nothing and failed to connect.

I could do more than this. I could stop her, take her down if I wanted to. With faint horror, I realized that I could kill her. But I wouldn’t do any of that. I had to lose this fight convincingly, without dying. Reese thought I was weak—and it was the only advantage I had.

I needed to reach her. Now.

“Sadie,
please
,” I whispered desperately. “I know you’re in there.”

Her muzzle wrinkled, and she cocked her head.

Then she went for my throat.

“
Brahd à dionadth,
” I gasped out, just before her teeth snapped. They encountered solid air instead of flesh.

Sadie shuddered. With a sound that was almost a whine, she inched her head down until I could feel her hot breath against my ear.

“
Gideon. Play. Dead.
”

Every word was a tortured wrench of sound. Trembling all over, she raised up with her pawed hand pressing my arm down. Her gold gaze met mine. Searching, aware.

I nodded once.

She lifted her head and roared at the night sky, drawing an arm back. I let my body go limp. When she batted me aside, I rolled a few times and made a show of struggling to my knees. Then she was on me again.

Her swipes and thrusts barely connected, just enough to draw a little blood, but she made a lot of noise. After a minute or two of savage display, she grabbed my arm and flung me effortlessly toward the center fence.

I caught a glimpse of her eyes just before I crashed into the chain link with bone-rattling force. They said
whoops.

I would’ve shrugged it off, even though it hurt like hell. But I was busy playing dead.

As the noise of the crowd settled, I cracked one eye open to a slit. There weren’t many ways this could go now. I figured Reese would come in, order a bunch of soldiers to knock Sadie out, and probably try to get me to fight again. Wasn’t sure how long I could play dead if he decided to break out the cattle prods. Or the dart gun.

Sadie stood where she’d thrown me from, breathing in harsh pants. Her glittering stare locked on the circular fence enclosing the arena and the soldiers standing behind it.

Without warning, she lunged at the chain link.

Sheer panic surged through me, and it took everything I had not to scream at her to stop. Somehow I understood what she was doing. Drawing their attention, reinforcing the illusion that she’d taken me down and wanted a new target. Even though she had to know how it would end.

I closed my eyes fully as multiple shots rang out. Sadie snarled a scream and fell silent.

The stillness lasted forever. Eventually I heard the gate open, booted feet marching on packed earth, the sound of something heavy being dragged away. I smelled blood and spent bullets.

And I sensed someone standing above me, a moment before Reese planted a hard kick in my ribs.

It was impossible to stay silent. I managed to turn a harsh gasp into a faint moan, and let my eyes flutter beneath closed lids.

“Get up,” Reese snarled. “I’m not done with you yet.”

He kicked me twice more, and I almost bit through my tongue. But I didn’t react.

After a long pause, Reese muttered, “Fine. I’ll be patient.” There was a slight shuffling sound, and he spoke near my ear. “I’m afraid the formula still needs a little work,” he said. “Tomorrow night, your Fae friend gets to go first. I might even give him his arm back. As for you…you’ll watch from the lab.” I could feel his grin. “And then it’s your turn.”

Frustration and fury boiled over as I struggled to keep still. I could’ve killed him, right then. But if I did, I had a feeling everyone else would be summarily executed.

I had to wait. And I wasn’t very good at waiting.

“Put him under, and take him to Dr. Romero,” Reese said from further away.

Trying to brace myself didn’t help. The shock of the cattle prod still screamed through every nerve, driving pain to impossible levels before I finally blacked out.

C
HAPTER 34

I
would’ve been relieved that at least I wasn’t in a cage, if this wasn’t a whole lot worse.

At first I couldn’t make anything out beyond an unrelenting tide of sensation. Lights were too bright, sounds were too loud, even the air was too heavy. Pain that had faded to a dull ache from being battered around the arena, now felt like bowling balls and broken glass shifting inside me.

My eyes watered as I forced them to stay open. Ahead of me was a big room with a lot of glass, chrome, and stainless steel—a mixture of medical equipment and autopsy tools—three or four computer workstations, and two large wall-mounted monitors. My back pressed against a steel table that was upright and angled back slightly. Metal cuffs with short chains fastened my wrists to the edges, and my ankles to the blocks supporting my feet. A locking metal band across my neck kept me from slumping off the table.

Beside me was an IV pole with a bag of translucent purple liquid, and a tube leading from the bag to a needle stuck in my arm.

A needle that felt like a knife blade.

From the way Taeral had explained how it worked, I guessed the purple stuff was mandrake. Wasn’t hard to see why he’d been practically incapacitated. It felt like someone had plugged reality into an amplifier and turned it all the way up.

“Oh. The subject is awake.”

The mild, unfamiliar voice sounded like a shout to my ears. A stained white blob approached from across the room and eventually became a middle-aged man with a round face, long legs, droopy brown eyes, and brown hair that looked like it was trimmed with a hedge clipper. Dr. Romero, I presumed.

He carried a shallow plastic dish in one gloved hand, and a scalpel in the other.

“Extensive scarring,” he muttered as he stood next to the table, on the side opposite the IV pole. “Tattoos appear…modern. Have to test the ink.” He poked and squeezed my arm for a minute.

I considered asking him to test the ink from one of the back tattoos. Maybe he could find out why the hell they glowed. If I was going to be a lab rat, I might as well get something out of it.

Then without warning, he sliced a strip of skin off with the scalpel.

It hurt too much to scream. My mouth opened without sound, and I felt veins bulge at my neck, blood streak down my arm.

Finally, I managed to gasp, “What the hell are you doing?”

The doctor looked startled. He blinked several times as he laid the severed flesh in the little dish. “Subject speaks English,” he said. “Interesting.”

“Of course I speak English, you asshole!” Without thinking, I tried to lunge at him.

It was a painful mistake.

“Signs of aggression. May have to increase the dosage.” Dr. Romero blinked again and scuttled away with his bloody prize.

I closed my eyes and attempted to breathe. That hurt, too. The pain was extremely slow to fade, and I decided I’d have to move as little as possible until I figured something else out. Something that didn’t involve Doctor Demento there increasing the dosage.

Forcing my eyes open again sucked. When I did, I made out the doctor approaching me—this time with a really big needle.

I had to fight the instinct to flinch away. That would just hurt more. “What’s that for?” I said, unfortunately not expecting a response.

“Biopsy. Need a liver sample.” He punched the needle into my stomach.

This time, I screamed.

He went away, and a gray haze wavered around the edge of my vision as I tried again to breathe. I scanned the room slowly, found a clock on the wall that read quarter after nine. It wasn’t nighttime, or I’d be subjected to watching Taeral being fed to a were-human on one of those screens right now.

Meaning I still had several hours of sharp objects and drug-enhanced pain to go.

When the doctor returned, pushing a wheeled cart full of implements, I decided to try a different approach. “Look. If you’re going to torture me, you could at least introduce yourself,” I said. “I’m Gideon.”

He froze for an instant in the middle of picking up an empty syringe. “Wesley Romero.”

“Thanks. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but it isn’t.”

Dr. Romero’s brow furrowed. Then he rolled my arm, stuck the needle in near the inside of the elbow, and filled the syringe with my blood.

“Christ,” I gasped. “Do you have any idea how much that hurts?”

He gave a curt shrug. “Not surprising, considering your species’ reaction to mandrake alkaloids,” he said, and jabbed a fresh needle in.

Okay. So he knew—he just didn’t care.

The doctor twisted my arm back none too gently and stared at the gash where he’d cut my skin off. “Subject displays accelerated healing,” he said. “The rate appears slower than a werewolf—”

“Yeah. Possibly because you’re drugging the shit out of me,” I said. “Take this IV out, and we’ll see how accelerated I can get.”

“Slower than a werewolf,” Dr. Romero said deliberately, glaring at me for an instant. “We’ll compare results to the control tests. Focus burn, knife, gunshot.”

“Why are you doing this?”

Once again, the doctor looked startled. He hesitated, picked up a length of slim rubber hose—and then put it down and stared at me. “To cure cancer.”

“What?”

“Cancer. Parkinson’s. Alzheimer’s. HIV. Every deadly threat to humankind,” he said. “Subjects like you hold the keys to eradicating them all. Other research facilities are still centuries away from cures we may be able to develop within a decade.”

I frowned. From an extremely removed perspective, it sounded incredible. Noble, even. I had a feeling management had withheld the memo about the greater purpose of exterminating all non-humans—but something about this guy suggested that wouldn’t bother him either. “Is that supposed to make me feel better about you torturing me to death?” I said. “Because you might have a cure for some things, maybe in ten years?”

“Feel? No,” he said. “The subject’s feelings are irrelevant. The scientific possibilities are astounding. We’re going to save the world someday.”

“Well, good for you. I bet they’ll give you a medal or something.” I waited until he looked at me again. “Did any of you bastards ever consider
asking
us if we’d help you?”

More rapid blinking. “Subjects are—”

“I’m not a goddamned subject!” The shouting cost me more pain, but I didn’t care. “People volunteer for medical research all the time. Did it ever cross your mind that maybe we’d want you to save the world? That we’d give you all the samples you want, without the drugs and chains and cages? It’s our world, too.”

The doctor stared at me for a moment. Finally, one corner of his mouth lifted, just a touch. “Not for long,” he said.

I shuddered and forced myself to keep my mouth shut. Obviously, there was no reasoning with this guy, so I’d have to work on more productive things. Like figuring out how to get the hell away from him.

Dr. Romero reached for the middle shelf of the cart and produced a small blowtorch. “First test for subject’s rate of healing. Focus burn, inner thigh,” he said. “By the way…this is probably going to hurt more than the needle.”

C
HAPTER 35

I
must’ve passed out five or six times while Doctor Don’t-Give-A-Shit stuck me with needles, sliced and diced me, and generally caused as much unnecessary pain as possible. Eventually I woke up to a near-silent lab and no sign of my torturer.

The wall clock read close to ten. I knew it couldn’t be morning, because I’d watched the unending crawl of time for hours while the parade of pain marched on. It wouldn’t be long before they started the night’s entertainment. And Dr. Romero had informed me that he’d be here to make sure I watched.

If I was breaking out, it had to be now.