FoM02 Trammel (21 page)

They were a mess of oil and drying come, and Lindsay’s scattered and rumpled clothes, but Lindsay didn’t want to deal with any of it. He wanted to know that Noah was healthy and safe, and he wanted to rest.

Noah didn’t protest. He snuggled down in the blankets and was asleep in seconds. Lindsay watched him sleep and wondered how often Dane did the same when he was the one who slept.

Dane.

Being with Noah didn’t feel like a betrayal, but it filled Lindsay with a longing for his first lover, and he thought about what Dane had said before they went to find Zoey. Dane loved him. Lindsay hadn’t had a chance to unravel the mystery of what that meant; he hadn’t had a chance to stop and think about how
he
felt about Dane. Not until now.

He found Noah’s scarred left hand and brought it up to his lips. Noah’s love for his wife had given Lindsay his first glimpse what real love looked like for other people, had given him something against

which to measure his feelings for Dane.
I don’t want to be the reason you feel the way I do.
Noah knew, saw it before Lindsay knew what to call it, and that made everything vivid and real.

They would find Dane, get him back from Moore, and Lindsay would tell him what he deserved to hear. Lindsay didn’t let himself feel anything but certain he’d succeed. He had to. He wasn’t going to lose Dane again. Not now. Not when he finally understood.

Eventually, soothed by Noah’s slow, unlabored breathing and the memory of Dane’s declaration, Lindsay drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Ten

They were offloaded in the dark, under a cloudy sky that made it impossible for Dane to see the stars.

He was, as far as he could tell, nowhere. His instincts were crippled, and he had nothing to go on but a runway and a cluster of gray buildings that could have been anywhere on earth. The wind blew and Dane turned his face into it, but he heard nothing. Maybe he couldn’t hear without his magic.

He and Jonas—in their cages—were loaded onto flatbed carts and accompanied into one of the buildings by a dozen soldiers and two white-coated technicians. When Dane squinted, he could see the nametag of the one who came close to inspect him. The man’s round face twisted with distaste. Dane knew he looked bad, but there was no need to be rude about it.

“Sorry I haven’t shaved,” he said, and was rewarded by the guy nearly pissing himself in terror and falling over his own feet to get back from the cage. “I asked, but these new airlines don’t even serve meals, much less provide razors.”

“Shut up.” One of the soldiers hit the cage with a baton and made the bars ring. Dane wanted nothing more than to reach through the bars and rip the man’s throat out, just to watch the others’ faces. He knew better, though. He was suffering enough already. If he made things worse for himself... Well, they could let him out of the cage right now and he still wouldn’t make it out of there alive.

Dane settled for flashing the technician a grin and hunkering down in the middle of the cage. Too close to the bars and it would be easy for someone to entertain themselves by prodding him with a charged baton. Behind him, he could hear them discussing Jonas. He felt half-deaf without his magical senses, but he could make out the conversation.

Damn right Jonas was “non-functional”. As things stood, Dane was going to have to leave him behind in order to escape and that was troubling him.

Another reason to hate Moore—worrying about the animal he’d spent the last century looking forward to killing. But he wasn’t letting Moore have a single piece of mageflesh, and that included Jonas.

The guards and technicians installed them in a lab, literally installed them by sliding their cages into place against a wall, side by side and some feet off the ground. It was dim, only a few small lights on where the technicians were working, but Dane could feel that the room was vast, the way sound faded into it and was gone. He was sure there were living things in the room other than the staff. When he tuned out the snuffle and whine of Jonas’s breathing, there were faint organic sounds.

“We need to put them out.” The words were spoken low, but Dane’s head whipped around so fast he wanted to whimper in protest. “Blow darts or...”

“I’ll get the stick.” That was a female technician, one who seemed to be in charge. She looked like a cheerleader, but Dane could make out the ugly curl of her smile when she turned toward him. Moore was crazy for ugly, inside or out.

Dane did his best to make it inconvenient for them to tranquilize him, but the back of his cage punched forward and crushed him into immobility against the bars. His body was screaming with pain and yet he still felt the single point of
hurt
as a thick needle sank into his thigh. Fire spread through his leg and left numbness behind. By the time it climbed up his torso, his consciousness was fading into black.

The black was a void in which he was suspended, but he knew time was passing. It was like he was awake in a dark room, staring into the lightlessness. They were doing things to his body, things he didn’t want done, but he couldn’t wake up. He heard howling and wondered if it was his own voice. The blackness faded into sleep and he dreamed of being in his own bed.

“Time to wake up.” A baton rang off the cage bars, jerking Dane back into consciousness. Waking made him suck in air, and he regretted it immediately. He stank. Jonas stank. Being doused in chemical cleaner hadn’t done much for either of them.

“Am I late for school, Mom?” Moving made his muscles shriek with resentment. His eyes were open, but everything was dim. He hoped it was the lighting and not his brain.

“You have visitors today.” It was the cheerleader again. Women had always been trouble, in Dane’s experience. They had different priorities than men, and their hate lasted for generations as they sculpted their children into weapons. They were dangerous. This one tapped her baton on the bars and smiled sweetly at Dane. “Hungry?”

Starving. The word was enough to make Dane’s stomach rumble, and she laughed, shaking her head so that her hair flicked across her shoulders.

“It’s breakfast time in two minutes.” She slipped the baton between the bars and tapped his cheek with it. “I’ll make sure you have your share.”

As she turned and walked away, the room grew brighter like a sunrise, but the light was watery and artificial. Dane could see better by the moment, and he knelt up, his shoulders against the top of his cage, looking around for the first time. His cage and Jonas’s were the only ones in the immediate vicinity, at one end of the room with technical equipment that he couldn’t identify and rows of desks with computer screens suspended in front of them. That made it harder to see, but if he pressed his face to the bars and looked out on an angle with his one good eye, he could get a sense of the room.

It was immense, like a warehouse. Fans hung from the high ceiling and turned slowly to stir the cold air. There were more cages, row on row, back to back, stacked three high. Dane watched a pair of technicians driving a mobile scaffolding cart into place so that they could see into each level of cages.

Above the hum of the circulating system and the voices of Moore’s people getting to work, he could hear soft sounds, animal sounds. There was the rumble of large doors opening and the hum of a small vehicle coming through, just before it was drowned out in a chorus of howling. None of the people Dane could see turned to look for the source of the noise, but it made the hair on the back of Dane’s neck stand up.

The echo in the room and Dane’s broken senses made it hard for him to understand. Awareness dawned slowly as a large clock over the lab ticked to read six o’clock. Breakfast. Feeding time. The howls—half-human, half-animal—came from the rows of cages. The flatbed cart brought bins of feed, and the technicians got to the business of feeding the animals, directed by the scientists.

“Here we are.” That was his scientist. His. Dane pushed the concept away as hard as he could. She carried two steel trays that seemed heavy, and she looked quite pleased. “You need to start eating well.

None of that kibble for you.”

“McDonalds?” It was hard to stay flippant in the face of the horror that was sinking in.

“I wouldn’t feed my dog that crap,” she said, opening a narrow door at the bottom of Dane’s cage.

“Well, I mean my other dog.”

The opening was too small for Dane to get anything but a hand through. She slid a tray in, forcing him to shuffle back, and locked it in place, then did the same with the second. Raw chicken on one, sprinkled with some sort of blue gritty substance, fruits and vegetables on the other.

“I can’t eat this,” he said. “Not with these teeth.” It was true, and he didn’t want to eat it, either.

“Start on your veggies.” She climbed up a step stool beside him and he could read her nametag. Dr.

Greer Fallon, DVM. A veterinarian. “Dr. Moore will come by to sort you out. She’s been away, or I wouldn’t have left you like this.” She pulled a steel hose down and locked it into place in the side of the cage. Water ran out of it in a steady trickle, disappearing into a drain in the bottom of the cage.

“Here’s that mash, Greer.” A technician came over, lugging a bucket of what looked like oatmeal and raw meat. “How can you stand the smell?”

“That smells yummy.” Greer hopped off the stool. “I stand it because I don’t have human prejudices.

Get me the feeding tube for Jonas and stop whining. I want to be done with this and have him cleaned up before Dr. Moore arrives. Eat up, Dane.” She smacked the front of Dane’s cage with the flat of her hand on the way past.

Dane backed up into a corner, but he realized by the slant and shape of it that he was probably sitting in what was supposed to be his toilet. He’d been in prison and it had never been this bad. He couldn’t stand up, could barely lie down. By the looks of things, they planned to keep him for a very long time.

His stomach growled again. He picked up a piece of apple and sniffed it. He couldn’t tell shit like this.

There wasn’t anything to do, so he started eating. Beside him, he could hear the soft rise and fall of the

veterinarian’s voice as she stuck a tube down Jonas’s throat and started force-feeding him. She sounded like a worried nanny. This was hell.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” Speak of the devil. Dane dropped the apple and got ready to be as uncooperative as possible.

Moore came into his line of sight from the far side of the lab, followed by an entourage of white-coated minions. She looked sleek and lovely, her ruddy hair and tall black boots gleaming under the white lights. Queen of the damned. She wore her lab coat like royal robes. Behind her, the girl drifted like a ghost, looking drained. In contrast, the weather mage who’d bested Cyrus at Wildwood radiated a light all her own, like the sun was under her skin. It would make her easier to find when he hunted her down.

“Dr. Moore. Thank you for coming.” That was Greer, stepping away from forcing breakfast down Jonas and hurrying to meet her. “Have you received the latest numbers?”

“I have, Dr. Fallon.” Moore gave her a tight smile. “Progress seems to be getting away from us.”

“We’ve reduced the transplant ratios, yes. The manifestation mortalities were rising too quickly.”

Greer clasped her hands behind her back and joined Moore on her slow parade across the room. “The new cell batches are far superior, thanks to our friends here.”

“It’s good to see them both looking well. But you wanted some adjustments?” Moore’s smile was nothing less than demonic as she caught Dane watching her.

“For this one, at least.” Greer stopped at Dane’s cage and patted the bars fondly. “He’s been running a fever. I’m afraid we collared him too early. Also, I’d like to see his teeth returned to a more feral state.

He’ll thrive if I can put him on a raw diet.”

“And the other?” Moore glanced over at Jonas’s limp form.

“He’s in good health, for his condition,” Greer said, frowning. “We’re keeping him sedated, and it’s safer if we tube-feed him. You were correct about his contributions. We should cultivate a hybrid of these two to maintain for long-term supplies. It’s a pity the cell cultures don’t maintain efficiency in a production matrix.”

“Magic can’t be nurtured that way.” Lourdes was barely audible. She moved past Moore, like she was sleepwalking, and stopped in front of Jonas’s cage.

“Yet.” The weather mage looked contemptuous. “It’ll come.”

Moore took a clipboard from Greer and signed several places on a form. “Sedate him, and we’ll take care of that healing.”

“Of course.”

Dane caught movement off to the side. He already knew where “the stick” was. It was a rod that held a hypodermic needle in the end and allowed them to inject him without reaching into the cage. He shifted into the back corner next to Jonas, where there was too little room between the cages for them to reach him.

“You know what you need to do,” Greer said, coming over to the cage with the stick in her hand. The needle on it was a good two inches long and thick as hell. “You need to get better and you need those nice teeth so you can eat your dinner. When you’re asleep, Dr. Moore will let you heal. Okay?” She gave him a bright smile as she slid the stick through the bars.

Dane watched the needle close in, watched her tense in anticipation of ramming it into him. He grabbed it out of her hands, snapped it, and lunged at her with what was left. He would have had her too, except that Moore snatched her back and away from him.

“You can’t treat them like they’re human,” Moore said icily. “And you can’t treat them like they’re animals. They’re born rabid. Get me another injector.”

“You need to stop that,” Greer said to him, looking wounded. He could see her pulse fluttering in her neck, and he wanted to bite it out and swallow it while it was still twitching. “I’m trying to make you feel better.”

“Here, Dr. Moore.” That was the grumbling assistant who had brought Jonas’s slop. He had a second stick that he was fitting with another syringe.

“I’ll do it.” Lourdes’s voice was faint, but her eyes—fixed on Dane—were brighter than he had ever seen. She dropped her gaze as she turned, her body language soft and submissive. “Please?” She held her hand out for the stick.