Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (74 page)

King stayed behind with Deuce. Ethan needed to rest his injured legs, but he refused to stay in the car. Our quartet rode an elevator up to the eighth floor. The building was well maintained, while showing signs of age—worn carpet,
stained chrome, peeling paint, and rubbed varnish. The elevator chugged along slowly, creaking its way from floor to floor, making me wonder if it would ever get all the way to eight. Like many other buildings on this side of West Hollywood, it was an old hotel converted into cheap flats—the only way many of them survived after the tourist industry went kaput.

Gage led the way down the hall, and I was eager to let him resume command. I preferred following orders. In that way, I supposed, I wasn’t unlike the two female Changelings, blindly following orders from their mysterious Overseer. Was that a Recombinant trait?

A television set blared through the door of a neighboring apartment, vibrating the floor with the sound of a car chase and flying bullets. My skin crawled. After being in one of my own, I could never think of those sorts of chases the same way again. Not without remembering the overwhelming fear, the sight of broken glass and blood, the burning brakes, and the ping of bullets off reinforced metal.

In front of Forney’s apartment door, Gage closed his eyes and let his senses loose. His nose wrinkled and his nostrils flared. His mouth twisted into a grimace. “There’s a body in there,” he said. He tried the doorknob, but it didn’t turn.

“Want me to get the door?” Noah asked.

Gage stepped aside. “Be my guest.”

Noah pressed his palm flat next to the brass knob. Wood crackled, metal squealed. The entire locking mechanism shot backward into the apartment, leaving a gaping hole the size of a fist, and the door swung open.

The air was hot and stuffy, closed up without ventilation. We followed the faint odor that had offended Gage into the one-room apartment. A single bed and two-seater sofa took up most of the space on one side of the room. A small refrigerator and two-burner hotplate served as the kitchen. Heavy blue curtains blocked out light from the room’s balcony doors. Old food had gone to seed on one corner of the cheap dining table, contributing to the funky odors. Clothing spilled out of a scarred wooden dresser, and more still from the mirror-door closet.

There was no body, though, which became more apparent as we moved into the center of the room. It had one other door, across from the closet.

“Bathroom,” I said.

Gage squared his shoulders and opened the door. I stayed in the middle of the room, uninterested in seeing another dead body (or human slipcover). I’d had my share, thank you very much. He pushed the door open halfway, reached in to turn on the light, and peeked inside. The odor became stronger. My stomach gurgled.

“It’s a man,” Gage said. “Another skin. I don’t know who.”

Ethan squeezed through, peering over Gage’s shoulder. He backed out quickly, followed by Gage. “Looks like the pyro who attacked us in the street earlier,” Ethan said.

Queen had been here in the last two hours. I shuddered, dread dragging cold fingers up my spine.

“Noah,” Gage said, “is that Ken Dawson?”

Gage and Ethan stepped out of the bathroom doorway, allowing Noah to go inside. He crouched down and poked at the
skin’s face with the end of a toilet brush. When he stood up, his face was dark, angry. “I’m almost positive it’s him,” he said.

“Queen used your old tutor to attack us?” Ethan asked. “She’s not leaving any loose ends, is she?”

“No, she’s not.”

“If she’s . . .” Gage paused, his nostrils flaring. “Do you guys smell—?”

The explosion sounded like a muffled shotgun report. Blazing air and smoke belched forth from the far wall, next to the outlet feeding power to the refrigerator. Flames erupted, sneaking up the wall on fast feet, bubbling paint and scorching wood, reaching orange and red tendrils to the ceiling.

I gaped. It wasn’t a large explosion. If Queen had meant to kill any of us with it, she had sorely misjudged her fuel source. We stared as a group.

“Anyone else a little underwhelmed?” Ethan asked.

“I guess you can’t win every time,” I said, taking a few steps closer to the small fire. My right hand reached for it. I concentrated, drawing the heat and flame away from the wall and into myself.

“Dahlia,” Gage said. “Wait!”

Too late. The instant the flames absorbed, my insides burned. I screamed and pulled away. The fire came at me anyway, scorching, scalding, like boiling water injected into my bloodstream. Like the chemicals in the warehouse fire, whatever sourced this fire was similarly tainted.

Arms circled me, holding me tight against a hot, muscled chest. I pulled, yelled, clawed to get away from the heat and the intense agony of being boiled alive from the inside out.
Tears spilled down my cheeks, sizzling hot, evaporating before they reached halfway.

I was lifted, carried away in strong arms, and taken to the cooler air of the hallway. My mouth was parched, too dry to produce any more screams. Sensations assaulted me from all sides, every angle, inside and out. Pain and heat and cold. Rough skin and a gentle voice. Soothing. Calming.

The pain receded, leaving behind only a memory of the initial agony. Every extremity trembled. Cold air whirled around me. I forced my eyes open and looked right at Ethan. He knelt in front of me creating the wind. I inhaled, forcing the air into my starving lungs. Familiar hands clutched me from behind. Noah. I pressed back; he tightened his hold.

“Stupid,” I said, shivering.

“It was a trap,” Gage said, somewhere on my left.

“Smart trap.”

“Maybe.”

I relaxed into Noah’s chest and let the others deal with the apartment fire. I just concentrated on breathing and getting my body temperature back to normal. Fine tremors ran up and down my legs. My insides felt numb, not quite there. The sensations were different from the warehouse poisoning—more concentrated.

My stomach twisted. I lurched out of Noah’s grip and vomited murky liquid onto the hallway carpet. I retched until I collapsed and my chest ached. Once again enveloped in the safety of Noah’s arms, I began to cry. Unashamed and exhausted, tears of loss and anger spilled in equal measure.

He held me and I sobbed it out, though I knew I should
stop; my body couldn’t afford to lose the moisture. Then I was aware of being picked up again and of forward movement. We were leaving. Voices spoke, but I didn’t listen. The sounds created no coherent words in my addled brain.

King’s voice, booming in the cavern of the parking garage, finally made it through. “What happened?” he asked.

“Booby trap,” Gage said. “Is she still out?”

She who? Me she?

“Yeah, she hasn’t even twitched.”

Oh, Deuce.

Noah deposited me on the front passenger seat. I relaxed into the soft leather, finally regaining my mental faculties. Outside the car, the four men stood in a circle, apparently unsure of their next step. Before they could reach their own conclusion, King’s phone rang, its shrill tone cutting across the lot. He pulled it out of his pocket.

“My, we’re impatient, aren’t we?” Queen asked, crackling over the speaker. “How’d you like my present, Dahlia?”

I hadn’t the wits to answer. “Fuck you, Queen,” Noah said for me.

She laughed, a frightening sound that set my teeth on edge. “Fuck me, dear Brother? My kinks go in different directions. However, I’ve done what you asked. Your precious Dr. Kinsey is now in a hospital.”

“Good.”

“Well played, I must say. But so far in this game, we’ve been busying ourselves with knights and rooks. Let’s see what happens when your queen is left unprotected.” The
final barb was punctuated with the familiar click of a finished call.

“Knights and rooks?” Noah asked.

“Chess pieces,” Gage replied. “Your queen is unprotected. Our queen.”

Dread blossomed in my chest, radiating outward like a thousand tiny needle pricks. “Teresa,” I said. Four heads swiveled toward me, wearing matching expressions of confusion and shock. “Our queen. The hospital, Gage. Teresa.”

Faster than I’d ever seen him move, Gage was in the driver’s seat and revving the engine. The others barely had time to climb into the backseat with the rolled-up Changeling before he peeled out of the garage.

Please, God, let me be wrong about this.

Prayers often go
unanswered, especially when you are praying to someone who tends to ignore your prayers on a regular basis.

We arrived to find City of Angels a flurry of activity. Police cars and a firetruck, plus a crowd of reporters and onlookers, swarmed the main parking lot. We hit a roadblock just before the entrance turnoff, so Gage pulled around to the next block. Safe from the onlookers. He parked, and we got out. The short drive had given me time enough to recover my leg strength, even though the trembling weakness remained in my arms and chest.

In the distance, four floors up, one of the hospital windows
was completely busted out. The majority of the rescue workers had gathered beneath the destruction. Patients’ rooms were on that floor. Hadn’t Ethan said Teresa was moved out of ICU the previous day? It was all so fuzzy.

With no patience for the police, Ethan swept me and Gage up inside a whirling vortex of wind and carried us into the air. I’d never flown with him like this, with nothing around me but the wind and sky, feet dangling over the ground with no net to catch me. I looked straight down. Noah, King, and the car shrank in size as they were left behind.

Spectators shouted and pointed. Police officers reached for their holstered weapons but then watched without drawing. We flew upward, toward the broken window. Through it, ducking low to miss any jagged edges of glass, right into a patient’s room.

A white-coated doctor and two uniformed police officers jumped back at our sudden appearance, their hair and clothes flapping in our wake. Ethan put us down and let the air dissipate. The nearest patient bed was empty, the mattress neatly folded over backward. The curtain surrounding the second bed whispered, slowly settling as the breeze died down.

As I adjusted to having both feet firmly on a solid surface, Gage strode toward the curtain. He ripped it back with one solid tug and yelled out in shock and rage.

Queen had, indeed, kept her word and deposited Abram Kinsey in a hospital bed. He lay there, on his back, still in his street clothes and makeshift bandages, safe now among hovering hospital personnel. On the bedside table was a vase of
flowers with a Mylar Get Well Soon balloon attached with a pink ribbon. Nestled among the flowers was a card, a name scrawled across the matching pink envelope: Teresa.

I fell to my knees, unable to breathe, as panic mingled with pure terror.

The opposite wall displayed a single word scratched onto the wallpaper in black charcoal. The chunk of charred wood used to write the message lay on the floor like a silent challenge. Five letters. One implicit meaning.

CHECK.

She’d captured our queen—a devastating move against our side.

Too bad she wasn’t smart enough to get her chess rules right.

Twenty-seven

Duality

E
than flew us back to the car, armed with confirmation from Dr. Shelby that Kinsey would survive. The bullet had missed all major arteries and organs, and the wound was free of infection. I relayed the information to the brothers as soon as we returned, trying to drum up some measure of happiness for them, but feeling only rage. I clenched my fist around the stick of burnt wood as I spoke. Noah’s relief was tempered by our collective anxiety, though, and he tried—he really tried—to be a comfort.

I didn’t want that; I wanted to be angry. Furious. At him and at Queen. At this human chess match we were caught in the middle of, with human lives as pawns and the winner allowed to live. Two sides striving for checkmate. A move I planned to make first.

“Why do that?” Gage asked for the sixth or seventh time since flying back from the hospital. He was trying to find sense in a senseless act, and it played on my high levels of frustration.

“Because of me,” I said, practically screaming the words.
“To make sure she has something personal to use against me, so I don’t renege on our deal.”

Gage stilled. He cast a confused look at Ethan, who dropped his gaze to the sidewalk. “What deal? What didn’t you tell me?”

More than you know.
I don’t know how I thought I could have hidden it.

“I’m their assignment, Gage,” I said. “Everything the two female Changelings have done is because of me: the slipcover bodies, the things the brothers have been manipulated into, the warehouse fire, and Teresa getting shot. All of it.”

A muscle twitched in Gage’s clenched jaw. His expression remained otherwise flat. “I still don’t—”

“To kill me, Gage, their assignment is to kill me. She”—I pointed at Deuce—“told me those were their orders. Period.”

“What was the deal you made?”

I shuffled my weight from foot to foot, hoping for a well-timed interruption. The cellular, though, remained quiet. “Just giving Deuce back wasn’t enough to get both Scotts, Gage. She gets me, too.”

He bristled. “Absolutely not.”

“This isn’t open for discussion now that she has Teresa. I know Queen has no qualms about killing, and I can’t risk the deaths of three people for my own life. I won’t.”

“We can come up with an alternative to this, Dal. We can do something.”

“No.” I shook my head hard—bad idea. Any chance I had of convincing Gage fled when I wobbled, overcome by dizziness, and almost fell. I caught myself on the edge of the car
before a rush of helping hands swooped in to save me. Again. I pushed away from the car and away from them. “Goddammit, you guys, I’m not going to break!”

Noah backed up a step, his eyes going wide. I surprised myself with the vehemence in my voice. I drew up to my full height—still several inches shorter than everyone, except Noah—and squared my shoulders.

“I got all of you into this,” I said to Gage. “I got Renee burned and Teresa shot and Marco killed.”