Mimics of Rune 02- Surrender (36 page)

The monitor blipped one-oh-nine before it dropped to one-oh-eight and one-oh-seven a second later.

Simone bumped him again. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Someone who at least cares,” Cael said.
Fucking idiots.
He raced back to the sink and repeated his activities with a towel he grabbed from the chair.

“I’m a geneticist, not a doctor, you know.” Jackie’s voice dripped disdain.

Draping another layer of cold cloth across Lily brought her temperature down to one-oh-six.

Cael, too, knew about the temperature threshold. Anything above one hundred ten could wipe out their genetic makeup, though it wouldn’t affect Lily’s health. It would simply freeze her in whatever form she’d taken at the time.

“There!” Jackie’s excited call had Cael’s heart stopping and nausea taking hold of his stomach.

Oh, god, no. Please don’t work.

“It’s in,” Jackie said. “I guess you were right, Randall. We’ll know for sure by end of day tomorrow.”

The grin upon Roy’s face brought bile up Cael’s throat.

Lily. What have you done?

29

Once Lily’s vitals regulated, Roy told Kevin to secure the ‘stowaway’, and he’d deal with it when he arrived. Cael raced down the hallway, slipped into Lily’s room and pressed for complete privacy.

James and Maggie jumped from their spots on the couch.

“Roy’s on his way with Lily, and he’s expecting to take someone back with him.” Cael had a momentary image of the two of them kissing, though he figured his overactive imagination had gotten the best of him, and their heads had just been pressed together over the laptop they studied
.

“I’ll—” Maggie started.

“I’ll go,” James said. “I’ll be you, Cael. Roy will expect you more than anyone since he’s already mentioned you in Lily’s life.”

Cael nodded. “Good idea, because I think we have a problem.”

Maggie and James both moved in closer. Cael relayed what had occurred in the makeshift operating room.

“The little shit.” Maggie stormed off toward the kitchen and back. “If it worked, he’s won.”

“Which is why we need to make sure he thinks it didn’t work,” Cael said.

Maggie’s eyes widened. “You want me to Mimic Lily tomorrow?” Her lips curved. “That’s brilliant. If it did work, but he thinks it didn’t work, he won’t be able to blend with her, and that’s the end of Roy as we know him.” She clapped once, a loud striking sound. “Why didn’t we just do that in the first place?”

“Because …” James stepped forward. “… if he hadn’t done all the tests locally, he’d have known you weren’t Lily. Now, all we need to do is convince him you
are
Lily … for one day. If he tries to blend with you, it’ll fail, and if he doesn’t blend, he’ll revert to eighteen and human.” James pumped his fist.

“Gone will be The Chameleon.” Cael tried for a smile, though lingering memories of Lily’s torture plagued him.
If it worked, Lily will be responsible for a baby she didn’t want. One bad situation to another.
“They’ll be here any minute.”

“Then her fabulous puppy shall return.” Maggie closed her eyes and before Cael could comment, began her change.

James held out his wrists. “Better secure me, then.” He shimmered into Cael’s form as he sat.

• • •

As the door slid open, Simone and Jackie rolled in a bed that carried Lily’s prone form. They pushed forward until the entire contraption fit inside the room, and they both faced Cael, still in Kevin’s form.

“Randall says you can lay her in her bed,” Jackie said.

“Just please be really careful,” Simone added. “She’s … delicate.”

Cael slid his arms under Lily’s lifeless form, lifted her with ease and strode off toward the bedroom.

The main room door opened again.

“Well, well. We have a friend, huh?” Roy’s voice carried through the space.

As Cael laid Lily down, Simone entered behind him. “I need you to stay with her,” she said.

“Why?” Her comment added an extra layer of worry to Cael.

She wrung her hands. “Because Randall wants me to run more tests for him, and I can’t stay here to monitor her.”

“Did you last time?”

Simone shook her head. “No. We knew it had failed then. We couldn’t do anymore until today. This time, though … well, it might have worked. But someone needs to be at her side until she wakes up. It’s the being asleep part that worries me.”

Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about, too.
“Fine, I’ll stay.” Cael spit the words as if the activity would be a huge chore for him.

Simone reached out and touched his arm. “Thank you. I’m a little—no, never mind.”

“You’re a little what?”

Straightening, Simone shook her head. “Nothing.” She walked away.

With a check on Lily’s breathing, Cael returned to the center room, where James still sat in the chair, tied up.

Roy paced, tapping his chin. “What to do, what to do, what to do. Seems a shame to waste a good life, right, Cael?” Speaking to James-as-Cael, but meeting the real Cael’s gaze, Roy’s eyes narrowed.

Does he suspect I’m not Kevin? That James isn’t really me? What does he know, and what can he see?

“It’s funny that you’ve been searching for me for so long, and now I have you all tied up with a little bow. How the tables have turned.” A grin built on Roy’s face as he turned back to the disguised James. “I’ll have to make use of that. Too bad for you … you didn’t make a move on your darling sooner. Tsk. Tsk. She’ll make a fabulous life partner.”

Cael stood to the side, a few feet from where Roy talked to James. Both Simone and Jackie had slipped out at Roy’s nod.

Once the panel slid back into place, Roy engaged the privacy, grabbed a chair, and straddled it in front of where James sat. “You wished to talk to me before … and now that you … or I should say
Charley
has given me what I wanted, I might be willing to answer a few questions. What would you like to know?”

“Did you hurt Lily?” James asked in Cael’s voice.

Roy shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

We’ll see about that.
Her soaring temperatures and continued state of sleep remained a cause for concern.

“Lily agreed, in full, to a little procedure. She’ll be fine in no time. She always is.”

“What is this place?” James asked.

The curved lips and full grin suggested the question hit Roy’s interest. “This is a facility run by the government that trains … ah … the otherworldly. Not just you and me, of course. We aren’t the only type of people out there, you know.”

“Lily wouldn’t have agreed to come here.”

“Well, that’s enough chatter. Kevin, let’s have Mr. Aldridge here secured in proper restraints until after our departure.” Roy offered another giant smile as he stood. “Oh, and I’ll send Simone or Jackie every thirty minutes for updates on Lily’s status. Don’t leave this room, and don’t let anyone in until I get back.”

“I’ll see to it,” Cael said in Kevin’s voice.

Roy offered a single nod, disengaged the privacy and stepped through the door. He came back a second later. “Oh, and now that I have everything I need … no matter what … we’re leaving in two hours. Be ready.”

Cael gave Roy a nod before the door closed, and he slammed his fist against the button, breaking it in two.

“He’s one step ahead again, isn’t he?” James asked. “And can you release my pulse points so I can shift out of these ropes?”

“We need to get Lily out of here … now.” Even as Cael said it, he unwound James.

The shimmer in Cael’s peripheral vision told him Maggie started her return. “I guess that means I need to authorize Matthew’s boat and get Leigh. And then I get to be Lily,” she said.

“You can’t stay here alone,” James said. “I’ll make sure he brings me along as Cael, too.”

Maggie nodded to the real Cael. “Then the two of us will meet you back home.”

“What if he won’t take you, James?” Cael looked to the other room where Lily still lay motionless upon the bed. “Kevin’s supposed to be ‘free’ tomorrow. You know he won’t want me around. What if Roy decides to do something else?”

James gave Cael a wry smile. “We’ll see what happens when it happens.”

• • •

With James able to re-secure himself at any moment, and Maggie off to find Leigh and deal with the boat, Cael sat at Lily’s side.

Her chest rose and fell in a rhythm as natural as the ocean’s waves outside her window. Cael tucked himself as close to her as possible and laid a hand on her stomach, withdrawing when a small moan left her lips.

That she made any sound at all brought him a small bit of happiness—a moment overshadowed by her lingering unconsciousness.

At a knock on the outer door, Cael-as-Kevin rose. James moved back to the chair in the baby room and shifted back into Cael’s form.

“Come in.” Cael extracted water bottles from the fridge, figuring one of Roy’s minions had returned early.

Herri, if he remembered correctly, entered, her hands at her waist, twisting together. “Hi, I’m Dr. Ontawabe. I’m just here to check on Lily.”

Lily had seemed complimentary of Herri to the point she’d found a way to trust her. Cael decided to do the same.
Maybe she can tell me everything’s going to be all right.

“May I?” She held a hand, palm up, toward where Lily lay.

“Yes, please.” Cael followed the doctor into the room.

Herri sat on the edge of the bed, raised Lily’s lifeless hand up from the surface and pressed fingers to her pulse. With her eyes closed, she turned her head back and forth as if on a pendulum, in time with the second hand on Cael’s watch.

Thoughtful eyes opened back up. “She’s more than asleep. Her pulse is really slow, but it’s steady. That’s more indicative of … a person like her being forced into a coma-like state.”

Cael stuffed his hands in his pockets.
A person like her. A not-fully-human person.

The doctor tilted her head. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you? It concerns me because she wasn’t expected to have any additional biological procedures done until the day after tomorrow.”

The day after her birthday.

“How much do you know about Lily? And who she is?” Cael asked.

The slight purse of the doctor’s lips suggested that she might have more to say.

If Lily trusted her, I will, too.
“Doc?”

Her eyes flitted back up. “Yes?”

“You know that whole doctor patient confidentiality?”

“Yes.”

“Can we count on that between us?” Cael pointed to himself, to Lily and back.

With a slight straightening of her shoulders, she said, “Yes, I believe we can. Tell me your name, though, so we can be on more familiar terms.”

“Cael.”

“Cael, please call me Herri.”

With a nod, he breathed deeply and forced his eye color to shift from Kevin’s to his own natural purple, added a couple inches to his height and tugged at his jeans to drop the hems back to his shoes.

“Ah, so you’re a Mimic, too?”

Using his own voice, a deeper and more resolute tone, he said, “Yes. And I’m worried about Lily.”

“Tell me what happened.” She hurried to the built in shelves and cabinets, producing a stethoscope from within.

“Let’s just say, Lily underwent a procedure that may or may not have worked. However, her temperature reached a hundred and eight, and she’s been out since.”

“Go on.” Herri stretched Lily’s collar down, pressed the silver circle to her chest and closed her eyes again.

Cael stayed silent.

“Keep going. I can count while you talk.”

He drew closer into the room. “She’s fragile. She’s like this glass box I’m expecting to break at any moment.”

“I think she’s stronger than you think.”

“She’s not.”

A small laugh burst from the doctor as she repositioned the end of the scope. “But she’s still able to shift when—”

Cael shook his head. “She’s not pregnant.”
Or wasn’t.

“I know that.” Her tone came out flat and serious. “Pregnancy wasn’t what I was testing for. I actually thought she’d already chosen to become human. To blend as you all call it. Permanently.”

He caught the time. “Go into the bathroom, please.”

“What?” she asked even as she rose and headed in that direction.

Cael changed back into Kevin’s form as the door to Lily’s room swished open, and Jackie walked in.

“She dead yet?” Jackie asked in as non-interested a manner as possible.

The effort it took not to punch her burned in Cael’s gut. “Still breathing,” he said, once again in Kevin’s voice.

“Good.” With that, she left.

Cael let out a breath as he held open the bathroom door. “I’m really sorry, doc.”

Herri narrowed her eyes but didn’t ask about the interruption. She returned to Lily and touched all the way down to her abdomen until she lifted her shirt. “Well. Hmmm ….”

Due to the closeness to Lily’s birthday, none of her wounds had healed on their own, nor had she been able to let them heal so she could remove them. “Laparoscopic surgery? For what? None of that is in the system and, here,
everything
is recorded. It’s mandatory.”

Cael raised an eyebrow. “It’s a little complicated. Someone had an ulterior motive, and I believe they went around the system some.”

Herri lifted Lily’s shirt to her breasts. “That’s not possible here.” Her tone ratcheted up a notch. “We have strict rules because of the types of people we work with. Strict ones. Immensely strict. No one goes outside of it.”

Well, Roy does what he wants; that’s damned clear.

“What were they testing?” She twisted toward Cael, though her fingers ran across Lily’s stomach.

“Artificial insemination.” Bile rose as he said the words. “I think the purpose had more to do—everything to do rather—with her lineage.”

Herri’s brows narrowed. Her lips squished together. If ever a doctor showed her anger, without letting the patient in, Cael saw it in her expression.

“The ultimate purpose of this center is the care of supernatural beings. Even to help those who’ve made their final transition. To start, someone has to teach them when their mother’s realize what’s going on and freak out. Mimics are just a small part of the overall, but they are my entire focus. From birth through transition.” Her hands crossed over her chest. “When Lily came to me, I had standard paperwork. The first thing I test is lineage. But as soon as I saw her, I knew something was different.”