Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (15 page)

“I expected you to be carrying a balloon,” she said to Dr. Forrester one day.

“I beg your pardon? Is that something you see under the influence of the hex?”

“It was Flannery’s nightmare, but I guess it’s mine now.”

“Interesting.” Dr. Forrester picked up her tablet and typed a note.

“If you wear a pinafore, your head will come off,” Thea said.

“Yes,” Dr. Forrester said in a soothing tone. “I’m sure you’re right.”

Thea narrowed her eyes at the doctor. “Don’t you feel guilty?”

Dr. Forrester set the tablet down and said, “For what?”

“You know for what. Look at me. What’s my blood pressure like these days, doc?”

“Thea, you’re performing an important—and necessary—service. We’re learning how to protect people from something very dangerous.”

“Something dangerous that
you created
!” Thea welcomed the anger. It wasn’t like the wrath she sometimes felt thanks to the hex. This was real. It gave her focus.

“Hiding from research is never the answer,” Dr. Forrester said. “If we Americans hadn’t developed nuclear weapons, one of our enemies would have gotten them first.”

“Hexing House has no enemies. There is nobody else who invents hexes.” Thea wondered, as she said this, whether it was true. She’d never heard of another colony of furies. But it would be strange if they were the only one. As far as she knew, they didn’t do international jobs. Surely someone was hexing the sinners of Europe and Asia?

But by then Dr. Forrester had hooked her up to a machine, and was going into the metal chamber. So much for focus.

Thea lost count of how many days she’d been at the lab after six, but she thought she must have been there at least twice that, maybe more. Dr. Forrester seemed frustrated. Whatever she was hoping would come out of these experiments, she didn’t seem any closer to getting it. The trials became more frequent, and the iterations of Hex Nine nastier.

If it went on much longer, Thea was afraid her mind would snap completely. She needed to break out of there before she got too weak, physically and mentally, to go anywhere.

She decided that learning to resist Hex Nine wasn’t enough. She needed to figure out how to reflect it.

And so she focused on that, each time Dr. Forrester inflicted it. Thea could sense the hex, sulfur and smoke, clinging to her. What she needed to do was take it off and find a way to store it. If she could somehow keep it in her sights, hold it without it evaporating, she would be able to bounce it back when someone else got within range.

Each time the hex came at her, Thea mentally conjured up one of the hex boxes. Not just how it looked, but how it felt, opening it, sensing the hex within, controlled, contained.

An enchanted box
, Elon had told her.
We only have an enchanter in the colony once every couple of generations or so
.

Okay,
Thea thought,
so it’s rare. But it’s
possible
. If they can make something that will hold a hex, then a hex is holdable. And I have powers. I can learn to hold it.

Thea knew that wasn’t necessarily true, that her powers probably didn’t run deep enough. But it was her best hope of escaping, short of finding a way to murder Dr. Forrester without the security guards noticing.

Not that she hadn’t considered doing just that. Once when the doctor was leaning over her, attaching something, Thea found herself looking directly at the other woman’s throat.  She could open it up with her claws before Dr. Forrester even had a chance to scream.

Only half-lucid that day, Thea reached up without thinking and touched the pulse in Dr. Forrester’s neck. It felt dry and hot, like the doctor had a fever. And then everything shifted.

Thea was in a different hospital room, this time in a chair. She was holding the hand of a small boy with no hair, singing to him. His eyes were sunken and ringed in dark smudges, his face so thin that his teeth stuck out. Thea was afraid the delicate hand she held would break if she put any pressure on it at all. The sight of him hurt her chest.

“They’re really going to make me better, Mommy?” the boy asked.

“They will, sweetheart,” Thea promised with Dr. Forrester’s voice. “You just need to hang in there a little bit longer. As soon as Mommy promises to help them with something, they’re going to help us back.”

Thea came back to herself, breathing heavily, heart beating wildly. Dr. Forrester was a few feet away now, looking at her with a mix of outrage and terror.

“I’ll have you put back in the restraints,” she warned.

Thea held up her hand, showing her smooth fingertips. “No claws,” she said. “They promised to cure your son. That’s why you’re working here.”

Dr. Forrester’s face closed. “That’s not your business.”

“They won’t do it,” Thea said. “They lie to get what they want. You should know that.”

For a second, Dr. Forrester’s professional mask fell away again, and she gave Thea a sad, tired smile. “They’ve already done it,” she said. “And I won’t let him get sick again. No matter the cost.”

It was selfish of the doctor, and short-sighted. But Thea had seen that frail little boy. Could she say for sure that she wouldn’t do the same, if she was offered hope long after she’d already given it up? She didn’t know, but she didn’t like the idea of killing Dr. Forrester quite so much after that, either.

So Thea kept concentrating on her imagined box. As soon as she sensed the hex, she would try to pull it inside. Sometimes she thought she almost had it, but the hex would always win, breaking free of her grip and settling over her, calling down the wasps and the headless girl and the hyenas.

Until one day, practice made perfect.

Dr. Forrester attached the disks to Thea’s forehead and hooked her up to all the machines, then went into the metal chamber. As usual, Thea could see the doctor’s head through the window. And the box in her mind.

When the hex came at her, Thea inhaled deeply. She sensed it, felt it.

She held it.

There were no hallucinations. There wasn’t even a struggle. Somehow, finally, Thea had mastered Hex Nine.

When Dr. Forrester came back out of the chamber, Thea waited. She had to be close. The whole thing was useless, otherwise. She waited until Dr. Forrester was bent over her, removing the disks.

And then she sent the hex back at her.

Dr. Forrester didn’t rant and rave. This version of the hex was strong, maybe the strongest yet. Dr. Forrester, a human, couldn’t handle it even long enough for it to have its desired effect. She simply collapsed.

Thea snatched at her as she fell, getting a firm hold on the doctor’s elbow and yanking her down onto the bed. They were piled on top of one another, and the angles were awkward, but eventually Thea managed to get the key.

Dr. Forrester groaned a little when Thea pushed her to the floor. So she was alive, at least. Thea got herself out of the cuffs quickly. She grabbed Dr. Forrester’s lab coat, clawed slits into the back for her wings, and yanked it on. It wouldn’t fool anyone for long, but it might, from a distance or if a security guard caught her walking down a hall out of the corner of his eye, look normal enough for him not to give her a second glance.

Thea couldn’t believe her luck had held out as long as it had, and didn’t count on it holding out any longer. She hurried from the room before Dr. Forrester could wake up.

She crept as quietly as she could through one hall, then another. The building she was in didn’t seem very big—at least, not hospital big—and she didn’t hear anybody else in the basement. There were thumps of footsteps and voices above her.

Thea found a staircase and hesitated. The smart move would be to get the hell out of there, preferably quietly and before Dr. Forrester regained consciousness. And if that couldn’t be done, to fight her way out. She had claws and talons, after all, and Dr. Forrester had said most of the staff was human.

But if Thea had been experimented on here, then Flannery probably had been, too. She couldn’t leave without looking around for some sign of her.

There were two storage closets and four other rooms in the basement. Of those, one was locked, and another was a patient room like Thea’s, but empty. Thea was back in the hallway, on her way to the third room, when she heard Dr. Forrester’s voice, loud and close. On the staircase, Thea thought. She couldn’t make out the words but she noted, with no small amount of satisfaction, that the good doctor sounded awfully pissed off.

There were answering shouts from above, then footsteps on the stairs, first going up, then coming down. More than one person. Thea was closer to the third door now. She might not make it to the last room she’d been in. There was no time to dither. Ignoring the protests of her bad leg, she darted to the door of the third room and turned the handle, praying it was unlocked.

It was.

Thea closed the door as softly as she could and leaned against the wall, where she would be behind the door if somebody opened it. She breathed slowly, silently.

But someone else was in the room, taking no trouble to breathe quietly. In fact, they sounded like they were snoring.

The overhead lights were off, and Thea didn’t dare turn them on for fear of calling attention to herself. The ground level window looked out onto a dull lawn on a rainy day. But as Thea’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, she could see somebody on the bed. She stepped forward, thanking the Lord for the silent feet of a fury, a talent she just seemed to have grown with her blood and her wings.

She caught her breath at the sight of golden yellow hair on the pillow. Thea pulled back the sheet and rolled the sleeping form gently over to face her.

“Flannery!”

Flannery blinked slowly awake, but there was no recognition in her eyes. Thea supposed that was understandable. She’d changed quite a bit since they’d last seen one another.

“It’s okay,” Thea whispered. “It’s me.”

“Thea? You’re one of them. When—”

“Shh. It’s okay,” Thea said again. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“But I can’t…” Flannery rubbed her temples, and Thea was glad to see she wasn’t cuffed or restrained. “I’m not supposed to…”

“I’ll help you. I’m going to take you home.”

“Home.”

While she disconnected the various bands and wires that connected Flannery to her machines, Thea kept saying soothing things about the farm, Aunt Bridget, Pete, trying to rouse her cousin. She looked like she’d gone through the same experiments Thea had for ten times as long, which was probably exactly the case, and Thea wondered if the real Flannery was even in there anymore.

But eventually Flannery seemed to get it. “Push the blue button.” She raised a shaky hand and pointed. “That one there, on the big machine. That’s the one they hit when the test is over, to send the data to their computers. If you hit it the system won’t know you interrupted a test in the middle and there won’t be an alarm.”

“Good idea,” Thea said. “I’m glad you’re thinking straight.”

Flannery nodded at the neck band in Thea’s hand. “Once I’m disconnected from that, it’s easier to think.” She sat up, swayed, then leaned against the wall. “I need a minute before I can walk, Dora.”

Thea’s throat closed at the nickname, almost forgotten, from when they were small. Dora, short for Theadora, and Flora, not really short for Flannery, but close enough for someone who hated her name. They used to pretend to be twin sisters, until the sibling rivalry became a little too real.

“That’s okay.” Thea managed to speak without her voice cracking. “You’ll be resting for real in your own bed soon.”

“How’s my mother? How’s Pete?”

And just like that, old affection gave way to old resentment. In conversation with Thea, Flannery always referred to Aunt Bridget as
my mother
. Never
Mama
, which was what she called her, or just plain
Mom
.
My mother
. Thea was surprised she hadn’t said
my Pete
while she was at it.

She scolded herself for her pettiness and said, “Your mother is worried sick, of course. And not just about you. They arrested Pete.”

For the first time since she’d woken up, Flannery showed some emotion: first shock, then anger. “Why would they arrest Pete? They prom— What evidence did they have?”

“Blood in his car. Yours.” Thea started to pull Flannery up. “Come on, I’ll carry you. I know you’re sick, but we don’t have any time. If we’re lucky, they think I got out and they’re looking outside for me right now, but it won’t be long before someone comes back down here.”

“No,” Flannery agreed. “It won’t.”

As if on cue, footsteps and voices sounded in the hall outside. 

Thea stared at her cousin.

“I’m afraid I lied about what that blue button does,” Flannery said. “I really am sorry, but I had to call them. You’ll get me fired.”

“Fired?”

The door swung open and two security guards came in, Dr. Forrester at their heels.

Everything happened fast after that.

Thea flew to the other side of the room as the security guards advanced on her.

“Flannery!”

But Dr. Forrester was already ushering Flannery out of the room. Flannery shot Thea one look that seemed genuinely guilty, and then she was gone.

On the bright side, that left only two for Thea to fight. One of the guards had a baton, and the other what looked like a small taser. She protracted her claws as they came at her, one on each side.

No guns meant they didn’t want to hurt her too badly. Of course. She was the only hex resistant fury they had. That was an advantage she could exploit.

The one with the baton was saying something,  but Thea was focused on the one with the taser. She could sense his virtues. Honor. Compassion.

He wouldn’t like hurting a woman.

Thea moved forward, deliberately swiping wide with her claws, allowing the guard to get a jab in with the taser. She jumped back in a split second, but it was long enough for her cry of pain to be mostly real as she collapsed to the floor. She hung her head and wailed.

The taser-guard, exactly as she’d foreseen, got on his knees in front of her and touched her shoulder.

Thea swiped forward again and raked her claws across his torso. Not deep enough to put him in mortal danger, but enough to draw a frightening amount of blood.

The stick-guard swung, but Thea batted him to the floor with her wing. As she rolled out of his line of sight, he got a good look at his partner, then swore and scrambled over to help him.

Thea figured she had three, maybe four seconds of confusion before they, or at least the uninjured one, came after her again. Running all the way through the building—a building she didn’t know—seemed like a bad option. The basement window was long, but it was narrow. Thea sized it up in the space of half a second. Thanks to years of being red-carpet-ready for Baird, she was still pretty damn thin. And her wings proved to be more flexible than she’d expected them to be. If she plastered them against her back, she thought she could make it.

Knowing that the only way it would work was without hesitation, Thea jumped. Stick-guard grabbed her ankle, but his hand was slick with his coworker’s blood, and she pulled out of his grip with no pause at all. Arms forward, fists clenched, she flew into the window with all the force she could muster, then as she felt the glass give way, flattened her wings to squeeze through.

The window didn’t shatter as she’d feared it would, but instead cracked in a spiderweb pattern, like a car’s windshield, and popped out in more-or-less one piece. The jagged and splintered wooden frame stabbed at her wings, then her thighs, as she wriggled through, but it could have been a lot worse.

Thea rolled out onto wet grass, opened her wings, and flew.

From above, she saw that the building she’d been imprisoned in was only a large house, in a wealthy-looking residential neighborhood. She headed for the nearest tree cover, which turned out to be a park, and perched in a pin oak to catch her breath. She knew she couldn’t stay long. The question was where to go next.

She should have been able to fly back to Hexing House at an untrackable speed, the way she’d flown back from her exam. Unfortunately, the brief flight from the house had shown her that flying would be problematic. She’d wobbled drunkenly in the air, and tired quickly. The latter might have just been the result of days of being hexed, but a quick survey of her damaged wings showed the reason for the former: the left one had a bleeding tear in it, not quite covered by a tattered flap of skin.

But maybe the fact that furies usually could rush home like that would work in her favor. They might assume she’d gone back and not chase her at all.

As she considered this, Thea realized that even if she could make it to Hexing House, it would be a stupid move. If Graves wasn’t running the lab he was at least heavily involved, but either way he wasn’t working alone. She already knew Hester had been part of it, and she distinctly remembered Dr. Forrester saying that
most
of their staff was human.

She had unknown enemies in the colony, and she was already wounded.

But if she wasn’t going back, she needed to get under cover. There was a good chance someone would send out a search party, and that some of that pursuit would be aerial.

Without direction, flying erratically with her wounded wing, Thea set off again, circling the area around the lab in a wider and wider radius until she found the river. She followed it first north, then south, hoping she’d see something she recognized. Eventually she did: where the Prescott River was at its widest and laziest, there was a long stretch of forest at its side, popular among hunters and fishermen. Pete’s family had a small cottage there.

The hunting cabins scattered around the area were mostly alike, and it took Thea a while to find the right one. But when she did, she was sure. She’d forgotten the battered old lobster crate and buoy that hung incongruously from the porch roof. Pete’s mother had New England roots, and despite being three generations and a thousand miles removed from them, she liked to remember.

Thea had spent time here as a teenager. It didn’t take her long to orient herself, and remember which knotted hole in which oak tree held the spare key. She happened to look up after she retrieved it, and saw something that chilled her blood:  furies, flying overhead.

She dropped to the ground, but slowly, so as not to catch their eye, and rolled inch by inch into the bushes beside the cottage. She stayed there for half an hour after they passed, but even then she didn’t trust it. Maybe they’d seen her and were just surrounding her, or going back for reinforcements. She should leave again.

But that turned out to be out of the question. Her wounded wing had gotten stiff while she was lying there, and almost as soon as she got in the air there was a shooting, tingling pain that went straight through her shoulder and down her spine. The wing faltered and Thea fell, narrowly missing the oak she’d just gotten Pete’s key from.

Had a nerve or muscle or something been damaged, in addition to the cut? She hadn’t had a chance to learn much about the inner workings of her new body, but one thing was clear: she would have to rest here for a while.

“One bum wing, one bum leg, and no shoes,” Thea muttered as she hobbled up the porch steps. Now that the adrenaline strength that had fueled her escape was wearing off, her whole body ached from the fight with the guards, and she had a feeling she’d be weak and exhausted from the experiments for days to come. Maybe even weeks. “How the hell am I going to get out of this?”

The air inside the cabin was stale, smelling vaguely of pine and fish. They hadn’t been up here for a while. Thea opened a window, not only for the fresh air, but to more easily hear any sounds outside. Then she went into the kitchen, took a long drink of water, and found a couple of cans of soup that hadn’t expired. She ate one of these cold while she considered what to do. Did furies heal faster than humans? She didn’t know, and she was too tired to try to figure anything out.

The mattresses had no sheets or pillows, but it felt lovely to stretch out her sore body on a bed she wasn’t chained to. Despite her fears and her disappointments, Thea was asleep within minutes.

When she woke up it was early evening, judging from the sky, and she felt refreshed, if not well. She decided to test her wings. Maybe if she only flew short distances, with rests in between, she could get somewhere faster than going on her bare feet.

But get where? Surely they would think to look at the farm, if she went to Aunt Bridget. Same with the apartment that had nominally been her home, and that was hundreds of miles away in any case. She’d never make it that far.

One step at a time. See if you can go at all, before you decide where.

She emerged from the cabin to find Flannery leaning against the porch railing with her arms crossed. Thea thought the leaning was due to more than just an attempt to look casual. Flannery looked pale and shaky. If it came to a fight, Thea thought that despite her own weakness, she could probably take her cousin down.

Thea’s claws came out of their own accord, but she waited. Maybe Flannery had come to explain. To beg for forgiveness.

“Heard you moving around in there,” Flannery said. “Thought you furies were supposed to be sneaky?”

So much for that. Thea wasn’t really surprised. Flannery was always at her nastiest when she was feeling guilty and defensive.

“They let you out, I see,” Thea said.

“I’m not a prisoner. I’m an employee. I’m free to come and go as I please.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. That might be what they told you, but they’re not going to want to just let you go with everything you know.”

Flannery ignored this. “I told them I could find you, and I was right. I knew you wouldn’t risk going to my house. But I figured you would run to Pete. It’s just like you.”

“Pete isn’t here.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then? Now you whistle for them to come swooping in and take me away?”

“Something like that.”

But she didn’t make any move. The two women regarded each other for a few seconds before Thea said, “Why would you do this, Flannery? Any of it? Did you even think about what it would do to Aunt Bridget?”

“Of course I did,” Flannery snapped. “But I thought it would be worth it, in the end. A few weeks of worry seemed a fair trade for a comfortable retirement. I’ll be able to take care of all of us, with all the money they’re paying me.” She shrugged. “I wish I could offer you a more interesting reason, but I’m afraid I really am just that easily bought. I’m sick of worrying about money. And I’m sick of waiting to get married because we can’t afford it. Do you know how long Pete and I have been together?”

Since the day I let you have him
. “Of course I know.”

“Well, then.” Flannery made a gesture that encompassed Thea from top to bottom. “We don’t all get to have it easy like you. We don’t all want to run out to Hollywood and get our pictures taken in our underwear. Some of us need to scrape by in the real world.”

“You could have called me any time,” Thea said. “I would have given you all the money you wanted.”

Thea wasn’t expecting it when Flannery came rushing at her, and Flannery easily tackled her to the porch floor, knocking the wind out of her.

“I don’t want your charity! I don’t want your whore money!”

Flannery had always been a crappy fighter. Physically, anyway. And with the two of them so feeble, limply slapping at one another with neither strength nor speed, the whole thing was almost funny.

“I don’t want anything from you!” Flannery shouted. “You think you’re so much better than me, but you turned out to be nothing but a slut!”

Thea got her breath back and pushed Flannery off, almost gently.

Flannery jumped up and pulled out a gun.

Thea didn’t even have time to be surprised. Flannery raised the gun, took aim. Thea flapped her wings and surged upward. In a split second she’d reached Flannery and lashed out with a clawed hand.

Flannery never got a chance to fire. Thea’s claws raked her arm and then, slipping as Flannery fell away, her belly as well. Thea never knew whether her cousin would have shot her or not.

But she had a haunting feeling that, just as her claws were sinking in and it was too late to stop them, Flannery’s finger froze, and there was hesitation in her eyes.