Chapter Thirteen
My forehead was pressed into something small and cold, and it hurt. My outstretched arm was tingling, as if something was wrapped tight around my biceps. The floor was equally cold and hard, and it smelled like bleach-washed stone. I could hear a series of soft noises that could only be described as a shuffling clatter. Behind that was a soft weeping.
A woman's high-pitched voice said, "Hurry up, will you? I've almost got this thing calibrated," and my eyes flashed open.
I was on the floor with my arm stretched through a narrow gap in the mesh of a cage, my head pressed into the wires. A syringe was stuck in me, and Jennifer was reaching to undo the tourniquet. Her eyes opened wide when they met mine, and her little mouth dropped into an O.
"Hey!" I shouted, painfully yanking my arm back through the mesh and sitting up. Jennifer's grip slipped from my wrist, but her hold on the syringe was tighter, and it pulled out of me, leaving a long, throbbing scratch.
Jennifer fell back on her butt, her round, baby-doll face showing fear. In a corner, a man in overalls, on his hands and knees, glanced up from wiring a TV monitor to a panel, then went back to work. I recognized him as the man who had been driving the car. The woman from the cage was in here with me, and she hid her face and sobbed, scrunching deeper into her corner.
"Holy shit!" Jennifer breathed, looking behind her to the blond woman in the lab coat. "You see that?" she said, scooting back to stand up. "You see how fast the chubi came to?"
"Maybe I should've kicked her harder," the blonde said, then turned back to the tabletop machine she was fiddling with.
"You call me that one more time, Jennifer, and I'm going to choke you in your sleep," I said, unwinding the tourniquet and dropping it beside me. "You're not getting any of my blood. Got it?" Oh my God. I was stuck in a cage who knew where? At least Jenks was okay.
Jennifer went white. "She . . . she knows my name!" she said, her face ashen and her grip on the syringe going white-knuckled. "How do you know my name?" she shouted, totally freaking out. "He was right! You're a demon!"
The woman trapped with me sobbed harder, her hands now over her head as if I were going to beat her. Yeah, that was a laugh. I was just as scared as she was. Where in the hell was I? It looked like one of those basement lockups they use to keep expensive equipment from wandering away, the painted mesh going from ceiling to floor on three sides, the fourth being the basement wall made of mortared stone.
My head hurt, and I rubbed at the new hole in my arm and scooted back. The cage wasn't very big. Maybe ten by eight, and just under six feet tall. We were definitely in a basement, one being used for storage by the amount of clutter stacked at the edges - no windows, low ceiling, thick stone walls by the absence of any other sound. The floor was old cement, and I could see a faint light from a bare bulb in the distance past the clutter. The light here was from floor lamps that looked like they belonged in the '50s.
"Chris! The witch knows my name!" Jennifer babbled, her pretty little size 6 shoes backing up on the poured cement floor.
Chris turned from the machine she was working with, her expression cross, as if things were clearly not going well in calibration land. "Will you shut up!" she said harshly, the scratches Jenks had given her looking red and sore. "She probably heard it before she woke up, the same way you just told her mine, you idiot!"
Jennifer caught back her fear, her dark eyes squinting in anger from under her long eyelashes. "Fool," Chris muttered, jotting down a number before fiddling with a dial and dropping a vial of clear liquid into the machine's hopper and pushing a big black button.
The machine started humming, and Chris turned, stretching for a metal folding chair. Snapping it open, she sat in it, her back to me as she waited for the machine to cycle through. The man at the monitors grunted happily. Getting off the floor, he flicked a switch. One of the monitors blossomed to life to show a narrow empty stairway, a bare bulb with its paint worn away from the tread. Satisfied, he began working with another camera.
Jennifer hesitated, then sneered and flipped me off as if it was my fault. I didn't get this. Chris was clearly the power-hungry bitch, but what was the gutter-mouthed china doll doing here? She'd been freaky scary when we caught her, but fringe organizations promoting species eradication usually didn't mesh with women named Jennifer who had rhinestones on their shoes.
"I got enough to run a sample," Jennifer said, setting the syringe beside Chris. "When we need more, I'll just dart her."
Like an animal? Not good. Not good at all. This wasn't the first time I'd been locked up: Alcatraz, demon jail, Trent's ferret cage, a hospital bed. If I could escape that one twenty years ago, then this one was only a matter of time. But as I looked over the bleak surroundings, warm and damp, I wondered. This was bad. Really bad.
"I'm Rachel," I said to the lump in the corner.
"Winona," the woman said, lifting her head from her seated fetal position just enough to see me. Her brown eyes were terrified. "Don't touch me. Please."
She sounded frantic, and I stopped moving closer. Her tasteful pair of slacks and a blouse were wrinkled by several days' use, but expensive. Her low heels were functional. She was an office professional by the looks of it. Someone who would be missed right away. Either they were confident no one would find us, or she had something they needed that was worth the risk.
My head hurt, and I felt it carefully and found three sore spots. I only remembered being kicked hard enough to hurt once. My gut hurt, too, and I lifted my shirt and saw an ugly bruise just shy of my kidneys. A little higher, and Chris would have cracked a rib. Bitch. I reached to push my hair out of my eyes, finding someone had tied a knot it in. My face screwed up in anger as I realized it was a HAPA knot. Real funny.
My band of charmed silver slipped down as I worked the knot free, and my anger grew. I supposed I could break my hand and slip it off - and fry my brain in the process. I was a day late and a dollar short in talking to Trent.
Winona was crying, her brown hair falling over her drawn-up knees, and after I got rid of the knot, I inched closer. "Hey, are you okay?"
"Why do they want us?" she quavered.
The answer wouldn't make her feel any better. "I don't know," I lied.
In the corner outside our cage were five rolled-up sleeping bags and several bags from a chain grocery store. Two locked army green boxes were stacked near them. There was no kitchen, but a beaker of soup was warming up on a Bunsen burner on a makeshift counter. My stomach growled, and I took that as a good sign. It was obvious they hadn't been here long, but it was equally obvious that much of it had been waiting for them.
Someone likes to plan, I thought, and I rubbed my head.
The tabletop machine made a clattering of noise and spit out a small strip of curling paper. Chris tore it off and looked at it. "Spectrometer is good to go," she said, popping open the little drawer and tossing in the empty vial. "Where's her sample?"
"Here." Jennifer took the needle off and handed her the end of the syringe with my blood in it. "Be careful."
Chris's eyebrows were mockingly high. She looked from the blood to me before turning her back on me. "I don't think she's really a demon, charmed silver or not."
Jennifer leaned back against the card-table counter, crossing her ankles and trying to look nonchalant. "Me neither," she said, her flippant voice giving her lie away. "We caught her easy enough. She didn't do one demonic thing."
My eyes narrowed and I leaned forward, curving my fingers through the mesh. "Let me out, we'll see how demonic I can be."
Ignoring my threat, Chris popped another vial into the machine and hit the button. "I think it more likely that Captain America is wrong about her."
"What about the coven?" Jennifer's shoulders stiffened. "They called her one. They put that on her."
She was looking at my bracelet, and I sneered at her pretty little face, wanting to smash it.
"Propaganda," Chris said simply, busy with the machine.
"Yes, but he was right about us needing to move." Bending down with her hands on her knees, Jennifer looked at Winona as if she was an animal in a zoo, interesting but easily forgotten.
Chris grimaced. "I think he was the one who gave us away," she muttered as she went back to her work.
Jennifer stood. "Maybe we shouldn't have strung that guy up in the park. They weren't looking so hard for us before that."
"If we hadn't, Morgan would never have become involved," Chris said, preoccupied.
The man at the monitors, almost forgotten, made a noise of disagreement. "Eloy didn't give us away," he almost growled, his thick fingers manipulating one of the cameras. "Staying was a bad decision. Your bad decision, Chris. I'm not so convinced taking her was a good idea, either." He glanced at me. "Even if she's not a demon, she's too violent and we're not set up to hold two people."
Chris never moved, focused on the machine. "I didn't ask for your opinion, Gerald."
The man's eyes narrowed, deepening his few wrinkles as he scowled. "That putrid clot in the suit killed Kenny."
Taking a deep breath, Chris turned, spinning smoothly on the metal chair. Her expression was mocking, and her hair was starting to float. She was tapping a line. Jennifer flicked her attention between them, clearly nervous. "Don't you have more cameras to install?" the distasteful woman said harshly.
In a noisy motion, the man stood, his cameras tucked in the crook of his elbow as he stiffly walked toward the edge of the clutter. "You are a cold, unfeeling bitch." I heard him hit something out of my sight with a grunt, and Chris smiled.
Looking smug, she spun back to the machine. "I don't think Morgan's blood is going to be any different from any other corrs we've taken," she said, and I became more uneasy. They knew my name. They knew the coven had labeled me a demon. I'd thought that I could ride this wild horse, but it was running away with me and I couldn't get the bit out from between its teeth.
The machine whined harshly and spit out another curling bit of paper. Jennifer grabbed for it, taking a step back out of Chris's reach. Her eyes widened, and an awestruck "Dudes!" slipped past her lips.