"Give it to me," Chris snapped, lurching to her feet to take it. Frowning, she dropped back into her chair, sitting sideways so that she only had to turn her head to see me. I could tell it was bad news for me by the way Jennifer was shifting from foot to foot.
"Look at her Rosewood levels," the younger woman said, pointing down over Chris's shoulder. "My God! She should be dead!"
Exhaling, Chris handed the strip to Jennifer. "I've never seen such a narrow spike. Hold off on pasting it in the data book. I'm going to run it again."
But Jennifer had already pulled a worn theme book from a cardboard box and was leafing through it. I recognized it as one of the books Chris had saved from the industrial park, and I was wondering about their backgrounds when Jennifer taped the strip in, then signed and dated it.
Her brow furrowed, Jennifer studied the page. I could see about eight strips pasted in. Eight people, six of whom were probably dead. Her careful data taking was going to land her in jail for murder. "You should be dead," Jennifer said when she looked up.
"That makes two of us," I snarled, and Chris chuckled as she popped in a new vial and hit the go button.
"A Rosewood spike doesn't mean she is a demon." Chris stood and stretched, going to stir the soup with a glass rod. "It means she's a freak of nature."
"But it's the increased level of the Rosewood enzyme that's killing them," Jennifer said, her finger on my printout. "Not necessarily the transformations themselves. She should be dead with what she has. Clearly she's got something, maybe another antigen, that's counteracting the first, allowing her to survive. If we can find out what it is, then we can keep them all alive - "
"Why?" Chris interrupted her. "We're not a hotel."
"No, you're a butcher," I said, ignored, and Winona trembled in the corner. "Oh, crap, I'm sorry," I whispered, and she drew back from me.
"Keeping them alive isn't the goal," Chris said, making me angrier yet. "Getting closer to the ideal is. As far as I'm concerned, the shortened life expectancy is a boon. What would we do with them otherwise? Stack them up like wood?"
My God, this woman was unbelievable.
Jennifer dropped her eyes, looking uneasy as she leaned against the counter and hugged herself. Clearly she had some smarts if she was spouting off about antigens. Maybe I could work on her guilt and convince her to let us go.
The machine spit out another strip of paper, and after Chris read it, she set it on fire using the Bunsen burner. "I have a better way to find out if she's a demon or not," she said, watching the paper go up with a weird green flame from the ink.
"What?"
Jennifer's voice sounded scared. Hell, I knew I was, and I scooted forward to the front of the cage, getting into the light. "Yeah, what?" I said boldly, but I wasn't. They had at least three drops of my blood left in that syringe.
Chris sauntered to me, crouching until the hem of her lab coat brushed the dirty floor. It was demeaning, being looked at like that, and I stiffly got to my feet, trying to hide where I hurt.
"The coven put charmed silver on her," Chris said as she rose as well, her eyes going to my wrist. "She can't do ley-line magic, but her blood is still good. I'm going to try one of those curses again - using her blood to invoke it."
Oh. Shit.
I looked at Winona, my thoughts zinging back to that monstrosity of a broken body found in the basement of the Underground Railroad Museum. That had been done with witch blood. Using mine might have even worse consequences. "Don't do this," I said, retreating from the wire mesh. "Please."
Seeing my fear, Chris smiled. "If it works properly, then Morgan is a demon and we have a good source of blood to pattern the synthetic stuff on."
"Don't do this!" I said, then jumped when Chris smacked the cage and Winona cried out.
"And if it doesn't work," the woman continued as she held the syringe with my blood in it up to the light to estimate how much was left, "we can use Morgan to shift the tolerance for the Rosewood antigens forward that much more." Chris set the syringe aside and smiled. "Like every other chubi we've had."
I pressed into the fieldstone wall, fingering my band of silver. This was bad. Really bad.
"Um," Jennifer said, shifting nervously as she slid from the table. "He said not to do anything until he gets back."
"The hell with him." Motions stiff, Chris strode to a cardboard box and began digging through it. "I'm not going to sit on my ass and wait. I'm the one doing the science, not him. If she's a demon, I want to know. Where's that damned book? The one with no title?"
Book? With no title? Oh, no, I thought, fear sliding into me when Chris made a happy sound and lifted out an old leather-bound book with frayed pages and a broken binding. It was a demon text, filled with demon curses. I could tell from here.
"Uh, ladies?" I said when Chris dropped the book on an open space and pulled her folding chair up to it. "I know you're all excited about thinking you're the superior species and all, but you seriously need to rethink this."
Chris's lips pursed. "Oh, that's interesting." I stared as she whispered Latin, practicing. "I need a strand of hair," she said, and I pressed deeper into my corner. Jennifer came to stand before the mesh door, and I growled at her, "Come in here, and you'll find out how it feels to have my foot in your face." But she only plucked a strand from the mesh, handing it to Chris and wiping her hand on her pants.
"I don't like using magic," she said, glancing at me. "Eloy says it's evil."
"Eloy is old school who calls blowing things up progress." Chris held the strand up between two fingers. "He has his place, but it's not making decisions. Magic isn't what makes them animals. It's that they prey on sentient beings."
"Kind of like what you're doing here, eh?" I said, but I was trembling inside. I had no idea what she was going to do, but it was going to be nasty.
Chris's attention flicked to me, then back to the book. "Anoint the hair, and break it while you say Separare. It's a communal curse, already twisted and just needing to be invoked."
Separare. That was Latin for sunder, wasn't it? Crap, what was she going to do? I pushed forward. "Don't do this," I said, gripping the mesh of the cage and giving it a shake. "I'm warning you!"
But what could I do, caged like a dog?
My pulse thundered and Winona looked up, scared, as Chris took a drop of my blood from the syringe and pulled my hair through it. "Separare!"
I braced for anything, staring as Chris's eyes grew wide. With a howl of pain, she shoved the demon book off the counter. It hit the floor as Jennifer gasped in fear, a few pages coming loose from the binding and drifting almost within reach.
"Chris!" Jennifer cried out as the woman gasped and hunched over in pain. "What's wrong?" she said, holding on to Chris's shoulders and trying to keep her from falling off the chair.
Was it the imbalance? I thought, feeling myself as if looking for a gunshot wound, but nothing felt different, nothing hurt. I heard Winona shift, watching now.
"Bitch . . ." Chris rasped, still hunched in pain as she glared at me.
"What happened?" Jennifer asked, bending over her in concern.
Chris shoved Jennifer away. "I'm fine!" she snapped, finally able to straighten up. Her eyes were bloodshot as she glared at me, her skin pale. "Not so helpless after all. Demon. Demon whore!" Taking a breath, she looked at her hands. They were trembling. "The bitch bounced the curse back at me."
Jennifer looked confused, but I wasn't. "Uh, if that band of charmed silver prevents her from doing magic, then how could she bounce it back at you?"
"I don't know!" Shaking, Chris stood up, bending to snatch the pages that had fallen out and shoving them into the front of the book before turning to glare at me, reminding me of Jenks with her hands on her hips like that. "Maybe curses don't work on demons. Maybe that's why the last woman died so fast."
Winona caught her breath, terror making her eyes wide.
I edged back from the front of the cage, relieved. The curse hadn't bounced back because I was a demon. Like Trent had said, if the curse worked through the demon collective, it wouldn't recognize me and would bounce back. I was safe. But Winona wasn't.
"I'm going to try it on the other one," Chris said, and a drop of ice ran down my spine. Winona had gone white, her fingers gripping her knees stiff and clawlike.
"No, you're not!" I shouted.
But Chris was drawing a long brown hair through her fingers, coating it with blood. I looked at Winona. Oh God. I couldn't stop this. "Winona," I whispered, and the woman's eyes met mine, scared. "I'm sorry."
"Separare!" Chris shouted, and the strand of hair broke.
Winona's eyes bulged, and she stiffened. Her desperate, despairing cry of pain echoed in the small area. She pushed to her feet, and I lunged for her, grabbing her before she could run into the wire mesh. I felt helpless, but I tried to make the pain go away by just being there, giving her something to feel besides agony.
"It's okay," I whispered, tears coming from me as she screamed in pain, her entire body stiff with it. "It's okay. It will go away. I promise." I didn't know if she could hear me, but her screams turned to sobs as she shook.
"It worked!" Chris crowed. "Jenn! It worked perfectly! We have it! I can do anything!"
I brought my head up as I rocked Winona, the woman slowly starting to relax as the pain ebbed. The blond sadist was almost dancing, her finger and thumb red with my blood and the gluttonous light of power in her eyes.
"It's getting better," I said to Winona, wishing I could help her. "See, it's going away."
"I want to go home," she cried as she slipped from me to the floor and huddled, her hair hiding her face. "I just want to go home."
"Me too," I said, feeling helpless. She'd be okay until they decided to do something else. "I'm so sorry. You shouldn't be here."
Gerald shuffled in, his expression irate and the cameras gone from his hands. "Keep it down," he said, weaving past the woman in the lab coat doing a happy dance as if she'd made a touchdown. "I can hear you all the way to the stairway." He looked at Winona, huddled in the corner with me, glaring at all of them. "What did you do?"
"It worked!" Chris sang, and Jennifer made notations in a second workbook, her expression pulled up as if she was smelling something rank. I knew it was the idea that Chris had done magic, not that she'd caused someone great pain. "I did a curse, and it worked. Morgan's blood is demonic. We have working demon blood, and it didn't cost my soul to do it!"