offer an intravenous snack in between drainings.
The thought seized my heart. Was that his game? Drain me as dry as he could, then let me rest and refuel for a while before round two? Or three, or ten? I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. Hours? Days? My numb body was cause for concern. I’d been lying here for too damned long. I tried testing my extremities again. Wiggled my fingers and toes, flexed one knee. Nothing else. Just an odd pressure between my legs that didn’t make—Son of a bitch! I’d been hospitalized with traumatic injuries enough times to recognize the feel of a catheter. He’d also removed my clothes and put me into a plain cotton gown, not unlike a hospital drape.
Asshole had seen me naked!
“Welcome back.”
A low growl rumbled out of my throat in response to the strange voice. It warbled in that odd middle between adolescence and maturity. The blond teen shifted into my line of sight, that same blazing hatred in eyes I now saw were a deep, glinting silver. The coloring was familiar somehow. I licked my parched lips with a still-dry tongue, then rasped out, “Fuck you.” It wasn’t poetry, but it would do.
Bastard laughed at me. “No thank you, you’re not my type.”
“Why are you not my type? Because you’re a filthy, fucking human.”
Which meant he wasn’t. “No, why am I alive?” God, my throat was on fire.
“Because you’re of less value to the master dead.” Spoken as though his reply should have been painfully obvious. Maybe it was, and I just didn’t want to admit it.
“Leverage?”
“Goodness no,” Thackery said, stepping up behind the teen. “I think I gave away my best leverage yesterday. You, Ms. Stone, intrigue me.”
Yesterday. It had been a whole day since the trade. Wyatt must be going out of his mind.
“Point of fact, you were dead,” Thackery continued. “For precisely forty-three seconds, your heart stopped beating from the blood loss. After I unhooked the drain, your body recovered on its own. I was, as you can imagine, fascinated. No matter what my other experiment yields, I couldn’t pass up this chance to study you.”
I had a sudden, terror-inducing vision of a high school–level science video I’d watched once upon a time, in which some man in glasses and a loud bow tie had expounded on a lizard’s ability to regenerate its own tail.
“In the interest of full disclosure, this is the third time I’ve had to reinsert your IV needle. Over the course of about three hours, your body pushes out the foreign object and then heals the tiny wound.”
A small, fascinated part of my mind wondered if that meant my body would expel a bullet on its own, given enough time. Not that I was about to give Thackery any ideas.
As he spoke, I tried to get a look around. The room was wider than I expected, the walls lined with locked cabinets and drawers. One counter was empty, save for a few racks that seemed bolted down. Coupled with the sense of motion and the odors of fuel, I was willing to bet anything we were on a train, or maybe even in the trailer of a big rig. I tested my Break tap and, as before, found nothing. Unlike before, I felt the orange haze blocking me. Shit.
“You don’t seem interested.” He sounded disappointed.
“Science wasn’t my … best subject.”
“No doubt.”
Had I just been insulted by the guy preparing to torture me?
He said something to the boy—did they have a secret language for just the two of them?—who strode to one of the cabinets and removed a metal case the size of a credit card. Returning to Thackery’s side, he snapped it open and removed a thin sliver of silver, much like a thick sewing needle. My stomach spasmed as he passed it to Thackery.
“Healing is gnome magic, not biology,” I said, ignoring the parched heat of my throat. God I wanted a drink of water.
“What is magic, Ms. Stone, if not the manipulation of matter and energy?” Thackery asked. “You manipulate your matter and the energy around you when you teleport. Mr. Truman manipulates the matter of solid objects when he summons them. Your Hunter colleague, Ms. Burke, manipulates the energy from your mind when she senses your truth and lies.”
I could get him knowing about Wyatt’s Gift, but his “Ms. Burke” had to be Claudia. How did he know about her? Did he know all the Gifted who worked for the Triads? What else had Bastian told him about us, the little fucker?
“No, I have a theory,” Thackery continued, “that whatever gift the gnomes bestowed upon you is less intangible than you think. It is part of you physically now, not something to be removed. Anything that is a physical manifestation can likewise be studied. And potentially duplicated.”
It sounded like a horrible joke, but he was completely serious. He wanted to study the way I healed and somehow use that to fight the vampire parasite.
“I also regret to inform you that I’ll be unable to administer an anesthetic during this process. I can’t risk its use tainting my results.” He wasn’t patronizing me, either—it was clear in his voice and his somber expression.
His sincerity made me hate him even more.
A lump formed in my throat as a chill tore down my spine. He might call it studying. I called it torture. And I didn’t think I could survive another round of torture. Physically, maybe—but not mentally. Not again. I’d survived with sanity intact because I’d been handed a new body—a body that didn’t come with sensory experience of those events. It had made recovery simpler and the physical healing process moot. I had memories of activity without the accompanying pain.
This time, I wouldn’t be so lucky. If I survived this, I wouldn’t be the woman Wyatt had loved. Would I even be myself anymore? I’d been Evy Stone once. I’d become a combination of Evy and Chalice Frost, rolled up into one. Who would be left behind when Thackery was finished? And did I want to be her?
“Make a deal with you?” I asked.
His slim eyebrows arched. “I admit, I am intrigued. What do you propose?”
“I won’t fight you … whatever you do to me.” I swallowed and it did nothing for my throat. I had to say it, though. I couldn’t live that way, not again. A tiny part of me regretted smashing those suicide pills, even though Thackery would have found and taken them away hours ago. “Just promise you’ll kill me when you’re done.”
He leaned down, placing one palm on either side of my shoulders, looming over me like a lover might. “You know I’m a man of my word, Ms. Stone. If you ask this of me, I will do it.”
I’d done enough self-sacrificing for one lifetime. I wasn’t strong enough to do this again. I didn’t think I wanted to try. I couldn’t put Wyatt through it. I couldn’t put myself through it. It was time to be selfish.
It might have been admiration in his gaze, but I doubted it. “All right, then, you have my word. As soon as I have acquired all the knowledge I desire, I will kill you.”
Tears pricked my eyes, but I blinked them away. Nope, not crying in front of this asshole or his accomplice. He moved away and returned moments later with a plastic cup and spoon. He scooped out a spoonful of ice chips and offered them to me. I wanted to refuse.
But who the hell was I being brave for? The ice felt heavenly against my parched throat, bringing some measure of relief—short-lived though it was.
“Now, then, let’s get started.” He shifted down the bed. The hem of my gown was lifted to the top of my thigh, high enough to send a shard of fear into my heart. My fingers curled into the thin pad on which I lay. He held one of the gleaming needles up to the light, as though contemplating its shape and width.
“Again, I do apologize for this,” he said. And then I felt the first sting in my thigh.
Followed, soon after, by five more.
I received more ice chips before each round began. I couldn’t guess at the passage of time—hours? days?— only that the size of the needles kept growing. Five different sizes, from pinpricks to wood nails, were shoved into my legs and eventually pushed back out.
I’d fallen asleep while my left thigh expelled the last of the wood nails and woke to the familiar shuffle of Thackery’s feet. The metallic taste of blood was still in my mouth from biting my tongue during their insertion. I
