The Lair

got closer, I realized it wasn’t just one machine but several, and the noises were coming from a room beyond a pair of doors just ahead.

I slipped to the side of the doors, pressing my back against the wall so I could listen. Someone was in the room. I heard the carts rolling around. Things banging. It didn’t sound like a Tick rampaging through the room, more like a human in a hurry. I peered through the window in the door and saw Price along with a woman in scrubs. Shit. And here I was. No weapon.

Still in a fight two against one, I could probably take them. Price was close to fifty. I couldn’t tell about the woman, but if Roberto was right about me—if Sebastian was right—then maybe all I had to do was ask her to step aside.

I didn’t want this power. I never had. No one should be able to bend others to his will. If you had asked me an hour earlier, I would have sworn that even if I had the power of an abductura, I wouldn’t use it. And here I was, ready to abandon my morals instantly. If it meant saving Lily.

I pushed through the doors in to the room. It wasn’t just a single hospital room but a whole ward, like an ICU. A dozen beds were lined up on either side of the room, each with the little privacy curtain pushed back against the wall. Four of the beds had patients tucked under the white blankets. Each had an IV bag hanging from the post above their bed. Each lay as still as a corpse.

Lily lay on the bed closest to the door on the far end of the room. Her skin looked unnaturally pale. She was as still and lifeless as the other three.

Price and the doctor stood over her. They had been talking in low voices when I came in, but both of them fell silent and turned toward me.

Thank God there wasn’t a guard somewhere that I hadn’t seen through the window. Faintly, in the distance, I could hear the whump-whump-whump of the helicopter still hovering above the building.

The doctor looked from Price to me and back again.

“Why did you let me think you had the cure?”

“I didn’t.”

“You said—”

“No. You said she needed medical attention. I got that for her. We don’t have a cure, but we have a treatment protocol that involves inducing comas. It slows the progress of the disease. Not indefinitely, but for a while at least.”

I glanced at the other patients. The one at the far end of the room was a guy with what looked like a short, military-style haircut grown out a couple of months. Had he been one of the guards? Whatever he had been in life, he wasn’t quite human anymore. His jaw was too big, his brow ridge too pronounced, making his eyes look sunken. Even under the blanket, the proportion of his limbs looked all wrong. I didn’t ask how long he’d been like this or how quickly he was progressing. I didn’t want to know.

I barely looked at the guy on the bed next to his, but the third patient caught my eye because it was a kid. And because there was a dog asleep under the kid’s bed. The chow mix slowly stretched and sat up. Chuy. Which meant the kid was Marcos. Ely’s little brother. They looked enough alike—despite the four year age difference— that they could have been twins. I might have doubted myself if Chuy hadn’t been there. And it made so much sense. Ely wasn’t a bad guy. He was just a guy who would do anything for his family. I could understand that. Knowing his brother was in here being held by Roberto, being held in stasis—it made me hate Ely less for betraying us. That was a good thing. I had enough people to hate right now.

I looked at Lily last. I couldn’t help but imagine her a few weeks or months down the road, looking like that guy at the end. How much time did she have? I didn’t know; I just had to pray it was enough.

I looked back up at Price. I expected to feel that burst of hatred. Instead, I felt nothing but exhaustion.

“I’m sorry.” He actually looked like he meant what he was saying. Not that I believed him. Not that it even mattered one way or the other. “I didn’t know you even thought we had the cure.”

I turned to the doctor. “How long can she live in stasis?”

“Dodson has been like that for two months, but we’ll lose him completely at some point. There was a guard before him who turned completely at eleven weeks. The sedative must be incompatible with something in the Tick biology. He woke up and we had to—”

I nodded my understanding. So, under three months. Probably less because it had taken more than twenty- four hours to get her here and into the coma.

I had come in here determined to save her. To get her out of the clinic and drive straight to the Genexome Corporation headquarters. To rip the place to shreds until I found the cure.

But how could I know if that was the right thing for me to do?

I looked at Price again. “You’ve got the helicopter? Where are you going?”

“Wherever we can find that’s safe. Probably one of the Farms.”

“You’re taking the doctor?” I looked at her. She nodded. “And you can keep her alive until I can find the cure and bring it to you?”

Pity flashed across her face. “I can try.”

Price stepped forward. “Once she wakes up, she’ll stay with me. I won’t let her leave with you.”

Now, it was my turn to feel pity. Price obviously cared about his daughters in his own twisted way, but he didn’t know them. If he really thought that he could keep Lily out of this fight, then he didn’t know her at all.

God knows I’d certainly tried and it hadn’t worked. Not at all. When you loved someone, it wasn’t always about keeping them safe. It was about caring enough to let them make their own decisions. It wasn’t about control or protection. It was about respect. I’d learned that the hard way.

“You want to keep her safe with you, you’re welcome to try.”

Price looked at me suspiciously. “You’re really just going to let me take her?”

The doctor looked at me and said, “There’s room in the helicopter. You could come.”

Price looked like he wanted to swallow his tongue, but then he nodded. “We could use a guy like you. With your combat experience.”

For a second, I was tempted. The best way to make sure Price didn’t take Lily too far away for me to find her was to go with them myself. But I’d seen the copter. It wasn’t that big.

“If I came, you wouldn’t have room for all of them, would you?”

Price shrugged. He obviously hadn’t thought that far ahead. He was too used to thinking only of his own interests. But the doctor shook her head.

In the end, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice lives, especially the life of a kid, to be with Lily.

“I’ll help you load the helicopter. Lily first, then Marcos. You take as many as you can. The doctor here stays with them.” I got right in Price’s face. “You find the closest Farm and you let me know where you’re going. As long as she’s still alive when I get there, I’ll let you live. But if you try to keep me away from her, I will find you and destroy you myself.”

“You’re so sure you could do that?”

“Yeah, I am. Don’t forget, I’ll have your other daughter.”

Something hard and soulless lit in Price’s eyes and I knew he’d been planning on snagging Mel on the way out.

“Mel won’t go with you,” I told him.

“She will. Mel and I have always understood each other.”

“Maybe. But you’re the one who said you should never underestimate the great things a human abductura can accomplish when working with a vampire.”

It took several seconds for Price to understand my point. I’d been right. He hadn’t figured out yet that Mel had turned into a vampire. The shock on his face might have been enough to make me smile, but I was already helping the doctor wheel Lily’s bed out to the helicopter.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Mel