Ah, that brought the sneering back as I’d expected. “So she can be trapped forever? Tested? Probed? I know all about those places and what they do to their prisoners.”
Yes, I’d heard rumors of experiments being performed on the inmates at certain facilities, but I kept on coming back to the facts. “She can’t live in the city. Too many—”
“I don’t care about so-called innocent lives! If you’re so worried, go and lock up every pod-born you can find, or any supernatural who does bad things. Go on, go and clean up the city right now so all the innocents can be saved.”
I didn’t answer him.
“Yes, I thought so. A coward and a hypocrite. You should know better being in your line of work. Life isn’t easy, bad things happen.”
Right. Reasoning was over. “Bad things do happen. But some of us can do something about them.”
He roared, charging at me with his knife held high, ready to get stabbing.
I hit the dirt, sweeping his legs out from under him. He went down hard, his knife flying out of his hand.
Mrs. Visser hissed from her nest.
“You will not harm her!” He struggled to his feet, face beetroot.
Mr. Visser came at me again in a zombie run, limbs thrashing wildly. “You—”
Crack! Right in the head with my elbow. That was the second time I’d had to knock him out. Knuckledusters to the face wouldn’t have been a good idea, hence the elbow. I wasn’t about to kill him unless I was forced to.
He tumbled down the slope, rolling all the way to the bottom, ending face down in the dirt.
I jogged to him as his wife hissed. She was still in the nest but was making that weird clicking sound.
“You … won’t … have her …,” he groaned.
He was still conscious, but his left arm was twisted at an odd angle. I’d need to get him out of here. His chest was rising and falling rapidly with his agitated breathing.
But first, Mrs. Visser.
I turned to face her, those rolling pink eyes glinting with hate in the light of the fire.
“If you’re somewhere in there still,” I said, “you know I have to kill you. This body you’re in now isn’t you. You’re dead.”
She’d killed and had killed brutally. There would be more of her to follow when those eggs released her offspring.
A shudder went through me at the insanity of it all. This Christmas bone stealer’s speed at procreating was baffling and disturbing.
I reached for my potion belt as she leaped off the nest with deadly speed.
She jumped again, stabbing at me with her spiky arm as she came in for a landing. I ducked and rolled as the spike struck the wall. She was dangerously close, only a couple of feet away. I pulled out my dagger, driving it upward into her scrawny belly and tossed a vial over to the nest.
As she shrieked from my dagger inside her, the potion exploded in a burst of white light. Parts of the muddy ceiling fell, a tremor vibrating through the ground beneath me.
I withdrew my dagger, almost getting a spike to the head and leaped to my feet.
Smoke curled from the nest, the eggs all burst, red and white ooze splattering the mud. The acrid stench of burning flesh filled the chamber.
Mrs. Visser rose up on her spindly legs, bleeding yellow liquid from her wound. She clicked and hissed and came at me.
Her movements may have been quick, but so were mine. I parried her clawed hand with my dagger, kicked at one of her legs—which were stronger than their thinness suggested. Someone had been loading up on the calcium.
Something squealed from within the smoking mess of the nest. Mrs. Visser forgot me, her head snapping in the direction of the sound.
Its eyes had the blueish black of a newly born bird’s, suggesting blindness, its skin the same red and white as its mother. The baby creature tumbled out of the nest, slimy but intact, unlike its siblings who’d never had the chance to see the world beyond their eggs.
Mrs. Visser went over to her baby, clicking as it wailed for her. She nestled it with her head, her clawed arm drawing it closer to her with a tenderness that was so alien. She was a mum, though, and her baby needed her.
Shit.
I had no choice. If I left them here, closed off the tunnels, they’d find their way to the surface. They needed bone marrow to survive. They’d die down here, or up there. Because if I didn’t take them out, then someone else would. There was no future, no other option.
The island prison idea wouldn’t work. How would I get her out of here? My phone had no signal this deep, and she’d kill me on my way out to try and get help.
It was over.
Mrs. Visser purred for her child, the baby creature letting out satisfied squeaks rather than anguished wails.
I took a potion from my belt. I had to do this.
I let the vial fly.
“My darlings!” Mr. Visser cried, getting to his feet. His left arm hung like a limp noodle. “No!”
The potion landed and exploded between the mother and child. Their bodies burst in a horrible spray of red, white, and yellow.
He fell onto his backside, screaming. “My family! You murdered my family.”
It was done.
“Mr.—”
“No! No! I won’t be without them! No!”
He was back on his feet, surging forward in a stagger.
“Mr. Visser!”
But it was too late. He threw himself into the fire, collapsing in the center of it. The flames engulfed him as he screamed his wife’s name, as the agony of burning to death ravaged his body.
Twenty-Three
Jake
The police car, driven by officer Evi, whizzed through the streets, siren blaring.
Evi, a bubbly auburn-haired officer, was one of my favorite coppers along with Lars. She was always so kind and had the cutest freckles ever.
“Almost there,”
