Secret Unleashed

Chapter Thirty-Two

There wasn’t anything in my stomach to throw up, but I managed it anyway, a pink foam soiling my shiny new ballet flats.

“I did warn you,” The Doctor said.

Crouching down, I cradled my head in my good arm, trying to obscure my vision of the room, but where Holden’s had been dark, this one was as brightly lit as a grocery store.

Maxime was strung from the ceiling, bound at four points, caught like a jumping jack in midair. He was stark naked and had been slit down his torso, with almost everything that should be inside him now on the outside.

The only blessing I could see was he was unconscious.

“What the fuck?” I screamed, realizing my mistake a moment too late. The shock from the collar zapped me, making my whole body spasm uncontrollably.

I collapsed to the floor, landing on my broken arm.

I had nothing left as far as screaming or wailing went. My body was spent, and now lying here, looking up at Maxime’s ruined form, I felt my soul shut down. I’d never believed I could feel my soul as a tangible entity, but I did in that instant.

All the hope leached out of me, going down the drain with the vampire’s blood. I lay on the concrete, breathing hard as my arm throbbed in agonizing protest beneath the weight of my body, but I couldn’t make myself move.

“We know complete regeneration is impossible,” The Doctor said, his tone still the same warm, charming one he’d used whenever we spoke. “But I did want to see how long it might take a vampire to heal this kind of wound. The organs are all still there.” He gestured to the trail of intestines spilling out from Maxime’s belly. “I wanted to know if his body would just suck them all back up. Like spaghetti.”

He laughed.

Dragging me to my feet in spite of my efforts to remain a dead weight, he rubbed my back in slow circles I suspected were meant to soothe me. “I did tell you it would get worse.”

He was right. Holden was on a beach vacation compared to what The Doctor was doing to Maxime. I didn’t want to regret getting Holden much-needed blood, but a nagging voice told me I could have saved Maxime from this if I hadn’t been so rash.

“I’m so sorry, Max.” I don’t know why I bothered saying it. If I had any pull with whatever higher powers might be out there, right now I was praying he wasn’t hearing or feeling any of this. His body, at least, had the common sense to shut down mine clearly lacked.

He was better off dead, as much as I hated to think it.

“Come on, then. One last stop.”

“No.”

“You asked for this. You wanted to see your friends, I’m showing you your friends.”

I turned my back on Maxime, not able to look directly at him anymore, the tableau too grim, too hopeless.

“I don’t want to see anything else.”

“I think you’ll like this last one.”

There was only one other vampire he might have who he’d assume I had an interest in, and that was my father. I’d never met Sutherland Halliston, and after this week I wasn’t sure I was ever going to meet him. But if I had any say in the matter, my first introduction to my biological father would not be in this madhouse. I wasn’t going to have that be my first and last memory of him.

“No,” I said.

“Does that mean you’re ready to show me what you promised?”

I nodded, choking back a new surge of bile burning the lining of my throat. “I’m ready.”

“Good girl.”

“But not here.”

He glanced over my shoulder to the suspended form of the vampire, then smiled at me. “I suppose that’s a reasonable request.”

Back in his dining room I found myself staring at the seat I’d occupied during dinner. The tablecloth was still rumpled from where I’d placed my hands, and the chair had been knocked over when I fell out of it. It remained on its side on the Persian rug.

“Let’s see what you’ve got.” He sat in his own chair and placed a small black fob on the table. It looked like a car starter, with a big red button in the middle, but I knew what it really was. He was showing me the remote detonator for my collar. Reminding me what was at stake if I tried anything funny.

“I need blood.”

He snorted. “Nonsense.”

“I need blood,” I insisted. “Maybe if you hadn’t broken my arm, I would have been fine, but it takes a lot out of a girl to rebuild bones in under twenty-four hours.”

He stared at me, his gaze raking over my face, trying to read my intentions from there. I don’t know what he saw, because I was all out of emotions, and my face had to be as blank as the rest of me right then.

Maybe it was the lack he found to be a relief. I wasn’t angry; there was no maliciousness in my eyes. There was nothing.

I felt nothing.

Fingers were snapped, and a glass of blood was soon produced. I wondered how it was his people were able to bring the exact right thing without him ever asking for it, but I suspected we were being monitored constantly. Some eye or ear in the sky was keeping tabs on The Doctor and all his pet projects.

I drank the blood without coming up for air, wishing I could shatter the glass and lick it clean as Holden had done with the bag. That might come across as threatening though.

The pain in my arm dulled, giving me a break from the near-constant, stabbing ache making me want to gnaw it off. I felt lightheaded with the power from the blood, stronger than I had in days. I wasn’t strong by any means, but I no longer felt like a human orderly could best me.

I licked my lips, and they were full and soft. I wasn’t on the verge of falling apart anymore.

He hadn’t been lying when he said he knew how much blood a vampire needed to get by. I hadn’t been given a full pint, not like the day before. He’d given me a top-up, a little boost. It was enough for me to feel good, but not enough for him to have to worry.

If I’d been a vampire, that is.

The thing about my metabolism was it wasn’t the same as a vampire’s. I needed to eat more often than they did, but I didn’t need to eat as much. I could make do with less blood because I’d learned to run on less. Whereas a vampire might half-drain a human in one feeding, I could go a full day on one donor baggie. On a good day, anyway.

The starvation and constant healing meant my normal amount wasn’t enough to build my strength up again.

But the boost had helped. It had helped more than he could possibly understand.

“Show me what you can do.”

I stepped closer so my knees bumped his. “You’ve watched a wolf shift, right?”

“Many times.”

I’d half feared my inner wolf had abandoned me. I’d been a terrible partner to share a body with recently, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d buried herself in an act of self-preservation. Disconnected from my psyche and vanished forever.

When she heard me cry wolf though, she was there, ears perked, attention focused on the man who’d caged us. She was going to like what I had planned.

“Always during the full moon?”

“Yes. I’ve attempted on numerous occasions to force the shift when the moon wasn’t full, but I’ve only succeeded on the day before or after. Never mid-month.”

“How long until the next full moon?” I asked, knowing full well when it was.

“Ten days.”

I leaned close, my movements those of a seductress, though it wasn’t my sexuality that appealed to him. I wanted to bait him with the promise of a show, though, and wanted to keep him slightly off balance.

As I pressed one palm flat on his chest, he smiled up at me, totally unconcerned. His arrogance fueled a flame lit deep within me, coaxed it up until all I felt was the blistering white-hot taste of my own rage.

Now I was feeling something.

My wolf paced, waiting for the word. I projected a thought of what I wanted, showed her the perfect mental image of it, and just as I’d suspected, she was thrilled.

Yes, she said. Oh yesyesyes.

“I’m going to show you a trick,” I whispered. “Are you ready for it?”

Yes, the wolf answered, though my question hadn’t been for her.

“Show me,” he said eagerly.

I took all the hatred, all the rage and agony built up inside me, and I channeled it into my wolf. She resisted at first, trying to fight the discomfort, but then she remembered our goal, what I’d promised her we could do, and she swelled through me, an impossibly large energy, too big to be contained.

The bones of my hand cracked, but compared to everything else I’d been through, I was numb to it. Shifting was natural. It was right, and it was what my body was designed to do. My nails grew and became claws, slicing away the fine, expensive material of his shirt.

At first he was fascinated, watching my hand shift while the rest of me stayed human. I hadn’t been lying; I knew it was something he’d want to see. But he should have kept me at a distance.

He should never have believed he was invincible.

My claws continued to grow, and without his shirt in the way, they pierced flesh. As my bones moved into a new arrangement and my skin covered with fur, he realized for the first time I wasn’t stopping.

Ribbons of his skin peeled away under my claws, and he tried to push away, but I hooked my ankle behind the leg of his chair, keeping him held in place. I kept right on digging, burrowing my nails into his chest until his breastbone gave way with a soft, pliant crunch.

I withdrew my hand, a bizarre mix of human fingers and wolf claws and fur, and kicked his chair out of reach of the small fob he’d placed on the table.

“Should have kept it in your pocket.” I tipped his chair backwards so he fell to the floor.

I moved around the fallen chair to where he lay on the concrete and stepped over him to straddle his torso. His chest looked like a flower in full bloom, shiny red petals with scraps of white in the middle. His hands fluttered like tiny birds around the new opening in his body, a hole where one should not be.

My clawed hand couldn’t move the same way a human hand could, so when I sat on his stomach, my knees tight against his sides, it was my human hand I stuck inside him. Even with a broken arm keeping my gestures limited, I burrowed deep in him, my pain forgotten with a new purpose flowing through me.

His hummingbird hands went still as I wormed my fingers past the broken gristle where his sternum had once been.

“How about we try an experiment, you and I?”

My hand wrapped around his heart, and it pulsed against my hand in a steady rhythm. Ba-bump ba-bump ba—

I squeezed, and for a moment his heart went still, then I loosened my grip and it beat again, more hurriedly than before.

“Do you know what your heart looks like, Doctor? Do you know how long it takes you to heal?” My voice cracked, going high-pitched and crazy.

I registered a click, and my brain told me the sound was familiar, but I was too far gone to think. I leaned close so my face was right near his, and his creepy little grin was nowhere to be found.

“I bet you don’t regenerate either.”

“Ma’am,” a voice bellowed, muffled but alarmingly close. “Step back, and put your hands where I can see them.”

Ignore it, the wolf cajoled. Finish him.

I squeezed, and he let out a bubbling moan, a thin foam of blood seeping from his lips.

“Ma’am, put your hands up, or I will shoot.”

Shoot?

I looked up and was staring down the barrel of a rifle, the matte-black gun aimed right at my head.

Security, I thought, my chance to finish the job vanishing before my eyes. I took a good look at the man holding the gun, his blue-black Kevlar armor and the helmet he wore. Then I saw the eight other men in identical uniforms standing around the room, their guns leveled on me. One turned away from me, sending a signal into the hall with his fingers, but I saw the back of his armor.

Big yellow letters against the dark blue material.

FBI.

“What the fuck?” I asked, and the shock went right through me into The Doctor before I slumped off him, unconscious.