It was as he dropped the last of them that he wheeled around and saw the mesh-covered cages.
Two of them, and Xhex was on the left, naked, with a food bowl and a container of water like she was a fucking animal. But there was another female in the other pen—and she was heavily pregnant.
Her eyes, hollow and haunted, stared at him through the weave of steel bands—and as her mouth opened in shock, reality warped on him.
The face in the sacred glass. This was the female!
“You can’t touch the bars,” Xhex said over the din of the alarms. “They’re charged.”
Murhder shook himself back to attention. The female he’d known he was coming for was up on her feet, ready to get sprung, but so emaciated, he knew he was going to have to carry her out. The one with the young—she was on her knees, and he worried that was all she could do.
“Over there,” Xhex said as she pointed to the right. “There’s the circuit breaker for the cages.”
No time to fuck around with fuses. He traded one of his daggers for a gun and plowed six shots into the metal box. Sparks flew and there was a minor explosion, smoke with a metal bite to it released into the lab.
“Stand back,” he ordered.
Xhex knew what he was thinking, and she jumped out of the way as he pointed his gun at the locking mechanism of her cage. The bullet he discharged split the casing, releasing a set of mechanical internal organs on the floor.
He had to look away, but that just landed his eyes on the pregnant female. “We can’t leave her,” he said. “I need to…”
But he couldn’t carry both of them and still have a hand free for a gun. And it went without saying that in their weakened states, neither could dematerialize.
“I need to help her.” His voice didn’t sound like his own. “I’m supposed to…”
The pregnant female dragged herself over her cage’s door. Behind the steel mesh, her hands clenched on the bars, her mouth moving, her voice too weak to carry through the alarms.
“I’ll come back for her,” he heard himself say as he grabbed onto Xhex’s arm. “I promise.”
“No! They’ll move her, they have other locations—”
Security guards skidded into the doorway, three men in blue uniforms. He shot at them as he pulled Xhex behind his body and moved for cover. Except there was none.
With yank, he flipped a worktable over and then pulled a portion of glass-fronted metal shelving on top of it, all kinds of beakers and test tubes hitting the floor as the front panels shattered and let loose their contents. Changing clips, he kept shooting, but it was without aim.
He bit his own wrist and shoved the open vein at Xhex’s mouth.
Without missing a beat, she drank hard and fast, taking the nutrition she hadn’t had, replacing weakness with strength. If she could dematerialize, there was hope for the other female—assuming she was even alive at this point. Lot of bullets in the lab, those guards returning fire—
Xhex let out a yell. “Fuck!”
As she released his vein without sealing it, he bled all over the place, but he was more worried about Xhex. She’d curled around on her side and was pressing her palms in under her ribs.
“I’m hit—fuck, I’m hit!” she barked.
A bullet whizzed by, just over his head. Two more went through the table and the shelving, the dull, metallic thunks belying the flimsy nature of their cover.
They both looked over at the female. She hadn’t been hit, yet, and it was clear she could read what was on their faces. That mouth of hers opened wide as she clawed at the bars, at the mesh, her frantic eyes revealing the depths of the hell she was in—
A car horn, set at the precise pitch of that terrified female’s scream, brought Murhder back to the present. He had stopped dead in the middle of the snowy street, and as he looked toward the sound, he was blinded by headlights. His arm went up to shield his eyes, but he didn’t think to move.
The car nailed him solidly, its tires locking on the snow pack, his body banging on the hood and rolling up the windshield. He caught a quick, passing survey of the clear winter sky as he passed over the roof, and then he hit the road on the far side facedown in the snow.
With a shudder, he gave his body a second to register any complaints, and besides, the cold pack of tire treads felt good against his hot cheek. Dimly, he noted the sound of car doors opening—three of them?
“Aw, shit, my father’s gonna kill me—”
“You shouldn't driven high—”
Murhder cranked his head around and focused on the three young human boys who were standing around the back end of a very expensive BMW.
“I’m okay,” he told them. “Just go.”
“You serious?” one of them asked.
And that was when he caught a scent he hadn’t smelled in years and years. As tears came to his eyes, he closed his lids.
“If he’s fucking dead,” he heard Xhex say in her hard-ass voice, “I will kill each one of you. Slowly.”