No response.
Memories of him burning up in Brimstone Headquarters bombarded me. His guttural cries as things cracked and broke inside him. The spray of black blood as he coughed up whatever life he had left.
I’d told him to stop. I’d warned him not to try to die on me again. And he hadn’t listened. If the ice inside me hadn’t responded...he might’ve dissipated again.
A sob caught in my throat.
If you start disintegrating, I swear to God I’ll glue all your pieces back together and lock you in a fireproof room.
The tiniest twitch flickered between his eyebrows.
Can you hear me?
The barest of touches against my mind as if he struggled to wake up. Was he back in that dreamscape? If I touched him, could I join him? Could we somehow heal each other again?
Glancing at my hands, I tried to summon the ice that’d felt so obedient back in Brimstone. Ever since waking from that spiritualplane, I’d been good as new, but now...nothing. Just the barest scattering of frost appeared over my knuckles, bringing a sickly throbbing in my heart.
“He’s not looking so good, is he?” the man muttered.
My eyes shot back to the asshole as he leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. He must’ve done something to us to make us so weak again. All of this was their fault. It had to be. I refused to believe that the powers inside us kept forsaking us when we needed them the most.
That wouldn’t just be cruel, it would be catastrophic.
The longer he stared at me with that tight little smile, the more I felt useless and vulnerable and...human.
“Wh-What did you do to us?” I coughed, clearing my throat from the dregs of pain. “Where are we? Who are you?”
“Goodness.” Pushing off from the doorway, he dropped his arms and came toward me. “Three questions in one. Nosy little thing, aren’t you? But I suppose I can oblige.” He stopped next to my chair and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
My skin crawled. I cringed away, but the buckles and straps kept me pinned.
“There, there.” He smirked. “I’m not going to hurt you. After all, you’re both rather precious.” Dropping his hand, he shrugged. “My answers are...we didn’t do anything to you...yet.” He smirked wider at that. “Second, you’re in my own personal home after the unfortunate destruction of our much-loved headquarters. And three, my name is Roy Swift.”
Swift...
Something about that name...
Narrowing my eyes, I studied him. I’d never met him before but something about him seemed similar. The shape of his mouth, the sweep of his eyebrows. Pushing sixty or so, he wore a black suit and haughty arrogance that I’d seen elsewhere. But where?
He let me study him. “Any other questions before we begin?”
“Begin? Begin what exactly?”
“The extraction, of course.” His entire face lit up as if today was a happy day for him. “You have no idea how patient we’ve been since Lucien escaped. We’ve had the most terrible time trying to get the reactors to work without his blood. Not counting the financial disaster he caused to his own company, he also has an untold number of deaths on his hands.”
“Deaths?”
“The others that rely on regular transfusions of his blood tostay stable.”
I shot a horrified look at Lucien. Just how many men had been drinking his blood over the years? No wonder they took so much from him and left him weak and hurting all the damn time.
Glowering at Roy Swift, I spat, “You don’t have to do this. Marcus is dead. Stop taking orders from a dead man and let us go.”
He chuckled softly. “Do you honestly think a company of this size and a project as life changing as this could be overseen just by one person? Silly girl. There’s twenty-four of us. Well, there was. You’re right that our numbers have dwindled. Which actually works in your favour, seeing as we won’t have to take nearly as much blood to service us all. Which leads me back to rebuilding our stock so nothing like this has to happen again.”
I ignored the twisting in my chest. “What stock?”
“The ones we created with Lucien’s blood of course.” He strolled around the room, his hands linked behind his back. “Twenty-seven men and women we’d painstakingly created all dropped like flies when Lucien escaped. Without his blood to sustain the change in their DNA, their hearts stopped. None of them survived because he selfishly decided to leave.”
