They’re awake. Several sit up when the door opens. One woman presses herself against the wall, her eyes locked on the blood covering my hands and vest. A man pulls his knees to his chest. Someone in the back row starts crying.
A woman near the center of the left row turns her face toward me. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t react at all. The expression ofa person who has stopped expecting anything from an opening door, even a door opened by a vampire covered in blood.
Her arms are thin. The IV line runs from the inside of her elbow to the collection system. The skin around the insertion point is raw and discolored. The line has been in too long.
Simone looked like this.
I step into the room.
“My name is Celeste. I’m here to get you out.”
The woman’s expression doesn’t change. Not right away. Then her brow pulls together. Her lips part. Her eyes move over my face like she’s searching for the lie.
Then her mouth opens. No sound comes out. Her hand reaches for the IV line in her arm and starts pulling.
“Wait,” I say. “Let me.”
I cross to her cot. I take the line out the way Elena taught me. Careful. Steady. The woman watches my hands. Her breathing changes. Her eyes fill. She doesn’t make a sound.
I move to the next cot. And the next.
Alexei stands in the doorway. Recording. This time, he’s recording something worth remembering.
Chapter
Nineteen
The building is secure and my hands are shaking.
I press them flat on the table. Marcellus is at the secondary console. The guards are dead. Celeste’s camera is moving through the processing corridor, and I’m watching from forty miles away with the taste of what I just watched still in my teeth. The door she ripped apart with her mind. The stake that drove toward her back before Alexei caught it. The light that poured from Alexei’s eyes and turned a guard to ash.
Celeste opens the first door. Twelve cots. IV lines. Fluorescent light. A woman presses against the wall when she sees the blood on Celeste. A man pulls his knees to his chest. Someone in the back row is crying. And one woman in the center who doesn’t react at all.
Her voice. “My name is Celeste. I’m here to get you out.”
The mark on my chest flares. Steady and certain. Reaching me through a speaker the size of a coin.
Celeste moves to the second room. On Julian’s camera, wolves are already entering the first. Several shift to human form in the doorway, bones cracking, sheets pulled from empty cots and wrapped at the waist. They move between the cots, helping people stand, guiding them toward the corridor. Alexei walks with the first group. “We’re getting you out. Stay with me. Keep walking.” His voice low and even. Repeating it for every person he passes. A wolf in full form pads beside the woman who won’t move from her cot. It presses its shoulder against her leg. She stands.
The second room. Same layout.
Celeste moves through the cots. I hear her, the same steady voice from the first room. “My name is Celeste. I’m here to get you out. I’m going to take these lines out. Hold still.”
Celeste crouches beside the first cot. She takes the woman’s arm, turns it, finds the IV line. Her fingers press above the insertion point. She slides the needle free. The woman flinches. Celeste presses a cloth to the site and holds it there.
“You’re okay. Keep pressure here.”
She moves to the next cot. This one grabs her wrist when the needle comes out. Both hands locked around Celeste’s forearm. Knuckles white. Celeste’s breathing changes. She doesn’t pull away. She kneels there, one hand holding the cloth against the IV site, the other held by a woman who isn’t letting go.
The grip loosens. Celeste moves on.
A man in the far corner is standing. The only one vertical in the first two rooms. His hospital gown hangs loose. Too much fabric for the body inside it. He watches Celeste move from cot to cot, getting closer.
“Are you new staff?”
Celeste’s hands stop on the IV line she’s holding.
“No,” she says. “I’m not staff. We’re shutting this place down.”
