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Her flat tone chilled me. “Please, come with me,” I implored her. “We’ll run together. I could handle him better with help. You can help me save Reggie, and I’ll do anything in the world that I can do to help you.”
Jana gave me a smile that was almost sweet. “No, Cass. You’re on your own.”
I had no intention of accepting that, but I just nodded. “So? This place is about to wake up. I need to switch out the gas, and get a needle for the morgue. What else?”
Jana’s face had changed. Even sallow and peaky, with those bruised shadows under her eyes, I got a glimpse of the woman she should have been before Halliwell crushed her almost out of existence. Vital, purposeful, switched on.
“So you’re doing this?” Jana’s voice vibrated with suppressed excitement. “For real?”
“Hell, yes. If you’re telling me the truth, then this is my only hope to save Reggie. But that’s a big ‘if.’”
“I wouldn’t lie about that,” Jana said. “In honor of my mother’s memory, I would never, ever lie about that.”
I stared into her eyes, gauging her sincerity. She’d been so completely deconstructed by Halliwell. It was dangerous to bet on someone so compromised.
But Jana looked back at me, unflinching. Her love for her lost mother was pure and whole. I could trust a promise based on that. I hoped so, anyhow. For Reggie’s sake, I couldn’t let myself be silly, naïve, overly trusting.
Not that I had any other option. In this case, it was trust Jana, or die.
“So?” I urged. “You’ll help me?”
She rubbed her swollen jaw, and nodded. “Come with me. And hurry.”
We ran through the halls toward the infirmary. Jana had shaken off her shuffling zombie gait. It wasn’t dawn yet, but Halliwell’s spawn weren’t the types to linger in bed. They were robot drones on the one hand, and pathetically eager to prove themselves on the other. And as always, once the corridors were populated, Invisibility Cloak was useless.
I used Halliwell’s passcard to access the infirmary, and Jana led me into the huge supply closet at the back end of the examining rooms, which was more like a warehouse than a closet. Jana was the pharmaceutical expert, and this place was her kingdom. Or had been, before she’d been demoted to scullery maid.
She unlocked a cabinet, and took down a canister like the one I’d seen loaded into the frame above Shane’s cell. “The red is for the lethal gas,” she told me. “The blue is the sedative. But I’ll put the sedative into the red one, and you can switch it with the one mounted outside the cell right now.”
“Got it,” I said.
She opened another locked cabinet, pulled out a drawer that was full of glass vials. She selected two, unscrewed a chamber on the top of the red gas canister, and snapped open the vial, pouring it all in. Then she hesitated, frowning as she did mental calculations, and opened another vial, counting out fifteen more drops.
“It’s a huge dose,” she told me. “But he’s a big guy. Very strong. It has to depress his respiration and slow his heartbeat so that he looks really dead. Which could kill him for real, particularly considering that you won’t have the opportunity to revive him for a while. You’ll be driving, and you have to get the hell away from here and find a place to hide before you can wake him up. It’s a very long shot.”
“If you came with me, I could drive while you gave him the?—”
“I have the tooth now,” she broke in, her voice harder. “Which means that scenario is not possible. If I went with you, the minute Halliwell figured out what happened, he would detonate it remotely. If I’m in an enclosed place, like a car or a van, the explosion or the gas would kill not just me, but anyone who’s with me. I’m a walking bomb now, Cass. Let it go.”
I hated the idea of leaving her behind undefended, to pay for my sins. “But I can’t just go without you,” I protested. “I can’t just leave you. If he finds out?—”
“If he finds out, tough shit. Get as far away as you can with Masters before you stick him with this.” She pulled out a hypodermic with a yellow plastic ring on the bottom. “This is a powerful stimulant. If he lives, and if it works, he’ll be confused, disoriented, violent. Possibly psychotic.”
Her eyes asked me if I had the nerve. I reached for it. “If this is my one shot, I’m taking it,” I told her.
“Good.” She passed me three more syringes, these ones with black plastic rings. “Knockout needles,” she said, in response to my questioning gaze. “One for me, when you attack me in the morgue. He won’t buy it, but we should at least try. The others are for whoever else you might run into. You still have to steal a catering van, or something like that. On the fly. It’s too late to put together anything clever now.”
“Um. Yeah.” I was reeling at the thought of all the desperate things I had to do, each building on the success of the last, each more improbable than the one that came before.
“Don’t mix those needles up,” she reminded me. “You’ll kill me if you do. Probably him, too.”
A horrible thought occurred to me suddenly. “Oh, shit,” I said blankly. “When can I even try to do this? The timing is all off! I’m supposed to work one of Halliwell’s bullshit kiss-ass parties tomorrow after the execution. Another fucking evening dress.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Yeah? Can you see a way out of it? Because I can’t.”
“You have to get yourself banished,” she said. “I do it all the time, but I do it involuntarily. Like my crying jag the other day, remember? You have to do it on purpose, at just exactly the right time.”
