AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He winced. “Every man in this room is a killer, whether you can imagine it or not.”
An interesting thought, but for some reason, it didn’t scare me as much as it likely should.
They all fell quiet again. I looked around, trying to guess at the reason. It couldn’t be because of me, as I didn’t respond. Besides, they all seemed to be in conversation. Not that it mattered. They seemed perfectly capable of doing more than one thing at once. Even Ransom stared at the door.
“What?” I whispered although it occurred to me, I needn’t have bothered after I said it.
The door flew open, and a man appeared in the opening. Like everyone else male in the room, he was huge. His face showed several days’ worth of beard growth, and his eyes were bloodshot.
Crew rushed over to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Druid, what’s going on? What brings you down this way?”
“Here.” His voice shook as he spoke, as if speaking words strained him. “Here.”
“Who’s here?” A man I didn’t recognize rose and walked over to him. In fact, soon most of the room surrounded him in some way.
Ransom, by contrast, blocked my exit from behind the bar. Was he trying to keep me behind him? Was Druid somehow dangerous?
“What’s going on?” I asked again.
“That’s Druid. As is obvious, he’s one of us, but they did things to him. Experimented on him, because in some ways he wasn’t what they planned. His brain, while brilliant, doesn’t work like the rest of ours. He lives on his own most of the time, so we don’t often interact. The man on his left is called Wolf. They grew up in the same juvenile hall, before Druid got taken by the corporation. Usually, if Dru wants something, he goes to Wolf. He doesn’t usually come here.
Right at that moment, Druid grabbed onto Crew. “Here.”
“Who’s here?” Everyone was asking, but this time I asked, too.
He turned to look at me, desperation in his eyes. “Girl.”
Druid stalked to the bar, and Ransom glared at him. “There are lots of women around. I know it’s odd. Back when, there weren’t, but there are a lot more born now. You can’t have this one, if that’s what you’re here for. She’s ours.”
I blinked. I was theirs? What was that supposed to mean?
“No,” he slammed his hand on the table. Finally, he took a long, audible breath. “You saw him.”
His words threw the image of the man by the cave into my mind as though Druid showed him to me again, pushing that memory forward somehow, so I could see it again. Maybe that was something he could actually do? My voice was gruff, from the shock of having someone ruffle through my mind like a junk drawer, but I managed to answer, “Yes, I saw him.”
“He’s here.” He visibly swallowed. “And he’s like me. But he’s…wrong.”
Having delivered that speech, Druid stalked back out of the bar. As he left, pressure seemed to fill my head, making it feel as though it would explode in his absence. I grabbed onto my forehead, nearly falling forward, crying out at the sensation.
Ransom grabbed me. “Damn it. He pushed at her mind. Hold on. It’ll pass.”
I laughed, even though nothing was funny about the pain bringing me to my knees. “I wondered if he was doing that. If he showed me the man.”
“That’s one of the things they did to him,” Mace explained as he jumped over the bar to my other side. “The corporation was trying to recreate something someone did on the other side of the universe. They messed up a whole lot of the people they used for their experiments. He can do that now, to non– Super Soldiers. I’ve never seen him do it here before, though. Only once, on another planet, before we were free.” He put his hand on my forehead. “Maybe you were right about us being bad for her. She keeps getting hurt.”
The pain passed. “I think he only wanted me to understand.”
Crew caught my attention. “Okay, Raven?”
“Okay.” I nodded.
Gunnar leaned over the bar and handed me a glass of water. “Here.”
I took a long sip. “So someone like him is here? That’s the point? He wanted us to know that. Like him, but bad.”
Wolf rocked back on his feet. “Do you think it’s possible one of Evander Corporation’s experiments are here, and that they can somehow fuck with lightning? Like a person can do that?”
I opened and closed my mouth. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there were so many things I didn’t understand, despite what I saw with my own eyes. The whole place continued to confuse me. I expected an uncivilized wilderness, since that was how Amias described it...but I wasn’t sure anymore that Amias understood it when he lived there.
