The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 28

Quinn

Getting into the restricted areas of the hospital was surprisingly easy. At three in the morning, it was only a skeleton crew anyway, the few nurses and doctors on duty busy with essential tasks. The men slipped inside through the shadows, one of them unlocked a staff side door to allow me in, and we slunk down to the basement without encountering anyone other than in distant voices filtering through the walls.

Crag stayed in physical form beside me, his solid fingers curled around my elbow to guide me in the dark as we left the active levels of the hospital behind. His eyes glowed with a ruddy gleam in the dimness. I held my arm away from my side so there was no chance of his skin brushing the silver-and-iron vest, but he didn’t reveal any outward sign of discomfort.

Torrent and Lance had gone ahead through the gloom to scope out our destination. When we reached the door, Lance pushed it open. “Lots to choose from!” he said with hushed cheerfulness.

As I stepped through the doorway, my stomach clenched up. The smells of the space closed in around me, both the standard hospital smell of antiseptic cleaners and a more pungent waft of the chemicals employed in this specific section. The chilly air raised goosebumps on my arms.

Torrent had switched on a desk lamp at the far end of the room to cast a thin glow over the space without risking too bright a light in case someone else ventured down in the basement halls. I peered around me at the shiny exam tables, the tool cabinets, and wall of stainless steel cubbies. Images flashed through my mind of what lay behind those doors, and I closed my eyes.

I’d risked death every time I’d gone out on one of my urban exploring adventures, sure. I’d been at its door every time the shadowkind beasts had launched an attack. But I’d never looked it in the face quite as vividly as I was right now.

The morgue didn’t hold any adventure or excitement, any sense of making the most out of life. It was wrenchingly banal in its finality.

If my transplant operation had gone wrong nine years ago, or if there hadn’t been a viable heart available in time, I’d have ended up down here. Just a husk of a body, already starting to decompose. Any day, any hour, any minute, my new heart could fail, and I’d be behind one of those doors by the next day.

I shivered, my lungs constricting. I didn’t know if I believed in an afterlife. I wanted to, but the older I’d gotten, the more it seemed like wishful thinking. And even if it did exist, there was so much I still wanted to do in this world. Even with all the thrills and experiences I’d chased, I wasn’t close to finished.

Lance roved over to the cubbies and started opening the doors, peeking inside. Torrent had emerged into physical form near one of the empty exam tables. He considered me, his mouth tight.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

I squared my shoulders, willing down the icy tendrils of nausea. I could do this. I had to do this if I wanted to live. Even if it felt like shit to know that I was stealing from someone else to survive just like the first time.

Don’t think of it that way, the counsellor had told me after the operation. The girl who gave you her heart was already lost. She’d be happy knowing that she saved someone else, that she managed to do one more good thing.

Hopefully whoever we picked down here would feel the same way.

“I’ll manage,” I said, and touched the hem of my vest. “Do you need me to take this off?” He’d said I should come with them to the morgue if we wanted to improve the chances of this plan working. The men could compare the overall human vibe my body gave off to the ones in here to make sure they found someone who was as close a match as possible. If we picked someone too different in physical composition, Rollick might sense something was wrong.

Torrent shook his head. “It only disguises the energies coming from that area of your body. We can pick up on your general essence from any other part.”

Crag’s hand slid to mine, and he lifted it to his nose as if to breathe in that essence. I held still and then extended my fingers to graze his cheek.

He gave my hand a little squeeze. “The strength beneath your softness is always impressive.”

“My strength, my softness. My baby girl,” Lance declared lightly, without sounding particularly put out by the other man’s attentions. He teased his claws over my hair and leaned in to give the back of my head a quick peck.

Torrent curled a tentacle around my other wrist. I remembered him saying that his suckers could pick up on things his other senses couldn’t.

I caught his eyes, feeling abruptly uncertain. My relationship with him had yoyoed all over the place in the past day.

He stepped a little closer and raised my hand so he could brush a quick kiss to the knuckles. It was a brief flutter of sensation, but it made my heart skip a beat.

“It will be worth it,” he said, with total conviction, and added, “You don’t have to get any closer to the bodies. We should handle the choosing anyway.”

“Okay,” I said. But I still saw the white-shrouded corpses as the men slid one and then another partway out, undoing zippers for closer inspections. My stance went rigid, holding me in place even though part of me longed to bolt for the door.

This wasn’t my fate. Not yet. I had at least a little while longer.

The men came back to me one at a time to refamiliarize themselves with the details of my essence and then continue their search. There did appear to be quite a large selection on this particular evening, although this was the biggest hospital in Jacksonville, so maybe that wasn’t surprising. Accidents and illnesses either sudden or finally terminal, probably at least one murder…

“I think this one,” Lance said, tapping his claws against the tray in a cubby he’d doubled back to. “Not the same but the closest. And her hair looks similar too, in color anyway.”

The other men joined him to study the corpse. “She’s older but not so much older that I think Rollick will notice once we’ve set everything up,” Torrent said after a moment. “Heavier, but that won’t really matter. I agree. This one.”

I swallowed thickly, wondering who this woman was that we were going to use in our scheme in ways she definitely didn’t deserve. “What now?”

Torrent glanced at me. “Crag can carry the body through the shadows. Lance will help you navigate back to the door. I’ll go ahead to the car so we can drive off quickly. It won’t be dark for more than a couple hours longer.”

Guilt clamped around my gut as I left the room behind. Lance tsked as he ushered me through the dark halls. “Why worry about her? She’s gone, wherever the part of her that matters would go, if it goes anywhere.”

“It’s still not something anyone would want to happen to their body, if they did know,” I murmured. “And she probably has family or friends, people who could find out and who’ll be upset…”

“We would be very upset if we couldn’t stop Rollick from taking you,” Lance informed me, his grip on my arm tightening.

I didn’t know how to tell him that knowing how invested they were in my survival unnerved me as much as it reassured me.

What if this didn’t work, and I was going to end up taken and eviscerated no matter what they did? What if I’d ruined their lives for nothing?

Maybe it would have been better if I’d never tried to get to know them, never shown any concern for them, kept my distance the way I had with every normal person in my life. I took the risks for me. I’d never expected anyone else to.

But these men weren’t normal, and the situation wasn’t either, and now here we were. What could we do other than keep going forward?

We drove through familiar streets to the park where the shadowkind men had first leapt to my rescue. It seemed fitting. They figured Rollick would have headed this way both following my energies before I’d put the vest on and then investigating my usual haunts when that beacon had vanished. We needed him to find the body first or at least quickly.

Maybe my safety would be secured in almost the exact same place I’d lost it.

Crag carried the body through the darkness again, and Lance followed his impressions of the other men. He led me through the shadowy park to an isolated spot far from any of the paths, sheltered by trees and shrubs. The gargoyle laid the corpse on the grass there.

I stared down at the woman’s bluish face, and Lance raised a hand, extending his claws, to begin the work.

“Wait!” I whispered urgently, and bent down by the dead woman. “I’m sorry. I hope you’re at peace, wherever you are. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it’d save more people than just me.”

The men waited until I straightened up again, not commenting on my little speech, and then they descended on the body without any sign that the act bothered them at all. I supposed it didn’t.

Lance and Crag tore into the torso with their claws. Torrent slammed the thicker part of one tentacle into her face hard enough to crush the skull and batter the woman beyond recognition. In between, the dragon shifter warmed the ravaged pieces to a more lifelike temperature with shallow huffs of breath, so Rollick wouldn’t think “I” had cooled too quickly.

The sounds of ripped and pummeled flesh made my stomach heave. I had to turn away and put my hands over my ears. I’d wanted to bear witness, but I was afraid I’d puke and ruin the scene we’d meant to construct. My gut kept lurching, bile creeping up my throat.

It only took a minute. I didn’t see what they did with the heart they removed from the flayed flesh. Torrent touched my shoulder with his hand.

“We need your blood now,” he said. “And then you’ll have to take off your vest so he can track your energy here.”

I nodded. My legs wobbled as I turned around. Lance blinked in and out of the shadows, the gore vanishing from his claws with the trip. For these guys, darkness was the ultimate disinfectant, erasing everything except the essentials of their physical presence when they reformed. Torrent had said not even germs could travel with them. I couldn’t have asked for a cleaner blade.

The dragon shifter took my hand with a gentleness I’d never seen him extend to anyone or anything other than me. “We won’t let you lose too much. I’ll seal it up quickly.”

“I know,” I said, but my voice came out choked. I forced myself to step over to the ravaged remains that barely looked human anymore.

A meaty smell hung in the air. I clamped my mouth shut, breathing as shallowly as I could, and held out my arm.

Lance severed one of my veins so neatly it was only a brief flicker of sharper pain and then a radiating but duller ache. Blood spurted down over the wrecked corpse. I moved quickly around the mess, guiding the traces of scarlet liquid all around the scene so that a little of my essence would cling to every part.

I had to give enough blood to make this trick work. If Rollick realized we’d tried to pull one over on him… I didn’t know if I or my men would make it through the night.

I kept holding out my arm and letting my blood fall until one of Torrent’s tentacles caught me carefully around my waist. “That’s enough,” he said in a low voice.

I was starting to feel a bit light-headed, although I didn’t know how much that was the blood loss compared to my jittering nerves and the roiling nausea that kept bubbling up inside me.

Lance raised my wrist to his mouth, blew his fiery breath over it to cauterize it, and then soothed the momentary burn with a slick of his dragon tongue.

“So handy,” I said with a wobbly laugh.

He grinned at me. “It is. I’ll always patch you up.”

If I didn’t end up torn up beyond repair like the corpse we were standing over.

I squashed down that thought and stepped back, tugging off my vest. Crag had already vanished into the night to watch for Rollick’s approach—and to dispatch any unwanted shadowkind who crept this way before their boss reached the site. Torrent sent Lance after the gargoyle with a brisk gesture. Then he motioned for me to follow him.

“You stay crouched here,” he said, ushering me to a cluster of bushes about ten feet from the body, which were dense enough that I’d be invisible to anyone near it. They formed a semi-circle that would shield me on both sides as well.

“As soon as any of us alerts you, put the vest on,” Torrent said. “At that point, I think it’ll be safer if you stay in this spot rather than try to go back to the car or anywhere else. We’ll be here helping manipulate the situation.”

I glanced behind me, in the one direction where I’d be exposed. “What if Rollick comes from that way?”

“We should know before he gets close enough to spot you in the dark, and we’ll move you. I’ve already scouted out a couple of other hiding spots.” Torrent paused and then touched my cheek with his hand. His cool gaze held mine. “This is a good plan. It’s your plan. The ultimate fix-it.”

The old guilt wound through me again. “I know. You don’t have to—none of you have to—” I sucked in a breath and gathered my words. “It’d be safer for the three of you too if you stayed in hiding and didn’t show him you’re here, wouldn’t it?”

“But not safer for you,” Torrent said calmly. “We’ll be helping sell the story. And if he doesn’t see us then, he’ll probably track us down just in case we were responsible. This will help settle things between him and us too.”

I raised my eyebrows. Rollick hadn’t struck me as the type to simply let a transgression go. “Is he ever going to forgive you either way?”

Torrent shrugged. “Forgive, no. Recognize that he’s got better things to do than make us suffer when no one knew we were running this mission for him anyway? Absolutely. He cares more about maintaining his reputation on a broad scale than retribution. The longer he lingers around here, the more chance another party will find out he was mixed up in this mess, and he definitely didn’t want that.”

“So it might be easier for you if you did just disappear.”

Torrent was silent for a moment, studying my expression. I wished it was easier for me to read his face.

One of his tentacles eased toward me, simply coming to rest against my ankle. “Do you want us to go? Would you rather be rid of us once we’ve dealt with Rollick? You will be reasonably safe with just the vest.”

I folded my arms over my chest. “Would you—or Crag and Lance, anyway—leave even if I told you to? You don’t seem to be very good at that.”

He gazed back at me steadily. “I’d make them. If that’s really what would make you happiest. I know a whole lot of chaos has come into your life along with us, and we lied to you for a long time—it’d be understandable if you didn’t want to be reminded of that. But we—I—would only be leaving for your benefit. I…”

He glanced away for a moment and then jerked his eyes back to me. “I’ve never felt anything close to the way I feel when you’re with me. It’s not something I want to lose. I don’t want to lose you. That’s why I’m here, in case I didn’t make that clear enough earlier. It isn’t just them, even if they’ve been better at showing how you’ve affected them. All right?”

A strange sensation bloomed in my chest—not the flutter of inexplicable energy, but a heady warmth that grounded me in the night. Because the three of them had done the same for me, hadn’t they? They’d brought a lot of chaos with them, but they’d also opened up my life to all kinds of things I’d never even known were possible.

Imagine what it could be like if we pulled this off and I had the freedom to have both normalcy and a little chaos on the side.

They were here for me… and I was giving them something in return. It wasn’t just take take take, me draining them in my quest for survival, the way it’d always seemed with my parents and my former friends.

I could have lied. I could have told him I never wanted to see any of their faces or sense them lurking in the nearby shadows again. But it would be a lie… and it sounded like leaving might actually hurt them more than staying would, even if this ended in catastrophe sooner rather than later.

“I just don’t like putting you in more danger,” I said quietly.

Something shifted in Torrent’s face, bringing a gleam of longing into his gaze that I couldn’t deny. His voice came out raw. “You aren’t the danger. You’re what makes things right. Our indomitable Ms. Fix-It.”

There was nothing but affection in the once-sardonic nickname. It drew me in. I stepped forward and answered Torrent the best way I could, with no words at all. Bobbing up on my toes, I pressed my lips to his.

He returned the kiss without hesitation, his tentacle rising to rest against the small of my back, to hold me in place. When I eased back, I added, in case it was necessary, “I don’t want to lose you either.”

A smile softer than I’d ever seen from him before touched Torrent’s lips. And then Crag leapt out of the shadows beside us, his stance tensed. My pulse hiccupped, and I moved to tug on my vest.

“No,” he said before I got very far, and turned to Torrent. “I haven’t sensed Rollick yet. Neither has Lance. And more lesser creatures have been intruding on the park. I don’t know how much longer we can wait.”