The Jekyll and Her Hydes

14. Zeb

Chapter 14

The world returns in fits and starts, flashing scenes that make Ghastly want to rip our enemies apart, except we can’t escape the darkness in order to find them. People surround us only to vanish again. A rumbling sound fills our ears and a metal wall is in our face, and then both are gone. Bright lights flash. Glaring lights. Lights that make me want to recoil because they stab like needles in my eyes. My thoughts blur with Ghastly’s, and half the time, I can’t tell who is in control of our body.

And then I wake up.

Screeching sounds fill the air, erratic and interrupted by short bursts of a bug-zapper type of buzzing. Something clammy presses against my cheek, and it isn’t until my eyes focus that I see I’m lying on a rubbery floor with metal bars ahead. My entire body aches, from my scalp to my toes to my teeth, but I’m the one in control for the moment. Ghastly is still groggy inside my mind.

And then memory starts to return.

Mabel.

A flood of adrenaline and rage roars through my veins, propelling me to my feet.

I only make it halfway before my legs give out.

Crashing to my knees, I catch myself with an arm that’s stained green and purple like the hue of Ghastly’s tentacles. I ignore it, though. My eyes dart around the room, my vision blending with Ghastly’s to make the scene warp in a dizzying way.

But she’s not here.

And the rest is hell.

I’m inside a cage. Beastly lies in another one across the room, motionless, and I’m frozen for the moment it takes me to spot how—thank the gods—his chest is still rising and falling. He’s my family, and Huck and Puck are too, every bit as much as my parents and siblings and hopefully Mabel someday. If whoever grabbed us had killed him…

I shudder, pushing that nightmare aside. We’re in some kind of loading dock, complete with large rolling doors to my left and markings on the floor to caution workers not to get too close. There’s a pair of double doors to my right that look industrial too, but more like they lead into a building, while blindingly bright lights glare down from overhead, offering nowhere to hide.

Several yards to the right of Beastly’s cage, Puck is locked up as well, and he’s obviously the source of the screeching I heard when I woke up. Like a deranged hornet in a box, he’s ricocheting madly off metal bars that jolt him with electricity every time he hits them. Scrapes mar the concrete floor where his efforts have made the cage shift across the ground. Bloodstained bandages are taped haphazardly to the majority of his bullet wounds, though a few gauzy scraps lie scattered on the ground like he ripped them off in his rage. Trails of dried blood crisscross his deathly pale skin, but the wounds themselves have long since closed, joining the pockmarks of old burns and jagged scars from his past. He and Huck can take a hell of a beating before they go down—a fact the sick bastard who kept him like a toy used to his advantage countless times.

But right now, the new cage and the fact Mabel is gone have obviously driven Puck past the limit of whatever rationality he still possessed. And considering who I suspect our captors might be, what they’ll do to him if he doesn’t calm down makes panic begin pounding like a drum in the back of my mind.

“Puck.” I start to grab the bars and then retreat at the buzz of electricity there. “Puck!”

The Hyde can’t hear me. He’s too far gone.

Ghastly rises up, reacting to my fear and Puck’s alike, and it’s all I can do to wrestle him back down. Yes, this is bad. It’s so fucking bad that, if we make it out of here, I’m definitely going to have nightmares. But we have to be smart. Make a plan. Keep our heads so that we do get out, and so that we can fucking butcher the bastards who thought they could take Mabel from us.

Ghastly recedes. Not much, but enough that I can think beyond keeping him contained.

There’s no doubt in my mind traders are behind this. The fact they’ve got us here, in a motherfucking loading dock, only reinforces that suspicion. But I won’t let myself believe they’ve taken Mabel away already. No, she’ll be here, maybe in a different room, but here.

Which means we’ll find her. Gut anyone who touched her. And make sure we never let anyone near her again.

Puck flings himself full-body at the bars, screaming as they burn him.

But first things first. “Puck!”

Still nothing. But in his cage, Beastly stirs, pushing up from the ground and growling like the monster he is.

Puck scrambles up to fling himself at the bars again.

“Dammit, Puck!” I shout. “Stop!”

He’s not listening.

“Puck, Mabel needs you to calm down right now!”

The Hyde freezes, his eyes snapping to me. “My belle.”

Thank the gods…

“You’ll get your chance to kill the ones who took your belle, but only if you let them get close, understand? So you have to stay calm.”

Puck starts shaking, but his enormous eyes don’t leave me. There’s a trace of rationality in his gaze now. Beastly’s too. It’s not sanity because the Hydes have never been sane, but I can see a focused intensity that shows their minds have started working past their rage and fear again.

And sure, it’s the kind of focused intensity that would string the traders’ teeth into a necklace, but I’ll take what I can get.

Ghastly mutters about pretty tooth necklaces for Mabel. I ignore him.

“Did you see where they took her?” I ask Puck.

The Hyde lifts one long arm and points his knife-like finger toward the door on the righthand side of the room.

Relief makes air rush from my chest. She’s here, then. I can’t let myself imagine what they might be doing to her—I’ll lose control of Ghastly if I consider that for too long—but she’s here and that’s a start.

“Okay, good. Now, did you see how they control these cages? Is there a key or a code or?—”

The double doors open.

Six guys walk in dressed in khakis like zookeepers. Ghastly snarls in my mind at the pretense, the arrogance. It’s on purpose, I know. A show to intimidate us and to create a sense of danger and wildness for buyers too.

And it probably means they’re going to hold an auction soon. Maybe not here, not if we’re in the fucking loading dock, but somewhere, and they want the buyers to feel like they’re getting rare animals.

Not living sentient beings with hopes and dreams and thoughts of their own, no. Never that.

Just rare animals, all without the trouble of traveling to far-off lands or actually risking anything.

Ghastly shivers through my skin, wanting to show them just how wild we can be, and I take a breath, reminding him that we need to stay calm. Need to stay focused.

We can’t kill them all, not yet. We need to know where Mabel is first.

And we need to get out of these fucking cages.

”I see one of you is trying to pretend to look human,” one of the men says, his tone bored. From the way the others are reacting to him, I’m guessing he’s the sick fucker in charge. “You really do enjoy that game, don’t you? As if you could hide what you are.”

“Where is she?” I demand.

The man smirks. “Only something like you freaks would want a hideous cunt like that.”

It gets harder to control Ghastly—and harder to want to try. But we have to be smart. We have to be…

Gods, I’ll make them eat their own tongues.

The guy in charge saunters up to the cage. “Don’t you worry about your little freak. Our crew’s keeping her entertained. By the time we’re done, she won’t even remember you.”

Puck screams, his voice like knives grating over metal. Beastly roars, grabbing the bars and howling when the electricity burns him. The smell of scorched fur joins the stench of concrete and sweat in the air.

I stay quiet, my body shaking all over, while Ghastly seethes beneath my skin, cataloging all of the ways he’ll make these men pay for touching her.

I’m on board with each and every one.

“She’s your mate, isn’t she?” the man continues. “All of you, sharing the same bitch. Couldn’t find anyone else to touch your cocks, eh?” He smirks as his buddies come closer, cattle prods in their hands. “You want to know how she’s begging for it? How she’s on the ground like an animal for us? Or how about what her new owner will do once we sell her?”

Everything Huck suffered, everything I’ve seen over and over again in all these years of rescuing people from the traders, flashes through my mind in an instant.

I can’t keep Ghastly under control now.

I don’t even try.

The shift takes me fast. My vision blurs into Ghastly’s, seeing more than my Jekyll eyes ever could. My back arches as tentacles burst from my skin, my spine, my shoulders. At lightning speed, the powerful limbs shoot past the bars in all directions.

Because that man was a fool. His buddies too.

They got too close.

Ghastly’s tentacles whip around their throats, round and round while their fingers pry at his flesh. He squeezes down, making their faces darken with panic and trapped blood.

But it’s not choking them that either of us has in mind.

Ghastly’s true gift, the darkest side of it, flows through his skin and out into the suckers now attached to their throats.

Images flash through our mind. Supernaturals crying. Screaming. Begging and pleading and whimpering. Mothers with their children being ripped away. Fathers flinging themselves at the bars just like Puck and Beastly did, fighting desperately to reach their loved ones.

Failing every time.

From the back of Ghastly’s mind, I watch as my Hyde’s madness—our madness—pours like burning lava into the traders’ brains. When we want to be, the two of us are monsters in every sense of the word, but my parents long since taught me that isn’t a bad thing.

Sometimes, it takes a monster to stop the monsters.

Sometimes, a monster is the only kind of good guy the world gets.

Pure insanity rolls inexorably across the traders’ brains, melting their thoughts, their wills, their identities, and their sick, twisted dreams. And they can’t withstand it. In the end, they were never brave or strong. They weren’t powerful, not really.

They’re cowards who feed on fear and who hurt others because they can.

And they can’t survive something like me.

Their bodies begin to seize and shake as their brains overheat and turn to mush. Blood vessels burst in their eyes and noses from the strain, sending red rivers streaming down. They gibber and they snap, breaking their teeth but still managing to bite off their own tongues with the jagged remnants. Choking on both, they spasm and blubber while their bowels fail and the reek of shit and piss fill the air.

Ghastly grins, and deep in his mind, I do too. Like hell these fuckers will ever hurt anyone again.

Lightning suddenly erupts from the bars so powerfully, it’s like the whole damn cage has become a box of electricity. Howling, Ghastly crashes backward. The smell of burned flesh chokes me, and from the agony, I’m guessing it’s probably ours.

I shudder. I’m still in the back of his mind, Ghastly holding prominence but only barely.

What the fuck?

Ghastly’s eyes flash around the room while he shoves up from the ground on tentacles that quiver with residual shocks. The bastards lie on the concrete, reduced to vegetables with bodies that will probably give up on living soon. Across the room, Beastly growls and Puck grins madly, both of them thoroughly approving of what Ghastly did.

“Well, that’s unfortunate.”

Ghastly’s eyes snap to the side.

By the double doors, and damnably beyond tentacles’ reach, a man in a suit stands, idly tapping something into a tablet computer in his hand. “We were hoping you would go over well with the Lovecraft enthusiasts.”

A rattling growl leaves Ghastly’s chest.

The man just sighs, looking back up at us. “Oh well.”

He motions to a redheaded woman beside him. Like the other sick fucks in this place, she’s wearing khakis. She even has a pith helmet on her head like she’s about to go on a gods-damned safari, and it makes me sick.

She stalks closer and then lifts a gun, nothing but ice in her eyes. Ghastly reacts instantly, sending his tentacles shooting through the bars at her.

But she gets her shot off first.

Three darts strike Ghastly’s chest, clustered tightly above his heart. Ghastly staggers backward, numbness sweeping his limbs and tentacles.

I try to make him shift back. To give me control. But the drug is messing with me, making my thoughts muzzy. My sense of my body slips through my fingers like smoke.

Ghastly crashes down to his knees.

The suit-clad man walks closer, the woman at his side still holding her gun at the ready. “We already have buyers lined up for you and your little friends. Jekylls and Hydes are a rare commodity, and our clients will pay top dollar to acquire you. But be that as it may, some of you are simply too dangerous to let live. We can’t let the brains of our buyers melt, after all. Bad for business.”

The sedative makes the world swirl. Ghastly’s cheek hits the floor as our muscles give out.

“But that doesn’t mean we don’t have use for you. Or, rather, that our military contractor friends don’t.”

Through the fading blur of the room, I see the man twitch his chin at me. While the woman keeps her gun level, another man comes forward. The knife in his fist glints like a star in the encroaching darkness.

From far away, I hear Beastly roar. Hear Puck scream in rage.

But I can’t even move.

“If we can’t sell the monster,“ the first guy says. “We can still make use of its parts.”