Chapter 20
“Aunt Becca! Wake up!”
Becca groaned and pressed a hand to her forehead. What the hell had she been doing? She hadn’t had a migraine this bad since she was fifteen.
“Shh! Don’t talk yet. Just nod if you’re okay.”
No, she wasn’t okay. She felt like crap and Theo… Theo!
Her eyes shot open, which apparently was a bad idea. Light stabbed through her eyeballs to attack her brain, and she slammed them shut again. Holy hell, she felt awful. But at least her brain was working.
“Theo?” she whispered, hoping like hell she hadn’t imagined it.
“It’s me.”
ThankGodThankGodThankGod! He was alive. “Where are we?” All she’d gotten in her short blink was a flash of white on white and metal bars. It was that last part that bothered her. But Theo was alive and the relief of that had her lightheaded from joy. Or whatever shit it was they’d made her breathe.
“An abandoned salt mine. That’s all I know. They’re not real big on talking with the lab rats.”
She nodded slowly, then decided to risk another peek.
Shielding her eyes with a hand, she slowly cracked them open.
Every once in a while her migraines were so bad they made her retch.
She didn’t think that would be a good idea right now.
She was probably going to need all her wits pretty soon, and that meant slowly taking stock of her surroundings without putting her on her knees over a bucket. If there even was a bucket.
She squinted and peered around.
There was a bucket about two feet away from her. And that was about it for her in this metal cage on a gray-white floor. Abandoned salt mine, huh? Well, she supposed there were worse places to be, though at the moment she couldn’t think of any.
Meanwhile, her eyes adjusted enough that she could look farther away. There was another cage beside her and in it, a young man was flopped on his back, his hair matted with blood. Somehow it would have been better if he’d been curled in on himself, but he lay as if dropped and unable to move.
She choked back a sob at the sight. It wasn’t Theo, that much she’d seen instantly, but the boy looked near death and she wanted to go help him.
“That’s Caleb,” Theo said in a low voice. “He’s not dead, so it’s best if you just let him rest.”
“Where are you?” she asked, slowly moving her throbbing head. But as she did, a sharp pain from the crook of her arm cut through her consciousness. She looked and saw a telltale bandage there and she cursed under her breath.
“I don’t think they gave you anything. Just took a ton of blood to test,” Theo said.
She was finally able to locate her nephew by the sound of his voice. Tilting her head up, she saw another cage, only this one was a great deal larger. Not big enough for a person to stand, but at least Theo had plenty of room to crouch forward against the bars.
“Theo,” she whispered, scanning him from head to toe.
He looked pale and bruised, plus his hands were raw.
Even crouched as he was, she could see that he’d lost weight.
No baby fat left on her boy anywhere. He had bandages at the crooks of both elbows and, now that she looked closely, she realized that he was naked and covered in raw welts.
It took her a moment to place what might have caused them, and when she did, the fury was nearly blinding. “Did they… Was that… a cattle prod?”
He flushed and tried to cover his wounds, but there were simply too many. And that made her all the more livid. To think that he’d be ashamed of what they’d done to him. My God, she was going to kill them!
“It looks worse than it is,” he said.
“Is there anything else? Are you hurt? Did they beat you?” She searched her memory for every scrap of medical information she had. There wasn’t much. All she knew about emergency medicine she’d gotten from TV.
“I’m okay,” he said, his words low and urgent. “Keep your voice down. You want them to think you’re still asleep.”
She nodded and pressed her lips together.
But the sight of his battered body made her want to wail.
And find a gun. She did neither. Instead, she tried to focus more on their surroundings.
There wasn’t much to see. Just long rows of cages, all of them empty except for her, Theo, and Caleb.
Then, twisting as much as she could, she picked out what she guessed were two doors, one on either end of the large room.
That was the extent of her reconnaissance.
“There was another boy. Caleb’s brother.” Theo’s voice choked up as he spoke.
“I know,” she said. That must be the boy who’d died at the farm.
“We found him, but were too late to…” Her voice trailed away.
Too late to save the child. Too late to find Theo.
And now she was trapped here, too. “They’re looking for you—Carl, the police, everyone.
We almost found you before. They’ll find you now. We just have to hold on a bit longer.”
Theo’s eyes went wide with hope, and for a moment, he looked like that little boy who’d just lost his mother years ago. The one who had put all his faith and trust in her, even though everything had just been shattered.
“We’ll be fine,” she repeated as much to herself as him. “Carl will find us.”
“Who’s Carl?” he asked. Trust the boy to hit on the one awkward part of the whole conversation.
“He’s Mr. Max. He’s been part of the search from the very beginning.
” She stretched out her legs as much as she could in this narrow space.
If she stayed on her side, bent at the waist, she could just do it.
She was pleasantly surprised to see that she wasn’t bruised or hurt in any way except at the elbow.
That was something. Though God knew how long that would last. “What do they want with us?”
“I, um…We’re being studied. Caleb and me.” He took a shuddering breath. “I think they did something to me, Aunt Becca. I think they made me into something…awful.”
She looked over at him. He was trying to be brave.
She could see it so clearly on his face, even though he was terrified.
But in this one respect, she had to tell him the truth.
She couldn’t let him look at himself like some kind of monster.
“You mean because you can shift into a grizzly bear? Is that it? Because if it is, that’s not something terrible.
It’s wonderful.” She looked over at Caleb. “And he’s a werewolf, right?”
Theo’s eyes were wide and he could barely get the words out. “You knew?”
She shook her head. “Not until a few days ago. Right after you went missing, Mr. Max came and explained things. He said…” She smiled at Theo, trying to show him with just her eyes and her words that she would love him no matter what kind of biology he had.
Human, bear, wolf, or anything else. “He said you were on the verge of your First Change.”
“Into a bear? It’s not…you know…lycanthropy or something?”
“No, sweetie. I don’t think so. But when Carl gets us out, he’ll explain it to you. He’s a bear, too. As are a lot of people. He says your father was one of them, and they’ve been watching over you since you were first born.”
Theo’s eyes narrowed and his hands gripped the bars, twisting as if he could work them free. They didn’t budge, and she could see his brows lower in fury. “My father did this to me?” he asked, his voice low and rough. “And Mr. Max?”
“No, no. They’d didn’t do it to you. It’s something you are. It’s something they are.”
“A freak?”
“Never! Theo, you have to calm down.” But it was too late.
She could see his emotions getting away from him.
His hands were thick where they gripped the bars and as she watched, they got larger and darker.
She looked to his eyes and saw them turn golden brown.
His nose lengthened and dark fur spouted everywhere.
He was shifting and in that confined space, he wasn’t going to fit.
Plus, she knew if she and Theo were going to have a chance to escape, it wouldn’t be with him unconscious after the bastards used their cattle prod on him.
Carl had said that shifters could change only once a day at best. That the change took too much out of them.
And it was clear that Theo needed to conserve his energy.
He was thinner than she’d ever seen him and this wasn’t going to help.
So it was time for her to go into Mommy mode.
“Theodore Samuel Weitz, you will settle down this instant!” Her voice was sharp and cold.
Theo’s head snapped up immediately, his eyes pinned on her, but he didn’t stop growling deep in his throat.
“Don’t you dare take that tone with me, young man.
You will sit down on your bottom and think, do you hear me?
You will use your brain or so help me, I will climb out of this cage and flick you hard right on your nose. ”
The absurdity of that threat wasn’t lost on her.
She couldn’t get out of her cage and no way was a finger snap on his nose going to do anything.
But it was the only physical punishment she’d ever used.
It was the shame of it that settled Theo down when he was ten.
And it was the tone—she hoped—that made it through to the bear.
It worked.
He dropped down onto his butt and stared at her.
A moment later, his nose seemed to recede and his ears returned to full human.
Odd how she was starting to pick up the little changes more than the big ones.
But she’d been studying Theo’s face since he was a baby.
Of course she’d notice every little thing.
She didn’t speak again until he was fully human.
“I know you’re angry,” she said softly. “I am, too. But you need to conserve your strength. We’ll get our chance soon. I promise.”
Theo swallowed and turned his face away. Then a moment later, he looked back at her, hope once again burning hot and wild in his hazel eyes. “Promise?” he whispered.
“I promise. Mr. Max won’t let us down.”
“But what if—”
“Hssst,” she said. “Stop questioning that. You can ask about anything else, Theo, but don’t doubt for a second that we’re getting out of here. Do you understand?”
He nodded twice, just like he had when he was ten and she’d told him he was going to live with her and they were going to be so happy together. “I understand.”
“Good,” she said, her voice dropping to a quieter tone. “Now tell me everything that’s happened to you so far. Everything. Starting from how they found you.”
His story turned out to be remarkably like hers.
He’d been walking to practice and then there’d been four guys on him and a cloth over his face.
He’d woken up some time later in the Moss compound basement with the two wolf boys.
There was a mad scientist—his words—and lots of bastards with cattle prods.
He’d shifted only once and that had freaked him out so much that he’d slept on and off for the next two days.
He’d even slept for most of the move from the farmhouse to here, though he suspected that was because they’d drugged his food.
He’d woken a few hours ago when they brought her in. He’d watched when they drew blood from her arm, and then he’d waited until they’d left to try to wake her. Which brought them up to now.
She suspected that he left a lot of the details out.
She didn’t know whether to be thankful or to push him for every last detail so she could figure things out.
But that was silly. She wasn’t James Bond or even Tonya the pissy cop.
She was a human baker who wasn’t going to martial arts her way out of this mess. She didn’t have the skills.
All she could do was keep Theo calm and wait for their opportunity. Because one would come. It had to.
Hurry up, Carl. Find us!