Chapter 24
Laurie
When the door closed behind River, I returned my attention to Mary. The girl was shivering, the barest tremor shaking through her hunched shoulders. Not fear, exactly but… unease.
I could guess what was running through her mind right about now.
A part of her was relieved to finally be free, to have escaped a cruel upbringing where she hadn’t even been granted a name.
But the other part of her—much like the other part of me—would be entertaining the idea of returning.
Not out of affection for her captors, but because when you’ve spent so long in survival mode, you don’t know any other way of living.
Freedom itself can feel foreign, and so you rebuild the very cage you escaped, simply because it’s familiar.
I wasn’t stupid (foolish maybe—reckless for sure.
But not stupid). I knew exactly why I couldn’t go a day without getting into some kind of trouble, even if it fucked with my head and sent me spiraling.
I’d built my new life like a roller coaster ride, savoring the highs and the sharp spike of adrenaline, and plummeting back down again when my luck ran out. It was the only way I knew how to live.
I hunched over at the edge of the cot, folding my elbows onto my knees and letting my gaze slide down to the floor instead of locking with Mary’s. In my experience, holding a conversation with a stranger was a lot easier when they weren’t looking straight at you.
“Tell me what you remember about the facility,” I murmured, keeping my voice casual enough to put her at ease. She would talk, or she wouldn’t. Either option was okay. “The bad parts… and the good parts.”
Mary hesitated for a beat, and then her small shoulders lifted in a stilted shrug. “I lived somewhere else before I lived there. The place I lived in before was bigger. There were more people like me.”
I kept my eyes on the floor and tapped the toes of my shoes together. “Hybrids?”
Mary nodded and I caught the movement from the corner of my eye. She sucked in a breath, and my heart clenched tight at the sound of it. She was trying to summon her courage, trying to be helpful.
“They said we were special because we were first generation hybrids.” She tried to sound proud. It came out confused, and I resisted the urge to reach out to her. To take her in my arms and hold her tight. To protect her and keep her safe.
Faint flashes of memories played behind my eyes—not the usual overwhelming cinematic experience, but distant snapshots. Blurry images. Red lights flashing in a smoky corridor, and something small—something precious—clutched to my chest. Something I had failed to protect.
I laced my fingers and swallowed around the stone lodged in my throat. When I glanced at Mary my words came out hoarse, like that choking smoke had never left my lungs. “How long were you there?”
Mary’s face scrunched up, curling lip revealing the barest hint of fangs. “All my life, I think. My mom said I was born there. Then, when she went away they moved me to the new facility.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Where did your mom go?”
“I don’t know. One day I woke up and she was just—” a hiccup, and the beginning stages of a sobbing fit stuttered her words, “—just… gone.” I looked up.
Mary’s lower lip trembled, and she dropped her head to her knees.
“The other hybrids said Mom went away because I was a monster. She didn’t want me. ”
Something in the hollow halls of my heart fractured into pieces.
“No, Mary. You’re not a monster.” I reached for her chilly fingers, encasing her hands in my own. Mary didn’t fight it, she only sobbed harder, and her shoulders shook with the force of it.
I shuffled closer, still holding onto her little hands, and she wove her way under my arm, burrowing as deep as she could into the folds of my jacket.
My every instinct screamed to hold her tighter, to shield her from everything she’d been through, and would yet have to face.
To carry her further than I’d carried my own precious bundle.
“It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.” My words came in ragged breaths, and I choked on each one.
I rocked us gently, ignoring the squeak of protest from the flimsy legs of the cot until Mary’s sobbing stuttered out. My own tears leaked out, unbidden. I barely noticed until I tasted the tang of salt on my lips.
“Hey, Mary.” I closed my eyes, a confession sitting unspoken on the tip of my tongue. But she had to hear it. She had to know, no matter what, that she was not a monster. “Can I tell you a secret?”
In the alcove of my arms, Mary nodded and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. I propped my cheek on the crown of her head. Somewhere beyond that door, River was listening. I knew she was. With her vampire hearing she’d pick up on every word, clear as day.
But that was… okay. I was vaguely surprised to find that I was fine with that, fine to share my most coveted of secrets. It was easier, in a way, to speak about these things when we weren’t face to face.
“I lived in a facility just like yours. I lived there for a long time and… and I—” I halted, inhaled a jagged breath, fighting tooth and nail to get the words out. “And one day I had a baby.”
It came out all at once, tumbling from my lips like a landslide.
I tightened my grip on the girl in my arms. “My little girl was a hybrid, too. Smallest fingers you ever did see, and louder than the alarms when she cried. And let me tell you, she cried a lot. She was happier in my arms than in her own cot, so I carried her around all the time.”
Mary wriggled her head free from my jacket and blinked up at me. “What happened to her?”
“She went away too.” The words fell cold and heavy from my tongue. The black smoke in my lungs writhed and curled, crawling up my throat along with the confession.
I forced another breath, blinking back tears that burned hot in the corner of my eyes. “Everything the organization took from me, everything they did. Nothing came close to the pain of losing her.”
I heaved in a breath, looked down at Mary, and cupped her small, soft face in my hands. “So when I hear you say your mom didn’t want you? That she thought you were a monster? No.” I touched our foreheads together, cool pallid skin on skin. “I know she loved you so much it hurt.”
Tears streaked Mary’s cheeks but she didn’t wipe them. “But she never came back.”
I folded her into my arms and resumed my gentle rocking, listing us both one way and then the other. “Maybe she couldn’t. But I can guarantee it—right to the very end, she never wavered in her love for you.”
River was waiting for me in the hallway when I eventually slipped out of the makeshift bedroom and quietly closed the door behind me. She had her arms loosely folded, leaning against the wall, shrouded in shadows where the ceiling light couldn’t reach.
Our eyes met. With her finely carved features and deathly stillness, she could have been a statue. If I didn’t know better I could have walked right past her and been none the wiser. I contemplated doing just that, purely to avoid what came next.
I wiped at my red-rimmed eyes and braced myself for that familiar look. Pained sympathy. The one I always got from Arlon, from everyone. The look that said I was something to be pitied, fragmented pieces to be tiptoed around. Something to be fixed.
Maybe that was true, but I couldn’t stand to see it: Anguish on my behalf.
But River only inclined her head, jutting her chin at the door I’d just shut. “Sweet kid. You did good in there.”
I stared at her, zeroing in on her eyes that glowed faintly in the shadows. “Uh… thanks.”
I’d been prepared to shoot down her sympathy, to defy her condolences with a particularly cold sneer. Now I was at a loss. Because she was looking at me like she always did. That quiet, assessing gaze like she was piecing me together bit by bit, patient in her pursuit of the bigger picture.
“Um…” I leaned my shoulders back against the door, looking away and scrambling to stay on topic. “She had some useful information, actually. Some of it was new, even for me.”
I relayed what I gathered from the rest of my conversation with Mary, soldiering on despite my occasional sniffles.
“Apparently they played some weird music over the facility speakers every night—it put people to sleep whether they wanted it or not. It’s like every facility has its own unique way of pacifying their captives.
And some of the human nurses… Mary said they were vacant.
Like they were under mind control—” I paused, suddenly aware that I was rambling, and that River had heard every word through the door already.
Her amber gaze swept me up and down, and though I twitched to fold in on myself, I kept my hands at my sides. I saw no pity, no second-hand sadness in her eyes. So I let her see me as I was. My biggest scar—the one on my heart—laid bare. The ache that would never go away.
River took it all in and said nothing. I wiped a knuckle at the last lingering tear on my cheek.
Then she pushed off the wall, stretched her arms above her head and clicked her back. When she caught my eye again, she was smiling. “So, on to the next one?”
The sigh of relief slipped out along with a dubious laugh. She wasn’t going to press, and she wasn’t going to pry. She had learned what she’d learned about me and my past—and that was that.
“Yeah.” I kicked off the door and fell into step beside her, my shoulder occasionally brushing up against her sleeve. And it was fine. It was normal. And I could breathe. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
We spent the rest of the day talking to the hybrids, before moving on to the newly-turned.
It was grim work. The more vacant eyes I stared into, the more heavy despondency piled up in my chest. They each had their own horror stories, and it all came together to form a macabre narrative of a shadowy organization taking what they wanted without care or consequence.
Some of what the freed captives had to say was already familiar to me, and some of it confirmed what I already suspected—and all of them, every single one of them, recalled the Doctor. Mary had mentioned him, and so did everybody else we’d spoken to.
He was the head of every experiment. The leader of the lab team that frequented every facility throughout the city. I knew him well.
The organization was doing all kinds of experiments—on humans and supernaturals alike.
They were turning other supernaturals to create hybrid-like beings.
Elven-vampires, vampire-shifters, anyone they could get their hands on.
But they were also having humans give birth to hybrids, which is exactly how Mary came about.
It was how my own child was born.
“Who exactly is this Doctor they all talk about?” River’s voice was a whisper in my ear, snapping me from a morbid string of thoughts as we crossed from one cot to another. “Do you know him?”
I kept my eyes straight ahead, ignoring the flicker of memory coiling in my peripheral. Of a vampire man in a crisp white lab coat, handsome and smiling like an old friend—and all the while slicing up his specimens without a second thought.
My hands balled into fists in my jacket pockets. “He’s a monster.”
River said nothing more, but her mouth settled into a grim line as we paused at the next cot.
An older vampire waited for us there, turned a few years ago judging by the size of her fangs.
She didn’t exude the same simmering hunger the others did, and her eyes flitted about the great hall with dull disinterest. Until her gaze settled on me.
“I know you.” She hissed the words out, and I stopped in my tracks.
The vampire woman clambered forward and River stepped in front of me, suddenly on high alert as the woman strained to peer past her.
“I know you,” she rasped again, and lifted a finger to point straight at me. “Experiment T-33.”
Boulders crashed down on my back at the title. My title. My designation at the facility when they’d tried to strip me of my original name.
No, I grappled with myself internally, wrestling my writhing thoughts into submission, that’s not you. That’s not who you are. You are Laurie Montgomery and you are never going back.
It helped, slightly. Until the vampire woman delivered her next words. With real fear on her face. “The Doctor still talks about you. He’s never stopped looking for T-33.”
The rush of panic that slammed into me sent me stumbling back a step.
River glanced down at me, erecting a cautious hand between the woman and myself. She looked ready to whisk me out of there at a moment’s notice, jaw set hard like she was holding back her fangs. “Laurie, what is she talking about?”
“I–” I stared at the woman as my mouth went dry, any explanation I could muster withering in my throat. “It can’t be—”
My pulse roared as images flared bright and garish behind my eyelids.
The Doctor in his lab coat, this time stained a vibrant red.
How he’d held my hand, and proudly told me I had potential.
That I was special. That I could never be replaced.
I had believed him once—until I realized I was just another victim of his heinous experiments.
He was still looking for me. Two years I’d been gone, and he still wanted me back.
River kept her eyes on the woman, but her whisper was directed at me. “We can step away for a moment. Take a break–”
“No.” Anger erupted inside me, lighting my nerves on fire.
Anger at myself for ever trusting that evil man.
Anger that, after all this time, after everything he’d done, some small part of me still wanted his approval.
Some small, sad part of me was triumphant.
Proud that he had never been able to replace me.
It was a terrible thought and I shoved it down, kicked it into the corner. I brought my fists out, angrily elbowing River aside. “I’m perfectly fine—”
“No you’re not.” I barely had time to yelp before River’s hands clamped around my waist and hoisted me into the air—all kicking legs and flailing fists—and threw me over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “We’re taking a break.”
“Put me down!” I pounded a fist against her back, burning bright red at the ridiculous position.
But River only gripped me tighter, dodging my frantic kicks, and patted a condescending hand on my back. “In a bit. You can get back to sleuthing later. For now, we’re going to go do something else.”
The slight smugness in her delivery had my fury burning all the brighter.
And so I kicked. I yelled. I hurled insults and death threats and every curse word in my vocabulary—and River ignored it all as she carried me past the cots of gawking hybrids, through the massive doors at the entrance, and out into the street.