Chapter 23
At first she was only aware of funny little flickers below her skin, little mice feet pitter-pattering.
Her eyes burned, barely able to blink aside a heavy crust; her teeth throbbed with horrible sensitivity, sharp edges pressing lightly against chapped lips and swollen tongue.
Every muscle felt savagely overstretched.
Even her bones ached, a feeling she vaguely remembered from being human.
A child might call it growing pains; a middle-aged woman would know it was mortality chewing at her bones.
After a few attempts at orientation, Simone discovered herself attached to a vertical metal surface by tight restraints made of some kind of flexible woven material which burned relentlessly wherever it touched bare flesh.
Ankles, above and below the knee, hips, a band over her ribs scarcely allowing enough room to take a middling breath, shoulders pressed hard to the wall by a strap passing just under her armpits and mashing her tits unmercifully as a bonus, a choker snugged to her throat, another ribbon cutting into her throbbing forehead.
Her arms were spread wide, jacket- and shirtsleeves cut away, and the burning from the strap passing over her biceps was awful.
Even worse was the wrapping on her wrists and hands; blisters swelled there, the slightest twitch sending hard zings of pain all the way up to her shoulders as they popped.
The light was a fluorescent glare from white industrial fixtures; the entire giant room reeked of disinfectant, pain, and a zoolike undertone she might be imagining since her nose was so stuffed.
Stainless steel tables, likewise surgically gleaming counters and cabinets, strange shapes that had to be machines of some kind, and a virtual jungle of glass beakers, tubes, test tubes in racks, rolling cabinets, wire cages, and other weird shit turned the entire space into a cross between a veterinary clinic and a mad scientist’s laboratory.
Fully stocked, too. A collection of smeared shapes hurried back and forth, most in bright white lab coats, some with clipboards and serious expressions, more with tablets they frowned at and thrust before each other with simulated enthusiasm.
People. Human beings. Okay.
It took Simone some while, peering from under heavy, itching eyelids, to realize many occupants of this strange anthill were doing not very much at all despite their frantic imitation of busywork, and every blessed one reeked of fear and tension.
A giant windowed observation deck loomed over the room, and the shape pacing back and forth behind the glass, stopping to glare down every once in a while, was a blurred but distinctly recognizable Elton Huske.
Fuckuva fishbowl you’ve got here, buddy.
Her senses were muffled, her vision full of strange amorphous blobs intruding as she struggled to focus, and her ears felt stuffed with cotton.
It was probably a blessing; vamp-sharp senses, when they came back, would make the bright light and nasty smells even worse.
Assuming she could heal from this. How far did her infected body’s ability to erase damage go?
Looks like we’re gonna find out.
A rhythmic but unmusical beeping and booping came from a vertical panel hung to Simone’s left, just within her peripheral vision.
Marching across its top third were lines that looked a lot like a heartbeat and…
was that brainwaves? Along with respiration and maybe blood pressure, yeah.
Her own vital signs, somehow communicated through the metal slab or straps?
What the fuck is going on? But she knew—she was a lab rat, and these people were supposed to figure out how to extract whatever Huske wanted to sell.
The tiny trickle of scent slipping into her snot-packed nose screamed of barely controlled anxiety; so did the buzz-thump of nervous human heartbeats.
Presumably everyone in here knew what vamps could do, and was justifiably a bit jumpy. Hard not to believe in the demimonde with a fang-bearing specimen strapped down right in front of you. She was, as the kids used to say, the Real Deal.
Oh, God, I’m already sounding like an old lady. Truth in advertising, she supposed.
What had they done while she was out? She hurt, sure, but she didn’t feel… well, there was no evidence of outright assault, to put it one way. And she didn’t smell blood—human, or vamp.
Yet the thirst was back, scratching at her throat. At least she wasn’t poisoned now—had she slept it off, like a college hangover? What would happen if they jabbed her again?
They didn’t leave you in the sunshine, at least. Think, Simone. Stop being scared and use that brain that got you out of that goddamn church basement.
But she was terrified, and the last few days hadn’t helped. Whiplash was cumulative, whether physical or emotional. As soon as she escaped one trap another closed on her, and wasn’t that the way it had always been?
Fresh scurrying warned of something new afoot.
The big glass observation deck had gone dark, and a knot of lab-coated shapes crowded at a featureless steel door across the vast space, clearly visible from her vantage point.
A luminous dial overhead said something was descending, and she had an idea of what.
Great.
The elevator opened and Elton Huske stepped out—bloodshot and blinking, though he’d changed into a fresh set of ironed jeans and T-shirt, his fleece vest now dark green instead of blue.
His jowls were tight with anger, his hair aggressively mussed under a payload of what had to be very expensive gel.
Instead of Birkenstocks, there were brand new sneakers, probably custom, squeaking in a different register than the sandals had.
The billionaire stalked through the flutter of lab coats, his gaze fixed past them.
Nailed, in fact, to her own sorry self strapped in T-pose like the most fucked-up crucifix imaginable.
The only surprise was Barry beside him, rumpled, pale, and bobbing alongside in imitation of an agitated stork, mouth moving at a mile a minute. Simone strained through the murk of overlapping voices; her arms and legs twitched, and the beep-boops changed intensity.
“—look, man, just let me talk to her. You don’t have to do all this.” Barry Jessup, bless his mercenary little heart, sounded downright upset.
“Shut the fuck up,” Huske hissed, his already-thin mouth now nearly lipless with tension.
He probably never showed this narrow-eyed glare in board meetings or breathlessly adulatory journalistic interviews; no, Simone thought, this expression was saved for anyone unfortunate enough to be labeled ‘the help’.
A rolling rattle alerted her to one of the lab-coated humans—a willowy brunette with a set expression, her gaze refusing to settle on a tied-up vampire—pushing a shining metal contraption, coming to rest just at Simone’s right.
It looked like a goddamn dessert cart, but its stainless steel top shelf held a tray of polished implements instead of sweet treats.
Nothing nice about the offerings here, no sirree bob.
Several large scalpels arranged by size, a rack of big syringes with elephant-sized needles…
was that a bone saw? Clamps, a kidney-shaped dish with smaller scalpels, surgical scissors—Simone didn’t want to think about what was in the drawers underneath.
Especially since the top also held a shining metal blowtorch, the type used for creme br?lée, resting on its own pad of bleached, presumably sterile paper.
A gangly blond kid behind the woman was pushing a wheeled pole, a complicated contraption festooned with tubing and hanging blobs Simone recognized.
Blood bags. Needles topped the tubes, oversized as the huge syringes, and there were other bags of yellow plasma. She couldn’t smell the red stuff in the closed sacks, but knowing it was there… God, that was almost as bad.
She was even thirstier, now.
“This isn’t what I signed up for,” Barry persisted, his hands flapping like fish just dragged from a pond. “You said you were just going to make the offer. You could’ve let her think about it, you could’ve—”
Simone saw the twitch of Huske’s left arm, a motion stopped just in time.
Looked like the billionaire had a teensy anger management problem, no doubt kept under careful control when there were reporters or fellow investors around.
He reminded her of Curt, in fact—all smiles and schmooze around clients and corporate visitors, passive-aggressive to any underling who didn’t seem likely to ever fight back, flat-out aggressive to wait staff or retail workers.
This guy seemed like her ex-husband dialed up to eleven, and the only surprise was that even this variety of cowardly, bullying asshole had the courage to get close to a vamp.
Then again, Simone was apparently a failure at being a finely tuned killing machine; all her experimentation and laborious logical testing of boundaries clearly hadn’t been the right kind of survival strategy.
Maybe she should have stayed with John, learned a thing or two. He was no doubt chasing some other girl vamp now, calling her leman and darlin’.
You can’t honestly be mad about that, can you?
“If you don’t shut up I’ll have Security drop you in the middle of the mountains.
With no pants.” Huske continued striding along, and the dismissiveness in the threat was almost as bad as that little twitch.
Something in his tone said he might have done it before, and of course with enough money you could make people disappear, couldn’t you?
A helicopter ride into the boondocks of Colorado could even be called comparatively cheap.
Her neck ached, her forehead burned. Simone coughed, wishing she could move—if she developed a sudden itch, being strapped down like this would quickly become unbearable.
What do you mean, quickly? It already is.