Chapter 14 #2
“Wait,” Dr. Tish says. I can’t be sure, but given the fixed way he’s staring at me, I don’t think he’s taken his gaze off me at all.
The asshole pauses.
“Sam, are you ready to tell me what I want to know?”
“Yes,” I say immediately. He might be bluffing, but I can’t risk Lily. Especially since I’m not planning to tell him the truth.
Fuck, where are the others? Are they tracking us? Was the scent trail I left enough to get them started? Please, please let them be close.
He nods, then gestures to the asshole, who drops Lily and goes back to his post by the door. I wriggle toward her as fast as I can, but she shakes her head, and the cut on her throat doesn’t seem to be bleeding too badly.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her. I’m not that close, so I don’t know if she hears me, but her gaze warms slightly and she shakes her head again, so I’m guessing she gets the idea.
“Sam,” Dr. Tish snaps, and I turn my attention to him. “You said it happened gradually.”
I swallow. “Yes. Uh… first my senses started to get sharper.” That makes sense, right?
And fits with what happened to me when we started breaking down the weaves.
“It-it happened so slowly that I didn’t realize, but then one day I-I was at work and I heard—” Fuck, what could I have heard?
“—uh, I heard someone who was late for a meeting coming down the hall, and it was then I realized I shouldn’t have been able to hear them. Nobody else could.”
“And then what?” he prompts. “Wait—I want to record this.” He goes around the desk and opens a drawer, pulling out a tiny digital recorder and tapping on the screen.
Quickly, he says his name, the date, my name, rattles off a file number—the bastard.
I am not a file number—then summarizes what I just told him. “Is that correct, Sam?”
I try to remember if I’d said anything different. “Uh, yeah.”
He sits in his desk chair and puts the recorder on the surface of the desk. “Continue.”
I take a deep breath. “Um, well, after I realized that my hearing was better than everyone else’s, I started thinking about it and figured out I was more sensitive to smells and that my eyesight was better.
Eyesight was the hardest one to tell, because it was mostly night vision and I didn’t go out to completely dark places. ”
“How old were you when this all started happening?”
Fuck. Fuck. This is the tricky part. Either I’m the exception, and none of his other subjects’ weaves broke down, or I’m about to get busted.
Sink or swim.
“I-I’m not sure exactly when it started,” I hedge. “I was, uh, thirty-three when I realized.” That was well before my first interview with Harold and fits with the next part of the story I’m weaving.
If I get that far.
He nods. “Thirty-three? I wonder if the change was connected to the approach of your second puberty?” He pulls over a pad and pen and jots down a note.
“That could have some impact on the efficiency of the current project—a time crunch, perhaps.” He seems to be musing to himself, but the words suggest that none of the other subjects changed like I did.
“What happened next?”
I drag my attention back. I’m on slightly firmer ground here, thanks to my work for the last five years.
“Other things started to happen. I, uh, lost time occasionally. At first it was always when I was in my apartment, but then one time it happened when I was watering the plants on the balcony.” I’m borrowing from a case my old team handled, where a teenage hellhound who had no idea she was a shifter was spontaneously shifting without knowing it.
Her single mom worked second shift, so they rarely saw each other in the afternoon or evening, and neither of them knew that the one-night stand that produced her hadn’t been with a human.
We were called when the succubus who lived across the street saw the kid change and realized that they weren’t just standoffish people but had no idea they were part of the community.
“The next day, I got a visit from the CSG and they explained that I’d shifted and what I was. ”
“And welcomed you into the fold, of course.” His sarcasm is heavy, and I wonder what his problem is—aside from being a total psychopathic douche, of course.
I try to shrug, but my muscles protest, so I nod instead.
“Hmm. Once you started to shift, did you experience any regression? Periods when you couldn’t shift or when you felt human again?”
“No,” I say honestly. He doesn’t have to know it hasn’t been that long.
“Do you know what happened to me? Because nobody at CSG has been able to figure it out. Is it an illness I had as a kid? Is that why you visited so often and took all those blood samples?” I want Lily to be fully aware of who he is.
She’s smart enough to put the pieces together, but confirmation is a good thing.
Dr. Tish looks at me for a long time, tapping his fingers on the surface of the desk—he’s going to regret that when he listens to the recording later—and seeming to consider my questions.
Finally, he smiles and leans forward, steepling his fingers.
He looks like the cliché of every supervillain in every third-rate movie ever made.
“There was no illness,” he says. “Not unless you consider having a human mother an illness. Which, I suppose, it is. But in the end, it was what allowed our breakthrough.”
I pretend to have no idea what he’s talking about, even as the mention of my mother—whoever she is—makes my stomach clench.
“W-What do you mean? I-I guessed that my parents weren’t really my parents, because neither of them could shift, but…
my mother was human? I thought I might have been stolen…
.” I trail off before I can give myself away.
He waves a hand dismissively, leaning back again. “Not stolen. Too much fuss is made over stolen children. You were purchased.”
I gasp. It’s like I’ve been punched. I don’t know what’s worse, the people I grew up thinking were my parents or the knowledge that my actual parents sold me.
Lily makes a low noise, and when I look at her, her gaze is sympathetic. In contrast, Dr. Tish doesn’t seem to notice my distress. He’s still talking.
“…so we hired a number of human women and gave them a list of approved community men to choose from. Those men were selected by us as having excellent bloodlines and genetic traits that we wanted… which reminds me. Can you partially shift?”
I blink. “I, uh, I’ve never tried.” It’s technically true. I’m a little freaked to know that whoever my father was, he was selected for genetic traits. Also, does this mean he doesn’t know about me?
Is that surge of hope ridiculous?
Dr. Tish nods and makes another note. “We’ll have to try.
Anyway, over the following three years, the women had an 82 percent success rate in becoming pregnant.
As soon as they conceived, we removed them to a secure facility so the real work could begin.
” He sounds almost excited now, and I get the feeling I’m in for a long, boastful monologue extolling his brilliance.
Not something I’d normally enjoy, but if it gives us the information we need and stalls him while the others find us, I can live with it.
“I don’t understand,” I say, trying to sound as confused as possible. “If my father was a shifter, shouldn’t I have been born a shifter?”
“That’s the genius of our program,” he crows. “You should have been born a shifter, but our weaves forced your shifter side into dormancy in the womb and allowed the human half to be dominant.”
Something about that doesn’t seem right to me, but I don’t have time to think about it.
He starts to ramble about the unprecedented brilliance of his weaves and how the future of the community has been changed forever and humans will soon learn to bow down to their betters.
That seems to confirm our theory that this has all been about world domination. I need to get him back on track.
“Wait… so there are others like me?” Could they still be captives after so many years?
“None quite like you, Sam,” he says with a look that’s completely nonsexual and yet makes me feel dirty and violated.
“There were seventy-three modified subjects who lived through the first year. They were all placed with carefully vetted human couples to be raised to legal adulthood. One died in a random car accident, one proved too susceptible to human illnesses and had to be terminated early, and we nearly lost one when the human couple became overly fond of it and tried to run.” His cold smile tells me more clearly than words could what happened to that couple.
“And then there was you, Sam. Ran away. The couple we placed you with tried to insist that you’d been kidnapped, but with the right incentive, they finally admitted the truth.
And then we found your death certificate.
” He shook his head. “That was a blow. You were just a handful of years from the next stage.”
I swallow hard. I never thought I’d be glad that the man who raised me was a raging homophobe. “What was the next stage?”
He shrugs. “Another breeding cycle. We needed to see if the weaves would breed through to the next generation.” A wide grin crosses his face.
“They did. The last of the subjects from that phase reached legal adulthood last year and were still human.” The sudden change from happy grin to scowl is disconcerting.
“If I’d known there was a chance the weaves would fail later on, I would have insisted we keep the subjects alive for further testing.
” My blood runs cold, but he’s back to tapping his fingers on the desk.
“I wonder if the second generation would also have failed, or if the natural reproduction of the gene pattern will protect it?” He looks back at me.
“Do you have children from when you were human?”
Choking down the desire to vomit at the thought of him experimenting on children I don’t have, I shake my head. “No. I’m, uh, gay, so it’s not as easy for me.”
“Really?” He sounds surprised. “I suppose that’s why you ran away? We never did find out why.”
“Yeah. Uh, so… I’m the only one left from the original, uh, group?”
“You’re the only one left from any earlier phase of the experiment,” he says bluntly, that cold smile back. “We couldn’t risk exposure, so all participants and subjects were terminated once their contribution was complete.”
He’s so casual while talking about the mass murders of what must have been hundreds of people—the biological mothers, the foster parents, and of course the test subjects from two rounds of experimentation—that the panic I’ve been keeping at bay begins to creep back in.
There’s no reason for him to keep us alive…
except perhaps to experiment further on me.
The weaves were clearly not meant to ever break down, so my existence as a shifter might be something I can use as a negotiating chip.
Somehow. If I can just think and work out how.
Where the fuck is my team?
“Your current lack of humanity is slightly concerning. We’ll need to run some tests to determine if any of your human DNA remains and try to determine exactly what happened to the weaves. The last time I saw you, they had so successfully bonded with you that you were completely human in every way.”
Tests. Okay. Tests take time. Time is what I need right now. “What kind of tests? Blood tests?” I stall, trying to wring out as much information as I can.
“Blood, skin, and semen to begin with. Depending on what we find, we may decide on others.”
“That, uh… If I donate samples willingly, is there any chance you could untie me and Lily? My arms and legs are pretty numb.”
He stands and walks over to one of the medical units, and I know instantly that I’ve made a mistake.
“Don’t worry, Sam. You’ve told me what I want to know, so there’s no need for you to be aware of your misery any longer.
” He pulls out a small vial and a syringe.
“We’ve found that subjects tend to be more cooperative when unconscious.
” The ridiculous statement is followed by a little laugh, but I’m too panicked to feel disgust. If he knocks me out, I’ll be completely vulnerable.
I can’t help myself or Lily if I’m unconscious.
I start to struggle, wriggling in a desperate attempt to…
do something . Dr. Tish strolls toward me.
“Hold him down,” he orders, and the asshole leaves his post at the door once more to come and pin me to the concrete floor.
With my limbs bound and mostly numb, there’s nothing I can do but beg them not to drug me.
It doesn’t work.
Dr. Tish injects the contents of the syringe into my neck and straightens. “There you are, Sam. That will just take a moment to kick in.” Turning and heading back toward his desk, he adds, “Kill her.”
I scream, so loud and so hard that my voice cracks, but already I’m feeling fuzzy and my vision is fading.
The last thing I see before everything goes dark is Lily’s blood spraying.