Confusion threaded through my pain. My heart had stopped beating hours ago—
With a squeak, something small and furry leapt out between the holes in the silver net. Two of my hardened guards actually jumped back while a third tried—and failed—to stomp on the critter, which outran him, then disappeared underneath a nearby door.
“Fuckin’ rat,” the guard muttered. Then his head swung my way.
“Why didn’t you kill it?” he demanded in an accusing tone.
“So it could shit in your soup,” I snapped.
Did he think I’d apologize for not being a good exterminator? Even if I hadn’t been too overwhelmed with grief to notice, why would I care if a rodent hitched a ride in the back of my kidnap wagon . . .
My eyes narrowed, but I ducked my head before the guards could catch something suspicious in my expression. That rat hadn’t just meandered onto the wrong vehicle. It had been inside the silver net, which would only be possible if it had hidden itself in Bones’s clothing during the brief interim between his death and our capture. And the odds that an animal would’ve stuck around after a firefight so intense that it killed a Master vampire were next to nothing.
“Lock the bitch up,” the guard snarled.
Those criss-crossing laser beams appeared around my cart again. I said nothing as I was wheeled through the doors of the unit and nothing still when the guard muttered about Maintenance needing to leave rat traps for that floor.
The traps wouldn’t work because this was no ordinary animal. In fact, what scurried under the door moments ago wasn’t an animal at all.
It was Denise.
Fifteen
Cells were arranged in a half circle facing the floor’s main work area, similar to how hospital rooms faced the nurses’ station in an intensive care unit. A thick wall of glass and a backup layer of lasers kept the occupants inside but left their actions visible to staff members. My cell was at the end of the curved row, which gave me a clear view into the others as I was wheeled past them. The first had an auburn-haired little girl in it, of all things, but then I passed a very familiar face.
Ever since I’d first met him, Tate had kept his brown hair in a buzz cut, a nod to his former days as a Special Forces sergeant. Now it was inches long, and the lower half of his face was shadowed by thick stubble, emphasizing his haunted expression. In the cell next to his was Juan, his mass of black hair now hanging past his shoulders while his skin looked pale even for a vampire. Dave was in the cell after his, looking equally unkempt and wan, but it was Cooper’s change in the second-to-last cell that made me gasp.
He’d lost thirty pounds at least, transforming his muscular frame into something gaunt. His normally tight haircut now resembled a seventies Afro, and his mocha skin held a sickly tinge of blue. It took me a second to realize it came from extensive bruising, with particular emphasis on his wrists, hands, and the crease inside his arms.
Needle sticks, I realized with a surge of fury. There was only one reason Madigan would bother with repeated blood draws or injections on a human. He was experimenting on Cooper.
My hands tightened on the edges of Bones’s bullet-riddled jacket. Wait for me, I silently repeated, feeling my anger grow. I have something to do before I see you again.
And with Denise here, now I had a better chance at succeeding.
Since none of my friends looked up when I passed, they must not be able to see out of their glass cells. My suspicion proved correct when one of my guards said, “Open Cell Eight” then my cart was unceremoniously pushed inside. When the glass door closed, all I saw was my own reflection underneath a pile of silver-and-razor netting.
“Didn’t you forget something?” I called out, knowing the employees had these rooms monitored for sound, too.
No response aside from the lasers on my cart disappearing. I sighed and leaned back against one of the poles, new tears slipping out as I glanced down at my husband’s body. From bones I rose and Bones I became, he’d said when he told me the story of how he chose his name after waking up as a vampire in a graveyard. That’s all he was now—bones—and the knowledge made my tears flow fast and red.
Then shock followed on the heels of pain as a click sounded in my triple sets of manacles and multiple knives stabbed me at once. When that pain began to slide through my entire body, searing my nerve endings as it went, I realized they weren’t knives.
They were needles injecting me with liquid silver.