And if it wouldn’t have knocked a hunk of his flesh off, I would’ve punched him right in the face.
“You heartless bastard,” I choked out.
His gaze was unblinking. Lacking eyelids will do that to a person.
“Later,” he replied in that rasping voice.
Oh, he could bet on that.
“Cat!”
I turned, seeing a mirror image of myself bounding down the hallway. At some point since her transformation from rat to my doppelganger, Denise had swiped a pair of medical scrubs. From all the holes in them, she’d also taken on heavy fire while pretending to be me.
My happiness over seeing her was tempered when I noticed she didn’t look the slightest bit surprised to see Bones alive, or in the condition he was in. Was I the only one who hadn’t known the real plan behind my meet-up with Madigan on the pier?
“Come on, the vampire jail section is this way,” Denise said before running past us and taking a right where the hallway forked.
I followed her, pushing past my whirling emotions to send my senses outward. It wouldn’t do for us to run right into a trap. After listening for a few moments, my tenseness eased. Bones’s destruction of the Dante Protocol machine hadn’t just killed a lot of people. It had also injured many of the rest of them since most of the thoughts I picked up on were disjointed with pain. The thoughts that were still clear seemed panicked, as Madigan’s employees realized that all of the interior doors were open, but the main lift to the surface was out of order.
Good. It was time they knew what it was like to feel helpless and trapped in this underground hellhole.
I hunted through the thoughts as best I could, yet Madigan’s wasn’t among them, making him either dead or unconscious. I hoped for the latter since I wanted to kill him myself. First things first, however.
Denise ran past the open security doors into the section where the holding cells were. Then she stopped, her nose wrinkling. The cells were vacant but bodies slumped over computer monitors, chairs, and on the red-smeared floor. Tate and the guys had been busy. Multiple bloody footprints led to an interior room past the cells, though another, smaller set had gone down the hallway in the opposite direction from where we’d come.
“A little more, amigo,” Juan’s low voice crooned from the interior room. Then softer and more urgently, “Get ready. Someone’s coming.”
I went in that direction instead of down the hall. “It’s Cat,” I called out, not wanting to get shot again.
“?Querida?” Juan let out a weary laugh. “Of course. Who else could cause such trouble?”
I glanced at Bones and Denise before I spoke. “Most of it wasn’t me this time.”
Then I stepped over another crumpled form as I entered what looked like an operating room. Medical equipment hung from the ceiling in various spots, while scalpels, bone saws, and other sharp instruments rested on a table next to a large metal slab with restraint straps. That table was empty, but the tubular machine on the far side of the room wasn’t. Tate was inside it, tubes protruding everywhere from him, while Juan and Cooper stood next to a control panel.
Dave came out of the corner, lowering a bloody M-4 carbine.
“Damn glad to see you, Cat,” he said, giving me a brief, fierce hug. Then he held on to my arm when I tried to get to the others.
“Wait. They’re getting the liquid silver out of Tate.”
I looked around with grim understanding. I didn’t remember being here, but this must be the machine Dr. Obvious alluded to when she said the liquid silver had been dissolved with nitric acid and flushed out. That meant the restraint table and multiple instruments were for lesser cases when the silver could be cut out, not that it would make it any less agonizing.
“How did Tate get silvered?”
Dave started to answer, then stared over my shoulder. Denise and Bones were behind me, and it was a toss-up as to which of them had shocked him more.
“Denise can shapeshift, and Bones was playing possum,” I summarized. “He’ll regenerate fully when he drinks more blood.”
“Now I’ve seen everything,” Dave muttered, shaking his head. “Tate’s restraint clamps were still on when they put him back in his cell after you drank from him. When the doors unexpectedly opened, we went for the pricks, but one of them managed to hit the switch that turned on the juice in them.”
Flooding Tate’s body with liquid silver. I shuddered at the memory of how excruciating that felt.
“They’ll have it out soon, it didn’t get too deep,” Dave went on.
“How do they know how to operate the machine?”
He gave me a bleak look. “They picked it up after all the times it’s been used to get silver out of them.”
Tate mumbled something that sounded like my name, but his voice was barely audible above the noise the machine made.
“I’m here,” I called out.