Ed (Looking me over): “She say anything?”
Blondie: “Nothing important. Just wanted to know where we were.”
Buzz. Wrong answer!
Ed jerked his head to glare at the girl.
Short temper, duly noted. No wonder she’d gotten so tense the second he arrived.
Then he snapped, “I’ll decide what’s important.” To which she nodded, a silent but obedient, Yes, sir.
His I-could-break-you-like-a-twig stance relaxed, but only by a hair. “You answer her?” he asked, turning back to me.
The way he assessed me gave me the creeps. He didn’t touch me or get too close, only eyeballed me, turning his head from side to side. His eyebrows lowered from time to time. It reminded me of the way people walked through the reptile exhibit at the zoo, crouching and squinting as they tried to glimpse the most venomous predators where they coiled beneath logs or in dark crevices behind the thick sheets of glass. They were fascinated and horrified all at the same time.
Ed was both fascinated and horrified by me.
He ran his hand over the side of his jaw. “Might as well get started. Hand me Lucy, will ya?”
Blondie passed him something I couldn’t quite see, a stick or wand of some sort and I tried to figure out what, exactly, we were “starting.”
He leaned closer, and even his breath was sterile, almost to the point of being caustic. “Let’s start with something easy,” he said, this time most definitely talking to me. “Where are they? How much longer do we have?”
I frowned, searching the room to see if anyone else knew what the hell this guy was talking about. “Where are who . . . ? How much longer to what?” I gave an uncertain shake of my head, wishing he’d get out of my face. “I have no idea what you mean.”
He lifted the thing in his hand, showing it to me. “Know what this is? This is ten thousand volts of truth serum. Answer me, or you’ll know the true meaning of hotshot.” He spoke slowly this time, enunciating each syllable. “Now, tell me what you know.”
I shook my head, still clueless. But he had that short temper thing I’d already noted, and before I could even open my mouth to ask, he jammed the end of whatever that thing was against my bare thigh.
My entire body jolted, wracked by a sudden surge of electrical current. The straps made it impossible to escape, but my wrists and ankles and chest all strained against them nonetheless as my muscles seized involuntarily. The skin where the thing jammed into me burned.
After a few excruciating seconds, he pulled it away and grinned like the sick bastard I was starting to realize he was. “We call her Lucifer. Lucy for short. Best damn cattle prod on the market. Better’n a stun gun ’cause you stay alert.” He was proud of himself, and he smacked a now inert Lucy against the open palm of his other hand. “Your tongue feelin’ a little looser yet?”
If I had better control over it, this would be the perfect time to use that telekinesis ability of mine. And I tried, the way Simon and I had practiced . . . to get mad . . . really, really pissed off, because I was. I was genuinely pissed that Ed had just jolted me with an effing cattle prod. One that he’d named no less.
But nothing happened. Maybe I was still numbed by the drugs, or maybe the electricity had short-circuited my brain. Either way, I couldn’t manage to throw one of those bricks that were lying all around us at Ed’s head.
Damn!
“Fine,” he stated, clearly taking my silence as a challenge. “We can definitely do this the hard way.” And I wondered when, in all this craziness, we’d been doing things the easy way. He lifted the pronged end of Lucy up so I could see it, and I swore I could smell my own flesh burning on it. “Tell me why you’re so damned important? Why is it we got someone so eager to get their hands on you? What makes you so special?”
I blinked, but this time didn’t hesitate. I didn’t want Lucy to find her way into my skin again.
“Me?” I rasped. Could I tell them I’d been abducted? And even if they were Returned, was it safe to admit I was a Replaced? Was that even what he was getting at? “I have no idea . . .”
“Don’t play dumb with me!” He was yelling now, getting right in my face.
He didn’t elaborate, just shoved the prod against my shoulder. Crashing against the metal chair behind me, my body went crazy stiff as pain jolted through me. Without meaning to, my teeth clamped on to my own tongue, even as I screamed at myself to release it.
By the time it was over, blood filled my mouth, and I could feel where my upper teeth met my lower ones. I’d bitten completely through my own tongue and suddenly the whole exposing them to a Code Red thing wasn’t something I had any control over. Blood was dribbling out of my mouth. I’d heal. Already the wound was sealing closed, repairing itself. If they got sick they’d only have themselves to blame.
But I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.