But I was focused inward toward the abandoned mystics. Pitying the tiny new thoughts she’d left behind, I took them in, wrapping them up in my own pain, giving them a place to exist within me until I could return them to her. She’d probably want these back. God knew I didn’t want them.
Twenty
Tingles of returning circulation stabbed my legs as the gurney hit a corner. The dart was gone from my thigh, but the drug was clearly in force. I could do little as I was trundled down a corridor. The lack of an echo and the ornate wall sconces led me to believe we were still in someone’s residence, probably someone with severe light restrictions by the feel of it. The outward-looking faces of the three men above me held a wide span of emotion: unease, dismay, concern, excitement. That last was in Ayer’s eyes, barely beating out his avarice. I was a thing to him. A way to up his timetable, and it scared me.
“You’re making a mistake,” I said, glad the Goddess was gone and it was just me in my skull again. “Bancroft was trained in dealing with the Goddess, and your splinter was too much for him. I don’t know if you heard, but he left this world from the thirty-ninth floor this morning.”
The gurney slowed at a door, cracked open about a foot or so. “You misunderstand,” Ayer said, his voice oily. “I fully expect you to go insane. That’s what will bring the Goddess in, and then we will sop her up like spilled milk.”
“You want me to go crazy?” I said as the gurney stopped at the open door.
Crazy? came a thought-not-mine, and I choked as the alien fear lifted through me. It was a mystic. Is that different from loss?
The question hung in me, and shocked, I realized that mystics were able to change their purpose, in essence, evolve, when exposed to the complex matrix of sustained thought of a living system. Perhaps that was why they had gone wrong in the prison the Free Vampires had made. They couldn’t grow or return, so they’d became erratic—spinning in the same repetitive circle like the thoughts the undead made—alive but static.
There was a spate of muffled noise down the hall, and Ayer’s brow furrowed. “Can she move yet?”
“If I could, you’d be dead,” I muttered, then winced when one of the gurney guys lifted a lid and shined a light in my eye. “Ow?”
“No, sir,” he said, continuing to breathe normally despite my wish to choke off his air.
“Get her strapped in and wait for me,” Ayer said tersely. “Wait for me!” he shouted, taking one of the men and heading toward the noise. “And don’t take off that zip strip!”
“Yes, sir!” the remaining man shouted, eyes rolling as he backed out of the hall and into a quiet room, dragging me behind. “I know how to handle magic users,” he grumbled.
More circulation prickles washed through me, or maybe it was wild magic, but I was able to shift my head as they wheeled me to a stop. It was a bedroom, underground and decked out with too many pillows and a chandelier that screamed undead vampire. A thick bundle of wires snaked in from the hallway and prevented the door from being shut. Two living vampires were waiting, a woman sitting at an empty card table and a man standing at the bank of equipment the cords were feeding. Both were in military garb complete with little caps; both had pistols on their hips; both had them unsnapped. Neither looked happy.
The chair was where my eyes landed and stayed, though; the thing looked ominous with its straps and head brace, and my heart pounded. Why couldn’t they have just put me in a cell for a few hours? But no—let’s hook her up now!
“That’s her?” the woman said, and I tried to get the drool back in my mouth.
“Category five,” the man who wheeled me in said as he unstrapped me. “Though you wouldn’t know it to look at her. Keep that zip strip on her. She completely trashed the control room.”
The woman flicked a piece of broken glass off my shoulder, leaning to stare at me with her black eyes. Vampire filled my world, and my skin tingled. “I’m not touching her. You do it.”
I felt sick as the two men worked together to sit me up. The woman had taken up a handheld scanner, and her lips parted, showing her tiny canines, when she looked up from the reading. “Shit,” she whispered. “She’s already covered in them. Can you feel it?”
“No . . .” one grunted as I hung in their grip. “And you can’t either, Annie. Some help here, maybe?”
The scanner clattered as it hit the card table, and she turned the chair so they could just drop me into it. “This isn’t a good idea,” I said as I eyed it. Damn it, it even had ankle straps. “You think maybe you could just sort of let me go? I’ll tell them I hit you and everything.”
“One, two, three, shift!” the guy to my right muttered, and they moved me, very professional and with little wasted movement.
My heart pounded as they backed off. Two watched with pulled weapons as a third strapped me in to keep me upright. “Please,” I begged as they fastened my hands to the chair’s arms. “He’s going to kill all the undead. Is that what you want? All of them dead? Free Vampires are all about personal choice, right? This isn’t choice, it’s murder!”
“Shut up!” the man nearest me said, and I gasped when his hand smacked my face.
“Hey!” I shouted, and he grinned, leaning in to eye my exposed neck, my flash of anger triggering his bloodlust.
“Back off, Snaps,” the other man said, and Snaps, apparently, eased back, a new, sultry grace to him as he enjoyed his little daydream.
I couldn’t help but notice that the woman’s eyes had fallen in guilt. But then she dropped down to tighten my ankle straps and I felt my chance slip away, even as the rising tingle of mystics hazed me. Their curiosity finally outweighed their fear as they lifted from me like a second aura, drifting away in search of an answer I couldn’t give them.
The lack of their faint background voices was a blessing, and hoping they were gone for good, I slumped in the chair as the three people clustered between me and the tower of machinery with its lights and dials. A second bundle of cords punched through a rough hole in the wall, and I wondered if the entire place was designed for capture and containment, sort of like a huge dish. They were whispering over the readout of the scanner, and Annie looked scared. “There’s a lot of them already in her,” she said. “And he wants to add to it?”
“As long as he doesn’t hook me up, I don’t give a shit,” the one who’d hit me said.