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Three darts strike Ghastly’s chest, clustered tightly above his heart. Ghastly staggers backward, numbness sweeping his limbs and tentacles.
I try to make him shift back. To give me control. But the drug is messing with me, making my thoughts muzzy. My sense of my body slips through my fingers like smoke.
Ghastly crashes down to his knees.
The suit-clad man walks closer, the woman at his side still holding her gun at the ready. “We already have buyers lined up for you and your little friends. Jekylls and Hydes are a rare commodity, and our clients will pay top dollar to acquire you. But be that as it may, some of you are simply too dangerous to let live. We can’t let the brains of our buyers melt, after all. Bad for business.”
The sedative makes the world swirl. Ghastly’s cheek hits the floor as our muscles give out.
“But that doesn’t mean we don’t have use for you. Or, rather, that our military contractor friends don’t.”
Through the fading blur of the room, I see the man twitch his chin at me. While the woman keeps her gun level, another man comes forward. The knife in his fist glints like a star in the encroaching darkness.
From far away, I hear Beastly roar. Hear Puck scream in rage.
But I can’t even move.
“If we can’t sell the monster,“ the first guy says. “We can still make use of its parts.”
Chapter 15
Creepy Mabel
The thick dark thinks it can hold me.
I’ll kill it too.
I thrash and twist, screaming against the muffling blanket of nothingness between me and my body. It’s pinning me down, keeping me from reaching my Hydes and killing the ones who hurt them. I’ll feed it back to itself in bloody pieces if it doesn’t stop soon.
The darkness gets scared. Retreats and grows thin because it knows I’ll be victorious.
Nothing gets between me and my Hydes.
I snarl again, determined to make it fade entirely.
My voice comes out as a grumbly groan, but it’s enough. The darkness does what I want and goes away.
But it leaves pain behind.
My eyes burn when I open them. My limbs ache like someone stomped on every joint and bone. I snarl again, and even though my throat scratches like it’s full of thorns and stones, the sound is clearer.
The pain recedes a bit. Good. It should be scared of me too.
I blink and scan my surroundings, my rage growing. Bars. I’m surrounded by a circle of metal bars. They’re thicker than my wrist and they go into the concrete ground like they’ve been impaled there. Over my head, they bend inward until they meet in the middle.
A cage. Big enough to hold a dragon and with stains on the concrete like blood that didn’t wash fully away.
I push to my feet, snarling so fiercely it sounds like a scream.
Something clanks on my wrist. I look down.
I’m dressed again. I shouldn’t be. The other was naked when those evil people attacked us. Red cotton covers me now, pants and a V-neck shirt like an outfit I’ve seen on nurses, but in the color of blood. I don’t mind that last part, but I’m furious someone dared to touch us.
And they gave us jewelry too. A thick bracelet hangs on my left wrist. It’s at least two inches wide, made of nearly solid metal but with a groove in its side like someone carved a chunk out of it all the way around. A thinner band of metal rests in the groove, gold while the rest of the metal is silver, and when I move, it glints weirdly like the silver portions are covered in an oil slick.
I wrap my fingers around it and tug, but nothing happens. The metal feels funny, though. All buzzy against my hand like a live wire, but I don’t know why.
My eyes go to the room beyond the cage again. Everything is still. My Hydes aren’t here. I can’t hear them either, not my Beastly or my Ghastly or…
