Page 29 of Hounded
I’d barely reached for the flimsy wire door when a commotion came from the edge of the room. Another man barged in. His arms were laden with medicalequipment that he dropped in a noisy heap when he caught sight of me.
The intrusion drew me to full height or near enough to it. My head tipped slightly to avoid collision with the roughhewn ceiling beams.
While the newcomer stared, slack jawed, I produced my glaive and leveled it at him. “What are you doing here?” I demanded.
Sweat glistened on the man’s sallow skin, and his Adam’s apple bobbed through a hard swallow. “S-science,” he stammered. “Discovery.”
It wasn’t an answer. Not an acceptable one. I whipped the polearm through the air, using the bladed end to gesture toward the caged man.
“Why is he here?” I asked.
The scientist raised his hands and crept a few steps closer. “That is a valuable resource. An immortal being capable of sharing its gifts with humanity.”
Not his.Its. The distinction galled me.
I glanced at the young man again. His frail body trembled, and his chapped lips parted in a look of mute horror.
“What is he?” I asked gruffly.
The scientist drew nearer. “My newest discovery. A phoenix. Infinitely valuable. Powerful.”
“And all this?” I swung my weapon in reference to the room’s contents. “What is this?”
The scientist flapped his hand toward a wooden rack of glass test tubes. “Research. Samples.”
So, it was the phoenix’s blood, extracted and stored. Possibly his feathers, though he hardly looked avian now.And the small bottles were filled with what? Sweat? No. I remembered this myth—presumed myth until now. Phoenix tears had myriad magical properties. Healing, cleansing, some even claimed immortality.
Scanning the room yet again found more evidence of experimentation: scalpels, syringes, and rubber-topped jars trailing tubes. A scent distinctly separate from the phoenix’s sweet aroma tickled my nose. It smelled like burnt syrup, an odor I’d detected near opium dens where men gathered and smoked. There was no haze in the air here, but a few of the smaller bottles held thick, brown liquid that may have been injectable.
Remembering the tube attached to the man in the cage, I looked at him, wondering if the drugs were to blame for his dazed, docile state.
My hackles rose.
“You can’t have him,” the scientist declared. His voice held unexpected grit. “This is my life’s work. The fruit of years of labor—”
“Years?” I echoed, my voice a growl. An actual growl followed it, along with another pang of protective instinct.
Treasure, my hound urged.
Years. The devastating reality of that word hung heavily on me. I’d been a captive, too, only recently freed. I’d felt terror and despair while enduring the endless march of time. Years of imprisonment felt like lifetimes. Or the loss of lifetimes because it was the slowest form of death to wait and want someone to come while hope of escape rotted away.
My fingers tightened on the metal shaft of my glaive, and I nodded toward the man in the cage.
“He’s mine,” I said. And I wasn’t leaving without him.
The scientist looked from my weapon to me and back, and his resolve began to fade. “If you take him… at least leave my research. I beg you.”
I surveyed his “research” one last time. Bodily fluids had been extracted, feathers plucked, and hair shorn. This wasn’t a laboratory at all. It was a torture chamber.
Another growl edged out of me, rife with bloodlust that demanded satisfaction. When I faced the scientist again, my lips peeled back in a sharp-toothed snarl.
The shake of my head should have been answer enough, but I wanted him to know: “I will destroy every bit and you with it.”
My weapon cut through the air, swift and deadly. When the scientist’s head left his shoulders, the spray of his blood blacked out the light.
The memory remained a visceral one, even a hundred years past. Besides Indy’s physical symptoms, he’d been nonverbal and cried out every time I came near him. I’d feared he would run away as I had no means of containing him in my flat. My intent had been to free him, not keep him as a prisoner of my own. But he stayed like a ghost haunting my home, quiet anytime he wasn’t sobbing or screaming in the dead of night.
At a loss of anything else to call him, I used the letters tattooed on his arm to form a name: ND62. The two letters seemed to harken back to what his captor hadcalled him: his “newest discovery.” I shuddered to think of sixty-one sad souls before him, trapped and tormented and stripped of their essence.
