Forged in Fire: An Urban Fantasy (Moonlight Dragon Book 4) (5 page)

The black ladder led up to a trap door.

"I'm sending Lucky through first," I said, giving Vale and Melanie a look that brooked no opposition. "No way am I letting us walk head first into a potential ambush."

Wisely, they didn't argue with me, so I called up my dragon and gave him a little oomph so he had enough physical presence to lift the trapdoor with his head. It opened without a sound and fell back soundlessly, as if the floor were carpeted or covered with rugs. Lucky curled up into the air of the room and took a look around.

I couldn't see through my dragon's eyes. Not unless I gave in to my ancient blood and
became
the dragon. When I'd performed the ruse with Xaran, I'd learned, much to my joy, that I was capable of becoming the dragon without fully losing myself to it. The prospect of losing my humanity had haunted me since I was a child, and now that worry was gone. But just because I could pull out of my dragon didn't mean it was pleasant or that I wanted to do it willy nilly whenever I felt like being a badass or wanted to fly around and burn things. It hurt and it was stressful, so I had no intention of doing it unless I absolutely had no other choice.

I had other choices here. So after Lucky had hovered for a good two minutes and nothing attacked him, I made the choice to risk entering the breeder's house myself. I had Lucky come down and take hold of my bag and Tupperware container in his tiger paws and then I quietly climbed the ladder into the house.

As I quickly discovered, though it looked like a house on the outside, the inside was a far different story.

As a huge fan of horror movies, I was familiar with the classic setting of a mad scientist working within a laboratory full of shelves holding specimen jars containing all sorts of unrecognizable unholies that floated in murky or glowing liquid. Or perhaps he worked surrounded by cages holding the next unfortunate subjects of his experiments, those beasts filling the air with their angry or sorrowful barking, squawking, or squealing. It was never a female scientist, by the way. Why were the crazy ones always male?

When I climbed up out of the hole and peered around, I was genuinely surprised by what I saw because it wasn't what I'd been shown in the movies. It wasn't even what I'd seen in movies featuring veterinarians.

First off, I'd emerged into what looked like a warehouse. There were no dividing walls and no windows. No sofas or cocktail tables, nor any lamps or decorations. It was one large room as far as I could tell, and it was at least three times the square footage that the house appeared to be from the outside.

That part was magick. I could deal with that. I was pretty sure the same kind of magick was at work in Tomes, since Orlaton had a veritable maze of bookcases in there, holding what seemed like millions of books.

The next thing that struck me as strange about this breeder's lab—since I could no longer call it a house—was that the walls appeared to be made of ice. The reason the trapdoor hadn't made a sound when Lucky dropped it open was because it had fallen onto a fur pelt. Dozens of them of varying colors, patterns, and sizes were spread across the floor, which also appeared to be made of ice.

With my breath puffing in little clouds in front of my face, I warily climbed out of the hole and rose to my feet. The hole was located in the front part of the building in what would have been the living room had this still been a normal house. I looked back across the room and saw three huge metal vats or silos, each fed from the top by large silver pipes. Each was the size of a small, standalone gazebo. On the wall adjacent was a line of stainless steel slabs attached to the ice wall, looking like a line of doors laid out horizontally end-to-end. Each door had an arm mechanism attached to its bottom two corners, which made me think that they weren't doors but work stations that flipped down when needed.

Standing opposite the vats on the other side of the warehouse were about two dozen unpainted stone or resin statues. They were clustered together haphazardly, as if shoved there to get them out of the way. Looking at them made me think of the fountain in the back yard…

"Oh, Jesus," I breathed, when I realized what they were.

This might not look like the horror movie I'd been expecting, but it held horror all the same.

I took my non-goodies from Lucky and then banished him for now. I didn't feel threatened at the moment, just grossed out and definitely queasy. I sent Vale a sickly smile when he climbed up the ladder and joined me on the pelt.

"This place is not good," I told him and Melanie as they looked around.

Vale figured it out right away, his face growing grim. Disgust thinned his lips. Melanie took a little longer to make the connection but when she did, she gasped loudly and then clapped both hands over her mouth.

"If I were sensitive, I'd be offended by your reactions," spoke up a woman's voice.

She rose up smoothly from the middle of the room as though she had ridden up on some kind of pneumatic lever. Apparently the floor here was riddled with trapdoors. Fun.

"Do you run this place?" I asked the woman.

She looked to be about fifty, heavily freckled, with brown hair streaked heavily with gray that she'd braided into a long plait that reached her hips. She wore a white lab coat over loose balloon pants covered with elephants that people wore when they wanted to get in touch with their chakras. Fur-lined boots covered her feet and a pale yellow scarf puffed up from the throat of her lab coat. The coat itself had seen better days and it retained the faint splatters of fluids that I didn't want identified.

Her hazel eyes watched us steadily from behind her thick-lensed goggles. I would have said she reminded me of an owl except I'd never seen a nature documentary where an owl looked as obsessively focused as she did. She stared at us as though she'd never seen human beings before.

"This is my breeding center," she agreed. She spoke softly, as though she were spooked. Her eyes didn't blink.

"My name is Anne Moody. I run Moonlight Pawn just down the street."

"I know it and I know you. You're the epicenter of curses."

I was caught aback. "I wouldn't have put it that way but, uh, yes, there are a lot of curses at Moonlight. They're contained, though. They don't attack anyone outside of the shop." What a claim to boast about…

The woman nodded, but tightened her hold on an implement that looked like a long-handled, metal iced tea spoon. It had an antenna coming out of the back end: two rings of metal encircling the center rod. She held the implement against her cheek, spoon side down, as though it were a pet hamster. In another minute I expected her to begin crooning to it.

I exchanged looks with Melanie and Vale but they didn't know how to read her, either.

"And you are?" I prompted the woman.

"Dr. Morrow," she said and spelled out her name for us. That was helpful, because she'd placed the emphasis on the last syllable, making me think she'd said Dr. Moreau, like the demented character in the book by H.G. Wells. That would have been a ridiculous coincidence.

Or would it have been? The statues that cluttered up the back end of the room weren't, after all, merely statues.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. Her head twitched from side to side, bird-like. "Did you come to breed?"

I can't accurately describe how hard I flinched at that. Melanie made a sound like she'd just thrown up in her mouth.

"No," I said with a hoarse, incredulous laugh. "We didn't come here to breed. But that's what you do here, isn't it? You combine different species." I waved in the general direction of the statues, hoping she'd just spit it out and save me the tooth pulling.

She looked at the statues, too, and a strange, wistful expression crossed her freckled face. "I do what I can. But the results don't always meet expectations. Science and magick—they aren't the bed partners they should be. So I give them a little nudge." She looked back at us, still owl-eyed. "Sometimes they need more than a nudge."

Not only was I creeped out, I was a little bit scared. Vale didn't look much happier. He seemed on the verge of demanding that we blow this Popsicle stand. But we couldn't. Not until I got my answers.

"I was hoping, since you're an expert on biology and probably shifters, too," I said with a smile that wobbled when I realized that I was likely standing not on an animal pelt, but on a
shifter's
skin, "that you could help me identify these." I held up the bag and Tupperware container.

Her mouth rounded into an O. "What do you have there?"

I began picking my way carefully across the floor, from pelt to pelt even though I wanted to scream inside. But if I'd stepped on the ice floor in my sandals I would have fallen flat onto my butt and maybe cracked my skull open.

Finally we reached her and I held out the containers. Dr. Morrow bit her lip as if debating with herself, and then hastily shoved the spoon-antenna thing into the pocket of her coat and thrust her hands out to grab the items.

I pulled them just out of her reach. "What exactly is it you do here, Doctor? What do you breed together?"

Her fingers curled needfully in the air. "I perform recombination for genetic and magickal improvement. 'Breed' is a misnomer. No animal husbandry or zygote manipulation is involved. My process utilizes sorcery."

"Are you saying you combine magickal beings together using magick?" Melanie looked ready to burst. "You make magickal Frankensteins?!"

"Frankenstein was a scientist. His creation is Frankenstein's monster," Dr. Morrow corrected her. Her bug eyes zoomed in on Melanie as if considering whether she'd make a good next subject. "I utilize various treatments on shapeshifters for the purpose of improvement, not for the sake of experimentation or reanimation."

While she was truthful about the reanimation, she was a liar about the rest. She
had
been experimenting. And failing. The proof stood at the other side of the room, pale faces frozen in anguish or horror.

"And people come to you asking for this to be done—to who?" I asked, just barely managing to keep my voice level. "To themselves? To enemies?"

"My work is not a weapon, Miss Moody."

But it can be a punishment, isn't that right, Doctor?

"So people ask you to make them more…exotic. Do you succeed?"

"Of course." She tried to snatch the Tupperware box but I jerked it just beyond reach. "How do you think I stay in business?"

Honestly, I thought she did what she did for the sheer perverse joy of it. Mad scientists typically didn't need anyone to pay them money to play in their twisted little sandboxes.

"Do you work alone?" Vale asked softly.

Dr. Morrow stilled, her goggled eyes settling on him as if just realizing he wasn't completely human. "I could make you better," she said to him, just as softly.

Every single hair on my body, even the ones on my big toe that I pretended didn't exist, stood on end.

Vale didn't appear fazed, though I knew better. "What could you do for me? To me?"

Dr. Morrow gave up playing grabby hands with me to focus on Vale. Never mind that he had a look and attitude about him that had stolen my heart the moment I'd laid eyes on him. He was a gargoyle. A rarity. His blood alone must be worth a fortune to some whacko somewhere. Dr. Morrow had seemed mostly asexual up until this moment. Now, she began trying to channel Jessica Rabbit.

"I could make all your dreams come true," she told Vale. She licked her lips. She finally blinked and kept her lashes lowered over her eyes. "I could make you the most powerful being on this planet, with my improvements."

"Gross," I whispered to myself. I saw Vale's lips twitch as though he'd heard me.

"You'd achieve this by yourself?" he asked the doctor. "That's impressive."

She laughed breathlessly, awkwardly, like she had asthma but was trying to cover it up by sounding like Marilyn Monroe.

"I perform all of my sorcery by myself. As well as all the lab work. I'm quite…educated."

Vale nodded, and then he turned around and walked away.

He didn't go far, just to the silver vats to inspect them, but Dr. Morrow looked after him like he'd just thrown her promise ring back in her face and left the state.

I couldn't stand her pity party. I thrust the box and bag at her. "I'll pay you to analyze these and tell me what they are. Immediately."

She looked down at the items dumbly, and then she gasped with evident excitement and hustled to the line of metal slabs on the wall. Just as she reached them, the nearest one descended from the wall like I'd guessed it might, becoming an examining table on which she set the box and bag.

The white ball of light that zoomed out of nowhere made Melanie and me duck, but the orb, about the size of a grapefruit, hovered above the table, providing light for Dr. Morrow to see by as she opened the sandwich bag and peered in at its contents.

"Hmm," she said. She pulled her spoon-antenna from her pocket and dipped the spoon end into the black charcoal of Raker. She waited a moment, then said, "Hmm," again and removed the spoon.

She repeated the process—"Hmms" and all—with the Tupperware box containing the remains of the dead Eastsiders shifter.

"What's that one?" I asked, pointing at the Tupperware box. "It started out as a wolf shifter but then it deteriorated into what you see now."

"It remains a wolf shifter. It's now also something else." She reached into the other pocket of her lab coat and withdrew a glass sphere that was colored a pale pink. She cracked the sphere into two equal pieces along a centerline and then snapped the hemispheres into place over the lenses of her goggles. She bent further over the box and stirred its contents with the antenna-spoon, whose rings began to rotate.

"Is that your wand?" I asked, realization hitting me belatedly.

She looked up at me, her eyes made enormous through the rosy spheres. She bit her lip and then bent over the box again. "It's my genetic sensitivity corroborator."

"So it's your wand."

Melanie giggled.

Dr. Morrow removed her "genetic sensitivity corroborator" from the box and  sealed it shut again. "Very unusual and so very fascinating," she said, as if talking to herself. "Sorcery was used to turn this shifter into a genetic explosive."

I looked over at Vale, but he was still studying the vats as if he was considering going into the beer brewing business.

"Even more special," Dr. Morrow went on, "is that this bomb was designed to target one specific individual and that individual only." She waved her wand over the sandwich bag. "The target was this wolf shifter here, who has been transformed quite impressively. I'd like to take some samples."