Hunting the Dark (30 page)

I tried to shut off the glut of questions, but it was like once I’d fed from Jace and been refreshed, my brain just wouldn’t quiet down. I was trying to figure out a million things at once, and everybody knows that there’s no such thing as true multitasking. Not even for a vampire.

We have our limits, you know.

‘So what’s the plan?’ Jace asked, crowding behind me as we walked along the corridor.

I had several ideas for what I wanted to do next, but as most of them involved violence or kissing I decided to keep them to myself.

Jace was looking pale, but there was no way he’d let himself slow me down. I’d have to trust that he could keep up and hope for the best. Not only was he suffering the effects of blood loss (on top of his other injuries), he was trying to come to terms with something personal that had just blown his life wide open. I wanted to comfort him, but there was no time. We just had to keep moving. One foot in front of the other until we could find a way out.

We reached the metal door at the end, and I shushed him while I listened. There was a time, not so long ago, when Jace would have pushed me out the way so that he could be the one to listen – to take charge. But this time he leaned against the wall and watched my back, letting me check things out in our path.

‘Anything?’ he asked, keeping a nervous eye on the dead-end corridor behind us as though he expected guards to materialize out of the walls.

‘It’s hard to tell,’ I whispered. ‘I can make out a very faint electrical hum, but that’s it. No other movement, that’s for sure.’

He nodded.

‘Also,’ I said, ‘I can’t hear any, you know  . . .’

‘What?’

‘Heartbeats,’ I muttered.

He put his full attention on me. ‘Right. You can hear them, I knew that.’

Gripping the handle tight, I twisted until it wouldn’t go any farther – and then twisted it past the point of no return. There was a satisfying
crack
as the door opened.

I entered the heart of the Facility, Jace on my heels.

For a while we simply walked along corridor after corridor, trying to get our bearings. The Facility might as well have been built to replicate a labyrinth – one that seemed endless – and I had visions of us getting lost and wandering for the rest of our lives. I’d stay forever young while Jace slowly aged, and I’d have to carry him when he got too old to keep walking. OK, that was stupid, but my imagination was currently in overdrive.

We’d both agreed that we were underground, so had been trying to figure out a way to go
up
. That didn’t seem to be working out so well, as we’d been moving for what felt like ages with no sign of a gradient at all – either up
or
down. No stairwells or elevators that we could see.

I stopped Jace with a hand on his arm. ‘Why is there nobody here? I don’t like it.’

‘You think I do? There should be a ton of people around. Scientists, guards  . . .’ He frowned, still looking thoroughly exhausted. ‘This place has got to have multiple levels, but we’re stuck in the basement walking in circles.’

‘Maybe they’re just watching us to see what we’ll do. Like rats in a freaking maze.’

‘They know exactly where we are, that’s totally obvious. But I think they’re herding us in the direction they want us to go.’

My shoulders slumped. ‘So we’re walking into a trap?’

‘Probably.’ He grimaced. ‘But what choice do we have? I wasn’t going to stay in that cell and just wait to die.’

He was right. This was it: all or nothing.

I kept having to remind myself to slow down so that Jace could keep up. If I moved the way I really could – especially having just fed – I’d be leaving him for dead. No way I was doing that. It was my fault he was even
in
this messed-up situation in the first place. It was thanks to him – to his blood – that we were getting out.

I would not leave Jace behind.

Those guards that had brought me down earlier, when I’d first spoken to Stark and then tried to escape, must have come from somewhere. Surely there was some kind of guard station. Yeah, I know I was once again relying on TV shows for my knowledge of how the dastardly bad guys would operate, but it was all I had to go on right now. If the cells were down here, then the guards had to be based
somewhere
. Wasn’t that at least a
bit
logical?

If we could find this hopefully not-mythical guard station, it might lead to a way out. A way up.

We stopped at the next turn and I flattened myself against the wall, taking a deep breath of recycled air in the hopes of smelling something to warn me of what might be around the next corner. Jace’s ‘trap’ theory had been bugging me. I hated the thought that we were just following a route already mapped out for us – that somewhere Stark was waiting for us to reach a pre-determined location, where we would probably get our asses kicked and then get dumped back into cells.

Honestly, just thinking about it was enough to give me a panic attack.

I leaned against the wall and listened for signs of life.

Jace bobbed his head around the corner and I dragged him back. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Standing around isn’t going to get us anywhere.’

I glared at him, then checked out the next corridor. It seemed exactly the same as the current one, all white walls and shiny floors, but there was something different at the very end.
Bull’s-eye!
Double doors with large, Plexiglas windows and a ton of security cameras marked the end of the hallway.

I swung back around to Jace and punched him triumphantly in the arm. ‘I told you there’d be a guard room of some kind!’

‘Ow.’ He made a big show of rubbing his arm. ‘I think a mosquito just bit me. Or a Moth.’ His mouth lifted at one corner. ‘Oh wait, you already did that.’

‘This isn’t funny.’

But Jace had already moved onto the next problem. ‘Why is there a guard station with no guards?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Let’s not think about it. What’s the point? We have to go in that direction anyway. We’ve tried all the other turnings.’

He nodded, but still didn’t look happy. Who could blame him? Nothing about this situation felt right. All we could do was keep moving forward and face whatever they threw at us. Together.

‘We should make a run for it,’ I said to him. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Go on. I can keep up.’

I made for the station, making sure to run at (mostly) regular human speed. We dashed through the door and I closed it behind us, but the moment I did
that
huge metal shutters slammed down on the outside of the booth – ceiling to floor – blocking the windows and effectively cutting us off.

‘Whoa,’ Jace said. ‘It’s like a bomb shelter.’

‘Or a panic room.’ It was also incredibly creepy, with glowing red lighting and a feeling of being underwater in a military submarine.

Looking around, I wasn’t so sure that this
was
just a guard center. It seemed too tech-heavy for that. Four monitors took up one wall and two desks were filled with computers and other electronic equipment that I couldn’t even begin to fathom. Maybe it was more of an information post. I had no idea, but it was the most hopeful thing we’d found and it meant we’d made some kind of progress. At the other end of the small space – a room that would hold no more than half a dozen people comfortably – were a set of elevator doors.

‘Bingo!’ I punched the air.

Jace wiped sweat from his forehead. ‘Try to get them open. I’ll look for anything that might give us a layout to the Facility. Even if all of this
is
just a test, this station must have been used for some purpose.’

The elevator doors, on closer inspection, were entirely coated with silver. My joy instantly deflated. If I had my boots I could try kicking them in, see if they would buckle enough to squeeze through a gap, but I was still barefoot – and they looked as solid as a bank vault’s doors. It was disappointing, to say the least. I felt like Supergirl, with her inconvenient allergy to Kryptonite.

‘Forget it,’ Jace said, once he realized my predicament. ‘Just help me search this place.’

Not knowing where to start, I made for one of the more ‘normal’-looking computers. Of course the screensaver was password-protected and I didn’t think I’d get lucky for the second time in a week. This ‘escape’ was turning into a bit of a disaster.

Jace, meanwhile, was busy ripping open desk drawers and rifling through the contents. Paper went flying as he tossed a huge sheaf of reports onto the floor. Maybe he had the right idea  . . .

There was a tall filing cabinet up against the back wall of the booth. It was locked, but I had no trouble tearing the whole front of it off its hinges.

I raised my eyebrows and admired the destruction I’d just caused. Feeding from Jace had evidently increased my strength.

As I began to flip through the contents of the cabinet, my vamp-hearing picked up what I’d feared was coming: footsteps. A lot of them.

‘Crap,’ I muttered, just as I reached a numbered folder marked:

Once again, it was the same code from Subject Ten’s dog tags. Maybe I was
supposed
to find this  . . . it seemed too easy. I opened the plastic file, glancing through the small collection of pages inside. I already knew what the ‘NB’ stood for – Nicole Bertonelli – but was still determined to figure out the ‘HM’ part. Whether the documents had been planted here for us to find or not, I didn’t care. Now that we knew Ten was Jace’s sister, it seemed more important than ever that we learn the full truth.

And then I found what I was looking for: the one piece of information that could blow everything wide open.

‘Moth!’ Jace shouted, cutting into my conspiracy-laden thoughts. ‘We have company.’

I pulled out the most important of the papers and folded it tightly, shoving it into the waistband of my leggings. Then we both gazed at the monitors, watching as guards converged on the booth. One of them was already banging on the shuttered door and shouting for us to give ourselves up. Maybe this hadn’t been a trap, after all. They seemed pretty keen on recapturing us.

Jace swore. ‘There are too many of them.’

He was right. There were six  . . . seven  . . . no, eight of them. Men and women dressed in those now familiar black army fatigues, decked out with all kinds of weaponry. I wondered how many of them in total were based here at the Facility. Was this it? Or were we going to face even more of them in a few minutes?

I gazed at all the buttons and lights on the control panel. One of them had to open those damn elevator doors. It was our only way out. Maybe I could take four or five of the guards, but I wasn’t convinced that Jace could handle even one in his current state. Not that I’d tell
him
that. Must protect his male ego and all that.

I tried not to dwell on the fact that I still didn’t even know where ‘here’ was. Jace had mentioned traveling over water (‘maybe’) when they snatched him, but that wasn’t exactly helpful.

Sighing, I forced myself to focus on finding a way to access the elevator. That was something I could do, right? There was a number pad among the controls beside it, clearly waiting for a code to be input. A code that we didn’t have. Maybe if we could grab one of the guards outside, I could force the information out of him or her  . . . But that wasn’t going to work without having to fight our way through all the others.

One of the lights on the code box blinked bright red and I wrung my hands.

‘What’s that flashing?’ Jace asked. He was looking over my shoulder.

‘How am I supposed to know?’ I pressed the button next to the light. What did we have to lose, right?

Jace shoved me out of the way. ‘Don’t touch anything!’

‘It didn’t do anything anyway! How are we going to get out if we just stand here?’ I was yelling, but couldn’t seem to help it. Stress had been eating away at me since I first woke up in this awful place. I’d been stabbed, drugged, examined, poked, prodded, drained of enough blood to make me feel super-guilty for being a vampire in the first place, hit, thrown, shot with darts, cuffed and chained. Honestly, I’d had enough. If Jace wanted to argue about a stupid control panel, he was out of luck. We were getting out of this nightmare.
Right now.

I elbowed him out of the way. Adrenaline coursed through me as I remembered the feel of his blood running down my throat, warming me and giving me life and strength. I could still taste him on my lips. Refusing to look at him again, I dug my fingers into the edge of the steel panel that housed all the electronics beside the door and
pulled
.

No more standing around, waiting for guards to shoot us and God only knows what else. I wanted to act, take control of the situation. I needed to. I wasn’t going to be a victim any more. I could get us out of here if I could only operate the stupid doors!

The whole panel came away from the wall. I tore it like a strip of old wallpaper, and tossed it to one side.

Jace’s mouth dropped open. ‘You idiot! What are you
doing
?!

‘Somebody has to save our skins,’ I said, quoting
Star Wars
and wishing there was a garbage chute we could throw ourselves into. Because that would have been cool.

It was at precisely that moment that the elevator doors opened.

Only to reveal a small space crammed tight with three more fully armed guards.

Two men and a woman stopped and stared at us. The expressions on all three of their faces would have been comical if they weren’t armed to the teeth and on their way to shoot us, dump us back in our cells  . . . or worse.

Jace, weaponless and weakened by blood loss, gamely threw himself onto the first guy to enter the booth. I allowed myself a moment to admire his bravery then, wiping imaginary drool from my mouth, I leaped at the other two. Fighting at such close quarters wouldn’t be easy, but maybe we could use that to our advantage. At least they’d find it harder to fire their weapons.