Jekyll, an Urban Fantasy (36 page)

“Yeah, it is.”

“How many nights have you left her here alone after they asked you to go do an errand or something?”

“A few.” He stepped towards her, suspicion aging his face. “Why?”

Eden didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to see his face when he realized a truth he’d been afraid to acknowledge. Moments of complete betrayal and anguish shouldn’t be shared, or witnessed. Fields should have privacy once he understood exactly what they’d done to his daughter.

Alex walked into the room and calmly went to the line of cabinets against the wall, pulling out a vial and a syringe.

“Is that for me?” Eden called. “Something to keep me from talking?”

“Why did you ask that?” Fields kept his voice low and glanced at Alex.

“Is
that
who you were telling me about, Alex?” Eden called loudly. “The pregnant girl who almost died because her Jekyll wasn’t mature enough?”

He looked at Alex, his moves slow and deliberate. “What’s she talking about?”

“I have no idea, Fields.” She rested her butt on the corner of the desk and flicked the cap off the vial. “Why don’t you go home now? I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Fields, I’ve never lied to you,” Eden said. “How confident are you that
she
can say the same?”

“I…” He glanced at Eden, his eyebrows pressed together. “Alex?”

“I told you to go home,” Alex said, the pitch of her voice screechingly high. “Ignore her. She’s just trying to manipulate you. You
know
how much I care about Alicia. I would never hurt her.”

Even if Eden hadn’t already known Alex was lying, she would’ve known at that moment. All she had to do was get Fields to stop deluding himself that they were all on the same side. “She wants to breed me, Fields. By force. Did you know that?”

“No one’s going to force you.” His head shook. “It’s
your
choice.”

“No, Fields, it’s not. They already tried it once. But it didn’t work. The girl almost”—she took a breath so the next word would have all of the power she wanted it to—“
died
. She was so young that her Jekyll wasn’t mature enough to carry the fetus.”

“Don’t listen to her!” Alex said, coming around the desk, her hands shaking as she tried to fill the syringe. “You
know
how Jekylls lie.”

Eden’s grip on the bars tightened. “You need to shut your mouth before your nose starts growing, Alex. Or better yet, come clean. Purge yourself of all that bullshit. It’s worth a shot, right?”

Alex tore her gaze off of Fields and glared at Eden. “Listen to the tough girl locked up in a cage, surrounded by her enemy.
Everyone
is expendable.”

“Finally! She speaks the truth!” Eden yelled. “You realize that goes for you too, right Alex? You’re just as expendable as I am. Maybe more. Because
I’m
a freak-of-nature who my enemies want to breed. Hmm… Which one of us do you think they’d keep around if it came down to it? The Abnormal one they can use, or the abnormally-bitchy one they already
have
used?”

“Enough!” Fields yelled. Then he backed away from Alex, staring at her. “You tell me the truth, or I tell
her
the truth.”

“Tell me the truth about what?” Eden asked. These people’s lies could fill a ten volume set, where the heck was he going to start?

Fields spoke through his teeth, his body tense. “Tell her who Hyde01 was.”

Was?

“I
am
telling you the truth,” Alex said. “We didn’t do anything to Alicia.” Her words were sputtered, her eyes were wide, and her head was shaking side-to-side slightly even as she denied it. Every part of her body screamed,
‘I am a huge, fucking liar’
.

Fields was a big man. And it turns out that big men have equally big tears. As they fell down his cheeks, he didn’t move—not to brush them away, not to strike. His stillness making everything and everyone in the room follow suit.

“I. Don’t. Believe. You,” he said to Alex, barely moving his mouth. “She said she had flashbacks, but I told her they were just bad dreams. I
thought
they were just sick fantasies her Jekyll was showing her. And then, when she almost bled to death, you told me it was her Jekyll’s fault. And I believed you.” Suddenly, he flipped around to Eden and headed straight for her, his hands grabbing the bars between them. “Do you know what they did to my daughter?”

She shook her head. “I wish I did. I wish I could tell you what they’re doing to
any
of us, but I just don’t know. I won’t lie to you though, Fields. You
know
I won’t. They want to breed me. They’ve done it before. To Mitch’s sister and, yes, to someone too young to carry full-term.” She shrugged. “Maybe it was Alicia, I don’t know. I don’t even know how many of us there
are
, how many of us The Clinic is using.”

“Not many. Not here, at least. Just a few women and a few men. But this isn’t the only facility—”

“Don’t!” Alex screamed from behind him.

He turned to face her. “When I’m done with her, you’re going to tell me exactly what you’ve done.”

“You need to believe me,” Alex begged. “I haven’t done anything wrong. And telling her anything will only make her more vengeful and more dangerous. Think of Alicia. Come on, Fields, we’re close to a cure! I know some parts of this aren’t pretty, but what we’re doing could give Alicia a normal life. So that one day she’ll get married and have—”

“Have babies?” When he turned back to Eden, gone was the look of sadness, of anguish, of betrayal. All that was left was a man, a father, who would protect what he loved. A father who was finally speaking the truth. “That
thing
in there, Hyde01, started everything. He was normal, for a Hyde. But then…”

“Fields, shut up!”

“…the board decided they needed a control.” He spoke quickly, as if afraid his courage would fail before he got all the words out. “Every experiment needs a control, someone who gets a placebo instead of the drug they’re testing.”

He jerked, shock filling his face, and then spun around. “You bitch!” His arm shot out, and all Eden saw was Alex flying to the side and hitting the ground a few feet away. Then he reached over his shoulder and yanked out a syringe.

“I’m so sorry, Eden,” he said, turning. But not like before. This time his movements were sluggish, off-balance. He was blinking like crazy as he fought whatever Alex had injected him with.

“It’s okay,” she lied. “Let me out, and I’ll try to help you.” That
wasn’t
a lie—he’d just proven he could be trusted by taking a syringe in the neck.

He nodded, stumbling forward a step. “They were testing on their own founder…to see what happens to your kind…when you don’t have the serum…” he slurred. “And now…now he never comes back.”

“Let me out, Fields.”

“Please.” He fumbled for something under his shirt, pulling out a long chain with a key on the end. “Find Alicia and tell her...” Just as he pulled it over his head, his eyebrows bunched, and his eyes widened. “…sorry.” Then his body fell forward, smacking into the bars of the cage.

Holding her head, Alex slowly got to her feet. “I
really
wish you hadn’t mentioned Alicia, Eden.” She snatched the chain out of his hand, walked calmly back to the desk, picked up her cell phone, and ordered whoever was on the other end of the line to come and pick up the trash.

The Clinic’s facility was so utterly and disappointingly anti-climatic, neither Landon nor Mitch spoke for a long time. It was dark and they couldn’t get too close, but from what they could tell, The Big Bad Clinic was contained in a white one-story building with a few windows that were either blacked-out or had the kind of film that made them opaque. An industrial-sized door in the front and who-knows-what in the back. Probably a golf course and a nice fountain. It was so fucking
normal
! No guards patrolling the area, no barbed-wire gate, no mean-looking dogs. In fact, the only growling was coming from Mitch.

“Can we please stop doing drive-bys and
do
something?” Mitch grumbled on their fourth time around the block. “Just let me out, I’ll knock on their front door and tell them I’m new in the neighborhood.”

Landon scoffed. “Before beating them with a bundt cake?”

“You got a better idea?”

“They know both of you,” Carter said from the passenger seat, his head against the glass, his wheezing breath fogging up the window near his mouth. “The second someone sees one of your faces, all hell will break lose. We need to wait until things settle down a bit. In about an hour, there’s a shift-change. The new guards start their rounds on the opposite side of the facility, so it’ll be easier to go in unnoticed. And since we can use my keycard, you shouldn’t have to shoot up the place too much.”

If Mitch wasn’t still pretending to wear the handcuffs, he would’ve smacked the back of Carter’s head. “They gave you a key to the place? Why didn’t you tell us that earlier?”

He shrugged. “Slipped my mind. Probably because of the near-concussion you gave me.”

“Great, more waiting,” he bitched. “Then, with any luck, we go in, find Eden, and get her out in no time.” Oh, and burn the motherfucking place down. But Mitch didn’t mention that.

“Our first stop is the cage room,” Carter said.

“Why do they have her in a cage? I thought she was going to help them.” Mitch knew he had no right to say anything—seeing as how
he’d
put her in one as well, but
they’d
known who she was. He hadn’t. It was a small consolation, but he held onto it. He needed as wide a gap as possible between their actions and his.

“I don’t know for sure if she’s still there. They might’ve taken her back to her room. We’ll have to check.”

“Then why don’t we go to her room first?” Mitch wanted to crawl into the front seat. Or grab Carter by the neck and yank his head around. You know, not to
break
anything, but to see his ugly face. Because there was something
off
about this whole thing. And he might be able to figure it out if he knew the boy scout was lying.

“No, the cage room first. Then, if she’s not there, we’ll check
her
room.”

What the fuck is in the cage room besides cages?

“I’ll distract the guard and then signal you,” Carter said. “But if you screw it up, I’m not helping.”

“You’re a great guy, you know that?”

“Thanks. Oh, and one more thing. If they find us—which we have about a 1% chance of
not
happening—don’t let them tase you.”

“They don’t have any
real
guns?” Landon asked, confused. Apparently unhappy that
these
bad guys worked differently than all the other bad guys he’d dealt with.

Carter shook his head. “No, but all of them carry Dart Tasers.”

“Yeah,” Mitch grumbled. “We’ve met.”

Carter turned to look at Mitch, his grin a cold reminder of their relationship. “They tased you? Damn, I wish I’d seen that.”

“As soon as I get hold of one of them, I’ll show you how they work. Maybe take a video so you can have a souvenir.”

“Considering that you’re still here to threaten me, it means that the Taser wasn’t turned all the way up. The ones the guards use aren’t your average, off-the-shelf variety. These are the hard-core, black-market, customized, you-do-not-want-to-mess-with-them kind.”

Landon grimaced. “This is South Florida.
Nothing
should surprise me.”

“You don’t understand. Not only do the darts make them able to be used at a longer distance, these are rigged for Abnormals. At the low-volt setting, they’re just garden-variety-incapacitating, but on high? They could put down Mitch’s more interesting side.”

“They’re strong enough to knock out Hyde?”

Carter shook his head. “They’re strong enough to
kill
Hyde.”

The silence got irritating quick. Mitch didn’t want Landon to start worrying or Carter to start celebrating. “Okay, good to know. Any other little tidbits to tell us?”

“Not that I can think of,” Carter said. “Maybe you shouldn’t have hit me so hard.”

“Maybe.” But it had been worth it.

A long while later, Carter needed to take a piss. So they parked the car a couple blocks from The Clinic’s facility. And because they’d already forced him to hand over the keycard to Emerald City, it made no difference to Mitch if Carter was using his tiny bladder as an excuse to run for it. Mitch had been dealing with bad fucking karma his whole life. Carter would get what was coming to him. Because karma couldn’t give a rat’s ass about intent. No, that shit was all about action. And Carter’s actions were
so
far away from good, there was a strong possibility that he was taking Hyde
classes
.

Not to mention that a slug could outrace the little prick at this point. In the short time they’d been driving, Carter’s complexion had grown paler, until even his lips lacked color.

“What the hell is wrong with him?” Landon asked, after the kid had gone a few feet into the bushes.

“Don’t know. Don’t care. You just concentrate on getting Eden out. Whatever happens, just do that. Got it?”

“Damn it, Turner.” Landon didn’t turn around, he simply refocused the rearview mirror, and they spoke to each other’s reflections. “Don’t do anything that’ll get me killed.”

Mitch smiled. “I don’t want to be a hero. I
just
don’t want you to do that whole ‘leave no man behind’ shit I see on TV.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Wait. Seriously? You’re not even going to argue with me?”

“Oh. No, Turner,” he said, dead-pan. “Don’t sacrifice yourself for all of the rest of us. If it comes down to you or me, save yourself.” He opened the car door. “Happy now?”

“You could’ve been more sincere about it.” He looked at the WTF-expression Landon wore.

“I’m going to check on him,” Landon said. “Make sure he’s still conscious. You just stay here and be pretty.”

“I’m on it.” Fuck it all, Mitch had a friend. First time ever. He finally had a friend who could put up with his bullshit, who protected him from himself, and who might end up in a lot more trouble than he deserved. “You’re exactly the kind of asshole I can respect, you know that, Landon?”