Violet (The Silver Series Book 4) (20 page)

“
Kaynan, we have to get
them out of here.”

“
I know.” He looked at me
carefully. “You're going to phase, aren't you?”

I hated myself for my lack of control, but
we both knew it was inevitable. I nodded. “If I phase I can still
lead the children out, but we don't know what's on the lower
levels.”

His face showed the dread I felt. “We don't
want to blow up innocent people.”

“
Are you going to have time
to look?”

He gave a grim nod. “I set Dr. Verus' bomb
for fifteen minutes. If I'm not out in ten, start worrying.”

“
If you're not out in ten,
I'm coming in after you.” My muscles were shaking so badly I
couldn't hold still any longer. I turned to the children. “Kids,
I'm a nice werewolf and I need you to trust me.” I pointed at the
room we had just left. “I'm going to go in there and change into a
wolf, then I want you to follow me outside, okay?” Most of the
children just stared in incomprehension, but a few of the older
ones nodded.

A dark-skinned, beautiful girl of about
twelve touched my hand. “We'll wait right here.”

I threw her a grateful smile, gave Kaynan a
quick hug, then stepped into the room and let the phase take over.
When I padded back out of the room as a cream and black wolf with
violet eyes, the girl I had spoken to before set a hand on my
shoulder with the trusting faith only a child can have. Her other
hand was clutched tightly by a little boy I guessed was her younger
brother.

Kaynan brought my shoes from the room, tied
the shoelaces together, and looped them around his neck. “Take
care, sis,” he said. He opened the last door and instructed the
older children to help him carry the younger ones out and follow
me, then he disappeared down the hall.

I led the way back to the elevator, waited
until all of the children piled in, then pressed the button with my
nose. The anxiety that filled me was calmed by the fact that we
were helping, and the children around me didn't seem the least bit
concerned about the fact that they rode in an elevator with a
wolf.

We reached the top floor and I nosed the
girl so that she would keep the others inside. I ran on ahead to
clear the way to the doors, but it seemed that someone knew of our
attack because there was not a soul in sight. I thanked Rafe's
powers of the Universe with a silent, grateful laugh, and loped
back down the hallway to the elevator.

The children followed me through both sets
of doors to the desert. Two of the younger children climbed on my
back while the older kids helped carry the others across the cool
night desert sand. Dawn touched the western horizon, lighting the
sky in deep red edged with rose. I led the children past several
dunes so they would be clear of the blast. I waited with them as
long as I dared, but my heart slowed with every second that Kaynan
didn't appear. When I couldn't stand it anymore, I rose, nosed the
twelve year old girl again so she would keep the others there, then
loped back to the facility.

The scent of fire touched my nose when the
inside door opened. Smoke trailed along the top of the hall and
told of burning plastic, paper, and electrical wires. I galloped
down the hall at full speed, slid into the elevator, and hit the
button for floor two. The door slid open when I reached the second
floor, but the hall it revealed was empty. Kaynan’s scent lingered,
but only lightly. He had to be further down.

The elevator shook when I stepped back in
and I hesitated. A sign on the wall warned not to ride the elevator
in case of a fire. I rolled my eyes and wondered if the same
applied to an exploding building. I took a deep breath and pushed
the next button with my nose.

The door opened on level three. A strange
scent of chemicals filled the air along with a tangle of smoke that
worked its way along the ceiling, but Kaynan’s scent was faint
there as well. I didn’t have time to investigate with the building
about to collapse and my brother missing.

I pushed the button for level four. My heart
thundered in my chest and I had to remind myself to breathe. The
smoke that rushed in when the door opened was white and billowing.
The scent of chemicals was stronger here, mixed with a stale smell
of werewolves and humans, but Kaynan had returned and entered the
elevator again.

I rode down to level five and began to
question what would happen if I didn’t find my brother. My
breathing was rapid and smoke clouded my nose, making me fear that
I wouldn’t smell him if I did finally reach the right level. When
the door to the fifth floor opened, a heavy scent of decay and rot
hit me so hard I had to fight back the urge to vomit. Part of me
felt like I should find out the source of the smell, but the other
half reasoned that Kaynan had returned, so I needed to keep
going.

I stepped back and pushed the button, then
cringed when the elevator started with a rocking jolt. Nothing
prepared me for when the doors opened on level six.

Kaynan lay on the floor halfway down the
smoke-filled hallway in his wolf form. His deep red hair was singed
and smelled of blood and fire. Smoke poured from the rooms around
him and flames lapped out from several doorways. The heat was so
intense I could barely look at him. I had to pass at least three
raging fires from open doorways to reach him. He outweighed me by
more than fifty pounds and I knew I couldn't move him in my wolf
form.

I raced into the room next to me and glanced
around quickly for anything I could use to protect us from the
heat. The room was empty save for a few beakers and a microscope on
a lone table. I braved the flaming hallway again and in the next
room I was relieved to find several hospital gowns, scratchy
hospital blankets, and a sink along with rows of tables covered in
beakers, microscopes, and stacks of slides that smelled of strange
chemicals.

I willed my heart to slow, but it was hard
to be calm with my brother lying in the middle of a torrential fire
while children waited in the desert far above for us to take them
to safety. Too many people depended on me to make it, and I wasn’t
about to let them down now. I closed my eyes, found the calm place
deep inside myself, and centered on it until it blocked out the
roar of the fire, the panic at the edge of my thoughts, and the
urgency to phase. My heart slowed and I felt control over my body
return.

I phased as quickly as I could, doused the
hospitals gowns and blankets in cold water, then pulled a gown and
a blanket over myself before I ducked back out the door and ran
down the hall to Kaynan's side.

His red eyes stared off unseeing into the
distance. I touched his singed fur, afraid to find him not
breathing. My heart started again when his chest rose and fell
shallowly under my hand.

“
I'm getting you out of
here, Kay,” I said between gritted teeth. I wrapped the remaining
soaked blankets and gowns around his body, picked him up in my
arms, and ran as fast as I could toward the elevator.

Chapter 16

I was almost there when the first vision
struck and staggered me against the wall.

Kaynan's ability to share images when he was
in his wolf form came especially helpful with Grace, but when he
was asleep or unconscious, he passed the memories he saw in his
mind to whoever touched his fur.

I watched the door to the elevator open on
the third floor. The chemical scent I noticed before lined the
walls as though coated. Kaynan stepped slowly into the hall, his
knife from his wristband held ready and my bomb shoes around his
neck. He peeked through the doors and found each room empty until
he opened the last door.

Wolves that looked so much like Rafe's pack
my breath caught lined the walls. Wolf heads, wolf hides, and whole
wolves took up every corner of wall space and most of the floor. It
would have looked like an ordinary trophy room except for the
eyes.

Somehow, the taxidermist had figured out how
to preserve the eyes of the wolves, and I, through Kaynan's memory,
stared into the gazes of over fifty wolves whose eyes told that
they had been werewolves. The place was a trophy room for
werewolves who had been killed in their wolf form, and the wolves'
eyes held expressions of pain, hope, sorrow, joy, and love that
reflected the lives they had lived in their human forms.

Kaynan turned and hurried quickly back up
the hall to the elevator, feeling no doubt the knot in his stomach
that I felt in mine.

He rode down to the next level and when the
door opened to reveal the same chemical scent, his steps dragged
down the hall and my stomach turned over in fear of what he would
find. He glanced in the empty, but strongly-scented rooms that
lined each side of the hallway, then hesitated in front of the door
at the end. I knew he wanted to turn back, but both of us had to
know what was beyond.

He opened the metal door and his werewolf
eyesight made out human forms standing in the dark. For a second,
he froze as though his fight or flight instincts were battling to
take over, but the forms didn't move and there was no scent of life
in the room. He blinked and the grays and blacks separated to show
humans mounted on the walls and on platforms like the wolves had
been.

Kaynan stepped slowly into the room. The
human forms stared back at him with their real eyes, the scent of
werewolf thick in the air. They had been mounted in action forms as
the wolves had, crouching by a pretend fire, running after a
stuffed deer, and kneeling together by a plastic stream.

The one that haunted me most took four
werewolves and stood them in a row in different stages of phasing.
The first one was partially hunched, but still in human form. The
second's hands were almost touching the ground, his nose and mouth
elongated into a muzzle and his fingers and toes retracting into
paws while a slight protrusion of a tail showed from his backside.
The third was on the floor on his hands and knees, gray fur running
up his arms and sides and his ears moving to higher points on his
head. His face had mostly phased to that of the wolf and there was
a haunted, wild look in his eyes. The fourth body was pure wolf,
but the sadness and pain on his face was unmistakable.

All of the figures were naked like the
wolves, posed as though for study and learning, but it was
impossible to think of them as less than human. They had lives,
joys and happiness that had been taken from them by this place so
that they could be displayed like museum dinosaurs.

I felt so sick it was all I could do to lean
against the wall and carry Kaynan to the elevator. The fact that
the bombs were about to go off somewhere echoed in the back of my
mind, but Kaynan's visions swept the warning aside, demanding to be
seen amid the smoke and flames of the hallway we traveled.

In the vision, he staggered into the
elevator and pushed the button for level five. His hands shook and
he studied them as though he didn't understand. The elevator door
opened again and decay and filth colored the air. Kaynan took a
steeling breath of the remaining fresh air in the elevator, then
entered the hallway.

This time, instead of being lined with
doors, the short hallway led to one giant room. Kaynan opened the
door slowly, then leaned against it and stared at the neon-lit room
beyond.

Rows upon rows of tables contained human
corpses like those brought by the dump trucks. I.V.s and machines
stood by each corpse, reading vitals and pumping red fluid that
looked like blood into the bodies. The bags had a big W written on
them; it took me a minute to realize it was werewolf blood. They
were infusing the bodies and the monitors told them which specimens
took to the fusion. The monitors beeped, but only to show the
infusion percentages. Heart rates were flat-lined and the bodies
stunk of decay. None of the fusions had taken, but fluids were
circulating through the bodies to keep them from rotting
further.

Kaynan left the door open and ran back to
the elevator with jolting steps. He pushed the button to close the
door, then hesitated, staring at the button for level six. His hand
shook when he raised it to press the number of the last floor. The
elevator gave a slight shudder, then lowered slowly.

The scent of decay from the floor above was
replaced by fear, pain, anger, and blood. Kaynan walked in slow,
resigned steps to the end of the hall, his bare feet hitting the
tile with soft thuds; the sound of each door handle echoed loudly
as he turned it. The rooms along each side of the hall were mostly
empty, containing nothing but beakers, slides, microscopes, and the
occasional sink and workstation.

Light showed through the bottom of the door
at the end of the hall and strange moaning noises and the
occasional shriek emanated from it. Kaynan approached it slowly,
then paused a minute as though to gather his strength.

He pushed the door open, then slid to his
knees on the floor.

The tables had been changed for hospital
beds, each of which contained an occupant. At the sound of the door
opening, rows of mutated faces turned toward Kaynan. There were
similarities between their faces and ours, and my heart beat
painfully in my chest when I realized these were our clones, the
failed experiments Dr. Verus had referred to, kept alive for some
cruel, demented, unfathomable reason.

Several of the creatures that looked at
Kaynan had his deep red eyes, while others bore the brown ones that
he had before the accident. Others, with mixtures of blond or black
and purple hair, stared at him through violet eyes or blue ones, or
one of each, at least those that had eyes with which to stare.

The facial features had come out distorted
and confused with those of both human and wolf. On the face closest
to us, rows of canine teeth stood out through one cheek while the
eyes, crooked and full of pain, blinked from down by where the chin
should have been.