Page 159 of The World Undone

The lighting was abrasive, that awful bright white that should be illegal to use in any room that wasn’t a hospital. It did nothing to help the pounding drum in my skull.

“Declan?” A soft voice whispered to my right, but I couldn’t quite move my neck around to see. “Are you awake? Are you okay?”

I blinked back the stark light, trying to get a feel for my surroundings. I was in a small room, the walls and ceiling a white as obnoxiously loud as the light bouncing off their surfaces. From my position, I couldn’t see a door—or much of anything.

I twisted, just slightly, wincing as pain shot up my spine. I followed the winding tubes from my arms. They led through a small hole in what looked like a glass wall, though I’d bet all the money in my bank account that it was shatterproof—impenetrable.

Familiar whirring blotted out the dull buzzing in my ears and the echoes of screams I was doing my best to ignore. I clocked a few machines just outside of my cage. I focused on them, trying like hell to ground myself in the present—anything to get away from the possibility of more sleep.

“Wh-” it was the only thing I could manage—a sound that would have to function as a question for now.

My head felt like it weighed two thousand pounds, my body like it had been buried under an avalanche.

Were we back in the lab?

No.

Max had burned it down.

A different lab, then?

The sterile coldness of this place had The Guild written all over it. Sterile-white was practically their branding package.

What happened?

My memories were sand, slipping through my fingers as I tried to collect them, coming to me in disjointed patches.

I reached for Max, chancing closing my eyes for a few moments in an attempt to feel her, to speak through our link. Only I couldn’t. All I saw when my eyes closed was death, all I felt a breath-stealing panic.

“Jarrod knocked Max out,” the voice whispered again, the sound more familiar this time. I held onto it, used the gentle warmth as a rope to pull me out of my spiral. Rowan. “Us too, though he hit you with the same number of tranqs as Max, so it’ll probably take you a while to feel like yourself. I’ve only been awake and cognizant for an hour or two,” a pause, “I think. You—” he sighed, “you were screaming. What was he doing to you? You were yelling, and then it was just silent, I thought—” his voice caught, “I thought you were gone for a moment there.”

“Is—” the word was more grunt than anything, my throat raw. I didn’t want to think about why—if I had been screaming, I didn’t want to linger on the reasons, didn’t want to revisit those dreams.

“She’s not here,” he said, picking up on the question I couldn’t voice. “Think they left her.” He grunted. Left her? The cabin. The town. My stomach threatened to empty itself at the memory of the massacre I’d been too late to stop. All of those innocent people, gone. And for no reason other than their proximity to Max, and Jarrod’s insatiable greed. “I think he’s keeping us for collateral, to ensure that she comes around to his plan. Force her into some kind of negotiation.”

“That,” a new voice—sharp, loud, and abrasive this time, “and we’re running a little experiment. If it goes well, I may not even need her at all.”

Jarrod appeared on the other side of my cage, his beady eyes assessing every inch of my body, his mouth twisted in a greedy little grin that grated like nails on a chalkboard.

“What’re you doing to her?” There was a series of loud, dull thumps that rumbled my wall, and I knew Rowan was likely ramming against it in an effort to get to me or attack Jarrod. Maybe both. “Leave her alone. O-or take me—use me instead.”

“You’re all but useless to me, unfortunately.” Jared glanced in the direction of Ro’s voice, his nose scrunched in disgust. “You see, I had a thought.” He lifted a small vial, dark with blood, but there was an almost iridescent shadow to it when he held it up to the light. He turned to me, fully stepping into his supervillain era, no longer bothered with trying to pretend he was anything else. “You see, Xavier noted that when you found him, with Evelyn and the others, you were particularly strong. He told me that you were able to easily pull and use Ms. Bentley’s powers, and with impressive ease.” His smile brightened.

My stomach lurched at the barely-constrained excitement in his voice.

“And I perhaps am uniquely positioned to understand just how impressive that is,” he continued. “I know firsthand how difficult these powers can be to master.” He tilted his head. “I can’t be sure that draining you will give me access to her powers too, at least not to the extent that you are tuned into them, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. If I can move things along without the girl’s direct compliance, well,” he grunted out a half-hearted chuckle, “that would certainly make things smoother for me—for us all, really—wouldn’t it?”

He emptied the vial into his mouth, cringing slightly at the taste. He licked his lip then shrugged. “Remarkable isn’t it, the depths one must sink to when trying to save our kind. I’m practically a vampire now.” His forehead lined as he studied the empty vial, blood still staining the glass. “Not quite to my preferences, but assuming I survive the sample, I’ll be ready for transfusions in a few hours. Those are less…revolting to suffer through.”

The banging from Rowan’s side of the wall grew more erratic, more desperate—but I knew it was futile. The Guild designed these cells to hold the strongest, most dangerous supernatural creatures they could catch. We stood no chance of getting out with attempts at using brute force. Especially not as weakened as we were.

Hell, I could barely even lift my head more than a few inches without wincing.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes again, this time ignoring the flashes of violence that seemed to be permanently etched into my brain’s memory.

The bond. I needed to fight past whatever they’d done to me.

What had they done to me? Was it a drude?

---