Page 50 of Fanged Embrace
In the alcove of my arms, Mary nodded and scrubbed at hereyes with the back of her hand. I propped my cheek on the crown of her head. Somewhere beyond that door, River was listening. I knew she was. With her vampire hearing she’d pick up on every word, clear as day.
But that was… okay. I was vaguely surprised to find that I was fine with that, fine to share my most coveted of secrets. It was easier, in a way, to speak about these things when we weren’t face to face.
“I lived in a facility just like yours. I lived there for a long time and… and I—” I halted, inhaled a jagged breath, fighting tooth and nail to get the words out. “And one day I had a baby.”
It came out all at once, tumbling from my lips like a landslide.
I tightened my grip on the girl in my arms. “My little girl was a hybrid, too. Smallest fingers you ever did see, and louder than the alarms when she cried. And let me tell you, she crieda lot. She was happier in my arms than in her own cot, so I carried her around all the time.”
Mary wriggled her head free from my jacket and blinked up at me. “What happened to her?”
“She went away too.” The words fell cold and heavy from my tongue. The black smoke in my lungs writhed and curled, crawling up my throat along with the confession.
I forced another breath, blinking back tears that burned hot in the corner of my eyes. “Everything the organization took from me, everything they did. Nothing came close to the pain of losing her.”
I heaved in a breath, looked down at Mary, and cupped her small, soft face in my hands. “So when I hear you say your mom didn’t want you? That she thought you were a monster? No.” I touched our foreheads together, cool pallid skin on skin. “I know she loved you so much it hurt.”
Tears streaked Mary’s cheeks but she didn’t wipe them. “But she never came back.”
I folded her into my arms and resumed my gentle rocking, listing us both one way and then the other. “Maybe she couldn’t. But I can guarantee it—right to the very end, she never wavered in her love for you.”
River was waiting for me in the hallway when I eventually slipped out of the makeshift bedroom and quietly closed the door behind me. She had her arms loosely folded, leaning against the wall, shrouded in shadows where the ceiling light couldn’t reach.
Our eyes met. With her finely carved features and deathly stillness, she could have been a statue. If I didn’t know better I could have walked right past her and been none the wiser. I contemplated doing just that, purely to avoid what came next.
I wiped at my red-rimmed eyes and braced myself for that familiar look. Pained sympathy. The one I always got from Arlon, from everyone. The look that said I was something to be pitied, fragmented pieces to be tiptoed around. Something to be fixed.
Maybe that was true, but I couldn’t stand to see it: Anguish on my behalf.
But River only inclined her head, jutting her chin at the door I’d just shut. “Sweet kid. You did good in there.”
I stared at her, zeroing in on her eyes that glowed faintly in the shadows. “Uh… thanks.”
I’d been prepared to shoot down her sympathy, to defy her condolences with a particularly cold sneer. Now I was at a loss. Because she was looking at me like she always did. That quiet, assessing gaze like she was piecing me together bit by bit, patient in her pursuit of the bigger picture.
“Um…” I leaned my shoulders back against the door, looking away and scrambling to stay on topic. “She had some useful information, actually. Some of it was new, even for me.”
I relayed what I gathered from the rest of my conversation with Mary, soldiering on despite my occasional sniffles.
“Apparently they played some weird music over the facility speakers every night—it put people to sleep whether they wanted it or not. It’s like every facility has its own unique way of pacifying their captives. And some of the human nurses… Mary said they were vacant. Like they were under mind control—” I paused, suddenly aware that I was rambling, and that River had heard every word through the door already.
Her amber gaze swept me up and down, and though I twitched to fold in on myself, I kept my hands at my sides. I saw no pity, no second-hand sadness in her eyes. So I let her see me as I was. My biggest scar—the one on my heart—laid bare. The ache that would never go away.
River took it all in and said nothing. I wiped a knuckle at the last lingering tear on my cheek.
Then she pushed off the wall, stretched her arms above her head and clicked her back. When she caught my eye again, she was smiling. “So, on to the next one?”
The sigh of relief slipped out along with a dubious laugh. She wasn’t going to press, and she wasn’t going to pry. She had learned what she’d learned about me and my past—and that was that.
“Yeah.” I kicked off the door and fell into step beside her, my shoulder occasionally brushing up against her sleeve. And it was fine. It was normal. And I could breathe. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
We spent the rest of the day talking to the hybrids, before moving on to the newly-turned.
It was grim work. The more vacant eyes I stared into, the more heavy despondency piled up in my chest. They each had their own horror stories, and it all came together to form amacabre narrative of a shadowy organization taking what they wanted without care or consequence.
Some of what the freed captives had to say was already familiar to me, and some of it confirmed what I already suspected—and all of them, every single one of them, recalled the Doctor. Mary had mentioned him, and so did everybody else we’d spoken to.
He was the head of every experiment. The leader of the lab team that frequented every facility throughout the city. I knew him well.
