Broken Blood (5 page)

Alex.

Technically, he was also responsible for bringing me down, I thought—and then kicked the idea away. I couldn’t go there just now. Not after everything. I needed to be strong; I could mourn his betrayal when I was free. I needed to be tough. I could do it. I’d learned it from him.

Alex always been tough on me. Since he was first assigned as my trainer at Wood Point Academy, he’d never cut me any slack. He’d also never let up on his complete faith and belief in my goodness. My capability. My strength. And I’d forfeited all of those the moment I’d hurt him.

I’d bitten him by accident in the middle of battle. I hadn’t known it was him. My wolf, distracted by my newly formed bond with my pack, had sensed a threat and simply reacted. And he’d almost died from the poison I’d injected into his bloodstream when my teeth had broken his skin. For months, I’d blamed myself. And for even longer, Hunters—CHAS—had done the same. They’d launched an investigation that included formal inquiries and interviews with everyone I knew. I’d been asked to come in for questioning when I’d realized Gordon’s plans for me didn’t include a fair trial or anything to do with a fair justice system.

Did Alex mean that my biting him had all been part of Steppe’s master plan? But how could Steppe have known I’d do that? I hadn’t even known. It was merely a reflex to my wolf feeling threatened. But Steppe had always been one move ahead of us.

To prove it, he’d gone so far as to frame Wes for a murder Steppe had committed himself. My memory flashed back to that last moment in the warehouse, right before I’d been knocked out. Wes sick and helpless against the chemicals in the room conspiring against him. Police pouring into the space and heading straight for him, cuffs at the ready. His arms wrenched at a painful angle behind him. The uniformed officers leading him out, guns pointed even after they’d restrained him.

But it wasn’t on Steppe.

All of that was on me. My ego, my callous disregard for everything and everyone in my smug certainty that I couldn’t be harmed. I was immune. Nothing could touch me. Like a ghostly reminder, the stab wound where Mrs. Lexington had pierced my side panged with a pricking pain. It had healed nicely thanks to whatever Steppe had been slipping me in my drugged-up dinners, but it still ached. Sometimes, I suspected the pain came more from guilty penance than physical wounding.

Maybe Gordon was right about ridding us of monsters. Maybe I was one of them.

“There’s our patient.”

Gordon’s voice startled me out of my self-loathing. I blinked and looked up, mouth already set to wage psychological battle against my captor. But no words came. I stared—past Gordon and straight ahead to his companion. He was the last person I’d expected to see here. My stomach dropped.

For the first time since Gordon had told me his plan, I realized the possibility of its success. And my heart broke all over again at my failures.

“Uncle Astor? What are you doing here?” I asked.

From underneath a mop of bushy graying eyebrows, Astor peered down at me between the gap of his brow hairs and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He looked absolutely the same as the first time I saw him, although his bathrobe had been replaced by a lab coat and his ratty bunny slippers had been replaced with newer versions sporting floppier ears. My dad’s brother was the smartest man I’d ever met—and the strangest.

“Killing spirits left and right. It’s a sad, sad story I have to tell,” he said with a despondent shake of his head. And the timbre in his voice was proof that, despite his response, he was completely lucid. Which made me sad for him. I’d much rather he went through this a little unaware of the horror.

Gordon ignored him. “He’ll be conducting a round of blood trials on you and running labs while we figure out the best way to approach our bonding.”

My skin crawled at the last two words. I couldn’t imagine Gordon invading my mind—so I hadn’t yet allowed the thought to sink in. But it nudged at me now and I shuddered at the thought.

Gordon’s mouth tipped upward at my reaction and my skin buzzed with the ache to shift. I grabbed at it, the feeling of my wolf—or what was left of it—and snarled, but there wasn’t enough. My wolf slipped away.

“What’s the matter?” Gordon asked. “Trying to be something you’re not again?”

“Just imagining how it’ll feel to rip your throat out,” I threw back.

“Oh,” Astor muttered to himself.

Once again, Gordon ignored him in favor of baiting me. “Funny, I’d heard it was next to impossible to injure someone bonded with you. Worse than dying, they say.”

I snarled—the closest I’d come to being a wolf in weeks. “Paws, hands, a friend willing to do me a favor—the weapon isn’t important. And I can stand the pain. The question is, can you?”

“Can you can you can you can you?” Astor echoed in a breathy voice.

Neither of us answered him.

“Where are my friends?” I asked.

“I told you before, they’re not here,” he said.

“And I told you, I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you must. I don’t have them.”

Gordon’s stare was like a brick wall. But even if I couldn’t see them, I refused to believe there weren’t chinks. A weak spot. And I was determined to find it. I held his gaze until he finally nodded at Mr. Lexington. “Keep an eye on this one,” Gordon said, pointing at Astor. “Make sure he sticks to the plan.”

Mr. Lexington agreed and Gordon walked out.

“Come. This way,” Astor said, leading the way to a fresh cot a few beds away from Olivia’s space. His words were high-pitched and clipped, a sign my exchange with Gordon had left him rattled. Guilt tugged at me, stabbing into the wound left behind by Victoria’s mother. Another tick mark against my ability to protect my loved ones.

Astor gestured to the bed and I sat while he rooted through drawers and laid out his supplies. Needle, vials, alcohol swabs, bandages—all of the same things I’d used on myself when I’d drawn all that blood for the hybrid pack. It made my eyes water just remembering. My knowledge about how to save them had come directly from Astor himself. None of those people would have lived if not for him. And now, was he the one helping Gordon kill them?

“Astor, why are you here?” I whispered. “Why are you letting him use you?”

Mr. Lexington either hadn’t heard or didn’t care based on his disinterest. He was scrolling his phone and I wondered just how many guards must be posted out of sight for him to seem so unconcerned.

Astor barely looked up from his careful arrangement of the tray in front of him. “I am here. You are here. I am here.” He shrugged, a jerky twisted sort of gesture, and I sighed.

“Did he hurt you?” I asked, searching him for some sign of injury even as I asked the question. His movements were sure and his coloring good. He looked fed and healthy enough but I knew not all wounds showed on the outside. Astor’s pain at Steppe’s hands had always been emotional. But he shook his head.

“No hurting. Not me. Not you. Not yet. Except.” He looked up at me sharply. “You will hurt. Less if it’s me but you will still hurt. And I’m sorry. Tell Jeremiah I’m sorry.”

“Astor, Jeremiah—my father’s dead,” I said.

“Oh. Right.” His gaze fell and I felt strangely guilty for saying it out loud, even if the statement had been true for almost as long as I’d been alive. This wasn’t new information. Whatever Astor had been through in being forced to work here had regressed him. Or affected him psychologically. He’d always been prone to weird bouts of forgetfulness or odd distraction, but this was worse. This was more ... complete.

“Where is Mr. Sandefur?” I asked, hoping to redirect us both to more solid ground with something easy.

But a shadow passed over Astor’s features. He mumbled something and kept working. I glanced at Mr. Lexington but he was staring hard at Astor now. An uneasiness filled my gut.

“On an errand,” Mr. Lexington said finally.

I sighed in strange relief. Errand. For Steppe, probably. Of course he couldn’t be here all the time. And why did I care? He was the enemy. Maybe I was going crazy under the pressure of all the trauma; maybe I got that trait from my uncle.

Mr. Lexington went back to his phone. Astor went back to his methodical arranging and I watched in concern as he picked up the same vial three times, moving it left and right and left again before nodding in satisfaction over its placement on the tray. When he’d finished that, he caught his tongue between his teeth as he slowly removed labels from a printed sheet and stuck them to the vials. I caught sight of my printed name and lettered codes I didn’t understand as he smoothed them into place on the rounded plastic casing.

Finally, he turned and pulled at my arm, laying it with my forearm and elbow exposed in my lap. “Like this. Time for blood,” he almost sang. “The hybrid queen’s blood.”

He started to turn away but I grabbed his wrist and laid my hand over his lightly. He went still, but he didn’t meet my eyes. “Astor, why are you here, doing this for him? What is he threatening you with?” I asked quietly. Desperation leaked in. Not for myself but for what Steppe would do with him once he’d served his purpose.

But there was no fear or worry in his answer. He met my eyes, blinked once, and said simply, “You.”

The tone was so clear, so directly honest, I forgot the rest of my questions and released my hold on his wrist. Before I knew it, he’d stuck me. We both watched as my blood poured into the first empty vial.

Astor filled five tubes before he withdrew the needle. “Hold pressure here,” he instructed, replacing his fingers with two of my own pressed over the prick point. I applied pressure while he readied a bandage and smoothed it into place.

“All better.” He beamed.

I smiled back, a soft encouragement, and glanced over Astor’s shoulder. Mr. Lexington still scrolled through his phone in the corner, eyes down, posture relaxed. But I knew better. He might not be watching us, but he knew our movements. Anything rash and he wouldn’t hesitate to retaliate. He was probably hoping for it. Either way, I probably didn’t have much longer to talk before I was herded back.

“Astor, what’s wrong with Olivia?” I asked. “Why won’t she wake up?”

Astor shoved his glasses up his nose and glanced down the rows of beds toward the far end of the room. “She is not strong,” he said with a frown before going back to his cleanup.

“Strong for what?” I pressed. “Did you take her blood too?”

“I took it, and I gave it. But they did not accept.”

“You gave it? Did you give her Gordon’s blood?” I asked, trying to keep the alarm out of my voice.

But Astor shook his head. “No. I gave her theirs. And hers to them. Some chose it and it worked for a moment. But then ... the darkness came. And the ones who chose the wolf got sick.”

His explanation was so fragmented but at the mention of the darkness, a chill swept over me. I remembered Nick and Janie, how they’d inched closer and closer to some cliff’s edge I couldn’t reach. No matter how hard I tried to pull them back, in the end, they had thrown themselves over. And I couldn’t save them before I was forced to stop them in order to save myself and the others. The bond wasn’t always a pleasant connection. Losing a bond was a pain Gordon only thought he could imagine. And I’d bluffed back. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to feel again.

But something else Astor said was nagging at me. “What do you mean the ones who chose the wolf? How was it a choice? What was the alternative?” I asked.

“They chose their other half,” Astor said.

I looked at Mr. Lexington. “They were made into Hunters again.”

Astor pressed his mouth together and huffed a breath through his nose. “They were whatever they were. Not all were strong enough. But they chose.”

“I’m surprised Gordon let them,” I muttered.

“It can’t be forced or it’s not real,” Astor said.

“Aren’t people angry over all the ones who ... aren’t strong enough?” I asked, my voice dipping low. “I mean, Steppe is killing them.”

Astor looked up and blinked at me, his face inches from mine. “He’s telling them it’s on you.”

“Are you almost done?” Mr. Lexington called, pushing off from the wall and walking over.

Astor and I exchanged a final look and something passed between us. For a second, I saw awareness behind the confusion and disjointed coercion. Painfully, torturously aware. But then it was gone and he was a confused scientist again, capable of world domination only as it related to beakers and Bunsen burners.

“For now,” Astor sang out. He gathered the blood he’d taken from me and turned for the office, but a sound from the far end of the room stopped him.

A moan, low and unintelligible, sounded from the other side of the half-drawn curtain. Before anyone could investigate, the curtain was ripped aside on its metal rungs. Astor dropped the tubes of blood back onto the tray and stumbled back. His legs hit the bed where I sat and he sank next to me, both of staring in shock at Olivia. Even Mr. Lexington was surprised into stillness.

“You,” she said, her voice hoarse. Blood dripped from her hand where she’d ripped the IV out in order to travel this far. Her dark hair was stringy and unkempt, hanging dully around her pale face and matching the darkened sockets of her eyes. The veins in her arms and throat stood out in stark contrast to her translucent skin. Her chin jutted at a hard angle and her collarbone created deep pockets of skin around her throat. She looked like a zombie come to eat my brains.

For a fleeting moment, I considered letting her have them.

“You are his new prize,” she said and the words were a croak of despair. Was she actually jealous Steppe had chosen me as his next victim?

“Trust me, I’m completely open to being superseded. You can have him back anytime you’re ready,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed and her back hunched. I wondered how she had the strength to stand barefoot on the cold tile this long. “He promised me. He said I could sit at his right hand. I could be his...”

“His lapdog? His patsy? His weapon?” I asked. “Because any of those fill in that blank perfectly.”

Olivia lurched forward. A strangled sound escaped her throat and I suspected she meant for a yell but got more of a whisper. She didn’t need volume. Her eyes gave away her intent. Maybe it was her fragility or maybe I’d underestimated the sheer will of her hatred for me, but when she landed on top of me, we both went down.