Authors: Amber Hughey
Sam pushed through the door into a dark hallway. She turned around to face Amalia, who held the door open for the rest of the prisoners. “This is where you want to be?”
Amalia nodded. “We need to check for any more prisoners.”
“Why? We need to get out of here. While we still can,” a harsh voice rang out from the middle of the crowd.
She couldn’t see who the face belonged to, but she guessed it was the heavy set one with the grimy gray wings. The one that reminded her of a long-haul trucker. “If you think you can escape on your own,
then go right ahead. I’m saving everyone I can. What you do is up to you.”
She heard dark mutterings from that area, but turned to Paul. “Check the far right corridor. Look for anyone trapped.” Turning to Sam, she sent her to the middle. “I’ll take the far left. The rest of you can stay here, or split up with us. Kasey, go with Sam.”
She found herself alone in the corridor, the rest of the people staying near the doorway. Shaking her head, she walked down the empty corridor. The lack of sound made her nerves jangle and twitch. Her shoes clicked softly on the hard floor, and a puddle reflected the dim light of an exit sign. The elevator was near that sign, and she could hear it clanging upwards before screeching to a stop.
So they’d already stopped it, Amalia thought, stomach dropped as she heard the screams from inside the still box. She’d tried to save them all, but maybe a couple would make it out.
A flicker of movement in the cell next to her caught her eye. Reeling towards it, she stepped back, Glock out and aimed. Peering through the dim light, she could see pewter flecks in the light.
“Gabriel,” she said hoarsely. Holstering her weapon, she stepped towards him before realizing he’d stopped moving.
Staring at him untrusting, she shifted her weight from foot to foot. Staring at him, she could make out his hands, behind his back. Much like she’d
left Jessamyn, she thought sourly. He was kneeling, head on the cot. The movement she’d seen was the feathers falling slightly.
She turned her head and saw Sam coming from the end of the long corridor.
The brunette shook her head. “Nothing. All empty. Paul said he had one. So do you,” Sam said, staring at Gabriel.
“That’s Gabriel,” Amalia said, “Now where’s Aleks?”
“Who?” Sam said with a halting breath. “What’s Aleks have to do with this?”
“Aleks went with Gabriel to look at a body. Gabriel is here, so Aleks probably is too.” Amalia growled. “Help me get him out of here,” she said as she gestured at Gabriel.
“How?” Sam asked, cocking her head in thought.
“Stay here, make sure I don’t get locked in,” Amalia said. When Sam nodded, Amalia slowly entered the small cell. Walking up next to Gabriel, she could see how white and bloodless his hands where. Standing next to his head, she realized he was blindfolded.
“Gabriel?” she said. The lack of a reaction scared her. Scared her more than she wanted to admit.
She reached out and gently touched him. He came to life, leaning back and growling at her.
Pulling out of his space, she stood, staring at him. In a quick motion, she ripped the blindfold off, wincing as she felt hair come with it.
He stared at her, frozen. “K-Amalia?”
A smile broke out of her face and she nodded. She started to say something, but he stopped her with a shake of his head.
“Can’t hear you. Earplugs,” he said angrily, shaking his head in frustration.
With a heavy breath, she walked around behind him. She stared at the zip ties that held his hands together. “Shit,” she muttered.
“Need this?” a cocky voice came from behind her.
She turned around to see Paul holding a small knife out to her.
Pursing her eyebrows, she said, “Where’d you get that?”
He gestured with his chin down the long corridor. “Small kitchen. It was locked. For a minute.”
She offered him a smile, “this will do nicely. Do the honors, if you don’t mind?”
He smiled back at her. “Gladly, ma’am.”
After an endless moment of cutting, the zip ties fell away from Gabriel’s wrists. Color flooded his skin, and he clenched his fists, trying to rid them of the electric spikes that drove their way through his nerves. He stood up slowly, unsure of whether his
legs would hold his weight. He stood carefully, legs numb save for the lightning that ran through them.
After he removed the ear plugs, he turned around with a shocked expression as he saw the crowd gathered around.
Stormy eyes looked at him, filled with hate and anger. Turning to Amalia, he asked, “what are you doing here?” Surprise laced his voice, followed only by happiness.
She gave a wry twist of her lips, “rescuing Sam. I told you I would. And everyone else who’s been held here against their will.” After a considering pause, the twist opened into a smirk. “I guess that means you too.”
“I guess so,” he said, rubbing the ligature marks on his wrists as the pain still hammered over his hands. “Thank you,” he said softly.
“Where’s Aleks?” she asked, looking around.
“Aleks is the reason I’m here,” Gabriel said, running a hand through his hair.
Amalia cocked an eyebrow at him, “so I surmised. You mean the body?”
“It was here. Someone got me from behind,” he paused, noticing the confused look on her face. “Sedative,” he confirmed. “Woke up, found myself in here. Couldn’t move much, see at all, or hear. Not my idea of a happy time fun picnic.”
She offered him a wry smile. “I can’t see that being happy fun anything. So Aleks is here? We haven’t found him, if he is.”
“Nowhere?” he asked, unhappiness and anger filling his face.
She shook her head. “Nowhere. But we need to get out of here.”
“Who are they?” he asked, staring at the sea of faces. Some seemed familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite place them. His brain must still be fuzzy from the sedatives, he figured, as the edges of his vision still crawled with a hazy black shadow.
“They’re the ones we’ve been hunting for. Most of them, at least,” Amalia said.
“Where’s Patricia? Kent?” Gabriel asked, throwing out the two names that came to the top of his addled thoughts. He swallowed, finally noticing how dry his mouth was. What he wouldn’t do for a cold glass of water.
“Patricia’s dead,” Paul said with a heavy finality. “When she got out with Lindsay, they made sure we saw what they did to her.”
“What did they do?” Gabriel asked, almost hesitating after picture Lindsay.
“Cut off her wings. Told her she wasn’t worthy of being one of them, even for as long as it took for them to figure out how to change her back. She bled to death in front of me. Me, strapped to a
table. Couldn’t do a damn thing,” came the harsh voice of the trucker.
“They paraded her body in front of our cells. Made it seem like they just couldn’t figure out where to put her, but it was a warning to us. What would happen if any of us tried to get out,” Kasey said softly, clutching the Beratta in her small hands.
“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said, “I should have gotten here sooner.” He turned to Amalia. Before he opened his mouth, she held up a hand.
“Not now, Gabriel.” Shaking her head, she repeated herself.
He nodded slowly. “Stairs?”
She gave him a nod. “Stairs. Some of us went for the elevator before I could get them. Before I got you out, I could hear the elevator stop. Screams. I hope some got out, but I doubt it. I really doubt it.”
“Then let’s go. Because they’ll be on alert soon.”
“Already on top of it,” said softly, scraped palms hurting as she clenched the Beretta.
Just as Gabriel opened the door to the stairwell, heavy footsteps resounded all around. He gestured, and Amalia led them to a dark storage room. Turning around, she started to speak, but Gabriel lifted hand, listening as he heard the heavy footsteps down the corridor, the door opening with a thud that reverberated the thin door of the storage room.
“You sure they’re in here?” came the rough voice.
Someone must have nodded, as the voice said, “Then we’ll search the floor. Boss says to save as many as we can. They don’t want to set the clinicals back any further.”
He couldn’t hear the reply, but he could feel Sam’s violent shaking. He leaned against the door, holding it shut. All of his substantial weight against it, and they wouldn’t be able to get in. Not easily, at least.
He could feel them pushing against the door, and it took all of his muscle to keep the door from budging. He felt someone press against him. Looking over, he saw Paul leaning against the door. The charcoal and sapphire feathers mingled, creating a dark waterfall cascading to the floor.
“Damn,” came the rough voice, “Something probably fell against the door. I knew they stocked the rooms too full. Same thing happened last week, and they had to take the door off the hinges to get us in.”
A mumbled, garbled reply.
Gabriel strained against the door as they tried again, this time both voices pushing.
“Screw this. Let’s check the rest of the doors. Then we’ll get Marty to take the door off again.”
Another garbled reply, further down the corridor.
Gabriel relaxed, breathing hard from the exertion. Angelus, he thought sourly, as he knew a human couldn’t have pushed that hard. Not in his experience, at least.
Up the next flight of stairs, Amalia thought, opening the door that led to the floor just below their escape. Paul had gone up there, and quickly reported back that there were more than half a dozen voices near the stairwell.
“So, we’ve been discovered, at least,” Amalia said sourly. “No going back. No going forward.”
“We can go forward,” Gabriel said forcefully. “We just won’t all make it. Sometimes-“
“No,” Amalia said, shaking her head violently. “I’m not leaving anyone behind.”
“If it means that we’ll make it out,” Gabriel said, only to be stopped by Amalia’s glare as she waited for everyone to exit the stairwell.
“No, Gabriel. I’m not sacrificing anyone just to save my ass,” she said harshly.
“What about to save Sam’s?”
“Sam says ‘no’ to that, thank you very much. Sam would like everyone to get out,” Sam replied, rubbing her shoulder near her wings.
“You’ll get used to them,” Gabriel said awkwardly, noticing the look of pain on her face.
“What?” Sam said, focusing on him.
He nodded to her wings. “The wings. You’ll get used to them.”
She gave him a half-hearted smile. “Well, I always wanted to be special.”
“Sometimes you get what you wish for,” he gently teased, trying to lighten the mood but failing miserably.
Amalia shushed them with another glare as she opened the door in the middle of the hallway.
She slowly opened it before stepping into a large laboratory. If she thought the one downstairs was large, she was wrong. So incredibly wrong. Fridges dotted the room, along with empty gurneys, and tables full of instruments and needles. Vials sat around the room. A large note was scrawled on the whiteboard reading “serum must be room temperature before administering”.
“Must be the laboratory. The main one, I mean,” Gabriel said, following her into the room.
“Really? No, looks like the kitchen to me,” she said sarcastically.
He ignored her as he pushed past her. Hearing voices he held up a hand, cautioning the followers to wait. He started forward, wings drawn close. Silently, he walked closer to the voices. He peered around the corner, seeing Aleks talking with a security guard.
The guard stormed off through a door, flinging curses over his shoulder at Aleks in the angelus tongue, giving Gabriel a glimpse of another corridor. When he was sure the guard wasn’t going to return, he walked up to Aleks.
The look of surprise on Aleks’s face was stark.
“You’re part of this?” Gabriel said, feeling his temper bubble just beneath his skin, already knowing what the answer was.
“No, I just escaped,” Aleks said calmly, casually.
Gabriel gave him a look full of doubt and contempt. “Really? Because from what I heard, you were part of this
Doctor
.”
Aleks lifted his chin, looking at Gabriel with a look of contempt of his own. “Really. You don’t believe me,
Enforcer
?”
Gabriel sneered at him, shifting his weight from foot to foot, feeling his temper rise even further.
“I seem to recall being injected with a sedative as we looked at the body, Aleks. I wonder why? Was I getting too close to finding out who it was? That it was you?”
Aleks didn’t answer. Eyes narrow, he stared at Gabriel as if willing the Enforcer to react.
With a quick move, he was at Aleks’s throat, gripping it tightly, cutting off all the air. “Why, Aleks? What the hell? You’re supposed to be one of us. One of the good guys. What the hell happened?”