The Countdown (The Taking #3)(20)
The building was in shambles. Everything . . . other than the monitors and machines connected to me, the electrodes and wires that slipped beneath the blue-green gown I was wearing, was rotting.
There were two faces watching me—the blonde and some guy. I continued to ignore them. I wanted to get a feel for my surroundings before deciding the best way to handle them, whoever they were.
“Fifteen?” the girl asked, licking her lips intently. “What does it mean?”
Her question caught me off guard, but I managed to swallow my surprise. I gave her an I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean stare, even though I knew exactly what she meant. I must have been mumbling in my sleep, before I’d come to.
A boy came racing into the room then. “Ed says keep her awake. He’ll be here soon.”
I started a mental file, compiling a list of the things I knew:
This Ed guy the boy mentioned must be in charge.
They’d drugged me at least once, and for whatever reason, it hadn’t been easy.
It was morning—something I knew because of the sharp stabs that had awakened me earlier. (Which day, I had no clue.)
And finally (and this was the biggie in my book), there were no fewer than four of them—one girl and three guys.
My guess: they were Returned, because none of them were sick from whatever needle they’d shoved in my neck—the whole drugging thing. If I was more heartless, more of a soldier like Griffin or Willow, I’d test that theory by biting my own tongue and exposing them to a Code Red. But I wasn’t a soldier, and even if Blondie and the others were holding me hostage, I couldn’t stomach the idea of watching someone else get sick the way Tyler had.
Not without knowing why they were holding me in the first place.
“Where am I?” I prodded, hoping to add to my list of facts. My voice came out a croak.
The girl tilted her head and her blond hair draped over one eye as she deliberated. “An old asylum,” she answered decisively. “No one’ll ever come looking for you here.” She smirked then, the corner of her mouth ticking up slightly. “The exact ‘where’ doesn’t matter.”
An old asylum. Made sense considering the condition of the place. It also explained the creepy hospital vibe it had going for it. Wherever it was, it must’ve been deserted years ago.
A guy appeared then. Marched in, was more like it. His presence filled the corroded space and made even the grubby air we breathed seem somehow antiseptic . . . sterile.
Blondie snapped away from me like a tightly strung rubber band. She threw her shoulders back and her chin shot toward the ceiling.
It wasn’t hard to deduce this was Ed I was laying eyes on, even through my drug-addled fog.
Acting as if I didn’t exist at all, their conversation went like this:
Ed: “How long’s she been conscious?”
Blondie: “Not long, sir. We sent word soon as we realized.” She almost, but stopped herself short of, saluting him. Yeah, this was definitely the guy in charge.
Ed (Looking me over): “She say anything?”
Blondie: “Nothing important. Just wanted to know where we were.”
Buzz. Wrong answer!
Ed jerked his head to glare at the girl.
Short temper, duly noted. No wonder she’d gotten so tense the second he arrived.
Then he snapped, “I’ll decide what’s important.” To which she nodded, a silent but obedient, Yes, sir.
His I-could-break-you-like-a-twig stance relaxed, but only by a hair. “You answer her?” he asked, turning back to me.
The way he assessed me gave me the creeps. He didn’t touch me or get too close, only eyeballed me, turning his head from side to side. His eyebrows lowered from time to time. It reminded me of the way people walked through the reptile exhibit at the zoo, crouching and squinting as they tried to glimpse the most venomous predators where they coiled beneath logs or in dark crevices behind the thick sheets of glass. They were fascinated and horrified all at the same time.
Ed was both fascinated and horrified by me.
He ran his hand over the side of his jaw. “Might as well get started. Hand me Lucy, will ya?”
Blondie passed him something I couldn’t quite see, a stick or wand of some sort and I tried to figure out what, exactly, we were “starting.”
He leaned closer, and even his breath was sterile, almost to the point of being caustic. “Let’s start with something easy,” he said, this time most definitely talking to me. “Where are they? How much longer do we have?”
I frowned, searching the room to see if anyone else knew what the hell this guy was talking about. “Where are who . . . ? How much longer to what?” I gave an uncertain shake of my head, wishing he’d get out of my face. “I have no idea what you mean.”
He lifted the thing in his hand, showing it to me. “Know what this is? This is ten thousand volts of truth serum. Answer me, or you’ll know the true meaning of hotshot.” He spoke slowly this time, enunciating each syllable. “Now, tell me what you know.”
I shook my head, still clueless. But he had that short temper thing I’d already noted, and before I could even open my mouth to ask, he jammed the end of whatever that thing was against my bare thigh.
My entire body jolted, wracked by a sudden surge of electrical current. The straps made it impossible to escape, but my wrists and ankles and chest all strained against them nonetheless as my muscles seized involuntarily. The skin where the thing jammed into me burned.