The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(35)
The cleaners, preoccupied with their grisly work, ignored him. I tried not to wrinkle my nose as they lifted the creature’s bullet-pocked corpse and wrestled it into a double-sized body bag. The room stank like someone had put a week-old piece of meat under a broiler and turned up the heat. Nedry looked over toward the cell. I saw my doubled reflection in the lenses of his mirrored glasses.
“Time for one more, I think. Let’s see. Eeny, meeny, miny…you.”
His finger pointed my way. I stared straight ahead and acted like I wasn’t aware of anything. The only thing I couldn’t control was the pounding of my heart.
“Come on, come on,” he said, reaching in and giving my sleeve a tug. I stumbled forward like a wind-up toy, letting him guide me along.
My deck of cards grew hot against my hip, but I let them sleep. I wasn’t sure what this guy’s background was or what he could do, but right now my life—and the lives of all the people back in that cell—depended on making myself look as harmless as possible.
An armed guard stood outside the door at the end of the hall. To the left, a second door hung open on one twisted and broken hinge with its screws ripped from the wall. Dents hammered the reinforced steel like it was made of tinfoil. I wanted to get a better look, but I didn’t dare turn my head or show interest in anything beyond my own breathing.
Nedry’s lab looked like a mad interior decorator with a chrome obsession got loose in a doctor’s office. My reflection bounced back at me from mirrored cabinets and walls, distorted and warped in a wall of burbling beakers and flasks connected by polished brass piping to a pair of stainless-steel vats. A surgical gurney stood in the center of the room, laid out with fresh white sheets and ready for an operation, lit by a dangling light fixture on a swing arm. Difference was, most gurneys in my experience didn’t come with leather restraints.
Nedry stood me in the corner of the room and shut the door, putting two inches of steel between us and the gunman outside. He didn’t lock it. If the room was soundproof, I had a chance at taking him down without drawing the guard’s attention. If not, I might as well hang a target around my neck and brace for the gunshot.
Nedry put his back to me. He puttered around the shelves, laying out a hypodermic needle sized for a horse and arranging a scattering of jars and vials as he hummed tunelessly under his breath.
“Take your clothes off and lie down on the gurney,” he said, not looking back.
I was taking a hell of a risk going up against an unknown mage with armed backup ten feet away, not knowing how or what could trigger the alarm and the lye deathtrap, but I’d tilted the odds as far in my favor as I could. Unless I wanted a firsthand experience of what that dead monster in the hall had endured, it was time to make my move.
I hesitated, just for a heartbeat.
Nedry smelled the change in the air. His head jerked up, taking in the room’s reflection in the chromed cabinets. The image bounced off his glasses and back again, redoubling into an infinite void with all of his attention on just one thing: the expression on my face as I dropped the zombie act, hardened my eyes, and called a spark of magic to my fingertips.
Seventeen
It all happened in the space of a breath.
Nedry’s face contorted in rage, his puffy lips peeling back in a grimace as he lunged for a scalpel. He twirled and whipped it through the air with perfect aim. The gleaming blade streaked toward my eye like an arrow. My cards crackled with energy, and the queen of spades flung herself into my outstretched fingertips, carrying my hand up with her momentum.
The scalpel’s blade punched through the card’s face, stopped dead in its flight. Then the hex Nedry had laid on the scalpel kicked in and sent a vicious shock down my arm that left me numb and reeling, like I’d just clamped my palm over a Taser and pulled the trigger.
Fight-or-flight kicked in, and the adrenaline flowed. I gave the gurney a savage kick, sending it rolling into Nedry and knocking him against the counter. He fell back, fumbling for his hypodermic needle as the lab door flung open and the guard’s silhouette loomed on the threshold.
I reached up, grabbed the surgical light fixture, and heaved. The boom arm flew, and Nedry had to throw up his hand to keep the fixture from slamming into his head. The guard’s rifle swung up toward me, but he paused, frozen in surprise for a second, as another card leaped out of my pocket and into my hand.
That was all the time I needed. The gun clattered to the floor and so did the guard, clutching at the card buried halfway in his throat as arterial blood guttered down the front of his camouflage fatigues.
Nedry was on his belly, reaching for the needle where it had rolled between the gurney’s wheels. I stomped down on his hand hard enough to feel bones crack under my heel. Then I dropped my knee onto his back, grabbed his other hand, and wrenched it behind him.
“If you want to die today,” I hissed in his ear, “go ahead and scream.”
He wheezed out his pain through gritted teeth. His fractured hand flopped on the tile like a dying fish.
“We’re going to play a game,” I said. “It goes like this. I ask questions. You answer them. If you answer them correctly, you win valuable prizes, like the ability to continue breathing.”
He grimaced and shook his head. I gave his arm a hard twist to keep him focused.
“Question one. The jets in the cell where you’re keeping the prisoners. What triggers them?”