Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(81)

I yanked my thoughts away from the possibilities and forced my feet to lift and carry me forward, knowing I wasn’t safe, not yet, not until I was back at HQ. All that blood . . . I stowed my gear, fell into my truck, and drove into the street before putting the Chevy in park to wait. I laid my head on the headrest and closed my eyes, the engine rumbling quietly up through the seat, soothing.

Some ten minutes later, Occam pulled out behind my vehicle and I led the way back into town and to HQ.

? ? ?

Occam passed the sugar for my tea. “I expected to smell blood on silver,” he said, “but the mesh pens weren’t silver-plated. They could get away. Why don’t they?”

“Maybe it’s all that blood in the place. Maybe they’ve all seen it and are scared. Maybe they’re all weak from blood loss.” I’d seen a starved vamp once and it was pitiful. Until she got free and came after me. “Or maybe their loved-ones are in danger and that keeps them from howling to the winds about the torture room.”

“Are you sure it’s a torture room?” Rick asked.

“No. I ain’t sure about nothin’,” I said. “Except there’s blood, at least three or four gallons of it, and not a drop in a body. That I know for sure.”

Over a cell connection, from the airport, Tandy said, “I should have been with you. I might have picked up something from the werewolf on the surface. Or his humans.”

“More likely you would have gotten overwhelmed by Occam and me,” I said, thinking about my exhaustion and the bad feel of the lab and the disembodied blood.

“Proximity and all that,” Occam added, agreeing.

Rick said, “There’s no point in stressing any of your gifts. So why would werewolves stay in a cage they could tear through in a heartbeat?”

“I don’t get it,” Occam snarled. “I got away from my cage the first second I could. Took me twenty years, but I did it.”

I carefully didn’t look at Occam. The werecat never talked in detail about his years in captivity or his escape. Just unadorned statements of basic fact. There were rumors. There was scuttlebutt. There had to be files stored somewhere on Occam and the details of his background. But nothing was verified. I realized I knew next to nothing about Occam. How was I supposed to date him if I didn’t know anything about him? Unless that was the purpose of dating, to learn.

I looked down at my hands, one holding a slice of pizza, the other gripping a mug handle. My own experience had similar captivity overtones, and I too had gotten away the first moment I could, yet not all my sisters wanted freedom. I said, “They might want to stay, like a caged bird not wanting to fly into the wild. Maybe they feel safer there. Maybe to them it isn’t a prison after all.” I took a sip of tea, feeling all sorts of unnamed things flowing through me. “Maybe they’ve been tamed, like a dog to the hand. Maybe they’re being given vampire blood to drink and it does something to them. Maybe having something done to their genes, research, like the two employees, Candace and Mary, said. Or maybe it’s just something that makes the weres believe they have to or want to stay.” Like my sister Priss. Like Esther. But not like Mud.

Occam said softly, “Like you, thinking about going back into your cage.”

A protest flashed through me. But until today, he had a point. “Programming can be hardwired into a body,” I said, not looking up. “It’s something that has to be fought, day in and day out, forever. Like an addiction one hates, has defeated, yet still has to battle.” I took a bite of pizza and chewed. It tasted spoiled, as if the pepperoni had gone bad. I swallowed and set the remaining slice down on the paper plate in front of me.

“We’re sorry, Nell,” Tandy said, his voice tinny over the cellular connection, maybe picking up on my emotions, despite the distance between us.

“No,” I said. “You aren’t sorry. You all seem to think you need to push and prod and remind me constantly what I was and what I came from.” Tandy let out a sharp breath, startled. A barb of anger speared up in me, hot and sharp. I was mad, not spitting mad, or throwing-things mad, but some other kind of mad, and I was holding it in like a . . . like a good churchwoman?

At that thought the anger burned hotter for a moment, struggling to blaze free. My anger would never be a churchwoman’s anger, something chaste and controlled, or pot-throwing mad. My very own anger was different from all others I knew. Because when I stood up for myself, people died and were fed into the earth. I was a killer with too little control. I didn’t get to let loose and howl.

I was both a victim of my past and a victimizer through my gift. That thought stopped me.

Turning my lips in and back out, thinking, feeling the winter-chapped skin chafing on itself, I nodded. Yeah. I had good reasons for not getting mad when others might, not fighting back or arguing as a human might. Because I knew how easy it was to lose myself to the bloodlust. So very, very easy. And there was all that blood on DNAKeys’ compound. I was overreacting because I wanted—no—because Soulwood wanted that blood.

I said, “I want you all to stop pushing me. I have a right to work through things on my own terms, in my own time.” I lifted my chin, knowing it was a confrontational gesture. “And if you don’t grant me that time and space, I’m gonna get . . .” Furious? “. . . unhappy. I don’t like who I become when I’m in a bad mood. I don’t think you will like me in a bad mood.” I looked up at Rick, who had an inkling just how dangerous I could be. “Understood?”