Catwoman: Soulstealer (DC Icons #3)(89)



Maggie was utterly limp on the seat.

A hundred steps. A hundred steps from salvation.

Selina rallied herself, trying to shove down the agony in her shoulder.

But the lightness in her head, the blurry vision…

She knew about the dangers of blood loss. Knew that the amount she’d spilled on the ride over here…

She was on borrowed time now, too.

And the Lazarus Pit she’d made only had enough in it for one use. One person.

It didn’t frighten her. Not as much as Maggie’s labored breathing. Nothing had ever scared her as much as that. Nothing ever would.

Fifty feet. A hundred steps.

Selina braced herself. Allowed herself three steadying breaths, the movement sending pain rippling from her shoulder, all the way down her body.

A hundred steps.

She reached for Maggie. Bit down on her scream as she hauled her sister’s weight up and over her good shoulder.

One step. Another. Another.

Down that cracked path, the sky open, stars watching above them.

Any minute now, Nyssa’s assassins would arrive. They’d probably stitched a tracking unit into the suit before handing it over at Arkham. She hadn’t dared waste a moment to find something to change into.

Ninety steps.

Selina’s blood dripped onto the brown dirt beneath her.

Eighty.

Maggie was still—so still.

Every impact and footfall sent sparks bursting behind Selina’s eyes.

Seventy. Sixty. Fifty.

Everything she had stolen, all of it, had been for this.

It is now about making Maggie as comfortable as possible.

She refused to accept that. Forty steps.

Selina picked up the pace. If she could make it there and turn on the machine…she could finish before the League arrived. Give Maggie the Mercedes keys and tell her to run.

Thirty steps left. Twenty.

The derelict factory loomed, its entry point leading down a long, narrow corridor that ended in another door—which opened to the factory floor beyond. To the space she’d converted into the Pit, the hollowed-out floor now filled with the chemicals and water she’d hauled in on those off-nights. The equipment she’d set up using machines she’d bought, forklifts and clever contraptions. No workers. She wouldn’t risk their speaking about it.

Ten steps.

She slowed, her body starting to shake, strength seeping out of her like the blood now streaming from her shoulder.

Five.

She lifted her hand for the twisted metal handle of the heavy door.

Maggie’s breath in her ear…Had it stopped?

Her own breathing halted in response.

The brink of death. Just at its doorway.

The Pit could draw her back from that threshold. It would bring her back. Even if— Maggie’s chest rose and fell. Slow and shallow.

Relief shuddered through Selina, threatening to buckle her knees.

Her trembling fingers closed around the handle. Right as the door opened—from within.

She found herself staring up at Batwing.

Staring up at Luke Fox, helmeted and the bat-symbol blazing on his chest, blocking her path into the factory.



* * *





He’d been too late to the hospital to catch her.

To do what, he didn’t know. But she’d grabbed her younger sister, Maggie Kyle, and vanished. Maggie’s adoptive parents were frantic. The girl wouldn’t survive an hour without the various machines she’d been hooked up to.

The couple didn’t know who had taken their daughter. They’d been asleep.

Luke opened Gordon’s laptop and began hunting.

Hospital security footage showed Selina leaving the building, Maggie over a shoulder, ten minutes earlier. Then street camera footage of Selina in a Mercedes, speeding through a red light. But going where— He’d found it, then. The deed of ownership. Of this factory, purchased by Selina Kyle over a month ago. Cash offer, but because of the factory’s chemical history, the owner had to be listed should any environmental issues arise.

He’d soared here. Beat her here by twenty minutes.

Long enough to see the Lazarus Pit inside. He and Bruce had looked into them once, as a potential project for Wayne Industries’ medical division. They’d both deemed them little more than myth, and likely impossible to ever create. Yet here one lay, exactly as the legends and rumors described.

She’d used a large, round vat the size of a swimming pool—once used for mixing some compound here. On a raised concrete platform above it, various machines had been gathered, cords draped and snaking along them.

And along the edge of the pool, dangling from pulleys anchored into the high, domed metal ceiling, a metal grate—a bed—swayed slightly. To be lowered into the dark, faintly iridescent liquid within. Liquid so dark that even the light leaking in through the grimy windows set high above didn’t pierce it.

The Pit could change everything. Especially for wounded soldiers, both overseas and at home.

The implications for the larger world were enormous. It was why he and Bruce had even considered investigating whether they could be made.

But in the wrong hands…

Luke had heard a car pull in and finished inspecting the machinery.

And when he hauled open the door, every word eddied out of his head. Every demanding question, every curse.

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