Cane. With Marcy by his side, leaned over a computer monitor, typing faster than I knew her fingers could move.
How did they . . . ?” I start past Tucker, but this time he grabs my arm and pulls me back against the wall, out of sight of the control room. “It’s okay. They’re on our side.”
“Right.” Tucker looks unconvinced.
“We were going to come here together,” I explain. “But they were going through the tunnels and I thought it would take too long. I have no idea how they got here before—”
“I don’t care how they got here,” Tucker says. “I want to know what they’re doing at those computers.”
I pause, tempted for a moment to tell Tucker the truth—that Marcy is with the CIA and probably searching for some top-secret intelligence or something. But no matter how much I like Tucker, I can’t trust him. “I don’t know,” I say. “Why don’t I go ask them?”
“No chance, Red, I—”
“Cane! Marcy!” I shout, making Tucker cuss colorfully and snap into invisibility.
As soon as his fingers slip from my arm, I hurry through the locker room and into the heart of the operation, refusing to feel bad for ditching him. In a few minutes, he’ll see that I’m okay. Hopefully then he’ll do the rational thing and get out of here because I’d really like one less person to worry about.
“Cane!” I step into the cavernous room, but only have a second to notice how immense it is—with several glassed-in labs to the right and a heavy wooden table with seating for twenty or more to my left—when Cane turns my way. His eyes meet mine and his scary expression crumbles, transforming to a combo of horror, pain, and hopelessness usually unique to parents who’ve just watched their children run into oncoming traffic.
I know I’ve done something I shouldn’t even before another familiar male voice shouts for me to, “Run, Annabelle!” My eyes flick to the left. A few feet behind Cane, Hitch sits tied to one of the wooden chairs from the medieval banquet-sized table. I realize several things at once:
1. Hitch is being held captive.
2. Cane’s pointing a gun at his head.
3. Cane’s holding the gun, but he’s not the one in control.
Now that he’s turned, I can see Cane’s chest is alive with blinking red lights and rows of red cylinders that I don’t need a degree in intrigue to know are explosives. He’s rigged to blow. And Marcy is holding the trigger.
She turns from the computers, a stick with a flashing red button on the end fisted in one hand, and my world crumbles for the third or fourth time today. “Put your rifle down, Annabelle, and go stand by Agent Rideau.” Marcy’s thumb hovers above the red button. “Do it. Or I’ll push this and Cane and everybody else in this room will die. There’s enough on his chest to blow a hole in the earth a half-mile wide. There’ll be nothing left of any of us.”
“But, but,” I sputter. “But you said—”
“I’ve already transferred the files I was sent for and corrupted the hard drive,” Marcy says. “I was told to consider myself a necessary loss after that. I don’t want to die and I certainly don’t want to kill any of you, but I will. So put the rifle down and start moving.”
As I set my weapon on the floor tears rise in my eyes, surging up from my core no matter how vehemently I tell myself not to cry. “You can’t do this.”
Marcy sighs. “I’m sorry, baby. I have orders and they don’t involve sharing information with anyone. Now step on over.”
A strangled sound escapes my throat—part laugh, part protest, part guttural prayer for this all to be a big, hairy misunderstanding. I walk toward Hitch on stiff, numb legs, the adrenaline of the day finally catching up with me, making my entire body feel wrong.
Wrong. This is wrong. I stop, spin back to face Marcy. “Please,” I beg. “You can’t kill Cane. You can’t—”
“I’m not going to kill Cane.” Marcy plucks her gun from the table next to the bank of computers. The screens behind her flash an agitated stream of numbers and symbols, as if they’re as angry with her as I am. “Cane’s coming outside with me. Once we’re far enough away, I’m going take off the explosives and send him back home through the gate.”
I shake my head, knowing better than to be comforted by her promise. “And what about Hitch? And me? What happens to us?”
Her mouth tightens the slightest bit. To anyone else, her expression would be unreadable, but I can see the pain in her. I can hear the regret when she says, “That isn’t my decision to make.”
“Then who—”
“I’m sorry,” she says, cutting me off. “Back toward me, Cane. Keep the gun on those two until we reach the hallway, then drop it to your side nice and slow.” She backs toward the entrance of another concrete hallway about five feet to the left of the one Tucker and I crept down a few minutes ago.
Tucker. For a minute I imagine he might rush in and save the day, that he’ll take advantage of his invisibility, snatch the trigger from Marcy’s hand, save Cane, and give our side the upper hand.
He doesn’t, and Marcy disappears into the darkness, followed by Cane, whose sad brown eyes are almost too much to take.
“I’ll come back if I can, Lee-lee,” he says. “I promise, I—”
“Don’t come back.” Tears crowd my eyes and spill down my cheeks. “Be safe. We’ll be okay.”
“I love you.” I can tell by the way he says it that he thinks it will be the last time, and that none of us are going to be okay. Before I can reassure him or even tell him I love him, too, he’s gone, pulled away into the darkness by Marcy’s firm hand.
I take an instinctive step after them, but stop myself with a clench of my fists. I can’t help Cane right now; I can get Hitch untied and started toward safety. I have no idea what Marcy meant by Hitch and me “not being her decision to make,” but I don’t want to stick around to find out. Hitch’s suit is gone and he’s down to his jeans and T-shirt, but maybe we can find some protection on the way out. Bare minimum we can zip him into a hazmat suit from the locker room, head back through the tunnels, and hope we come out somewhere close to the iron gates.
“Tucker?” I call out, though I’m pretty sure he won’t answer. “Tucker?” I pause, giving him a chance to prove he’s not as full of shit as almost everyone else in my life. “I thought you said you were going to help me!” I shout over the still blaring siren. “Tucker!”
Nothing. Not a peep or a flicker in the air or a flash of blue eyes.
“Bastard,” I cuss as I circle Hitch and kneel down by his bound hands.
Screw Tucker. I silently vow never to weaken toward him again. He’s a coward and a minion and under the Big Man’s thumb and I was a fool to let his country-boy charm make me forget it. Even for a minute.
“I’m sorry,” Hitch says numbly, staring at the ground in front of him as I start working on the knots binding his wrists. “I’m sorry I asked you for help.”
“It’s okay. We’re going to get out of here.” I pull at the knots, cursing my inability to grow real fingernails. The knots are tight and I’m having a hard time getting them started. “Eventually.”
“I already set the explosives in the lab. They’re going to blow in twenty minutes. Maybe less. You should go.”
My breath comes faster and my hands shake. “No. I’ve got you. Give me a second.”
“I took time to evacuate everyone. All the prisoners in the holding cells and the people working here,” Hitch says. “I shot a few people, but nothing they can’t recover from if they get treatment.”
“Good,” I say. “I’m glad.”
“I knew you were right. I’m losing my mind.” He drops his head back and searches the ceiling, as if seeking wisdom from the heavens. But we can’t see the sky down here, and I’m not sure the heavens are paying attention. “I can’t believe I killed those men at the docks . . . I can’t . . . I . . .”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. I killed two people. I could have killed you, too.
And I’m so—”
“Don’t apologize,” I say, cutting him off. “You’re thinking clearly now and you did what you were sent here to do and Stephanie and the baby will be fine.”
Even if we won’t, I add silently. Sweat drips down into my eyes and the insanely tight knots slip through my fingers once again.
“Maybe,” Hitch whispers. I can barely hear him over the blerngh, blerngh, blernghing of the alarm.
“The Big Man will keep his word,” I say with more confidence than I feel. There’s no reason for Hitch to go out as hopeless as I am right now. I don’t trust half my friends or surrogate family, let alone a murdering mad scientist with a god complex. Stephanie is probably a dead woman, and her baby right along with her. But maybe Hitch hasn’t reached that conclusion. Maybe he—
“I don’t trust him,” Hitch says. “I can’t trust anyone.”
“Weren’t you just telling me that—”
“I’m the one who hacked into the system.” Hitch turns to look at me over his shoulder. “I read some of the files before Marcy and Cane showed up. This lab is legit.”
“What?” I glance up, wincing at the red surrounding Hitch’s blue eyes and the haggard look on his face. “What do you mean?”
“This is a top-secret FBI facility. Funded by the government.”
My fingers slip off the edge of the knot again. “You’re kidding me.”
“No. I’m not. There were presidential signatures on some of the orders,” he says. “And the prisoners I freed? Convicted felons. Supposedly already executed in other states.”
“So they—”
“Faked the executions of men on death row so they could test their weapons. I set free a bunch of killers and rapists, half of them already infected.”
Fuck. I definitely don’t like hearing convicted felons are loose in the bayou near my town, but that doesn’t change the core of what’s going on here. “It doesn’t matter what kind of crimes they committed.” I return to the rope with renewed intensity. “That doesn’t give the government the right to experiment on them.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Hitch says. “Or the right to kill Steven to make sure he didn’t talk. Who knows how many people they’ve killed to keep this a secret?” His voice drops. “You should go.”
“No.” I abandon the knots and hurry to the banks by the computers, searching for something sharp enough to cut through Hitch’s bonds.
“There’s something else,” Hitch says. “I want to tell you and then I want you to go. Save yourself. Find someone you can trust and—”
“Shut up!” I knock keyboards to the ground, sending piles of paper floating into the air as I hunt for something, anything. Even a stupid ink pen might help me pry open the knots.
“Annabelle, you—”
“I’m serious. Shut up,” I shout, panic rising as I circle around to the other side of the computer bank and there’s still no sign of a pen or a pencil and the damn alarm keeps blaring like a sledgehammer to my face. “You have a wife and baby waiting for you. You can’t—”
“Stephanie’s signature was on one of the orders.”
I freeze midriffle through a stack of medical charts. Suddenly, Hitch’s empty eyes make a terrible sort of sense.
“I only saw it once, but I didn’t have much time to look,” he says. “She approved a series of tests on Subject J, a child killer from Kentucky.”
I walk back around the bank, my hands still horribly empty. “You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.” He drops his head, mumbling his next word into his lap. “Leave.”
My shoulders sag, my entire body going limp with pity for him. Even a week ago, I might have been secretly pleased to learn that Stephanie was keeping something so enormous from Hitch. Now, it only makes me sad. For him. And, surprisingly, for her.
“He was a child killer,” I say.
Hitch looks up. “He was deliberately infected with fairy venom.”
“So what?”
“And she kept this from me. She let me come out here without—”
“Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe—”
“Fuck it, Annabelle. It doesn’t matter,” he shouts. “I’ll never know and you need to get out of here.”
I shake my head. “No. I’m not leaving without you.”
“Go!” he shouts, so loudly he momentarily eclipses the siren.
“No!” I spin in a frantic circle, looking for something, anything—
My rifle. It’s still on the floor. I’ll shoot through the ropes. There’s a chance I might hurt Hitch, but I probably won’t kill him and he’s definitely going to die if he stays here.
I rush over, squat to grab the barrel, but when I try to stand, the gun doesn’t budge. I pull again, hard enough to make my shoulder ache, but it’s like the damn thing’s superglued to the cement.
Or like someone very heavy has their foot on it. Their extremely large foot, the foot that made monster footprints outside Grace Beauchamp’s window, the foot that belongs to one of the last people I want to see—or not see—right now.
Even before the foot and the leg and the rest of the Big Man slowly drift into visibility, I suspect it’s him. Maybe it’s the smell. He’s got a particular stink about him, an earthy, bayou scent accompanied by the faintly sour odor of a man who spends most of his life sweating.
And really, who else could this be? I’ve never seen the Big Man before, but the behemoth looming over me has to be the man who put the Harley in my kitchen. How many other six feet four, four hundred plus pound invisible men with clown feet can there be in Donaldsonville, Louisiana?
“Annabelle.” He smiles.
“Big Man.”
He chuckles, making his fleshy neck shake. He doesn’t look anything like I imagined. His khaki pants and white short-sleeve button-down are too business casual for roaming the swamp, and his curly mop of red hair and freshly shaved chins—he has at least three, maybe four—make him look like an overgrown kid despite the wrinkles that make me guess him somewhere north of forty. He’s got the same pale, redhead skin I have, but a bigger crop of freckles, riots of brown spots that cover his nose and forehead and dribble down his cheeks. On the whole, he’s much more Dennis the Menace than Charles Manson.
But when he speaks, his voice is as deep and dark and shiver-inducing as I remember. “I think you been keepin’ things from me, mouche à miel,” he says, proving Cajuns do produce their share of pasty white people.
Honeybee. He called me “runt” last time. Hopefully the change indicates an improvement in our relationship. I pull my hand from the gun and come slowly back to my feet. “Nice shoes. Converse?”
“Gotta have my Converse.”
“I thought you were a work boot kind of guy.”
“Only when I’m working.” A grin blooms at the center of his corpulent face like a toothy flower, lips curling until I can see his cotton candy pink gums. He’s a flosser, this one. His mouth is practically glowing with health. I think about complimenting him on that, and maybe thanking him for the Harley while I’m at it to butter him up really good, but Hitch takes that moment to remind us of his existence.
“This cave is going to blow in five minutes,” he shouts. “Get out of here. Now!”
The Big Man casts an amused glance in Hitch’s direction. “High-strung, ain’t he?”
“Um . . . yeah.” I nod too long, caught between playing along with the Big Man’s low-stress, cheery vibe and catching Hitch’s much more reasonable terror. On the one hand, it seems best to keep the tension level low and the Big Man happy. On the other hand, I’ve heard this man sound perfectly pleasant while strangling people to death with his bare hands, so his chumminess right now might mean less than squat.
“But Hitch did rig the labs to explode,” I say. “We should probably get while the getting’s good.”
“Hitch did a good job. He proved he’s willing to do whatever it takes to save his family. Followed orders pretty much to a T.” The Big Man stuffs his m
eaty hands in his tentlike pockets. “Except for telling a few stories to you.”
“But I don’t count, right?” I force a grin. “Since I’m on your side and all?”
“You made that sound like a question, Annabelle.”
“I didn’t mean to.” My smile wilts at the warning in his tone. “Bad habit.”
“Lifting your voice at the end of a sentence makes you seem like a person lacking in confidence.” He stalks around to my right. I turn, keeping him in front of me, memories of Libby’s last moments making me unwilling to be any more vulnerable than I already am.
“Low self-esteem,” I say. “I’m working on it.”
“You should. No reason for a smart, pretty thing like you to feel dat way. Plenty of people would kill to be you.”
I nod again, acutely aware of the sweat gathering at the base of my neck. The siren seems to have faded in volume, but the urgency behind it feels more intense than ever. If Hitch’s estimate is right, we’ll all be blown to pieces in a couple of minutes, maybe less.
“Can we continue this outside?” I squeak, edging toward Hitch. “Maybe after you help me carry Hitch out to—”
“No need to carry him. Let the boy walk.” He wanders with maddening slowness over to where Hitch sits slumped in his chair, eyes closed, chin tucked, his defeat complete. He’s certain we’re going to die, and his certainty makes my tongue feel like it’s going to crawl down my throat. “You and I are on the same side, Annabelle. From now on, you come to me when you’ve got a problem. Especially a fairy problem. I understand you know where to find me.”
“Okay.” My knee jogs, my hands shake at my sides. We’re running out of time. Fast. So fast.
“I killed that fairy bastard Tucker said was messing with your head.”
Grandpa Slake is dead? I know I should be relieved, but all I can think about is the explosives in the other room and the seconds ticking away and what it’s going to feel like to blow up.