“Baz, come over here,” Bree said. I looked over my shoulder at her feet. Nemo and Baz were standing beside her now.
Out of nowhere, I had the overwhelming urge to sink my teeth into Bree. Wrap my arms around her in a tight, deathly embrace as I slid my fangs in. A groan came from me—a mixture of pain, dismay, and pleasure. Wouldn’t it be so nice to grab Bree and sink both cock and fang into her? Watch her slowly slip away while whimpering around my thrusts. Buried between her thighs as her skin turned black and green.
And she’d never rot afterwards, not with my venom. I tried to wash the thought from my head. It was one thing to have the thought; it was another tocraveit.
I backpedaled, pushing away from Bree, Nemo, and Orson. A dense circle of bodies crumbled to the ground around me, a writhing dying mass. Venom was in the air, bleeding from my pores. I crawled my way up from the ground and ran.
Hope had made things worse. For a brief moment, I’d really thought there was a chance that I could turn into a phoenix. That was sad and pathetic. Plus, running away hurt that much more after having envisioned a future with Bree and them.
At the end of the hall, a trail of bodies stretched behind me. I turned the corner, and another row of humans dropped dead, eyes turning black as green veins covered their skin. Bree and the others chased after me at a distance. The airport, once bustling with life, slowly became a silent tomb. There wasn’t even a scream. I’d simply turned off the lights, and it had been so terribly easy. The roar of airplanes filled the space as my boots squeaked.
“Baz!” Nemo called for me, but kept his distance.
Finally, they were scared of me. Apparently, they had some sense of self-preservation. They followed me as I retraced our steps, back towards security, desperate to get out of this place. How many people had I killed? I slid into the security hall,and everyone’s heads slid upright before their bodies collapsed—dead in an instant.
My hands shook as I leapt over piles of people. I needed more distance. Bree kept begging me to stop. Then Nemo and even Orson. I pretended I couldn’t hear. I let the words slide by, refusing to let them sink in. I ran harder, ducking under partitions and slipping around corners, trying to lose them in the labyrinth. They pulled back further, trying to appease me.
“Please stop, we won’t get closer,” Bree yelled down the hall.
Damien D'Bolique’s voice kept playing in my head, promising salvation. He’d promised so many things in such few words. He said he’d be here, that my partners would be fine and left alone, that he’d help me … Where was he? Was it too late?
I was running down another terminal hallway, lost as I tried to find my way out, when I finally saw them. They stood in a line of gasmasks, covered faces, every inch of skin covered, guns in hand. Behind them was a portal. Well, that explained his guarantee of fast travel. The soldiers saw me and took a step back. They knew what they were coming for, but couldn’t help it. Not when they could see corpses lining the floor like rugs.
“Baz!” Bree screamed. She’d dropped back too far, though, and her plea didn’t stop me. I ran straight ahead, into the arms of the force that had been chasing at our heels since we escaped the asylum.
I was never meant to leave Verfallen or walk freely, and hoping for something else had only led to pain. Tranquilizers sank into my thighs, sharp needles biting at me.Assholes. They knew I was turning myself in. Also, didn’t anyone tell them that stuff doesn’t work on me? Not unless they gave me a lot more. They fired off a lot more. Yeah, like that much actually. Except, it still wasn’t doing anything to me. Nothing at all. I lumbered toward them, falling to my hands and knees, simply because the tranqs sticking out of me were too cumbersome to move with.
“Take me in,” I huffed, ripping a few tranquilizers out of my thigh as my teeth dripped saliva and venom on the ground. One of the soldiers lassoed an alligator pole around my neck and tightened the loop. The pole was shoved towards the ground, forcing my cheek to kiss the floor. Well, wasn’t this fucking friendly?
“There’s the others, we might have to shoot,” someone said.No.
I thrashed and pressed my venom through the pole. The man holding it dropped, and I surged forward, digging my fingers into another soldier’s gas mask, ripping it off. The person's eyes were hazel and dripping in terror as he looked at me. I held back as much as I could, prolonging his screams. Up close, I saw the veining in his eyes looked alive. The venom pulsed like thread-like worms in the white of his eyes before they burst and pooled all black. A scream scratched up his throat and kept going and going and going. Time stood still as I forced him to suffer. The other soldiers stood in shock for a moment, unable to move.
“Take me now,” I hissed over his screams. Something hard exploded on my temple, sharp pain knocking around in my skull as I dropped to the ground. I was still conscious but barely. I could hear Nemo yelling as I was pulled towards the portal. Bright lights exploded in my eyes, and a terrible, mechanical wail filled my ears. Then we were in a new place entirely, the airport nowhere in sight.
They dragged me in and dropped me, frantically yelling for the portal to be closed. Bree was too fast for her own good. I saw the tips of her claws reach through, and then the portal was gone. My head settled on the floor, feeling too heavy to lift. There was green tile beneath me, the color of scrubs.
Then it was chaos. Bodies all around me, looking like the nurses and orderlies from Verfallen. The world spun. Suddenly, I was tossed on a gurney and pushed into an elevator all bymyself. The doors slid shut, and I twisted my head, looking at the floor light up as I went down.Down, down, down.The speaker clicked on.
“It’s good to have you, Basil,” Damien D'Bolique said.
“My… Bree…”
“They’re unharmed, as promised. You won’t try to escape now, right?” He waited for a response.
“No,” I whispered, the edges of my vision blackening.
I lost consciousness for a second but regained it the moment people filled the elevator, grabbing my gurney. Next thing I knew, I was in a room with all-glass walls. It even had a glass door. Someone lifted my shirt and slapped stickers on my chest. Beeping filled the room.
The edges started to go dim again, and the heart rate monitor beeped slower and slower. They ignored it, prying open an eye, my mouth, pulling off my gloves. They all had on their own thick gloves, long sleeves, and gas masks. Someone lifted my arm, wrapped an elastic band around it, and tied it off. I glanced at the watch on my wrist.
“Get the venom monitor in,” Damien said over a speaker. He was watching somewhere. Someone pressed a needle to my skin. The pain came back worse than ever. I groaned.
“Monitors in,” the needle man said, pressing tape over my skin to keep it in place. The burning was unimaginable, acid fire in my veins. The heart rate monitor beeped faster and faster.
“He might be going into cardiac arrest.”
“Look,” some said, tapping a screen. “His venom numbers are off the charts of what we expected.” My eyes flipped to it, but everything was fuzzy. The fire was in my skull, in my brain. My body arched off the gurney as every muscle tensed.
