She sways on her feet, and Graeme rushes forward, catching her and swooping her into his arms. She loops an arm around his neck, not zapping him with her painful magic. The moment she’s safe in his arms, she passes out.
Jack bows his head, stroking her arm and taking slow, deep breaths. “We found her,” he whispers to Graeme.
Graeme nods, his eyes shining with unshed tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The detective inspector carries Cora onto the jet and lays her down on one of the fold-down seats, immediately examining her for wounds. He gingerly lifts the hem of her shirt, revealing the radiating, spiky lines of a combat hex.
I release Marcus’ hand and immediately go for the first-aid kit, pulling out my scribe as I take it to Cora’s side. The first-aid kit is stocked with ointments and enchanted bandages, plus a small handbook of healing spells. I thumb through it quickly, looking for a spell to stop a combat hex from spreading.
When I’ve finally found it, I kneel beside Cora. It’s no more complex than the healing magic I’ve already learned. It takes just five glowing sigils for the spidery black lines to stop growing out from Cora’s left side. I dig through the handbook again, looking for a spell to reverse the damage the hex has already done, and cast the one I find. Beneath my scribe, the black lines slowly disappear, and I let out a sigh of relief. She’s still bruised, and I can tell she has soft tissue damage, perhaps even deeper than I can guess, but I cast astrength spell on her, apply the magical ointments and then, with Graeme helping to sit her up, wrap her abdomen in the enchanted bandages. The rest will be up to Doc, who Cassian has already phoned; she’ll be waiting for us at the castle when we arrive back in Fairhaven.
Finally, the adrenaline from the facility and healing Cora floods from my body, and I slouch. Marcus opens his arms to me from one of the jet’s seats, and I go to him, needing the same comfort he gave me inside my father’s clandestine surgical suite. I wish we could place the seat down or take the bedroom so I could curl up against his side, but the flight is crowded as it is. Instead, he shifts me onto his lap where I curl in on myself. With the utmost gentleness and care, he strokes my back in slow circles. Not even questioning my need for him, forgetting that I should still be mad at him for lying to me, I press my nose into his neck, seeking his scent. I calm as it washes over me, lulling me and pulling me under until I’m comfortably numb in his arms.
In the seat across the narrow aisle, Simon prods at a few pieces of damaged tech he took from the facility with his scribe. Unsatisfied, he draws out his laptop and a toolkit and lets out a disgusted sigh at the condition of whatever it is he’s working on.
Cassian stands behind his seat, peering over our lover’s shoulder. “What is it?”
“Itusedto be a hard drive. Now it’s little more than slag, but I’m sure I can getsomethingoff it.” He sighs. “Not as much as I would like, though. They really did a number on their tech when vacating the facility. If any of it was linked to a cloud server for back up, there’s no chance of tracing it now. Not with the condition it’s in.”
“What are you hoping to find?”
“MRI scans, or even partials. We have to know what was being done at the facility if we have any chance of stopping itin the future.” He looks up to me, a frown knitting his brow. “And wewillstop it, Junes. You have my word.”
“And mine,” Ian says quietly.
“Mine,” Luca chimes in from in front of me.
“Mine as well, of course,” Cassian says.
“And mine,” Marcus says softly in my ear, lacing his fingers with mine and giving my hand a gentle squeeze. I curl closer against him, soothed by the heat radiating from his strong body.
After some time, Simon finally lets out a whoop of satisfaction, and disjointed, tinny words stream from the small speakers on his laptop. They’re broken up, barely intelligible, and warped, as though the speaker had whispered them through water, but there’s no mistaking the sound of my father’s voice. He reads out the serial number I saw in my vision and on the hospital bracelet, and a series of glitchy-sounding words follow, the recording clearly fragmented. “Ice… test subject…. sedated... first incision... maginalus.”
Surgical notes, dictated by my father. He always did love to hear himself talk, especially during his darkest deeds. That he dictated his actions throughout his experiments shouldn’t surprise me, but hearing his words did.
Simon slams his laptop shut. “I think that’s enough Redwood Rose bullshit for now, don’t you agree?”
“I certainly do,” Cassian mutters.
Maginaluses from affinitied omegas… What could my father’s horrible intent be? Locking magic doesn’t require incisions, only spells and serums, and he can’t be removing maginaluses to take away the omegas’ magic as was done to omega and beta mages historically—often taking their lives along with their maginaluses. In Foundations in Magic, Professor Hayes taught us that it was virtually impossible to remove a mage’s maginalus without killing the subject, even with the newest guided robotic surgery techniques. None of which my father seemed to be using, which leads me to believe that my father’s doing a hack job of it. To hell with the sanctity of omega lives; he’s butchering omegas for their maginaluses.
But to what end?
I peer around the jet as though I’ll find any sort of answers. There are a few fragmented images pulled up on Simon’s computer, MRI scans from what I can tell, but the file quality is so bad, so broken, that I can’t make out much else. Cassian leaves his side to talk to Graeme, and I watch him go.
I can’t make out their conversation at the front of the plane. Until my affinity lets me overhear them perfectly. I don’t know if I’m reading Cassian’s mind or Graeme’s, but it doesn’t matter, I can hear their conversation as clearly as if I were sitting right beside them.
“There was more to the facility than I originally thought,” Cassian tells the detective inspector, who was in pursuit of Cora while we did the walkthrough. “They had to have been holding as many omegas as Cora said. There were cages for fifty, but we don’t know how many were filled. There were MRI machines, all kinds of tech, and a surgical theater, complete with a table and surgical instruments. The tray had been knocked to the floor, but there was no mistaking it. Forceps. A scalpel. Nothing good.”
“To what end?” Graeme asks.
I see Cassian shake his head. “From the clip Simon played, it sounds like the extraction of maginaluses from the omega test subjects—affinitied omegas. But I can’t fathom the purpose of doing so. We’ll need to investigate further.”
Investigate further? Aside from picking at the tech Simon took from the facility, what can we possibly do now? My worst suspicions about my father are coming true, and we were too late to stop him. I don’t blame Cora for triggeringthe warding, especially because the facilitywasrevelatory. But my father’s gone. Now that he’s fled the facility, he’s in the wind. We have no way of stopping him now. I’m certain he’ll build a new surgical suite, that he’ll continue his research, but we have no leads to go on. We have no idea where he’ll pop up next. Near Fairhaven, since he’ll be teaching there this autumn? Or somewhere else?
The only thing I know for sure is that he won’t stop.
