To confirm it with a test or an exam?
“Don’t tell Kevin.” The siren eyes fluttered closed as she spoke. She’d passed out, which meant I didn’t have to remind her that her husband had been arrested along with Alyrose and Abraxas for helping us take over the menagerie. Kevin was in prison.
His wife was in hell.
“You did this to her?” I turned on the doctor and felt my hair begin to stand up at the roots. “You operated on her without her consent?”
“Consent?” He crunched into a carrot stick from his tray. “She’s not a patient, she’s a cryptid. If you ask me, you should all be fixed when you’re brought in. That’d be cheaper in the long run.”
“Fixed?”Thefuriaeroared within me, her outrage echoing through every cell in my body.
Lenore would be avenged.
“Delilah.” Pagano had one hand on his stun gun, but he hadn’t pulled it yet. His other hand held the remote control. With one click, he could immobilize me, but he was waiting. Giving me a chance to rein it in.
“It’s okay,” I lied. My voice sounded strangely full and my vision was so sharp I could see individual threads in the weave of his uniform. “Let’s go before I lose control of it.”
Pagano didn’t holster his remote, but his stance lost a little of its tension.
“Control of what?” the doctor said around his carrot. “What’s her deal?”
I headed toward Pagano, and his gaze was glued to my eyes, which were no doubt absent irises and threaded with black veins. As I drew even with Dr. Hill on my way to the door, I sucked in a deep breath. Then I leapt at him.
“No!” Pagano pressed the button on his remote, paralyzing me even as pain shot through my entire body. But I was already airborne. Momentum drove me into the doctor, throwing us both to the ground.
The doctor’s elbow cracked against the floor, and he howled in pain.
“Don’t touch her!” Pagano cried, but Hill shoved my limp, pain-racked form onto the floor. His hand brushed my arm, and my pulse surged as rage poured out of me and into him. As fire raced through my veins from my collar, scorching every inch of me.
The doctor froze. Then he pushed himself upright, while I lay panting on the ground at his feet.
Both my paralysis and the sadistic electric current ended.
“Dr. Hill?” Pagano seemed to have forgotten me as he watched the doctor, well aware of the brutal inevitability of whatever was about to happen.
The doctor picked up a scalpel from a tray of tools on the counter.
I pushed myself up and scooted back until my spine hit the cabinets, trying to ignore the pain still echoing in my every nerve ending. From there, I had an unobstructed view of the doctor as he lifted his shirt and sliced his own belly open, just below the pooch middle age had given him.
“Oh, fuck...” The guard pocketed his stun gun and pulled the radio from his belt. Static burst through the silence of the lab. “This is Pagano. I need backup down in the infirmary basement lab. Delilah freaked out again, and Doc Hill just opened himself up with his own scalpel.”
“Shit! I mean, roger that,” the voice over the radio said. “We’re sending everyone we’ve got.”
But it was far too late for Dr. Hill. I watched, stunned, while he sliced into his belly again, deepening the original wound. Then he dropped the bloody scalpel on the tile and reached into his gut with his right hand. The doctor who’d operated on Lenore without her consent then began to pull his own intestines from his body, one bloody, lumpy length at a time.
Pagano retched, and the acrid, sweet stench of vomit filled the room.
Deep inside me, the gleefulfuriaecurled up to watch her gruesome handiwork play out. Gallagher too would have gloried in the spilled blood of an enemy, if he’d been there to see it. But I turned away.
Lenore was avenged, but I still needed answers. “Michael.”
His boots shuffled away from me, and from the doctor crying as he slowly disemboweled himself onto the floor. “Holyfuck, Delilah, what did you do?”
“Vengeance is never pretty. He made his own choice, but Lenore didn’t get one.” She hadn’t chosen to get pregnant, and she hadn’t chosen to get unpregnant. “This is what I do. If you can’t handle it, request a transfer.”
“Fuck!” Pagano wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of one arm, still clutching the radio.
I stood slowly, holding my hands out to show him that I was no threat. Anymore. “Take me to Vandekamp.”
