“Shh! Don’t talk yet. Just nod if you’re okay.”
No, she wasn’t okay. She felt like crap and Theo… Theo!
Her eyes shot open, which apparently was a bad idea. Light stabbed through her eyeballs to attack her brain, and she slammed them shut again. Holy hell, she felt awful. But at least her brain was working.
“Theo?” she whispered, hoping like hell she hadn’t imagined it.
“It’s me.”
ThankGodThankGodThankGod! He was alive. “Where are we?” All she’d gotten in her short blink was a flash of white on white and metal bars. It was that last part that bothered her. But Theo was alive and the relief of that had her lightheaded from joy. Or whatever shit it was they’d made her breathe.
“An abandoned salt mine. That’s all I know. They’re not real big on talking with the lab rats.”
She nodded slowly, then decided to risk another peek. Shielding her eyes with a hand, she slowly cracked them open. Every once in a while her migraines were so bad they made her retch. She didn’t think that would be a good idea right now. She was probably going to need all her wits pretty soon, and that meant slowly taking stock of her surroundings without putting her on her knees over a bucket. If there even was a bucket.
She squinted and peered around.
There was a bucket about two feet away from her. And that was about it for her in this metal cage on a gray-white floor. Abandoned salt mine, huh? Well, she supposed there were worse places to be, though at the moment she couldn’t think of any.
Meanwhile, her eyes adjusted enough that she could look farther away. There was another cage beside her and in it, a young man was flopped on his back, his hair matted with blood. Somehow it would have been better if he’d been curled in on himself, but he lay as if dropped and unable to move.
She choked back a sob at the sight. It wasn’t Theo, that much she’d seen instantly, but the boy looked near death and she wanted to go help him.
“That’s Caleb,” Theo said in a low voice. “He’s not dead, so it’s best if you just let him rest.”
“Where are you?” she asked, slowly moving her throbbing head. But as she did, a sharp pain from the crook of her arm cut through her consciousness. She looked and saw a telltale bandage there and she cursed under her breath.
“I don’t think they gave you anything. Just took a ton of blood to test,” Theo said.
She was finally able to locate her nephew by the sound of his voice. Tilting her head up, she saw another cage, only this one was a great deal larger. Not big enough for a person to stand, but at least Theo had plenty of room to crouch forward against the bars.
“Theo,” she whispered, scanning him from head to toe. He looked pale and bruised, plus his hands were raw. Even crouched as he was, she could see that he’d lost weight. No baby fat left on her boy anywhere. He had bandages at the crooks of both elbows and, now that she looked closely, she realized that he was naked and covered in raw welts. It took her a moment to place what might have caused them, and when she did, the fury was nearly blinding. “Did they… Was that… a cattle prod?”
He flushed and tried to cover his wounds, but there were simply too many. And that made her all the more livid. To think that he’d be ashamed of what they’d done to him. My God, she was going to kill them!
“It looks worse than it is,” he said.
“Is there anything else? Are you hurt? Did they beat you?” She searched her memory for every scrap of medical information she had. There wasn’t much. All she knew about emergency medicine she’d gotten from TV.
“I’m okay,” he said, his words low and urgent. “Keep your voice down. You want them to think you’re still asleep.”
She nodded and pressed her lips together. But the sight of his battered body made her want to wail. And find a gun. She did neither. Instead, she tried to focus more on their surroundings. There wasn’t much to see. Just long rows of cages, all of them empty except for her, Theo, and Caleb. Then, twisting as much as she could, she picked out what she guessed were two doors, one on either end of the large room. That was the extent of her reconnaissance.
“There was another boy. Caleb’s brother.” Theo’s voice choked up as he spoke.
“I know,” she said. That must be the boy who’d died at the farm. “We found him, but were too late to…” Her voice trailed away. Too late to save the child. Too late to find Theo. And now she was trapped here, too. “They’re looking for you—Carl, the police, everyone. We almost found you before. They’ll find you now. We just have to hold on a bit longer.”
Theo’s eyes went wide with hope, and for a moment, he looked like that little boy who’d just lost his mother years ago. The one who had put all his faith and trust in her, even though everything had just been shattered.
“We’ll be fine,” she repeated as much to herself as him. “Carl will find us.”
“Who’s Carl?” he asked. Trust the boy to hit on the one awkward part of the whole conversation.
“He’s Mr. Max. He’s been part of the search from the very beginning.” She stretched out her legs as much as she could in this narrow space. If she stayed on her side, bent at the waist, she could just do it. She was pleasantly surprised to see that she wasn’t bruised or hurt in any way except at the elbow. That was something. Though God knew how long that would last. “What do they want with us?”
“I, um…We’re being studied. Caleb and me.” He took a shuddering breath. “I think they did something to me, Aunt Becca. I think they made me into something…awful.”
She looked over at him. He was trying to be brave. She could see it so clearly on his face, even though he was terrified. But in this one respect, she had to tell him the truth. She couldn’t let him look at himself like some kind of monster. “You mean because you can shift into a grizzly bear? Is that it? Because if it is, that’s not something terrible. It’s wonderful.” She looked over at Caleb. “And he’s a werewolf, right?”
