The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [95]
“I said … let me go.”
Fear blossomed on the woman’s face. She scrambled for a device clipped to her belt, pulled it off, and held it to her mouth. “I need security in Lab Four. Repeat, security in Lab Four. Now!”
Beltan knew what those words meant. Guards were coming. He pulled against the restraints, feeling a strength he knew he should by no right possess. Now his entire body tingled, as if he had rolled in snow. Across the room, the chin-pasi let out a screeching sound and beat against the walls of its cage.
The woman grabbed something from a shelf and stripped paper off of it: a kind of tube with a needle on the end. Using both hands to control her shaking, she slipped the needle into one of the tubes that led into Beltan’s arm.
Instantly the world grew hazy and dull. Once before a woman had stolen his manhood with a poison spell. Lady Kyrene. Not again.
“What have … you done to me … witch?”
His words were barely a whisper. She lowered the needle and stepped back, watching him, but he glimpsed all this as through a veil. The screaming of the chin-pasi faded away.
Help me, Travis.
But he knew he didn’t manage to speak these words aloud. Instead the world went not gray but black and, after that, Beltan knew no more.
31.
After their conversation with Deirdre Falling Hawk and Hadrian Farr at the museum, Grace and Travis kept to their musty, dilapidated room at the Blue Sky Motel, curtains drawn, waiting for the Seekers to contact them. However, by the third day, Grace was ready to break down the door and bolt, no matter if a whole army of Duratek agents was waiting with chains and shackles on the other side.
“There’s nothing on TV,” Travis said in a voice that encroached dangerously on a whine.
They had convinced the manager to replace their TV with one that worked—albeit nominally, and only so long as green was one’s favorite color since that was the only one it displayed.
Grace didn’t look up from her book of crossword puzzles. They had had this same conversation on pretty much an hourly basis. “Change to a different channel.”
“You know perfectly well there isn’t a different channel. This is the only one we get.”
“Then get a mirror and watch this one backwards.”
This won a snort. “You know, that might be an improvement. Have you seen this guy? His name is Sage Carson. He’s supposed to be some sort of televangelist, but I think he’s really a robot. His hair looks like a vinyl replica of the state of Kentucky.”
“What’s wrong with Kentucky?”
“Nothing. Except when it’s on your head.”
Grace clutched the pen in her hand. She cared for Travis a great deal, had even risked her own life to save him, but she was going to kill him very soon. However, she would make it quick and painless. Nothing said love like a swift jab to the medulla oblongata.
Travis turned off the TV, flopped onto the other bed, and stared at Grace. “I thought you hated crossword puzzles.”
“I do. They’re a complete waste of time.”
“So would you care to explain why you’re doing an entire book of them?”
“Because right now wasting time is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing.”
He grunted at that, then leaned on an elbow and picked at a battered cardboard box of donuts. “You know, we’re not prisoners. We can leave here if we want.”
“Sure. And we’ll just tell our bulky friends outside the motel that we’re stepping out to buy them each a neck, since as far as I can tell neither of them seems to possess one.”
As promised, Farr had stationed a pair of operatives to keep watch on their room. Grace pegged them as former football players or professional wrestlers. Their expensive Italian suits strained across their shoulders, and both of them looked as if they could crush subcompact cars with their bare hands. Neither of them seemed anatomically capable of smiling.
Every few hours