New Regime (17 page)

Rune growled and flung a zombie into a group of shooters, her
mind still on the baby as she charged the Shop’s humans.

She twirled and kicked and used her claws like the lethal
blades they were, desperation making her even faster than usual.

But the Shop ops kept coming. She’d put down six of them,
and eight more would appear.

And Wallace was in there with the baby.

She heard Lex scream once, “Too fast, Rune, stop…” but she
couldn’t stop. Lex needed to get the hell out of her head, because she
couldn’t
fucking stop.

Lex screamed again, her voice somehow wrong, and upset, and
horrible, but Rune had gone somewhere deep inside herself and if she didn’t
fight like a mad woman, like a monster, that baby was dead.

It couldn’t die. She couldn’t let it.

Then she heard a flutter of wings, and a scorching wind
caressed her sweaty cheek, burning hot and hard before sliding away with a
whisper of heat.

She had called Lex’s demon.

There was no time to think about how pissed Lex would be. No
time to feel guilty that she’d ripped Lex’s demon free much as Lorraine had
forced out Cree’s bird.

No time to care that it was true.

Lex was hers to hold.

Really, hadn’t she known it all along?

The Shop ops could stand against Rune, but she was only one
woman against a Shop army. Now, there was Rune, and there was the demon.

And no fucking one was standing against that.

Lex drifted toward the ceiling, and for one second, when
Rune glanced up at her, she found the demon’s hate-filled stare burning into her.

The demon’s
stare.

It dawned on her that the demon could see—maybe not the same
way sighted people could see, but something was different in those eyes.

Then Lex sent a stream of fire at the Shop op humans.

When they saw their mates burning so hot they fell to the
floor as black ash, the humans ran.

Too late, but they ran.

Lex began to systematically destroy every living and dead person
in the room, and Rune left her to it. She had a baby to save.

And a sheriff to kill.

She raced to the door, flung it open, and plunged into the
room. “Wallace,” she screamed.

But the sheriff was not in the room.

Rune ran to Thirteen, unable to take a breath. The baby was
gone.

“Fuck,” she screamed, and shook with a fury and terror she
couldn’t contain.

Erin Wallace had the newborn.

A little innocent Other, in the wicked hands of the Shop.

Wallace had somehow sneaked out of the room while Rune was
occupied fighting, though she’d been sure she’d glanced toward the door every
few seconds.

“Rune,” Owen said, running into the room. “You’re okay?”

“God,” she said, her heart still beating hard and fast. “I
lost the baby, Owen. I lost the fucking baby.”

He walked to stand in front of her, his eyes narrow. “Baby?”

“One of the girls went into labor. She had a baby. I put it
on the bed and went to fight, and the fucking sheriff stole the
kid.
”
She retracted her claws and put her fingers to her temples. Unable to resist,
no matter how stupid it was, she fell to her knees and peered under the cots.

“The kid was alive?” Owen asked. “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” she snapped, climbing to her feet. “We
have to find her. I don’t know what these people are doing with babies, but I’m
not about to let them have mine.”

“Yours,” he said. “Yours.”

She closed her eyes. “Fuck you. I delivered it. We have to
find the sheriff.”

“The baby,” he asked. “Was it a monster?”

“It seemed to be a normal Other newborn. Whatever that is.”

It dawned on her that there were no sounds coming from the
other room, and when she went to the doorway and looked out, she saw no sign of
Lex. The room was a mess of charred zombies and piles of ash and stank of burnt
meat and hair.

“It’s not your baby, Rune. You—”

“Shut the fuck up, Owen.” Furious, she strode toward him.
“Shut your fucking mouth.”

He held up his hands. “You can’t take on another burden,
that’s all.”

Before he could say something that made her lose control and
punch him, she turned and left the room.

The sheriff was either still in the building or she’d
escaped through some other exit. No way had she gone out the same way she’d
come in.

When she was halfway across the circle room, stomping over
piles of crispy zombies and lost silver weapons, she remembered she needed to
ask Owen if they’d found any sign of Fie.

Perhaps that was where Strad, Jack, and Raze were—carrying
their necromancer to safety. And where the
hell
was Lex?

As she was walking back to the room, Owen stuck his head out
the doorway.

“I found a passage, Rune. Hurry.” Then he was gone.

She ran to the room, then stood still, confused. The room was
empty.

Owen wasn’t there.

She put a hand to her stomach. “Owen?”

But then she saw how he’d exited the room—the same way Erin
Wallace had left the room with the baby.

The door was indistinguishable from the wall when shut, but
Owen had left it ajar.
How did he find that fucking door?

Urgency held her heart in a cruel fist, and she felt as
though there was no one else left in the world but her, the dead girls, and the
piles of burnt bodies in the next room.

Rushing into the passage, she noted the dim lights spaced in
high intervals upon the wall, shining upon a rather narrow hallway lost in
darkness. As she ran, lights above her came on, and the ones behind her went
off.

Reverence was full of secrets. Terrible, dark secrets.

Just as the cowboy was.

She rammed a door at the end of the passageway and it spit
her out into a room so brightly lit and strange she couldn’t, for one moment,
process it.

Edward, the memory-wiped shifter, had been there, or someplace
exactly like it. His horrified voice echoed inside her mind.
“Jars,”
he’d screamed.
“Jars and jars and jars!”

She stumbled back, hitting the wall with such force it
knocked her to her knees. She crouched on the cold concrete, staring up at the
horrors before her.

Gleaming glass containers stood with uniform neatness upon
high tables. The room was full of jars and tubes and silver industrial sized
sinks, strange, unrecognizable smells, and racks of more jars hanging on the
walls. Rows of jars.

Jars and jars and jars.

And every single one of them contained a clear fluid, in
which a fetus floated.

Mutated, Other fetuses. Some had tiny, extra limbs. Some of
them had bony protrusions—claws—instead of fingers. One of the…babies had its
swollen, oversized face pressed against the glass, and Rune saw two long, sharp
fangs covering its bottom lip.

Monsters.

The shop was growing monsters in labs.

She hadn’t really believed Eugene. Couldn’t, maybe, conceive
of it.

That was no longer true.

She believed.

“Fuck me,” she whispered, going from one jar to the other, forcing
down bile that rose into her throat. “Monsters. Growing monsters.”

None of them had lived. They appeared to be the experiments
of someone who’d been trying, and failing, for a very long time to do something
no one should ever do.

She rubbed at the pain in her chest, only realizing when her
hand came away sticky and wet that her wounds were seeping. A lot.

A shriek, dim but unmistakable, rose distantly and fell into
an almost silent moan. Then a cry. An infant’s cry.

She spotted a doorway, wide and gaping, and ran toward it.
She was almost out of the room when she saw the other horrors.

Three fetuses, protected behind the thick glass of a huge
silver tank, stopped her in her tracks.

The liquid in the tank bobbed as the infant Others inside kicked
tiny feet and energetically waved fat little arms.

“God,” Rune said, her voice coming out in a whispered
shriek. “Oh, God.”

She put her palms on the tank, pressing her forehead against
the surprisingly warm glass. She couldn’t break their false womb—the encased
Other babies would pour from the tank and splat upon the floor like helpless
fish.

The triplets’ heads were overly large, the thin, delicate
skin blue with the sprawling roadmap of tiny veins. There were no umbilical
cords trailing from their little bellies, but as she watched, something silver
and glowing swam between and around the bodies.

“What the fuck?” She was barely able to pick up the
translucent swimmers. The infants—girls, all three of them—weren’t born of or
created by natural means. They were being grown and kept alive by magic. Or
with the help of magic.

Bad fucking magic.

One of the silver swimmers latched on to the middle child’s
chest, its thin tail waving much as the infants’ arms had.

It was feeding the Other.

The middle child’s eyes flipped open at that moment, and it
caught Rune’s stare with its own.

She stopped breathing.

The look in those eyes was clear, knowing.

Trapped.

Then the child opened its toothless mouth and began to cry. It
didn’t make a sound, really, but the baby gazed at her, its mouth open, and she
knew it was crying.

Calling out for help.

“No,” Rune murmured. “Oh, no.”

It took her a moment to notice that Owen had appeared and
stood beside her.

He didn’t touch her, surely knowing better. “Rune.”

She shuddered. “What can we do?”

“You have to come with me. I’ve found Fie but can’t release
her.”

Finally, she looked at him, and tried to blink away the
image of the infants. “What?”

“Stefanie,” he said, his voice careful. “She’s down the
hall, third door on the right. She’s caught in some sort of silver trap and I
can’t cut it loose. Rune,” he said, when she glanced back at the babies. “We
have to get Fie. Now.”

“I’ll go,” she said, running her gaze over his pale, worn
face. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“I had to.”

“Find a cell signal and call Eugene. Get our lab guys here.”
She headed for the door, then turned back. “The other baby?”

He shook his head. “No sign of it or the sheriff.”

“Okay. Go.”

He nodded, then jogged from the room.

But in a few seconds, he was back.

“Rune,” he said, and there was something in his voice that
made her heart drop to her stomach.

“God,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He shook his head, then walked toward her, a walk that was
completely Owen—deceptively nonchalant and even a little lazy—and when he
reached her, he just stood there looking at her.

“Owen, you’re scaring the fuck out of me. What is it?”

His eyes were clear and calm. “I got a bad feeling. What if
I walked out of this room and never saw you again?”

“What?”

He sighed, lightly, and put his arms around her. “I don’t…”
He said nothing more.

For one second she let herself relax into him, let herself
inhale his scent, and let herself imagine how she’d feel if Owen disappeared.

Then she pushed away from him. “Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

Her chest was tight. “Don’t say shit. Don’t waste time.”

He nodded, and turned away.

“Owen.”

He looked at her, silent, waiting.

“Don’t fucking disappear,” she whispered.

And with one last glance at the infants in the tank, she
went through the doorway to find Fie.

The magic in the room was powerful. It clung to her skin, to
her brain. To her mind.

Once she was out of the room of horrors, she was able to
clear her mind and breathe a sigh of relief that the powerful little
necromancer was alive.

The well-lit hallway was lined with doors on both sides, but
she didn’t take time to investigate. She went through the third doorway with
her claws out, fully expecting enemies to jump her.

But no enemy waited.

Instead she found Fie, wound tightly in a silver netting, suspended
from the ceiling. “Get me
down,
” Fie yelled, her high-pitched, childish
voice holding not one shred of fear.

The room was empty except for the girl and the silver
contraption that held her. There wasn’t so much as a chair or a table in the
room. There were also no lights. The only illumination came from the hallway
and through the open doorway.

“I’ll get you down, baby,” Rune said. “Turn your face away.”

Fie obeyed immediately. Her cheeks were red, her eyes slightly
swollen, her hair hanging in limp, sweaty strands. “Get me down,” she said
again.

Rune studied the long, silver net holding the child, then
stepped closer and slid the tip of a claw between one of silver strings of the
net and Fie’s body, carefully slicing upward.

The silver netting didn’t break.

“Rune,”
Fie said. “Ow.”

“Hold still, Fie. I’ll get you.”

But she wasn’t so sure she would.

Because as she’d tried to cut through the net, it had moved
in response. Had begun to tighten.

As though it were alive.

“Shit,” she said.
“Shit.”

“That’s the way trash talks,” Fie grouched, sounding
suddenly like a snippy old lady.

Rune raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you supposed to respect your
elders?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a monster? Get me down!”

Rune took a deep breath, releasing it slowly. “When I try to
cut through, the net tightens.” She forgot Fie was a child, wrapped as she was
with her old lady manner. “It’ll squeeze the life from you.”

“I want my
mommy,
” Fie screamed. She scrunched up her
face and began to howl.

Rune jumped back. “Holy hell.” She put a hand to her chest
and looked around, frantically hoping for someone to come help her with the
screaming kid. “Shit, Fie.”

“Mommy,”
Fie screamed.

The berserker barreled through the door, Raze and Jack at
his back. He raked Rune with his glance, quick but intense, and then he went
straight to Fie.

“The fuck?” Jack asked.

“Careful, Strad,” Rune said. “The net is alive. Mess with it
and it tightens.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Raze, scraping his messy
hair out of his face.

“I’m going to get her down,” the berserker answered.

He yanked his spear from its sheath and stabbed into the top
of the netting, transferring it from the ring to which it was attached to his
spear.

He got Fie down. In seconds.

But though she was held securely in Strad’s arms, she was
still confined by the net.

“I tried to cut through it,” Rune told him. “Couldn’t do
it.” She held up one hand and shot out her claws. “And these will cut through
any fucking thing.”

“Shit,” Jack muttered.

“That’s what
I
said.” Rune glanced at the blessedly
quiet child and retracted her claws.

“Where’s Lex?” Raze asked the question Rune knew he’d wanted
to ask since he’d strode through the doorway.

“I don’t know.” She squeezed his arm. “She became the demon,
killed the Shop shooters, and took off.”

“We saw the ashes,” Jack said. “She’ll be okay.”

“The lab,” Strad said, bringing up what no one else wanted
to talk about.

Rune swallowed and pushed her fist into her chest. “Fucking
jars.”

“I’ll take Fie out of here.” He pulled the child closer to
his massive chest. “Rune?”

“I sent Owen to call in backup and transport. I’m going to
search for the infant and the sheriff. Raze, guard those…babies in the lab.
Jack, come with me.”

And with their duties clear, Shiv Crew separated to complete
the mission.