Reborn (Altered) (22 page)

With blood running down my face and from a wound on my
leg, walking on the streets would draw too much attention, so I cut through a few neighboring yards until I reached the line of woods that would eventually thin out to a church.

I’d made this same trek two days before. It was always good to have an escape plan. But I wasn’t so sure I’d make it this time. My leg kept folding beneath me, and I had to rest for a second until the feeling came back to it.

I was leaving obvious tracks in the woods, too, but I didn’t have time to cover them.

A half mile from the church, I leaned against a tree and strained to listen. No sirens here. No dogs barking. That was a good sign.

I bent over and sucked in air. It never seemed like enough. My chest was burning, my leg was pounding, and my vision kept winking out.

The church parking lot was empty save for a small white car and a truck. I found an unlocked back door that led to the church’s basement and stumbled inside, blinking against the dusky light.

There were kids’ toys everywhere, spilling from toy boxes and piled in baskets along the wall. The carpet was dark green, thankfully, so it hid the blood still dripping from my wounds.

I followed a hallway to a lounge, and then another to a storage room and plopped down on an old wingback chair shoved between stacks of boxes.

I dug out the cell phone to call Trev, but he didn’t pick up. Trev was closest, but I needed more help than one guy could give. Looked
like Sam was going to get his wish. I needed the others right now. I hated to admit it—I liked to think I could manage just fine on my own—but I was clearly in over my head.

The Branch was here. And I bet Riley wasn’t far behind.

With a blood-crusted finger, I pounded in Sam’s number. Anna picked up. “Where’s the dog?” she said, opening with our code.

I inhaled, biting down the urge to cry. I did not cry. I wasn’t going to start now.

“Nick?” she said.

My voice wavered as I managed to get out, “I need your help.”

She immediately went on alert. “What’s wrong?”

“The Branch… they have Elizabeth and I might have been shot. I’m not sure yet.”

“Where are you now?”

“In a church about two miles from Elizabeth’s house.”

“Are you safe for now?”

“For now.”

“I’m calling Trev—”

“I just did. He didn’t pick up.”

“Then I’ll keep trying him until he does.” She shouted for Sam, then Cas, before coming back on the line. “We’re on our way, okay? Sit tight.”

“Hurry. Please.”

“We’ll be there in a few hours, if we have to speed the whole way
there.” Her voice hardened. “And then I’m going to kill whoever hurt you.”

I heard the back door open sometime later and realized I wasn’t hidden very well. I didn’t have enough energy to burrow in somewhere now, so if it was Riley here to finish me off, he wouldn’t have a hard time finding me.

There had been a total of eight Branch agents in Aggie’s house, and I’d taken them all out. But not without some major damage. After looking at my leg, I was confident I had only been grazed by a bullet, not shot, but the longer I sat there, the worse I felt. My wounds were growing hotter by the second and pounded in time with my heart.

“Nick?” Trev called.

Not Riley then.

“In here,” I replied.

The door opened, and light washed through. I shielded my eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that in a church.”

He chuckled and came closer. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to hell for a dozen other things already.”

“Like turning on us?”

“‘Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.’”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

He helped me to my feet and put my arm around his shoulders. He was a few inches shorter than I was, which made it a lot easier to walk using him for support.

“We got a problem,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I think Elizabeth’s mother is working with Riley.”

“Really?”

“She was at the house when I got there, right when the Branch agents swept in.” I winced, and held my breath for a beat as a new twinge of pain subsided. “And when I saw a picture of her at Elizabeth’s house earlier today, I thought she looked familiar, but the memory was one that just appeared, you know? Not a flashback, just a memory that resurfaced, like it’d never been gone. I knew I’d seen her before, I just couldn’t place where until now.”

“So where did you see her?”

“At the lab beneath the barn, which makes sense, because she was kidnapped with Elizabeth, except I don’t think she was a prisoner.”

“Well, we can sort all this out after I clean you up.”

We hobbled out of the church together. Trev’s car was waiting nearby. “Looks like you’ll be getting blood all over your pretty Jag.”

“I brought plastic.”

“You what?”

“Anna told me you were injured, so I brought plastic.”

“I can’t believe you right now.”

“I can’t believe you’re surprised.”

The plastic crinkled as I sat down. It stuck to my arms, covered in sweat and blood. I needed a shower. And a shot of tequila.

“Got any booze at your place?”

Trev slid in behind the wheel and started up the car. “What do you think?”

I grumbled as he took off.

“We’re a half hour out,” Anna said through the line. “You’re okay?”

“For now,” I said. “Bring booze.”

She relayed the message to Sam, who grunted in the background.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m going to need it. I’m banged up, remember? We can use it to numb the pain and clean the wound.”

“I can buy rubbing alcohol for that,” Anna said. “I think there’s some in the first-aid kit already.”

“Bring me booze,” I said again, and she finally relented.

I lay back on the bed in Trev’s hotel room and slammed my eyes shut. The room was spinning. And not because I was drunk this time.

“We have to go after them,” I said to Trev as he handed me a glass of water.

“I know.”

“They have Elizabeth.”

“I know.”

How had I lost her? She’d been so close. And then she was just gone.

Probably that had been their plan all along. Send in a bunch of Branch agents to distract me so they could nab Elizabeth without a problem.

Of course, I couldn’t compete with her mother. Elizabeth would probably have followed her anyway.

I took a gulp of water and set the cup down.

Trev stood at the end of the bed staring at me. “We should probably check out your wounds.”

“Are you trying to get me naked?”

He sighed. “You’re a lot more like Cas than you care to admit.”

I snorted. “Bullshit.”

“You’ve got the sarcasm down pat.”

I tugged off my shirt and tossed it aside. Trev had to help me with my jeans, which were almost glued to the wound in my leg, and I had to bite back a string of curse words while he doused the area with water to loosen some of the old blood. Then he quickly and none too gently ripped the material away.

“Fuck!”

“Sorry.”

The jeans met the shirt on the floor.

Trev pulled on a pair of black-framed glasses.

“Since when do you wear glasses?”

He shrugged. “About a month, I guess. It’s been getting worse lately. I think I might have worn glasses before the Branch, but the alterations, and all the shit they had us on, changed my sight for the better. Now that I’m not receiving treatments…” He gestured to the glasses. “Sight’s going again.”

He crouched beside the bed to examine my leg. “Didn’t go straight through, so that’s good. Seems to be a superficial wound.”

He stood up and came to the head of the bed to check out the wound in my shoulder.

“Knife wound,” I explained. “But just a slice.”

“Deep, though,” Trev said. “It’ll need stitches.” There was a second slice on my abdomen, on the lower right side. “That one, too, probably.”

“You got any pain meds?” I asked.

“Ibuprofen.”

“That’ll work.”

A half hour later, as promised, Anna, Sam, and Cas showed up. Cas whistled when he saw me lying in bed with hardly any clothes on. I told him to screw off.

Anna came straight over and wrapped her arms around me. I groaned from the pain, and she pulled back. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“We have to get Elizabeth.”

She nodded. “We will.”

“How bad is it?” Sam asked Trev.

“Not bad at all. He should be fine in a week or two.”

I sat upright and winced when the wound in my side pulled open. “I’ll be fine by tonight. When we go get Elizabeth.”

The longer she was out there, the farther away she’d be. And not just in physical distance. If she was with Riley right now, they could have already wiped her memories. Or brainwashed her into thinking I was the bad guy. Or worse… killed her. And I still didn’t know the answer to the question that’d been nagging me since I arrived here: Why Elizabeth? What had the Branch done to her?

And then it all clicked into place.

The Angel Serum.

The other night, when Elizabeth was cut by a shard of glass from the broken rum bottle. The cut was gone minutes later.

“Hey,” I said, the realization becoming clear. But my call was drowned out by Cas and Trev arguing. I yelled again, “Guys!”

They all turned to me. “Elizabeth was treated with the Angel Serum.”

“Yeah, we already figured that out,” Anna said.

I groaned. Sometimes I hated how smart she was.

“But,” she went on, “that doesn’t explain why they’d take her now, instead of killing her. Why do they want her back? If they created the Angel Serum once, they could do it again. They don’t need her.”

“And based on the audio logs for Patient 2124,” Trev said, “she was more trouble than she was worth.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think Elizabeth was Patient 2124.”

Trev frowned. “No?”

I got a flash of the girl in the cell in the lab, the one who’d whipped me with a bedsheet. I closed my eyes, tried to recall the whole memory. The girl had been skinny. Her eyes were narrow, pinched at the corners, as if there was a drop of Asian heritage somewhere in her past. Definitely not Elizabeth’s big, round eyes. I was such an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

Even though it wasn’t Elizabeth, I still felt like I knew that girl—I just couldn’t place her. The answer was right there, but my head was pounding and nothing made sense.

I lay back down, feeling like I might puke.

“Here.” Anna handed me a plastic cup.

I gave it a sniff. Vodka. I grinned at her and emptied it in one gulp.

“We can debate all this later,” she said. “Right now we need to patch you up.”

Anna, Sam, and Trev got to work while Cas flipped through the TV channels and settled on one of those
Real Housewives
shows. “This bitch is crazy,” he said, right before he stuffed his face with a handful of popcorn.

Once the wounds were cleaned up, and I’d downed two more shots of vodka, Trev came at me with a needle and suture thread. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The bullet wound wasn’t too bad, and had been deemed safe for
patching up. The knife wounds were another story. Trev started on the one on my shoulder. The pain was searing, like a hot poker in my skin, over and over again.

Fifteen seconds in, I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I gritted my teeth. Tried to internalize the pain and swallow it down before I ripped someone’s head off.

Trev was quick and efficient and had the first wound closed up in less than ten minutes. The cut on my abdomen was bigger, though, and would require more stitches. Twelve, it turned out.

“You really should stay off your feet for a few days,” Sam said as Anna bandaged up the last wound with gauze and tape.

I sat up when she finished, swallowed a grimace, and got to my feet. “I can rest once Elizabeth is safe.”

I had a sudden, driving need to find her, a need to protect her. It wasn’t like what I’d felt with Anna, when the Branch had programmed me to defend her at any cost. This felt different.

It wasn’t an automatic reaction, it was a conscious decision.