Where natural creatures needed a reason to kill, hunger or self-defense, Moore’s Hounds had been bred to hunt mage-flesh, to chase and to slaughter mercilessly. Freshly created, without inhibition, they turned on each other. The terrified staff, in fleeing, marked themselves as prey.

Creatures passed above him, hunting each other from one row of cages to another in a fatal game of tag. Noah had no idea where to find Dane, but he was sure Dane simply wouldn’t fit in the cage he’d been in. He picked a direction and ran.

At an aisle that cut across the rows, he stopped to flame a furred beast off of a screaming, struggling man. It was impossible to remain indifferent to the slaughter. The place had become an abattoir. A quick look around told him he was no closer to finding Dane than before. Everything looked the same—rows and rows of cages now open and spilling their half-mad contents into the aisles.

A shadow flickered in the corner of Noah’s eye and he threw himself aside to avoid being tackled from behind by the man he’d just saved. Suddenly, he was aware of more than one set of eyes on him. He’d drawn attention to himself with the kill and now, with his back to the cages, he was being stalked. The man who had seemed so human while fighting for his life was wild-eyed, and the teeth he bared were long and jagged.

“There’s no saving any of them. They’re gone . ” Lindsay’s voice rose up in the back of his head.

It was hard for Noah to override his natural instinct to protect his own kind. But once he did, he wasn’t afraid anymore. Just sad. A wave of fire rolled out and swept away everything around him.

Through the fire that cleaned the aisle ahead of him, Noah saw what had eluded him before. He’d gone the wrong way, his body automatically trying to go back the way it had been brought in. But this way there were computers and workstations, and other cages. Different cages. Once he had Dane, he could sweep the whole lab clean. He followed his fire, his bare feet seared by the heat held in the concrete floor.

Chapter Fifteen

Without his magic, Dane had been left to rely on his body and he was surprised to find out how efficient it was. The break Lourdes had given him had allowed him to become as close to perfectly functional as he could be without his magic. While he couldn’t hear Jonas’s heartbeat, the man’s breathing—and his humming—came through loud and clear. Sure, it was classical music, Baroque even, but Dane still wanted to ring Jonas’s head off the bars half the day.

When Jonas was quiet, the techs’ and scientists’ conversations were audible. Dane was slowly piecing things together and receiving a crash course in magical genetic engineering. Moore was using some hodgepodge of runes and cells and science so she could inject the essence of being a Hound into her victims. They had to have the potential for magic first, but the treatment would cause a full manifestation.

They were bringing in another batch of “recruits”, as Greer called them. Dane had no idea how Moore was finding them, had no idea that magic still ran so plentifully in the blood of mundane humans. It made his skin crawl to see the limp bodies loaded into cages and primed for treatment. Not all of them survived the preparation and the treatment brought fatalities as well.

Dane had seen the failures when they were rolled past on gurneys, on the way to autopsy. One had died of “uncontrolled growth-plate expansion”. That was what Greer had said. To Dane, it looked like the man’s bones had exploded out of his flesh in all directions. Another spawned half a head from the neck and a leg from the middle of the back. Some were so deformed—even to the point of being puddles of flesh in buckets—that Dane couldn’t work out what had gone wrong.

Every day, he watched for any sign of a flaw in the routine around him, something he could exploit and get free that way. Someone would come for him but he wouldn’t be Cyrus’s first priority. If he wanted out soon, he’d have to do it himself. All he’d managed to determine was that the locks on the cages were electronic, controlled from the consoles in the lab area, and no one made mistakes.

His own cage was locked with bolts and padlocks, maybe even with magic; Jonas’s cage looked the same. Moore wasn’t trusting their containment to the main system; she’d learned from his escape with Lindsay months ago in New York. He was certain it would take more than one cooperative person to unlock his cage—Lindsay couldn’t just ensorcel a single low-level tech into opening it up.

“How are we today?” Greer came in and headed straight for him, looking positively sunny. She always came by, sometimes more than once a day. “Sorry I missed dinner last night.” It was surreal, the way she spoke to him like he was a roommate or a friend.

“You didn’t miss much.” Dane talked to exercise his mind more than anything else. Jonas hadn’t been a good conversationalist before his brain was scrambled, he was worse now. “Chicken again.”

“I know.” Greer gave him a sad look. “Beef shipment next week.” She was about to say something else when a gray-faced soldier came racing in like there were Hounds behind him.

Dane wanted to hear, but she stepped away and the soldier whispered in her ear. It had to be bad; she went as white as her coat. She sent the soldier away with a gesture and hurried off to confer with her colleagues. He leaned against the front of his cage and watched.

“Problems?” he asked, when her panicked scurrying brought her close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice.

“One of you has terrible manners,” Greer snapped. There were tasers and sedative guns racked on the wall nearby. She clipped a small taser to her belt. Dane stifled his laugh so he wouldn’t tempt her to use it on him. He’d seen her in a mood before. Working for Moore suited the flip side of her personality.

“That’s definitely Jonas,” he said solemnly. “My kids would never misbehave.”

“We’ll see about that.” Greer’s look was purely venomous, and Dane missed having his fangs to bare.

“You should be hoping they might,” she added. “When we get a stable cultivar, we’ll put the primary stock in storage.” She left him with that and headed down the aisles of cages, off to whatever crisis was distracting her from work.

Dane tested the cage again. Every day, he felt weaker. He didn’t know what storage meant, but it was going to be worse than this. If he thought for a second that Moore would buy it, he’d take Jonas’s old place in order to get out, but there was no way he could mean it enough to pass any test she’d give. Lourdes might lie for him, but Moore wouldn’t be satisfied with her word alone, not if she’d taken Jonas away.

Snarling with frustration, he pushed off of the front bars hard enough to bang his head on the back ones.

“Let it go.” Jonas was slumped against the near side of his cage, staring at the back wall. “At least they might put us to sleep after this. I can’t sleep.”

“You sleep all the time,” Dane reminded him. Jonas looked fine on the outside, but he wasn’t right in the head. Some magic healed the spirit as well as the body. Neither of them was that fortunate.

“Sleep tires me out. I’m always running.”

“Well, go to sleep in your sleep,” Dane said reasonably. Being cruel to Jonas wasn’t fun anymore.

Moore fucking ruined everything. “Close your eyes and dream about sleep.” If Jonas slept, he’d be quiet, and Dane could eavesdrop.

There was a rumble as gurneys came in the wrong door. Dane shuffled forward on his knees to see.

Bodies. Mature Hounds in uniform. The trainers didn’t put uniforms on them until they were reliable.

Had the others tried an assault on the place and failed? There weren’t that many bodies. Dane’s heart beat so hard he was afraid it was going to damage itself. It slowed as the gurneys came closer, and his fear turned to malicious glee.