CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Accessory… to Crime

The helicopter hovered over the prison. Pricina did everything she could to shield the people nearby from the chopper’s sound waves announcing our arrival. I was going to make some noise, but I didn’t think I could spare the space in my brain to stop anyone from hearing me, so I whispered to Rhuk to help me. I finished securing my helmet and left the front seat. In the back, I opened the sliding door and was stunned at how little wind I felt. I grabbed the rope with the grappling hook and I jumped.

It was a free fall of ten feet or more to the roof of the building, but I landed nicely. I secured the rope with the hook around a chimney and remembering what Rhuk had told me about the floor plan of the building, I positioned myself above Christian’s room. Grabbing the rope between my fingers, I slid over the edge of the building.

His window was in sight. I bounced with my toes against the side of the building. Gaining some speed and force in my jumps, I prepared to kick the window out. Naturally, I would not be able to accomplish such a thing with my weight alone since the window was barred. I did some work on the matter that made the window, freeing the bars and glass from their holds, by changing their sizes. It was only the slightest difference, a centimeter on all sides, but that was enough. I kicked it and the bars fell to the ground in a grid. On my next leap, I kicked the window again and the glass came out in one chunk onto the floor of Christian’s cell, where it instantly shattered because it couldn’t hold the position I’d asked it to hold for long.

I swung into the room.

It was a larger room than I expected. It had a bunk bed and a toilet, but also places for people to sit. Christian obviously had company often. I rushed to the bed to wake him, but I couldn’t see well. Lifting my visor, I saw that both bunk beds were empty before I got there.

Damn it. Now I would have to tear the whole building apart looking for him.

“Easy girl,” Rhuk whispered in my ear. “Just go quietly. I’ll look for him while you get out of the cellblock. It’s unlikely that he’s here since it’s so quiet.”

I tried the doorknob of Christian’s cell. It wasn’t locked.

The prison hallway did not look anything like what movies had led me to expect. Each cell door was a whole door, except for a window inside. I started looking in the cells. They were dark, doubly dark with my visor down.

“I told you, he’s not going to be in any of these,” Rhuk explained. “They don’t interrogate him during the day. They want to keep the violence of their interrogations a secret from the other prisoners, so he is probably far from the cell block.”

I made quick work of the hallway and headed down a flight of stairs into a large hallway that led to the main atrium. Recalling the map, I pointed to the different passages and labeled them: the woodworking area, the cafeteria, the yard, the showers, and the administration wing.

That was it. The prison didn’t have a solitary confinement area. It was meant for low-level offenders. They had to be doing the interrogation in the administration wing.

“Have you still not found him, Rhuk?” I asked, rounding a corner.

“There are two men who are being interrogated right now in separate rooms. I’m sorry, but the minerals around them are stupid even though I’ve repeatedly shown them Christian’s picture. It seems like neither one of the men has Christian’s face.”

“It’s not a problem,” I replied, picking up my pace. “We’ll rescue both of them.”

Entering the administration wing, it was dark. There was a lot of glass, showing a bullpen where secretaries and security officers had their desks, but further down the hall, the doors didn’t have windows in them.

“They’re in opposite directions,” Rhuk informed me.

“I’ll take this one,” I said, taking the closer of the two choices.

I tried opening the door, felt it was locked, faked unlocking it, and found myself in a bright room where a man was tied to a chair. His face had been pulverized, his eyes and lips fat with swelling. Blood trickled from his mouth, his ears, and gnashes in his dark hair.

It wasn’t Christian. Christian had a particular build and I was used to the way his skeleton looked, and this man, though sitting, obviously had a shorter torso. It was so easy to see after my training on how to manipulate matter.

He was being thrashed by two prison guards. To the left, another man stood… watching, perhaps asking the questions. He wore a suit. The prison guards weren’t important. I focused on the man in the suit.

He was young, under thirty, blond with his face shaved so closely that it seemed like a warning about him. This man knew how to use a razor. Something about his face was vaguely familiar as I examined its corners. He wore thin framed silver glasses that covered his icy blue eyes. My gaze traveled downward and I saw a name tag perched over the pocket of his suit coat. I saw at once that his tag should have been on a white lab coat, but it wasn’t. It read ‘Dr. Bobby Hilliar’. I knew at once that this was Dr. Hilliar’s successor, if not his son, then a relative of some sort. Dr. Bobby had taken on the position and was now torturing immortals in the good doctor’s place. I couldn’t say I was surprised.

Christian was right. Once someone learned that immortal people were in the world, their curiosity could not be satiated. Not by anything.

I stared at the knot of men and they stared silently back at me.

Finally, the man tied to the chair spoke and said, “Is that the next step? A sword through my chest?”

My hand went to cover my mouth, but my helmet was in the way. He saw the sword! He should not have been able to see it. He was a second level.

One of the guards came toward me “Who the hell are you?”

As he spoke, I reminded myself of how Christian and Brandon looked on the roof of Christian’s cottage when the mercenaries took me away. I rewrote the scene. Instead of hiding in a room, I was on the roof too. As we lay on the shingles, my elbow brushed Christian’s. I glanced over and saw the look in his gray-green eyes before he pulled the trigger. He didn’t doubt what he had to do.

At that moment, I gained unwavering conviction, and it was all mine. The burden of eternity stated that anyone could be immortal if they could gain control of the Red Forest. They could do it without hurting Christian or this man. People like Dr. Hilliar were poisonous.

The guard came closer, raising his gun and filling my view.

My eyes became like Christian’s, eyes that showed no fear because there was none. These people couldn’t hurt me. If he shot me, the King of the Red Forest would heal me. They couldn’t do experiments on me or even contain me. I was completely free.

I kicked him in the throat.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

The guard fell to the floor in a fit of coughs. The other guard reached for his gun which was in a holster on the other side of the room. I beat him to the gun, undid the safety with my mind, and shot him in the chest.

I aimed at the last man standing—Dr. Bobby.

He put his hands in the air like he was surrendering. “Take him,” he said, indicating their prisoner with a resigned sigh. “I don’t need him.”

I shook my head. I didn’t believe him and kept the barrel of the gun pointed level with Dr. Bobby’s skull. Without speaking to Rhuk, I spoke to the duct tape and zip ties that bound their prisoner and made them go limp. The man shook his arms free and painfully stood up.

“Come with me,” I said, without raising my visor.

He didn’t know me, but he stumbled over all the same, ready to deal with the devil he didn’t know. I offered for him to use me as his crutch and he fell onto my shoulder. At his full height, the man was only an inch taller than I was, which made him easier to move about than if he had been a man of Christian’s height. Together, I maneuvered us to the door.

I noticed the other guard that I’d kicked in the throat. He had mostly recovered and was waiting to make his move.

I shot him in the leg and without pausing to even listen to him scream, I moved to take aim at Dr. Bobby. To my dismay, he had ducked down behind a desk and I saw the tails of his suit coat as he slipped out a back door.

I turned away. There was nothing he could do.

I pulled the man I had captured out into the hall. “Which way, Rhuk?”

“Straight down the hall. At the end,” Rhuk answered in a quiet hush.

The man in my arms was straining to move at all. I pushed him through a set of doors on the way to Christian, but I couldn’t take him with me. I lowered him against a wall. One look said he wasn’t strong enough to heal himself instantly.

“I know what your problem is,” I said without showing him my face. “I can’t take you all the way out just yet. I have to get the other man who is a prisoner like you. I came here to free him and my freeing you is just your luck. If you can make it outside to my helicopter, I’ll take you with me.”

His eyes looked dead as he regarded me through my helmet. He didn’t trust me at all. He was going to run as soon as my back was turned. My gaze fell on the bruises on his hands. The bruises indicated not only that he had been tied, but also that he had done a lot of punching. He was probably faking how immobile he was so I would leave him as dead weight.

His wish was granted.

I stood up, gave him a little salute, and ran down the hall.

When I got to the last door, I jiggled the handle, when thirteen bullets went through the door before I could open it. Four of them hit me. Just like King Christian promised me, I barely acknowledged what happened before I couldn’t feel it anymore.

Dr. Bobby had obviously called his friends and warned them I was coming.

Unconcerned, I opened the door. This was unlike the last room. Christian was not in a chair but strapped down on a hospital bed. I couldn’t observe more than that before the bullets started flying. I hit the floor and took cover behind a line of hospital crash carts.

“Rhuk, I thought they were only interrogating?”

“It escalated quickly,” it replied.

“Whatever. Jam their guns,” I said with my mouth while I spoke with my mind directly to the straps binding Christian. I didn’t ask them to undo themselves. I asked them to snap in half.

Peeking over the crash carts, I counted seven figures surrounding Christian. None of them were wearing guard uniforms. These guys wore splatter gear. There was blood everywhere—sprayed everywhere. Their guns had stopped firing and they worked feverishly trying to fix the problem, screaming and swearing all the way.

One of them noticed Christian’s restraints had fallen away and was stupidly holding a broken strap.

I stared at Christian. He hadn’t fluttered an eyelash. Was he so messed up that he couldn’t move?

I let the expression on my face go dead as I stood up and deliberately shot everyone who hadn’t taken cover. It didn’t matter if my aim was good or not. The bullets did as they were told and adjusted themselves slightly to make me hit my marks better, which meant I shot four people in the head without hesitation. I should have shot everyone in the last room.

Three of the scientists huddled behind Christian’s hospital bed. They were pleading for mercy, yelling insults, and screaming. It was so noisy, that I wondered if there were only three of them back there.

My gun was out of bullets, but that wasn’t a problem. I picked up a new gun and instructed Rhuk to unjam it.

Without saying a word, I approached the bed and saw Christian. He was cut everywhere. What had they been doing to him that they had been randomly cutting him everywhere? They can’t have been trying to collect his blood. It was all over the walls and the floor.

He was also naked, except for a blue sheet that covered his groin. He was just like the Other Christian, lying naked on a raised bed with something tying him down.

The three remaining scientists were making so much noise that I remembered what I was supposed to be doing. I went around Christian’s hospital bed and shot all three of them in a row without blinking, execution-style.

“I suppose there are locks on the wheels to stop this bed from moving,” I said to Rhuk. “Undo the locks.”

“Aren’t you going to fall all over him and cry, Beth?” Rhuk asked softly.

I turned my back on Christian, still bleeding, and leaned my bottom against the edge of the bed. “Nah. I can’t touch him. His blood circulates but the heart in his chest doesn’t pump his blood. He has no pulse, even when he’s fine. I can’t check to make sure he’s okay and I can’t see this. Let’s just stay calm for a minute. Can you search the area to see if any of his organs are in bottles nearby?”

“Sure thing,” Rhuk said.

I breathed and wished I could remove my helmet. It was very hot and I was feeling like I couldn’t stand another minute with it on. I glanced around the room and spotted two cameras. I immediately killed the wiring inside them with two angry blinks. That was an easier thing for me to do than search the area for organs.

I pulled my helmet off and, using my mouth, I asked, “Are there any freezers nearby? I especially want you to check those.”

“Who are you talking to, darling?” Christian asked from over my shoulder.

Whirling around, I saw he wasn’t on the bed. He was standing beside it with the blue sheet tied around his middle like a sarong. Was the Other Christian already there?

The cuts in his chest and arms were already vanishing. The blood spilled from a particularly vicious cut in his throat was diving back into his body like a slasher scene in a movie played in reverse. And his eyes, those gray/green eyes, had that look in them like he knew exactly what he had to do. He didn’t say anything to me, just pushed the bed so it was no longer between us, and pulled me into his arms.

“Kiss me,” he said, right before he did so.

His lips were cold as they came down on mine. I loved him so completely, and yet it very much felt like I was kissing a dead person.

I pulled off. “We have to get out of here,” I said, hefting my helmet back over my head. I grasped Christian’s hand in mine and started pulling, ever so relieved that I didn’t have to wheel him out of the prison on a gurney.

Speaking in my helmet, I said, “Rhuk? Did you find any organs?”

“None.”

“Where’s buddy?”

“He’s outside, cowering around a corner,” Rhuk replied.

“Who are you talking to?” Christian asked as he allowed himself to be pulled around by me.

I didn’t answer him. I just needed to get him out to the yard. Pricina could pick us up from any place that was nearby.

“You should use the same exit the other man used,” Rhuk advised.

Immediately, I saw what Rhuk was talking about. That guy had broken off an entire door handle, security pad, and all. He could see my sword and he could move matter.

I used the door. Christian and I stepped out into the yard.

Pricina wasn’t shining any of the helicopter’s lights, but she saw us when I waved and stopped the movement of the blades. Without them moving, she could drop the chopper down in an area as small as a parking space. The chopper didn’t fall heavily. She lowered it softly with her mind.

Moving to the back of the chopper, she helped Christian and I climb aboard and then returned to the pilot’s chair. She didn’t need to be there to move the helicopter. It was just a good seat.

After I covered Christian with an emergency blanket, I looked around for the man I’d rescued. I spotted him across the yard. I waved to him.

He frowned and shook his head. We must have freaked him out when our chopper blades stopped moving, but still landed slowly. Shouldn’t he have known what that meant? That we were like him? That we were allies instead of enemies?

Who knew what he thought?

With mild regret, I slid the helicopter door closed and Pricina lifted it off the ground. What did that guy matter anyway?

I sat next to Christian in the back and took my helmet off.

I put my arms around him and struggled to explain my relief that he was safe. Whatever had happened, he was not dead. He had kept himself alive! I felt like I’d been given a new life too.