Chapter Nine
A nurse came and took Danny to get ready for the tests leaving Chris at a loose end. He called Will, letting him know they were making some progress.
“Good, because there’s a lot of pressure coming to bear on Eden. Dale County doesn’t want to believe that Danny isn’t here, and Mitch is getting hassled from inside Eden too, from some of the business owners and bigger families. He thinks there’s something off about it. These are people who usually wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a human drama like this, but they’re all over it, telling Mitch the guilty party should be handed over.”
“What does he think is causing it?”
“He’s not sure. There’ve been rumblings since he took over, so this might be just an extension of that.”
“Or?”
“The Alpha we’re looking for might be pulling strings.”
“Is that likely? Wouldn’t he be lying low right now?”
“Whoever this bastard is, he’s playing a game, and he’s good at it. I took another run at Antoine to see if I could get a name but I’m beginning to think he doesn’t know who this guy is.”
“Which makes sense. This Omega trafficking ring is secretive. They wouldn’t trust someone like Antoine with their identities. And there are plenty of ways a shifter with influence could stay out of the public eye.”
“The lab got back about Danny’s clothes. Trace amounts of ash but no gasoline. So it makes it hard to prove he was the arsonist.” Which they knew he wasn’t.
“Good. That, combined with Doctor Hollis’ testimony might be enough to put Danny in the clear.”
“You really care about getting him off, don’t you?”
“His whole life has just been torn apart. Dying for someone else’s crime on top of that, just because he was unlucky enough to be born a wolf, doesn’t sit right with me. The shoot first, don’t bother asking questions approach has never sat right with me.”
“That’s humans for you.”
“Speaking of humans…” He filled Will in on the kind of experiments the hospital had done.
“Hell, that’s the stuff of nightmares. I’d heard rumors about that sort of thing a decade or so ago, but I thought that’s all it was. There were stories of unwanted shifter babies disappearing from government records. They didn’t place shifter kids in foster homes but none of the secure facilities have ever admitted to having any.”
“Makes you wonder where they all are. Doctor Hollis made it sound like Cindy was the exception, giving Danny a home, but he definitely wasn’t their only test subject.”
As he spoke, the scream they’d heard earlier came again. Ending the call with Will and promising to let him know as soon as they were ready to make their next move, he decided to do a little investigation.
The one thing he couldn’t work out was what the hospital was doing now. Could they still be treating shifter children? Unlikely, since government policy had undergone radical changes in the years since.
He found a door leading downstairs, but it was locked with a swipe key access. Backtracking along the corridor, he smiled at a lady with a cleaning cart moving from room to room and paused at a water dispenser for a drink. On his way back down the corridor, he liberated her swipe card from where it hung on the cart.
Holding it over the reader at the door, he grinned when it turned green and he pushed through. As soon as the door closed, he realized that not only was it heavier than it should be, it was some sort of reinforced steel. It was also soundproofed, the noise from the corridor dropping to almost nothing to even his shifter ears. He wondered why they’d bothered since it was clear they could hear sounds from the basement through the floors.
He climbed down the stairs, peering out into the corridor beyond. It was empty and he couldn’t hear anyone walking around. Slipping out into the corridor, he followed along, seeing rooms labeled as kitchen, storeroom, bathroom. Nothing untoward.
Ahead of him, he could hear noise. Lots of noise. It told him they had soundproofed the ceiling above but it hadn’t been enough to block the tortured screams.
As he got closer, he could made out crying, groaning, and shouting. A cacophony of voices not audible from upstairs. Then that scream again, piercingly loud, and almost inhuman. He waited for someone to respond to it, but no one did. He started to suspect there wasn’t anyone down here except the poor creatures making the noise.
The next corridor, running perpendicular, contained a series of rooms with solid doors. This was where the noise was coming from. They looked like prison cells, each door with a hatch in the top half and a slot at the bottom.
Stopping at the first one, he opened it and peered inside. It was dark enough that, at first, he couldn’t see anything. Then he could make out a shape on the floor, curled up and rocking back and forth. Another few seconds and that shape became that of a young man, close to Danny’s age, moaning in agony, seeming unable to stay still.
Feeling sick to his stomach, he shut the hatch and tried the next door. Another pitiful figure, this one shouting unintelligibly, over and over.
The third hatch was the screamer, a young woman, with gouges all over her body from her own fingernails. Chris hurriedly closed the hatch, forcing himself to check the rest of the rooms before he retreated, back to the stairs and up.
The cleaner was only a little further down the corridor. He stooped down when he reached her and straightened with the card in his hand.
“I think you dropped this,” he said. She took it with a grateful smile. He smiled back and kept moving, the smile falling from his face as soon as he was out of view. Now he knew where the rest of the shifters they experimented on were being kept. Were they like Danny, trapped in human form, unable to shift? Would that be Danny’s fate, to lose his mind in agonizing pain? It was too horrible an outcome to contemplate.
The room Danny was taken to was eerily familiar. Sterile and cool. He donned the gown they’d given him, lay up on the table and watched as Doctor Hollis put a needle in his arm.
“Just a small sedative now,” the doctor said, and a rush of cool liquid into his arm was followed by a heavy sleep.
He woke on his back, staring up at the ceiling, a blanket covering him up to his chin. Blinking, he looked left and right.
“Don’t get up just yet, Danny. Another ten minutes should do it. Doctor Hollis had to do quite the battery of tests, a lumbar puncture, a joint aspiration, and a bone marrow biopsy.”
He was happy to comply, letting the sleepy sensation wash over him.
When he woke again, Doctor Hollis was sitting by his bedside.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.
“Tired.”
“Not too sore?”
He moved around experimentally, feeling a dull ache in his back and hip. “No, not really.”
“Good. Tell me, Danny. Have you been having pains in your joints?”
“Yeah, I have. How did you know?”
“For how long?”
“I guess they began about a year and a half ago. They only started to get troublesome in the last six months and then really bad the past few weeks. Our family doctor did some tests but he couldn’t find anything wrong. Cindy was going to contact you, but I guess she never got the chance. Do you know what’s causing it?”
“Sadly, Danny, I do. It’s a side-effect of your childhood infection. It appears the disease has taken root in the bone marrow and is expressing a mineral that deposits around the body, mainly in the joints, causing intense pain. We’re working on a treatment for it, a way to eliminate it from the body.”
“Then I know I’m in good hands. The tests, will they show what we need them to?”
“Oh, yes. Without a doubt. I’ll go and speak to Officer Ferris now, with your permission. I’ve contacted the hospital’s lawyer. We haven’t had a case like this yet, but I’m confident we’ll get you out the other side.”
He rested a hand on Danny’s arm. “I just wanted to say again how sorry I am for your loss. Your aunt was a strong, brave woman who loved you deeply and wanted what was best for you. I have always kept that in the forefront of my mind.”