Page 77 of Triumph of the Wolf
Had Duncan caught up with him? Or was Lykos trying tolureDuncan to him? Into his trap?
“Do you still feel that way?” I didn’t want to linger and chat further but also didn’t know what to do with Izzy. Would she help me find my allies? Or club me in the back of my head when I was distracted?
“I…” Izzy looked from me to the cage and back. “You could have left me there.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever this place is…” She looked toward a distant wall in the direction where the Space Needle had been visible in the night sky. “Even if I’d escaped from the cage somehow, which didn’t look likely after however many days I was stuck in there, I don’t think I could have escapedthisplace.”
“Maybe not.” I shrugged, realizing I had no idea how to get back either. I didn’t even have a magnet to wave at frog houses if we found one in the garden.
Maybe when I rejoined Duncan, we could find Abrams and wring the location of the exitportal out of his throat.
“My daughter needs me.” Izzy’s gaze slid to me. “I can’t… vendetta right now. Maybe, as a responsible mom, I never should have taken up that mission.”
Had time in here to think about it, had she?
“Being a responsible parent is tough sometimes.” I knew that well.
“Yes.”
A distant accented voice reached our ears, raised to carry throughout the building. “Show yourself, Drakon! Come up here to face me, or I’ll kill the female wolves. I’ll killyourfemale. We have her, you know.”
“The hell he does,” I growled.
Abrams sounded like he was at the far end of the building, back in the direction we’d entered from, but in the maze of vats and machinery, it was hard to tell.
Wherever Duncan was, he didn’t answer.
“Will you help me find my friends and get out of here?” I asked Izzy.
Whether it was wise or not, I offered her the rifle. Right now, she couldn’t likely turn back into a wolf, and without her fangs and claws, she was little more than a naked human woman.
“Yes,” Izzy said firmly, taking the weapon. “I’dloveto shoot someone.”
“As long as it’s not me.”
“I’ve learned my lesson on that. Just being near you is trouble.” She grimaced, probably having figured out along the way that she’d only been kidnapped because Abrams’s men had been after me. “If anything, I should stay far, far away from you.”
“Isn’t your home in Arizona? I hear it’s nice.”
Izzy snorted. “Aside from getting cactus thorns in your paw pads and melting under the unrelenting summer heat.”
A clang and a muffled grunt floated to our ears, just audible over the gurgling of a nearby vat. Had that been Bolin?
“Follow me.” I would have to trust Izzy at my back and hope I wasn’t being a fool.
Heading in the direction of the noises, I turned down an aisle I’d already visited, but I halted after only a step. Two of those awful bugs were in the center. They swiveled toward me, vapor puffing out of their orifices.
I reached for the gas mask hanging around my neck, but Izzy didn’t have any such protection. And who knew what drugs already bogged down her system.
“We’ll go that way.” I pointed toward another aisle that ran between hulking machinery and vats linked by thick pipes.
The bugs skittered toward us. Izzy eyed them and didn’t argue, jogging off after me.
Not far down the aisle, we reached another open area with counters filled with computer monitors and keyboards as well as lab equipment. The spot also held the first ladder I’d encountered, metal rungs leading up to a section of the catwalk, a railing running along only one side of it.
“This place can’t be OSHA approved,” I muttered.
