Page 82 of Witch Unbound
CORA
The room beyond the wooden door was definitely a lab. The people in the glass chambers were human. At least most of them were.
“The children.” Ursula rushed toward a chamber to our left where two kids were floating peacefully. There were no electrodes or anything else taped to their bodies. No connection of any kind.
The scent of old blood tickled my senses. No idea how I knew it was old blood; I just did. I followed the smell toward a white screen stretched across the back of the room.
“No, Cora. No.” Wren hugged me tighter.
But I had to see. I tugged back the screen to reveal a gurney loaded with…Oh, God.
Body parts were strewn across metal. Pieces that made no cohesive sense, all except one part, with wide-open green eyes that looked up at me as if to say, why? Why did you do this to me?
“Jamie…” I backed away from what was left of Leana’s lover. “Fuck.”
“Look at this.” Rune called me over. “This stuff is alive.” He tapped the glass on a chamber and the liquid rippled and surged toward his finger. “And look, the human has gills and talons.”
“They’re changing,” Ursula said.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Faerie,” Wren said. He clambered off me and stood in front of the liquid-filled chamber. “This is Faerie.”
“What are you doing here?” A wiry older man appeared by the screen.
Crap, there must have been a door back there.
“Who are you?” There was panic in his eyes now. “You’re not with them.”
Rune and I exchanged glances a moment before I made the jump to the new arrival’s side.
I grabbed him by his nape. “What the fuck is happening here?”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Wait. Wait. I’m not with the Order. They made me come here.”
The Order? What the fuck? “This is an Order operation?”
He began to tremble. “I don’t want to be here. I really don’t. Can you get me out?”
He was human. Not a threat.
I released him. “What’s happening to these people?”
He adjusted his collar and looked warily from me to the others and back again. “It’s called the changeling process, but it’s accelerated and focused. There’s some gene sequencing involved and then…well, Faerie does the rest.”
“The liquid?” Rune asked.
The man nodded. “Sap from the dead forest. It’s powerful.”
“Why?” Ursula asked. “Why is the Order doing this?”
His mouth turned down and a darkness entered his eyes. “I don’t know.” He said it as if he’d been asking himself the same question. “I just work here. They want anomalies. They want me to create them using the… materials they provide.”
Materials as in people.
A low whine drifted out from behind the screen, and the man looked over his shoulder, fear etching lines across his face. “Oh no. It’s awake.”
“What’s awake?”
