Page 46 of Bizarre Bonds
Thankfully, it’s a short flight to Rollick’s estate. We land before I’ve literally crawled out of my skin, and the airfield is close enough that we can simply flit through the shadows to reach the house, with Jonah following on his mortal legs.
As we weave through the expansive home to the stairs that lead to the basement, my skin starts creeping with a different sort of restlessness. Despite my best efforts, flickers of images pass through my head—metal walls, searing lights, harsh voices alongside the prick and jab of blades and needles.
The room down below isn’t like the lab where the humans who captured me poked and prodded me and all those other shadowkind, I remind myself. Rollick is one of us. He’s trying to stop these beings from getting into trouble, not looking to torment them.
But his mention of the humans who did revel in torment is still pinging around my head. My nerves stay on edge all the way down into the white-walled research room.
One of Rollick’s assistants is waiting there, tapping on a computer keyboard. At our entrance, she stiffens. “Sir, the subject that was farthest advanced… is gone.”
Rollick grimaces. “I’m sorry to hear that. Let’s see the one that’s next worst off.”
Gone? Does she meandead?
What could be killing shadowkind down here? Rollick wouldn’t let anyone hurt the creatures.
The woman goes to the stack of cages and opens one near the top. She coaxes out a creature that currently looks like a huge dragonfly with feathered wings.
In the first moment as it glides down the floor, I have no idea what Rollick could have meant about it being “worst off.” Then, as it lands, the impact sets its wings fluttering—and tendrils of smoky essence drift off them. A couple of feathers outright disintegrate into the air.
Peri gasps. “What’s wrong with it? It doesn’t look injured. It doesn’tfeelinjured.”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine,” Rollick says. “The creatures that came out of those odd rifts the longest ago… Their bodies appear to be breaking down. Maybe it’s the overall instability from all the morphing they’re doing, and they simply can’t hold their essence together after too many transformations. We’ve attempted various approaches that work on actual wounds, and nothing?—”
The words burst from my throat before I know I’m going to say them. “You have to let them go!”
Everyone’s head swivels toward me. Hail’s lip curls disdainfully. “What are you going on about now, fur-brain?”
As if he wasn’t grumbling about the cages when he first heard about them. He just likes to sneer at whatever he can.
I can’t stop a tremor from rippling through my limbs. My fox ears flick in and out of being through my hair. “Let the creatures go back to the rift. Back to the shadow realm. They can’t die there. They shouldn’t behere.”
They shouldn’t be trapped in cages while they fall apart. They shouldn’t dissolve into nothing surrounded by an alien world of iron and light.
Rollick steps toward me with his hands held up in appeal. “We’ve tried sending them back. They don’t want to go. Anyway we send them, they come right back. Not even supernatural compulsion will stick.”
No. It isn’t right.
I shake my head, and my whole body moves with it. “Maybe now that they’re breaking—maybe they’ll go now. You have to try!”
“It isn’t that easy to transport these beings to the nearest rift. By the time we get them there, it could already be too late for some. I’m trying to save them right here.”
My ears protrude again to lie flat back on my skull. “What if you can’t find a way to make them better? Will you let them go then? Leaving them trapped here for the last small bit of their lives—it’s horrible.”
How many beings did I consign to that horrific fate because of the experimenters’ tricks and traps? I never wanted to be part of that kind of awfulness again.
I want to make everyone jump and laugh, maybe scare them a little but only enough so they enjoy the relief afterward. These strange beings have been nothing but confused since they came through their weird rifts.
And with all my foxy powers, there’s nothing I can do to solve that problem.
Rollick meets my gaze solemnly. “I don’t want them to live out their last few hours in misery either, my friend. We’ll do what we can for them, and if it doesn’t seem there’s anythingtobe done, we can let them roam at least a little.”
Raze’s voice comes out raw in its gruffness. “We’d still need to make sure they don’t hurt anyone before they go.”
What about the creatures? They don’t deserve to be hurt either.
I shake again as if I can dispel the collision of twisted thoughts and memories inside me. They squeeze tight as silver chains around my body.
Rollick isn’t budging. Maybe there really isn’t anything more he could offer.
