Page 58 of Storm to Victory
Blinding, burning pain tore across Fieran’s stomach, and he screamed around the leather even as he clamped his teeth on it. He arched against Dacha’s arm, and Dacha leaned even more weight onto him to keep him in place.
His magic jolted within his chest, rising to defend him. Yet even that sent a secondary flare of pain through him, swirling with more nausea and dizziness.
Then Dacha cut off his magic. He remained frozen as he was, his shoulders hunched, his breathing ragged.
Fieran slumped on the table, also gasping for breath as he tried to conquer his lurching stomach. His head pounded painfully at the temples while a lingering ache remained in his chest and across the wound.
After another moment of catching his breath, he turned his head and spat out the leather. “I always wondered what that would feel like. Being burned with the magic of the ancient kings. Haven’t you? Wondered, I mean.”
Dacha pushed away, swiveling so that Fieran couldn’t see his face. But his tone was hard, his shoulders stiff. “No.”
That was Dacha’sDo not ask; I will not tell youtone.
Fieran snapped his mouth shut on the rest of his chatter and breathed deeply, still trying to settle his stomach.
Dacha moved across the room toward the white cupboards and stainless-steel countertops that filled two of the walls. He opened and shut cupboards and drawers. “I will see if I can find bandages.”
Fieran eased first onto an elbow, then all the way upright so that he was sitting on the steel surgical table. Like Dacha, he wore only his olive-green army-issue undershorts. The gash across his stomach was an angry red slash, but it wasn’t bleeding anymore. He was, however, still dribbling small rivulets of blood from the various pokes on his chest. “And maybe some clothes while you’re at it.”
Dacha halted, glanced down at himself, and sighed. “Why is it that every time I am captured, my captors insist on taking my clothes? The trolls, at least, left me the dignity of trousers.”
Fieran grimaced and swung his legs, working some of the stiffness out of them before he tried standing. “With the way we were laid out like frogs for dissection, I’m just glad they even left us our undershorts.”
Dacha made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat as he went back to searching the cupboards.
Fieran pointed to where the two white-coated men lay still and very dead on the white-tiled floor. “I suppose we could always take their clothes.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Dacha grimaced, shook his head, and turned back to the cupboard he was searching.
“Yeah, I agree. I’d rather make this escape underdressed.” Fieran scowled down at the two dead men. Books and moving pictures made it sound so simple to merely take a dead man’s clothes for making escapes like this, but death was a rather messy affair. He was as reluctant as his dacha to put on some dead man’s soiled clothing.
Dacha gave a triumphant grunt before he pulled something from a cupboard. He tossed one of the folded white lab coats at Fieran.
Fieran caught it, nearly tipping over as a wave of dizziness washed over him. He had to press a hand onto the surgical table beside him to steady himself for a moment before he could shake out the lab coat and shrug it on.
It didn’t have any buttons or a belt to close it, but it was better than nothing.
Dacha pulled on his own white lab coat before he returned to looking through the cupboards and drawers.
“Where do you think we are?” Fieran eased to his feet, keeping a hand on the surgical table to steady himself. The room still tilted somewhat, his stomach churning with nausea. But he stayed upright and didn’t pass out, so that was something.
“Based on the presence of those machines, I suspect we are at the Ludin facility.” Dacha halted beside a notebook on the steel countertop, pausing from his perusal to wave a hand at the now smoking, blackened, and shattered husks of the machines. “Edmund suspected there were experiments being done to the ogres.”
Fieran grimaced and resisted the urge to shudder as he took in this room. Drains set in the floor gave away just how prepared this room was to handle blood and gore while the straps on the surgical tables indicated that the people were alive when experimented on, as he and Dacha had been.
One side of the room must have been a large window, perhaps for honored guests to stand and watch the experiments being conducted. The viewing window had been shattered in the magical explosion, shards of glass littering the floor. If there had been anyone in the room beyond, they were now lying dead on the floor out of sight.
The last wall held only a thick steel door, windowless and locked. Even if there was a guard, no one was getting in until that door was unlocked.
Another churn whirled through his head and down into his stomach. He pushed away from the surgical table, only to have his knees nearly give out beneath him. He gripped the table again, steadying himself. “Pip. Do you think they’ll experiment on her? We need to get to her before they hurt her.”
Dacha remained where he was, so he must not have seen how close Fieran had come to falling. Instead, he cocked his head for a moment, his eyes going distant in that way they did when he was communicating with Mama in the heart bond. “Your macha seems particularly relieved I am awake. I get the sense she has been in contact with Jalissa, and that Edmund has been awake longer than we have. I will need to confirm once we are no longer in the middle of escaping. But I think Edmund and Pip are safe enough at the moment. We should look after ourselves first rather than act in haste.”
“Good. That’s good.” This time when Fieran pushed away from the surgical table, he didn’t fall over. He shuffled across the room, the tiles cold beneath his bare feet. He reached the opposite end of the cupboards from Dacha. “Weren’t we an almost two days’ drive from Ludin when we crashed?”
“Yes. We were likely kept sedated while being transported here.” Dacha’s words were somewhat absent as he paged through the notebook.
A shiver ran down Fieran’s spine, and for a moment he couldn’t move enough to open the first cupboard.
