He glanced her way every now and then when the progress in his perimeter lap wouldn’t make it obvious he was watching her. She was doing as he’d suggested, staying far from everyone. Good. What he’d told her was true, except the parts about him wanting her away from him.
The others would smell and sense her weakness. It could initiate the predatory response. Why would the idiots running this place let her mix with the others? Unless that was their hope.
He’d initially been relieved they hadn’t yet marked her with one of their terrible tattoos. But if they hadn’t, it could only mean one thing. They didn’t intend for her to live long enough to waste the ink.
4
Noah sat in the corner of his cell trying to ignore Sydney on the other side and running the plan for the following night in his head. It was hardest for him to ignore her when she slept. He didn’t have to worry about her discovering things that could put her in danger. It was only the cameras he had to be concerned with. And sometimes they seemed barely real. It was harder to have the self control not to look at her when only hidden electronic eyes watched.
Noah felt the surge of power building for his birth moon, and for the first time he felt certain he could do this. It wasn’t a pipe dream or a vain hope to keep him going.
If he could get her to go with him, he knew he could get them out of the building. The people in charge had gotten slack with the security, putting too much faith in how they had beaten the prisoners down over time. And they trusted too much in the canned raspberry-scented calm they sent in through the vents before they let them out for exercise each night.
The cells were secure. Noah had checked. Nobody was getting out of those. But during one of the brief windows when they were allowed outside them…
The powers that be had already slacked on the number of guards. They never needed them, so why keep them all on the payroll? Occasional fights broke out in the yard on full moons, so there would be higher security, but that still just meant one or two more guards.
There was a service elevator he’d glimpsed many times, and once five months ago, he’d had the rarest opportunity to go check it out when the only guard that day had gotten sick. The security in the elevator had major holes. He’d always been good with tech. He got that from his dad. He’d watched and absorbed all the ways the tech around him worked while he was still just a pup and not even in a human form yet. He was convinced he’d developed a photographic memory during his time in wolf form. It was a skill that served him well now.
As soon as he’d shifted to human for the first time, he’d started taking machines and computers apart and putting them back together using all the schematics his brain had been processing nearly from birth. The adults in the pack had been amazed, but machines had an internal logic if you listened to them and learned their language. He’d learned how to find bugs and holes in programs and fix them or exploit them from the moment he’d been gifted with opposable thumbs. Part of it might have been a native intelligence or something genetic from his father, but part of it had been the very nature of his earliest years.
From the moment Noah was born until the first time he shifted, he’d had nothing much to do but watch and absorb and wait. And now, inside this building for so many years waiting for his birth moon—the next time he would have the power to act—he’d once again had nothing to do but watch and learn and absorb and wait.
When he’d seen the problems with the computer in the service elevator, he prayed no one else knew about it. He doubted they did. They’d gotten too confident. Noah had quickly returned to his cell with the others after that to think about what he’d seen. He couldn’t be sure what was outside the building but the idea of getting out of it ceased being an impossible dream after that.
Sydney stirred in her corner. He sensed the lab technician before he saw her. The glass door of the cell whooshed open and the woman moved into the room. Noah felt his muscles go rigid while his internal dialogue insisted that he had to remain cool and calm. He had to keep it together. He couldn’t react. For Sydney’s sake. Whatever they did, he couldn’t react. If he reacted, they’d suspect something. It would risk her.
But the woman in the lab coat just wanted to chat. And he knew this one vaguely. Kristen. She was one of the less evil people in the facility. He hoped he was right about her.
Noah could hear their conversation through the glass, though it was muffled.
Kristen studied her clipboard. “We got the test results from the lab,” she said.
“Oh?” Sydney said. She glanced his way then quickly away from him and back to the lab tech.
“You’ve stopped aging. We double-checked to make sure your aging hadn’t just slowed, but no, you’ve stopped completely. Around six or seven years ago. Do you understand what this means?”
It meant they could keep her alive and keep her for centuries if they decided to. Though, the lack of tattoo had pointed to not letting her live long, maybe they’d change their mind on that score now that they knew she was conditionally immortal.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Sydney said. “I’m not a real vampire. I’m too weak to survive for hundreds or thousands of years. It doesn’t matter how my cells are aging or not aging.”
“That sounds like denial to me,” Kristen said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Don’t do it, Sydney. Don’t trust her. This particular woman might not herself be the queen of evil, but she reported to someone who likely was. Noah held his breath, hoping Sydney wouldn’t let them inside her thoughts.
As if he’d somehow managed to communicate that warning to her—or she was just smart—Sydney shook her head.
“No, that’s okay. I’m just not as optimistic about it as you seem to be.”
Kristen looked like she would argue, but two more lab techs were moving down the hallway toward Sydney’s cell. The door whooshed open again, and they tossed a badly beaten and bleeding human into the room.
Kristen seemed startled when the blood splattered her white shoes. “We observed you last night and noted that perhaps you might need to drink from a living source given your history. We know vampires can’t stay as strong with bagged blood. Ordinarily we prefer that for our own safety, but you’ve been determined to be an exception to that rule.”
Keep it together, Noah. Stay calm. Don’t react. If he’d had any doubts that they now planned to keep her alive as long as possible, in the name of “science”, those doubts had vanished. With her test results, they found her even more intriguing, which could only mean bad things.
The man groaned from the middle of the cell.
“Well,” Kristen said, “I-I’ll just leave you alone with your meal. We’ll talk again in a few days, I’m sure.” She patted Sydney awkwardly on the arm and then strode briskly out of the cell, sparing a glance at Noah while he tried to stay blank of discernible emotion.
“Don’t worry, we weakened him so he can’t harm you,” one of the technicians said. Then both of them followed Kristen out of the cell, leaving Sydney alone with her beaten bloody dinner.
The man groaned again from the ground. “Syd?”