Embers & Ice

Chapter Thirty

Dr. Wolfe’s rubber gloves slapped over his wrists with a bloodcurdling thwack. Hunter stared up at him, her eyes near-blinded by the light from the overhead beam, and suddenly wished she was back in her solitary cell by herself, a steel door’s width from this lunatic.

“Welcome back, Miss Harrison,” he said cheerfully and picked up some gauze with metal pliers. “I trust you had a pleasant stay in Solitary?”

She always loathed his humorless small-talk, but found it better just to go along with it.

“Actually, I rather enjoyed the peace and quiet. And the solitude. I did miss the excitement though. Am I mistaken, or did I detect a roar coming from downstairs one night?”

“You’re mistaken,” he said sharply and lifted the protective mask over his mouth and nose. “It won’t be heard again, I can assure you that.”

A chill ran through her spine, a feeling she did not welcome back.

“For today, however, I’d like to show you some of the X-rays we took last week.”

He reached behind the steel table she lay upon and pulled on a lever, allowing the back of it to rise up like a reclining chair. Hunter – still strapped to the table – had a clear view of the door. Dr. Wolfe’s bright screens on her left showed a long succession of X-rays. Every single part of her body was on full display, all ghostly and skeleton-looking. Everything appeared normal, to her eyes anyway.

“Your blood tests are normal, well to your standards. I’ve come across some unusual toxins, however, which I have matched with Joshua’s DNA. I seem to find myself with an interesting number of unknown substances. Tell me, Hunter, when did Joshua get his hands on Feucotetanus?”

Hunter clenched her jaw and refused to meet Dr. Wolfe’s oyster eyes. So he knows about the drug. So what? It’s only half the formula, and even then, the rock is far more powerful than the drug alone.

Dr. Wolfe watched her closely for a moment, but saw she would not crack. He grunted something under his breath and continued.

“I came across Feucotetanus many years ago. The Swedish people are very smart, very well developed. In fact, most of the equipment we use was manufactured there. I had a sample of Feucotetanus, once. Now I wish I made multiple copies, because all the laboratories in Sweden were destroyed. Unfortunately the test subject we were using our last batch on escaped this facility and went into hiding. The drug was too much for his system and there was no way he would have survived more than a few days before it reached his heart and consumed him. Died of hallucinations, I assume. It’s a shame we never got to monitor his progress.”

Hunter was seriously tempted to spit on the man, purely because of his selfishness. But then suddenly, she remembered something. Joshua had said that her mother operated on a homeless man the night of the fire that killed her father. Was it too much of a coincidence that this man, the man who passed the drug on to her mother, who then gave Hunter her abilities that night when she was conceived, was the same man who escaped this facility? Was she really so close to New York?

Dr. Wolfe didn’t seem to notice that her thoughts were somewhere else, and continued talking. “This other… substance, I am unable to identify.”

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, she thought smugly.

“But what I do know is that whatever has infected your blood, it happened long ago. Around the same time that it happened to Joshua, am I correct?”

Hunter didn’t answer, staring at her rib cage on the X-ray board, imagining a hole like the center of the earth burning within her, volcanic lava oozing out. That was where the fire dwelled, the living fire that came from inside the stone. Ravenadium.