The Hybrid Legacy Part II (Sequel to the Baile Series)

Chapter 1 Captivity

Cullen

This is the story about a hybrid legacy. Sure it sounds like a quite a complicated and unpredictable story, but in reality it proved to be far more sinister. Everyone has legacy, an object or series of objects they may have inherited by the following generation to keep and protect. But not every legacy is noble or holy in nature, for I have learnt that a legacy can be an immeasurable burden and like an incurable disease, it can be passed on through blood. My own blood, my hybrid DNA was my legacy, a credit to my Shapeshifter mother and Werewolf father. Sure my legacy could be considered a gift, a unique inheritance of strength and power and reputation. But with power brings jealousy and greed, potential for honest good invites potential for formidable evil. I had been taken to the lion's den and I was sleeping amongst the bones of my father.

"Tap, tap-tap, tap, tap, tap-tap-tap." My metal fork clanked against the white plate before me, replaying my thoughts into the cavernous dining space that echoed the dreary and dying voices of stolen children. It was the safest way I could communicate with my cousins, Fillan and Kenzie, who strategically sat interspersed around the same table as I did. Sitting away, but not too far away. There was still no guarantee that using Morse code to communicate was going undetected, but there was simply no other way to have semi private thoughts when the collars around our necks recorded every word spoken and quite possibly, every internal thought. Cameras and microphones were also built into every crevice of every room and hallway in the entire building, watching and listening to our every move and instilling a type of paranoia that would have surely been experienced by prisoners of war. I didn't know how big the laboratory was, but I could certainly speculate. The staff and guards were on a three-week rotation, which I assumed meant that the laboratory was big enough that they needed weekly shifts, dispersing people to different areas of the building, three times the size of what I had glimpsed during my time in captivity. The only areas of the laboratory that I had seen were the dining hall, a few corridors, the gym and my bedroom-which adjoined a mini lab where blood was taken from me as regularly as clockwork. I had lost count around the third week my cousins and I had been imprisoned, the days and nights passing in an irregular blur between pain and drugs to numb the former.

I watched with tired eyes as the guards situated around the walls of the room swapped with new guards. I looked down the end of the table and locked eyes with Fillan. We exchanged a silent agreement before the bells chimed to signal the end of lunch.

I stood up from the table along with everyone else, picking up my tray to take it to the canteen. I took my time walking amongst everyone while Fillan approached a guard. Fillan threw a strong punch at the guard's jaw and the dining room fell into chaos.

I used the distraction to slip down a newly unguarded corridor. I ran as fast and as far as I could, memorising each doorway I passed and corner I turned. Right, left, left, right I recited. I never anticipated I would escape, merely that in knowing the layout of the laboratory we would be able to find our way out when the time did come to escape. We knew we might never get the opportunity to do it again, so we had to get it right the first time.

After a couple of minutes I knew that I was being followed and that my time was running out to find the exit. I bursted through a set of double doors and into a room that was dimply lit in pale blue light. I halted in my quest of freedom to gawk at the tubes that surrounded me, spawning fetuses in varying degrees of growth. The lab went beyond simply experimenting on children it was creating children. An electric current emitted from the collar around my neck, travelling down my arms and torso. I fell to the floor, writhing in pain, my body jerking every which way. Needles punctured my skin from within the collar, releasing liquid drugs to make me instantly lose consciousness.

I awoke in my small, box-like bedroom, my head heavy as the drugs slowly faded in my system. The door opened and a man I had never seen before waltzed in, wearing a black suit that differed from the white lab coats all the nurses and doctors wore whenever they visited me.