Wayward: A Cadence Phoenix Novel Read online

  He was examining the letters with his lips moving. “This is bad, kiddo. Very bad.”

  Cadence grabbed his arm. “What, damn it?”

  Her swearing seems to calm him down. “Watch your mouth, kid. This stuff, it’s the serum, I would bet my deck on it.”

  Cadence paused and looked a the bag. There was a pinkish blue residue, not purple, two colors one pink one blue, at the bottom of the bag. It looked like wet cotton candy swirled together.

  “What serum?”

  Ethan tossed the bag aside and grabbed her wrist, raising it to eye level. “The one running through your veins, or something very much like it.”

  His grip on her wrist was like iron and his eyes were wide. He was genuinely frightened, and that scared Cadence, more than she wanted to admit. She pulled her wrist back and stepped away, almost raising her shield.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Ethan turned away and took off his hat. “Look, CJ, I don’t know if you’re her granddaughter or her reincarnation in a lab, but I know what you are. They created you and all the other people with gifts.”

  Created? What the hell did that mean? Cadence picked up the discarded bag and raised it to eye level. The serum inside glowed ever so slightly, an inner light that pulsed in time to her heartbeat.

  “That doesn’t make sense, Ethan. You can’t create people.”

  He still hadn’t turned. “They injected that serum into you and it changed your genetic code. Made you what you are.”

  His shoulders were hunched, and Cadence could tell he was crying. There was some hidden pain gnawing at him, some guilt. She could feel it in the way he stood, the way he choked on his sobs.

  She wasn’t good at consoling people, she’d never had much practice, but her heart told her to help. She set the bag aside, moved up next to him and placed a gentle hand on his arm.

  “You’ve told me this much, E. Tell me the rest, you’ll feel better, yeah?” She said softly.

  Ethan wiped his eyes with a swallow’s eye handkerchief that had been in his sleeve. When he was finished he dropped it on the floor and leaned against the wall, one finger nervously tapping the polished grip of his pistol.

  “The Nazis started it. They were getting their asses handed to them, and they needed an edge. Dr. Oberheuser gave it to him in the form of the Dix program,” he said.

  “I saw something about that once, what was it?” Cadence asked.

  “It was supposed to be their super soldier serum, and it was, after a sort. What Hitler and his cronies didn’t know was that Oberheuser was a necromancer. She’d tapped into the power of the Veil and used it to create her serum. At first, the effects were horrific. Mindless monsters that couldn’t be controlled,” Ethan said. “Terrible things from the dungeon dimension, it was a horror show of evil the world still hasn’t recovered from.”

  He straightened and paced the length of the room, still fidgeting with his pistol. “Somehow she refined the process, I don’t know how, and Hitler had his super soldiers. Stronger, faster, most with bizarre abilities like the earth hasn’t seen since the time of the gods. They decimated entire regiments without taking a casualty.”

  Cadence was beginning to get a feeling about how she fit into this story, and she didn’t like it at all. She looked at her boots, focused on the cute chiseled silver toes and waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “What does that have to do with my grandmother?”

  “I’m not sure she was your grandmother, but that isn’t important right now,” Ethan said. “In 1942, the Office of Strategic Services, working in secret in the United Kingdom, started to make their own serum.”

  He waved his hands as he talked as if trying to draw the process in the air between them. “An operative got them a sample of the Nazi version, and they broke it down into something usable. They contacted me and some other members of the Order and we did our thing, made it work. Cadence Jasmine was one of the first volunteers. She was chosen because of her psychic abilities, the doctors thought she had a better than fifty percent chance of surviving.”

  “The ability to talk to ghosts,” Cadence said.

  Ethan nodded and ran a hand through his close-cropped hair. “Like mages, psychics have natural abilities that make it easier for your bodies to handle the serum. Normal people tend to burn from the inside out after its administered.”

  Cadence pursed her lips and looked back at the empty serum bag. “So, you’re thinking they are making more of us? More powered people?”

  “Yes, and it’s a bad idea, CJ, very bad. It almost killed all five of the first volunteers, it did kill seven more,” Ethan said. “Nature isn’t something to be fooled with.”

  “This is heavy. Ethan, most of the Men in Black are metahumans. I’ve encountered at least eight of them, all with different abilities,” Cadence said.

  She knew she should be finding all of this hard to swallow, superpowers, secret serum, Nazi experiments, it was all like something out of a bad movie. If she told a friend back at school, they’d have laughed and asked what she was smoking. She knew it was real, though. She had powers and she’d seen others with them up close and far too personal. Like Ethan had said before, it was kind of stupid to pretend this wasn’t her reality.

  “I was afraid of that, its why I decided to follow the hybrid and find out what was so interesting,” Ethan said, putting his hat back on so it shaded his eyes. “Turns out it was you. What’s our next move?”

  Cadence knelt and picked up the empty serum bag and stuffed it into her back pocket. “This looks like some sort of treatment room. I want to see what else is here.”

  Ethan shuffled his deck in one hand and nodded. “Lead the way, kid. Your instincts are better than mine.”

  The hallway was quiet, unchanged from when they’d last been there, but to Cadence, it seemed more sinister. The shadows were a little darker, the dust a little thicker, the distant sound of wind a little louder. She knew it was nerves, in the moments before the curtain went up on a gig, she always felt that same thing. She led the way to the end of the corridor and checked both staircases. Both were empty, with no signs that anyone had been there recently. The stairwell leading up was dark, lit only by what light filtered through a sunlight far above. The lower staircase was brighter, with an emergency light mounted on the wall halfway down. It cast dull red light down the stairs and made them look as if they were spattered with blood.

  “That’s not creepifying at all,” Ethan muttered behind her.

  “Its just light, E. Come on.”

  She descended one step at a time, one hand on the wall for guidance and balance. At the bottom was a metal door, definitely not part of the original construction. It was heavy, like something you would put in a prison, with metal rivets around the frame and a wheel in the middle to lock or unlock, depending on which way the wheel was turned. Cadence gripped it in both hands and turned it to the open position. To her surprise, it turned easily and the locking mechanism opened without a sound.

  Beyond the door was a narrow corridor painted battleship grey. The walls were lined with heavy steel plates and the lights were inside cages bolted to the ceiling. They flickered to life as she entered and cast yellow light that made the shadows longer and the walls deeper.

  To the right was a step down into an oblong chamber with four steel-walled cells. Each held a bank of monitors more advanced than anything Cadence had seen before bolted to the wall beside the door. Whoever had been inside the cells could be examined without the door ever being opened.

  She stepped into the chamber and peered through the window into the first cell. Inside was a small bed, toilet/sink combination of the sort common to prisons and a small table. A corpse lay in a pool of dried blood on the floor beside an overturned chair. He’d been male and hadn’t died well. His spine poked through h
is skin in sharp points and his skull was elongated and had sharp points instead of hair.

  “Goddess,” Cadence muttered.

  “That can happen,” Ethan said.

  Cadence looked away. “It’s horrible.”

  “It’s why the OSS program was ended,” Ethan said. “Most subjects died in twisted, painful ways, and it just wasn’t worth it. The war was over.”

  She didn’t want to look in the other cells. The dead man, she knew his misshapen skull and protruding spine would haunt her for the rest of her life. But she had to look. What if someone was still alive and needed their help?

  Thankfully, the next two cells were empty, though the bed and table showed signs of use; rumpled bedclothes, uneaten meals and discarded hospital gowns were in both. The last one, however, contained another test subject. At first, Cadence thought the woman inside might still be alive. She was huddled in the bed, pressed up against the wall. Her skin was black as midnight and looked hard, like obsidian or smoked glass. Cadence turned the monitors on and looked at them, anxiously hoping for a sign that the prisoner within still held some spark of life, but there was nothing. No blip on the screens, no respiration and the entry record marked her as deceased two months before.

  “Damn it!” She punched the wall hard enough to leave a dent and turned away.

  Ethan turned off the monitors and put an arm around her shoulders. “Take it easy, CJ. She was dead before you even knew she existed. She wasn’t your responsibility.”

  “Then why are we here?” Cadence asked.

  “For answers,” Ethan replied.

  He turned Cadence and she looked up into his eyes, hoping he had something that would make this better. She’d wanted to know who she was, where she came from and what Specter was up to, but the more she learned the more she didn’t want to know. Maybe it was better to forget.

  “Look, kid, now isn’t the time for recriminations or thoughts of saving people. We try to save as many people as we can, but we can save everyone,” Ethan continued. He jerked his chin at the cells. “We certainly can’t save dead people. That power just doesn’t exist.”

  Cadence frowned and looked away. “Maybe not. But we can get revenge for them. We can find the bastards that did this and make sure they don’t hurt anyone else.”

  Ethan shook his head. “Vengeance is never the right path, Ceej. Vengeance is an emotional response, emotional people make mistakes and get innocent people killed.”

  “Listen to him,” a new voice said. Cadence could tell by the change in the air and the tone of the voice it was a spirit somewhere close. She moved away from Ethan and closed her eyes, focusing on the spirit.

  “Who are you?” She asked.

  “Who is who?” Ethan asked.

  “Shush,” Cadence hissed.

  “You’re doing the ghost-talking thing, aren’t you?” Ethan pressed.

  Cadence opened one eye. “Yes, now shut up!”

  “You can hear me?” The ghost asked.

  “Yes, who are you?” Cadence asked.

  Ethan leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Do you know how hard it is to only hear one side of a conversation?”

  “Shut up!” Cadence said in unison with the ghost.

  She opened her other eye and turned, trying to locate the ghost. “I can hear you and Ethan promises to keep his big mouth closed. Who are you?”

  “My name was Dimitria. They called me Diamond,” the ghost said.

  Slowly, like a picture coming into focus, she appeared in the shadows near the far cell. She’d been a tall woman with skin the color of night and short white hair. Tall and willowy, with an aristocratic face, the only word for her was beautiful.

  “You’re the woman from the cell,” Cadence said.

  Dimitria nodded and turned to look at her corpse. “Yes. They left me to die when their experiment failed. I suffocated…”

  Cadence couldn’t imagine how terrible that must have been. She’d seen how the corpse was curled against the wall, now she knew why. Dimitria died begging for air, locked inside her own skin. Tears pricked her eyes and she reached out the ghost as if she could somehow take the pain away.

  “I’m so sorry, what can I do?”

  Dimitria turned back and drifted across the floor until they were almost touching. Cadence noticed she was becoming more solid, with more details and less haziness to her shape.

  “My soul needs peace,” Dimitria said. “Nothing more. I was never a vengeful woman, and you have come to hear my story. You are my witness and I am grateful. Do not let me be forgotten.”

  As the last words faded away, a shaft of light appeared from above, bathing Dimitria in a golden glow. She smiled and looked up, spreading her arms like a dark angel in flight. Cadence stepped out of the way, then reached out one hand.

  “Tell me… where are you going?”

  Dimitria’s smile was beatific. “Someplace better. Have a care, Cadence Phoenix. There are men that would do you harm to protect this secret. You are all that stands in their way.”

  “What men? Can you tell me more?” Cadence asked.

  The light grew brighter, and Cadence shielded her eyes from the glare. In the last moment she saw Dimitria cascade into a thousand points of light, then the glow vanished upward, leaving the room dark, with a surprising edge of cold that hung in the air and turned her breath to vapor.

  “That always makes my skin crawl,” Ethan said in a soft voice.

  “What does?” Cadence asked.

  “Spirits passin’ on to whatever it is that comes next. I never believed in that until I met you,” Ethan replied. “The original you, I mean.”

  “What, do you think I’m a clone or something?” Cadence asked.

  Ethan straightened and hung his thumbs on his belt. “We don’t have the science or the magik for that, no. Not a clone, but maybe a copy. It would explain a lot.”

  “Maybe I just look like my grandmother,” Cadence snapped.

  She walked up the steps and continued down the corridor, not wanting to hear whatever Ethan said next. She was glad to have him on her side, but he got on her nerves with his cryptic statements. If he had information to impart, he should just spit it out, not give it with an eyedropper.

  Lights came on as she walked, activated by dome-shaped sensors in the ceiling, and Cadence could see that this hallway was different than the entry. The walls were glass, broken only by aluminum frames, and she could see into what looked like operating theaters or medical labs. There were four in total, but most of the equipment was gone. Specter had left behind only overturned gurneys, counters scattered with used equipment and a single discarded latex glove. But you didn’t have to be a psychic to know what happened here. The tang of blood and the stink of fear-induced sweat hung heavy in the air, a stench that twisted the guts and stung the eyes in sympathy for the victims. Cadence felt it in the pit of her stomach, like frightened butterflies were taking a vacation on top of her breakfast.

  She looked into each chamber, then turned the corner at the end of the hallway. Here, there were more cells, all empty save for smears of blood and other fluids Cadence didn’t want to think about. At the end, was another security door, this one locked with a thick chain wound through the wheel. Curious why the door would be closed with so much hardware, she stepped on the locking ring and peered through the porthole. On the other side was another corridor made of heavy steel that emptied into several other corridors. The whole place was a maze beneath the village, there was no telling how far it stretched.

  A light somewhere down the hallway caught her attention and she craned her neck, trying to see what might be in the room. So focused was she on the light that she didn’t see the shadow in the corridor until it slammed into the door. Cadence jumped back in fear and fell to the ground, almost into Ethan�
�s arms. He caught her before she could fall completely and hauled her to her feet.

  “What the hell was that?” Cadence asked.

  “I just got here, darlin’, you tell me,” he said.

  “There’s something in there, its big. It punched the door and scared the crap out of me,” Cadence said.

  Ethan moved to the door and inspected the chain. “Probably why they locked it in and skedaddled. We should go, too.”

  Cadence wasn’t convinced. She went back to the door and pulled herself up again, trying to see… it.

  “What if its someone like me and they need help?” She asked.

  “Specter wouldn’t have left any useful operatives behind, CJ, and they don’t leave witnesses,” Ethan said.

  There was no sign of the creature. She couldn’t be certain what she saw, the thing looked more like a monster out of a John Carpenter film, not a human being. Still, this was a sort of combination torture chamber and lab and her eyes could have been playing tricks on her.

  “Let’s open it up,” she said.

  Ethan gaped at her. “Are you out of your little blonde mind? What if whatever that is tries to disembowel us?”

  Cadence gave him a blank look. “We fight it off? We’ve both got guns, you’ve got your cards and I’ve got my shield. What are you scared of?”

  “Dying slowly and painfully, being eaten, drowning, being burned at the stake−”

  “What are you babbling about?”

  “All the things I’m afraid of,” Ethan said.

  “Great. Where’s Han Solo when I need him?” Cadence groused.

  Ethan shrugged. “I never saw Aliens.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  After twenty minutes arguing and five minutes to pick the lock on the chain, the door was open. The hallway stretched ahead, into darkness. The walls were black, yet glistened with moisture that seeped in from above and left the taste of rust hanging in the air. There was also the scent of blood, it clung to everything and clogged Cadence’s nostrils. She held a hand to her nose and drew her pistol, walking carefully. Each step echoed in the enclosed space, until something squished beneath her boot. She paused and raised her foot, leaving something slimy trailing from her foot to the steel-plated floor.