If he was dead…

I didn’t want to think about it, but it made sense.

Unless The Doctor was holding him, starving him the way he starved me. Holden was a full-blooded vampire and could last infinitely longer than I could without blood. If he was being starved, it stood to reason he wouldn’t be able to reach out to me, or me to him. Two nearly dead batteries can’t complete a circuit, not the way fresh ones could.

A starved vampire was an appalling sight. It was considered a fate worse than death for most, but right then I was wishing that fate on Holden. I wanted him to be starved, prayed for him to be in agony.

I didn’t want him to suffer, but if he was suffering, he wasn’t dead.

All alone, with enough blood to be lucid, I started contemplating what I knew about the man who held me captive. I’d seen him before he took me, dressed as a homeless man, so it was possible he’d been following me for a long time, disguising himself to avoid recognition. But how long? Was it just in California, or did this go back longer?

Was he acting alone, or had someone hired him?

Sutherland had told me in his dream he’d been taken by The Doctor, which I believed now that I’d experienced those blistering emotions for myself. I understood why he’d told me to stop looking. Was he still here somewhere, or had this room been his first, until The Doctor finished with him?

I zipped my jacket up to my throat, like the leather could protect my chest from further penetration.

The entire time he’d been cutting me open, he prattled on, making notes and comparing my parts to those of other creatures. He seemed fascinated by my normalcy in a lot of ways, commenting on how similar my organs were to those of a human.

What did he want from me? Did he want to open the hood to see how the gears worked before sending me on my merry way? It was unlikely.

I suspected once he got bored of timing my healing process, he was just going to dismantle me entirely. And I couldn’t fight back. Between the minimal amount of blood I was being given—barely enough to recover what was being lost in the surgery—and all the healing my body was forced to do over and over, I didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t best him in a fight.

I might be able to land a few blows, but he had a full staff with him as far as I could tell, and he only spent time alone with me when I was weak or incapacitated.

He was smart, and had obviously perfected a system to keep supernatural beings from getting the best of him.

But for what?

Science?

Was he trying to create a real Dungeons & Dragons monster guide, some sort of ultimate physiological compendium of how we beasties ticked?

If that was the case, I could respect how rare a specimen I was for him. I didn’t empathize, because the guy wanted to filet me, but I kind of saw how I might appear to him. A white whale of sorts.

But how…how did he know about me?

The pocket of people who knew what I was had grown over the past couple of years, but they were all people I trusted, people I’d relied on. If one of them had spilled the beans on my condition, it had been under duress.

Unless it hadn’t been a friend at all.

Two people who knew what I was wanted me dead.

My mother had known from day one, and she’d abandoned me because of it. She’d worked closely with Alexandre Peyton in an effort to overtake the city, and though I don’t think she’d ever told him what I was, she hadn’t hidden what she was.

Peyton had spent years alone with only his thoughts, and in that time I was willing to bet he’d thought about me an awful lot. Enough for him to realize a girl with a werewolf mother who was half-vampire had to be hiding something.

They both hated me, but my mother wanted to see me die in front of her eyes. I knew that because I wouldn’t be satisfied with her death unless it was by my hands, and she and I were cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways.

So this torture? This starvation and pain?

This was all Peyton.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I paced the cell in a tight circle, glad to have use of my legs for however long the blood allowed it. I wanted to run—my body craved the adrenaline—but I wouldn’t get a chance to run any time soon.

The longer I thought about my captivity and the way in which I was being treated, the more certain I became Peyton was responsible. Like my mother I’d thought he would prefer to kill me in person, but he was pragmatic too. He was a smart, cunning vampire, and if he hadn’t gone rogue, he would have risen far in the council ranks.

He had what it took to be in my seat, if he hadn’t been bat shit crazy.

A man as smart as him would know how hard it would be to get to me once he was free. I was pretty sure he’d tried through Grendel, and it had almost worked. But this was sheer genius.

I wasn’t sure how he’d managed it. He’d have had to know I was coming to California, which meant he still had friends within the council. My trip hadn’t been a secret from the other vampires, but he’d have needed someone inside in order to find out.

So he had a mole. We’d suspected it, but now I knew for sure.

Would he have come to California himself, wanting to be present for my capture and to witness what The Doctor was doing to me? Or was he hiding somewhere else, anywhere in the world, watching footage sent to him?

I slapped the wall with my palm, the gritty surface stinging my skin. The last thing I needed right now was another wound to heal, as my aching chest could attest.

How was I going to get out of this?

It would be one thing if they were trying to get me to share secrets, but this was experimentation, plain and simple. The Doctor wanted to know how I worked, the same way a mechanic sought to understand a car engine. Without any information to offer him, he was only going to take me out of the cell when he wanted to poke around inside me.

There had to be something, some way I could have him release me from the room without being bound, and convince him I needed my full strength.

I looked at my hand pressed flat against the wall. My brittle, cracked nails seemed to be telling me something, and I didn’t think that something was You need a manicure.

You must be stupid, my wolf told me, piping up for the first time since we’d gotten here.

My wolf.

My wolf.

She was right. If the answer had been any more obvious, it would have smacked me in the face. The Doctor was fascinated with me because he knew I was half-vampire/half-werewolf. He’d never seen or studied a creature like me in his life.

If he truly was a man of science, wouldn’t he want to see what I could do?

I cleared the room in an excited bound, pounding the door with my fists. “I want to see him,” I shouted, my throat stinging from the screaming I’d abused it with throughout the evening. “I need to see The Doctor.”

I kept right on shouting and pounding, doing everything short of swearing up a storm. Shocking myself half to death was a last resort, but if it came down to it, they’d come in and stop me before I did permanent damage to myself.

I yelled until a speaker I couldn’t see announced, “Step back from the door.”

I did as I was told, scurrying into a far corner and raising both hands in a gesture of submission. I didn’t want to project any menace. The only way this plan was going to work was if I made him trust me. Maybe not as a person would trust a friend, but perhaps as a lab scientist might trust a rat not to bite him.

The door sighed open with a rush of warm air, and one of the male nurses came in, leaving it slightly ajar.

Run, my wolf urged. Knock him down and run.

She didn’t seem to understand escape wasn’t an option. Running wasn’t going to happen. Walking was hard enough. I ignored her, but didn’t overlook how happy I was to have her back. I’d need her soon.

“What do you want?” the nurse asked impatiently.

“I want to see The Doctor.”

“You don’t dictate that sort of thing. Haven’t you figured that out yet? You’re not a guest, you don’t get to make requests.”

“He’s going to want to see me.”

The nurse sighed, rolling his eyes. He’d heard this before. I had to wonder how many others had been in this room before me, and all the different ways they’d attempted to woo these people into letting them go. If I’d had my full strength, I would have tried to enthrall the nurse, I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

He was accustomed to that dog-and-pony show, though, because he wasn’t looking me right in the eyes. Some people who knew how the thrall worked would focus on my forehead so it at least appeared like they were meeting my gaze. This guy was fixated on my chin. If his gaze had dropped any lower, I’d be convinced he was staring at my tits, but I doubted he saw me as a sexual object.

Hard to be attracted to someone when they were bound to end up like a biology class frog. Once you’d seen someone’s literal guts, it had to be difficult to think of them as a hot commodity. I wasn’t offended. I didn’t plan to use my feminine wiles to get out of here.

“He’s seen everything he needs to see from you today.”

“He’s going to want to see this,” I insisted.

The man turned to go, and I panicked. This plan only worked if I was going to get out of the room, and to do that I needed to convince this guy I wasn’t talking out my ass.

“Wait. He’s a scientist right? You all are. I mean, this isn’t a hospital, so we’re in some kind of lab. Right?”

He didn’t say anything, but he did stop his attempt to leave.

“I get it,” I said, trying to sound calm. “My grandmother, she’s a scientist. Studied genetics and biology. She taught me to respect science, to look for an explanation. I understand why you guys are doing this. I’m different. I defy logic, and you want to make me make sense, right?”

The nurse stared at me, and a variety of expressions battled for supremacy over his face. He looked conflicted and angry but also confused and a little sad. I’d read somewhere making yourself human to those who might want to kill you would at least give them pause. If they stopped thinking of you as an object—or in my case a monster—and started relating to you on a human level, you had a better chance.