Chapter Five
Max hadn't been sure, at first, that asking Joshua to help find Alec was a good idea. The last she'd talked to him about it, Joshua had still been plenty mad at Alec for attacking and trying to kill them in the empty lot all those weeks ago. She didn't know if he'd even care that Alec had been kidnapped, or if he'd decide that it wasn't his problem and that Alec was getting what he deserved.
She'd been more than mildly surprised when he'd stood up out of his chair and headed for the front door.
"Father's children are a family. Alec is like a little brother. Loud, annoying little brother. Nobody can steal Joshua's little brother."
If Logan had been at all shocked to see Joshua standing outside of Crash, wearing a jacket with the hood pulled down across his face, he hid it well. Introductions were short, because the seriousness of the situation didn't allow them to be anything else.
Max handed Joshua Alec's jacket. She'd called Cindy in a panic and explained what was going on, after she'd talked to Logan. Cindy hadn't even questioned her when she'd asked where Alec's jacket was; she'd just told her that she'd dropped it at the apartment. It hadn't taken Max more than a few minutes to run home and pick it up.
Joshua buried his nose in the leather and inhaled deeply, letting his sensitive nose absorb Alec's scent.
Logan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and scrolled down his contact list. "Give me a minute," he said.
"What are you doing?"
"Checking something," he said. "Before we get into this, let's just double-check and make sure we're not overreacting."
Logan pressed his phone to his ear.
Max jumped when she heard the phone that started ringing behind her.
Logan turned toward the sound, which seemed to be coming from near Crash's door, and walked in that direction. He didn't hang up, and the other phone kept ringing. He bent down and picked it up, looked at the screen, then snapped his own phone shut.
"Okay," he admitted. "Now we can do this your way."
He dropped the phone in her hand as he walked by, being careful not to let their skin brush. She looked down at the display on the front of the phone and sighed. If she hadn't already known it was Alec's phone, the fact that the screen said Missed Call: Logan would have been convincing on its own. She sighed and flipped the phone open, and found herself surprised by what she found when she looked through Alec's contact list.
Logan's was the only name on it.
Joshua appeared in front of her suddenly, handing her back Alec's jacket. Then he sniffed at the air experimentally, and started walking. Max tucked Alec's phone into the pocket of his jacket, then tossed them both under the front seat of Logan's car. She pushed the button for the lock before closing the door and motioning for Logan to follow Joshua.
They stayed back a few feet, giving Joshua room and letting him concentrate on what he was doing. Max was worried that this wasn't going to work, that if the Steelheads had put Alec in a car and driven away with him that Joshua wasn't going to be able to follow them. But it looked like Sandeman had made Joshua's nose even more sensitive than an ordinary dog's, because he'd already crossed the street and was walking down the sidewalk on the other side, and he was showing no signs of having lost the trail.
"Are you sure this is a good idea, Max?" she heard Logan ask beside her. "What if someone sees him?"
Max sighed and looked around. Part of her knew that Logan was right. If anyone saw Joshua out there, the results would be catastrophic, especially so soon after the incident with Isaac. But she also knew that they had no other choice. Logan had been trying to find the Steelheads' hangout for months and hadn't been able to. No one seemed to know where they actually went when they weren't out causing trouble.
Joshua was Alec's only hope of being found.
"It's getting dark," she answered. "We have to do this, Logan. Joshua's the only chance we've got." She turned to stare straight ahead before mumbling, "He's the only chance Alec's got."
They did have to leave street level and go into the sewers to get past the sector cops at the checkpoint, but Joshua had picked up the scent again on the other side. By that point, it was completely dark, and only the faint glow of streetlights lit their way.
Joshua stopped suddenly in the middle of the street, sniffing the air around him. Had they come this far only for him to lose the trail now?
"Alec," Joshua said, a low growl in his throat. He turned his head slowly and glared at the building across the street from them.
It was a large, old house, Max could see. There was some sort of sign in front of it that she couldn't read from where she stood, but she could see the coffins that "decorated" the yard around it.
"He's in there?" she asked, and Joshua nodded. "You're sure?"
"Scent is strong," Joshua said. "Alec here."
"Okay," Max said. "There should be three of them, right? That's easy enough to take care of. Joshua, you take the..."
"Max," Logan said. She turned to look at him and saw him waving his cell phone at her. "Step back into the shadows. Let me take care of this."
"You're gonna what?" she asked, but she did step into the shadows behind a tree next to the sidewalk. "How are you gonna take on three Steelheads?"
"I'm not taking them on," he answered as he pressed the phone to his ear. "I'm getting them out of the way." He turned his full attention to his phone then. "Hey, Rob, it's Logan. You set up that thing we were talking about, right?" Max assumed this Rob person answered yes, because Logan nodded his head. "Okay, great. I need you to call him and tell him to come to the meeting right now. No, I can't tell you why, I just need you to. Yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Rob."
Max looked up at Joshua in the shadows at her side, and then back at Logan. "What did you...?"
"Just watch," Logan said.
It was only a matter of minutes before Eddy and his henchmen came out of the house, along with a Steelhead girl that none of them had expected. So there were four of them, then, not three. Max thought she recognized the girl from Crash a couple of weeks before, could swear she'd seen her there flirting with Alec.
The four of them climbed into the black car sitting in the front yard and drove away. As soon as they were out of sight, Max motioned for Joshua to cross the street. She followed a few steps behind with Logan.
"So Rob is your contact?"
Logan nodded. "Yeah. With any luck, we'll have Alec's kidney back within the hour. We'll have to see if Sam can put it back in for him."
"First we have to see if there's someone to put it back in to," Max muttered as she finally caught sight of what the sign in front of the house said – Miller Funeral Home.
"Don't think like that, Max," Logan said. "We'll find him, and Sam'll patch him up if he needs to. He's a Transgenic, isn't he? Rapid healing, hyper-immune system? He'll be fine."
Max only nodded.
Joshua had reached the front door of the house. He didn't wait for Max and Logan, didn't even bother to glance at them. He just turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside.
Max and Logan jogged to catch up with him, and Logan closed the door behind them.
Joshua sniffed at the air intently; Max could tell from the look of concentration on his face that he'd definitely picked up a scent. He walked through the living room, which was "decorated" with more coffins than the front yard was, and into a dining room. When he stepped toward the metal door in the far wall, she followed him wordlessly and motioned for Logan to do the same.
Joshua's sniffing increased in intensity as he neared the door, and Max felt her heart speed up. "Smell Alec," Joshua said. He moved his hand toward the doorknob, but stopped before he actually touched it. The sound of his sniffs turned into a low growl, deep in his throat.
"Smell too much Alec."
Max looked up at him from where she stood at his side, her head tilted and her eyes wide in confusion. "What?"
"Too much," Joshua repeated. "Too much Alec."
Max and Logan exchanged worried, questioning looks behind Joshua's back as Joshua lowered his hand away from the handle. Max didn't understand what "too much Alec" meant, not in the context of what Joshua was saying, but Joshua's behavior was making it obvious that it wasn't good. He'd definitely picked up Alec's scent behind that door, but something was making him not want to open it.
Max placed a gentle hand on Joshua's arm and reached past him, wrapping her fingers around the door handle carefully. Her heart pounded in her throat as she turned it.
As she slowly pushed it open and her eyes widened in horror, she understood what "too much" meant.
"Is this...?" she swallowed audibly, almost afraid to ask the question only because she feared she already knew the answer.
Logan seemed to understand what she was feeling, because he spoke up behind her, saving her from being the one to ask.
"Is it all his?"
Joshua sniffed again, the growl in his throat a constant, low rumble beneath his voice. "All Alec."
The room they'd just opened had obviously at one time served as the funeral home's embalming room, but it appeared to have been converted into a sloppily constructed operating room. Surgical instruments that Max couldn't imagine having ever been clean – to say nothing of sterile – were scattered around the room. Empty IV bags littered the floor. Filthy sheets were piled in the corners and draped over tables and other unidentified apparatus. In the middle of the room, on a raised section of grated floor, stood a metal table that was much larger than the ones that lined the walls. It had grooves that ran the length of it and emptied into a sink at one end, and it was crossed by several leather straps whose purpose was immediately evident to her. Next to it stood a red machine that she couldn't identify, with tubes and wires running out of it.
And blood covered everything.
The surgical instruments were coated with it; the IV bags were splattered with it; the sheets were soaked in it. The table in the center stood over a pool of it that had drained through the grate in the floor, and both the grooves in the table's surface and the sink had bits of it sticking to their edges.
"My God," Max breathed, though walking into that room made her seriously doubt the existence of such a creature. "What did they do to him?"
Joshua hadn't entered the room at all and looked to Max as though he was physically unable to. The scent of copper in the air was so thick that Max almost was almost choking on it; she could only imagine how it was overwhelming Joshua's sensitive nose. Logan had the advantage, in this instance, of normal human senses, and he'd managed to make himself move further into the room than even Max had been able. He was inspecting the leather straps attached to the table's surface, as though he hadn't immediately known what they were.
When he looked up at her and their eyes met across the room, the look of sadness and horror in his eyes almost made her want to run. Maybe Logan hadn't recognized them immediately. Maybe he hadn't seen restraints exactly like those as many times as she had. She envied him that lack of knowledge.
"What?" she asked.
"Restraints," he answered, his voice so quiet that Max might not have heard if not for her enhanced hearing.
She nodded her head slowly. "I know."
Logan looked past her, at the open door. "Where's Joshua?"
Max turned and looked behind her, both surprised and not to see that Joshua was no longer standing there. "I don't know," she said. She turned back around and stepped further into the room. The smell was still powerful, but she was getting used to it.
She was almost afraid to touch anything, like it would make the whole thing more real or more horrible if she did. But that wasn't possible, was it? This was so terribly bad, and there wasn't anything that could have made it any worse. She just stood there, slowly turning in the middle of the room, keeping her hands at her sides. The blood, so much blood, Alec's blood... and it was everywhere.
How the hell had he possibly survived this?
She heard the sound from a long way off – a low keening wail that rose to an almost ear-splitting crescendo before falling off, only to rise again. It was an animal's howl of pain, fear, and sorrow. It was a friend's cry of loss.
It was Joshua.
Max was running from the room, Logan following closely on her heels, before she had even fully realized why. Her heart pounded in her chest, not from exertion but from emotion, from apprehension. There was only one reason for Joshua to make that sound, in this place, at this time.
He'd found Alec.
She and Logan raced through the parlor, past the coffins, looking in open side doors as they passed. Joshua's voice echoed all around them, coming from above, below and both sides all at once. Max could tell from the way Logan followed her that he was uncertain exactly where the sound was originating, but Max knew. The echo was caused by the voice bouncing against the walls of the ductwork; Joshua's cries were traveling through the vents.
"He's in the basement," she explained quickly, as she rushed through the kitchen. "We have to find a way down." She pulled open the door on the far side of the room and was rewarded with a dark set of stairs. As she started down them, she heard Logan behind her.
"Why did Joshua go to the basement?"
"He must have followed Alec's scent," she answered as her feet his the floor at the bottom of the stairs. "Now that we're away from that room, I can smell it, too. But it's... " Her voice trailed off with her footsteps, and Logan had to stop himself on the bottom step to keep from walking into her. There wasn't much room to navigate in the narrow hallway they'd stepped down into, and even less light to see by. The passageway went in two directions, and Max stood at the junction where they met the stairs, looking completely uncertain of which way to go.
"What is it?" he asked worriedly. He stepped around her, keeping his hands to the side, barely resisting the urge to grab her shoulders to steady her. "Max, what?"
"Alec's scent," she said. She closed her eyes and shook her head in confusion. "I can smell him, but it's wrong." She opened her eyes again, looking directly into Logan's. "Oh, Logan, something's wrong."
"Of course something's wrong," he answered shortly. "That blood wouldn't be there if everything were all right."
"He smells... " She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to pin down not only exactly what was off about Alec's scent but also which direction it was coming from. "Sweet," she finally said. "Overly sweet, like rotting fruit."
"Like he's sick?" Logan asked.
"No," she answered softly. She opened her eyes and turned to her left, heading down the narrow hallway with determination. "No, not sick. Worse than that."
She could hear Joshua's voice getting louder and knew that she'd picked the right direction. There were closed doors off both sides of the hallway, but she didn't spare them a second of thought. She would find Alec when she found Joshua, and until those two things happened, she couldn't think of anything else.
There it was, at the very end of the hall, right under one of the few bare bulbs that lit the hallway – an open door. She ran the last few feet to it, grabbed the door frame and pivoted around it. And stopped in her tracks.
"Oh, God," she whispered. "Alec."