Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,8
the other hand, maybe he was just happy that Wolfe was dead. I knew I was.
If I was dead, I wouldn’t be talking to you.
Shut up, I thought with all my might. I must have grimaced while thinking it, because Zack raised an eyebrow. “Yeah...I’m sorry. I just couldn’t wait for you guys to get back.” I looked away from him.
“Damn shame you killed Wolfe,” the fat guy from M-Squad said, loud enough that it told me he’d been eavesdropping. I turned to find him leering at me; well, not so much me as my body; his eyes were looking below the equator and moving up slowly. “I was looking forward to tangling with him. But if he can get himself killed by a little girl, “ he said with a laugh that sounded like a bark, “ I guess he wasn’t so tough, was he?”
“You’re a moron, Clary,” said the leader, the first guy off the helicopter from M-Squad. “You’re just lucky most people judge by appearances, like you do, and write your fat ass off or you’d be dead ten times over.”
“You think I’m fat?” One of Clary’s eyes had squinted, drawing his puffy cheek up his face and causing it to wrinkle. “This is three hundred and twenty pounds of ripped steel.” He waved a hand over his body. “And the ladies love it.”
“The next lady to love your body will be the first, I’d wager.” I said it before I knew I had, and heard the snickers from M-Squad, Dr. Perugini and Zack. Even Kurt seemed amused by my barb. The old guy in M-Squad let a low, rolling guffaw of purest amusement. “Unless you’re resorting to picking up lovers from the graveyard,” I said, pointing at the object on his shoulder, “in which case they’re not loving you so much as—”
Clary turned a bright red and I watched him clutch the coffin a little tighter, and he let out a loud grunt. “I’m not gonna sit here and be insulted by some tweener punkass bitch.”
“Yeah, you’ve got important things to do,” the older guy spoke up. “You were talking about your damned motorcycle the whole time we were gone. You gonna go ride your ‘phat hog’?”
Clary’s embarrassment turned to glee. “Naw, your mom said she’s busy tonight.” He let out a high, long burst of laughter, one that was obviously fake, and turned to Dr. Sessions, slapping him on his skinny back and nearly waylaying the good doctor. “Come on, Doc, this son of a bitch is getting heavy.”
I watched Doc Sessions nod and turn, leading the way toward the science building, Clary in tow and Perugini following behind them. When he turned to follow Sessions, the coffin dipped and I saw the top of it for the first time as he repositioned it to carry it like a backpack. It was flat, with a small window, just enough to show something glowing within, like fire in a bottle. He dipped it lower, and I saw something else—
Eyes. There were eyes staring at me from within. Plaintive, begging, filled with a fear that I knew all too well; the fear of a captive confined, one who might never take another free breath again.
Chapter 3
“Who is that?” I asked Ariadne. I turned and caught a flash of her face pinched as though she had just pulled a splinter from her finger. I turned to Zack, and he looked away.
“Aleksandr Timofeyevich Gavrikov,” the leader of M-Squad said to me. “One of the most dangerous metas you’ll ever meet.” He nodded at the capsule on Clary’s back. “That’s a containment cell Dr. Sessions designed to keep metas that have high energy projection abilities under control—without it Gavrikov could fry everyone.”
“How’d you catch him, then?” I didn’t throw any undue sarcasm into the words; I was curious.
“By not getting anywhere near him,” the Nordic woman said, a slight smirk curling her flat lips.
“I think introductions are in order,” Ariadne said. “Sienna Nealon, this is Roberto Bastian,” she nodded to the leader, then to the woman, “Eve Kappler and Glen Parks,” she indicated the older guy, who gave me a genuine smile, one that (surprisingly) didn’t creep me out. “And of course the other gentleman,” she strained at the word, “was Clyde Clary.”
“Don’t call him Clyde,” Parks said, his gray beard reminding me of a thousand grandfathers I’d seen on TV. “It doesn’t bring out the sparkling side of his personality.”
“Sure it does,” Eve said. “He sparkles like broken glass—then