I couldn't tell what he was doing for a moment. Then I realized he had his finger jammed in a long-dead electrical outlet. I felt a strange pull from him, as if his power were calling to something, and suddenly I saw electricity surge up his arm.
Conleth's face slackened in pleasure, and I realized he was recharging.
I always wondered how ifrits got their power, I thought. Despite the circumstances, I was also fascinated by how Conleth called the power he needed to him. But I also needed to figure out where the fuck I was, so I stopped staring at Con and started looking around the room. It was a big empty space that looked like it could have been an office. It was familiar, though, in a weird way, and after a second I realized why.
It's got the same kind of crap he had at his squat, I realized, looking around. There was a battered old desk that probably belonged to the chair upon which I was currently tied. A stained mattress lay in one corner, and junk-food wrappers were strewn about everywhere. Con must have been living here since we found his place in Southie…
After a few more minutes at the plug, Conleth stood, wiping down his bedraggled jeans before coming toward me.
“Sorry I had to drug you, Jane, but I knew I didn't have time to explain. So I figured this was easiest.” Conleth sounded genuinely apologetic, and I realized that he thought, given a chance to talk, that I would have agreed to come with him. Which meant that he still thought I was on his side.
I cleared my throat, trying to find my voice. My tongue was dry and wooden.
“Need a drink?” Con asked, and I nodded. He walked away and came back with a bottle of water.
“I know, I know,” he soothed as he uncapped the bottle and raised it to my lips. I greedily drank nearly half the liter. “The drug I used makes you thirsty. It does make you sleep, but I still always hated that one, for the thirst.”
His words hit me like a fist. I hated this creature, but hearing him talk so nonchalantly about the fact that he'd had his entire life stripped from him made me shudder with pity. I closed my eyes to blink back tears as Con crouched in front of me again.
He started rubbing my legs gently, but he might as well have been branding me with his hands. As the feeling returned to my limbs, it felt like little knives were dancing over my flesh. I whined, and the tears broke free, rolling down my cheeks.
“I know, it hurts. I'm sorry,” Con said, stricken.
I gritted my teeth against the pain and nodded.
“Not your fault,” I managed to croak.
He smiled beatifically. “No, it's the drugs. But it'll wear off soon.”
Keep him talking, keep him distracted, I thought, as his massaging hands started to wander up toward my knees.
“How?” I mumbled, fighting my still-dry throat. “How do you know these things?”
“Like what?”
“Drugs. Computers.”
Conleth laughed, but there was no real mirth in his tone. “What else did I have to do, trapped in that lab all my life? When I was younger, they let me play outside, but by the end, I wasn't even allowed to leave my cell. Except to go for testing.”
His voice was grim, and I felt another surge of sympathy, even as my skin crawled as his hands made their way up over my knees toward my thighs.
“You're smart,” I said, trying to distract him.
“Yeah, well, it was either learn stuff like that or go crazy.”
His strategy wasn't entirely effective, I thought, still forcing myself to meet his mad blue eyes.
“More water?” I asked. I was still really thirsty, but he was also groping my inner thighs.
“Of course,” he said, his voice suddenly deeper.
Not good, I thought as my still-loopy brain scrambled to think of a way to distract him.
He gave me another long drink and then tossed away the now empty bottle. He stood in front of me, staring down and letting his eyes rove over my body. The sight was more terrifying than if he'd raised a fist.
“Can you untie my arms?” I hazarded. “They hurt.”
“No, sorry. I know it's just because you don't know me yet, but until we're friends, I can't let you go.”
I watched him, noting how his own power flared up and down erratically. Every once in a while, his fire burst free, and I couldn't believe just how much mojo he had at his disposal while having so little control. He crouched down in front of me again, reaching for me—
“What was it like?” I asked, my voice overly loud. Con paused, his eyes snapping back to my face.
“What was what like?”
“Growing up the way you did.”
Conleth sat back on his heels and gave me a hard look. He obviously didn't like my line of questioning, but I persevered.
“You don't have to talk about it if you don't want. But I want to know. If we're going to be friends, we should be able to talk…”
He shook his head and sat backward onto his bottom, crossing his long legs, indian-style. He looked so young sitting like that, and so vulnerable. I wondered what it was inside of him that switched on, or off, when he killed.
“Okay, okay. You're right.”
I waited for him to begin, glad for the respite from his touch but dreading what I was about to hear.
“It wasn't that bad, really. For a long time.”
I cocked my head, giving the ifrit halfling my best “listening” face.
“I mean, I didn't know any better. I wasn't born in the lab, but I might as well have been. I got there when I was really young.” He stopped talking to stare at his feet, lost in thought.
“How'd you get there? Into the lab?” I prompted, even though I knew the basic facts already.
Con shivered and started wringing his hands nervously. “It's pretty fucked up,” he said.
“It's okay, Con,” I said. “What happened?”
“I was just a baby. Probably only a few months old. My mother was human. Bitch abandoned me at a convent. I know that a nun called the police around midnight, reporting that a baby had been left on the doorstep. She said she was only awake because she'd had a bad dream. Cops said they were busy and couldn't get there right away. The nun said she was enjoying taking care of me. Then there was crying in the background, and all of a sudden the nun was screaming. I must have gotten upset and burned the place down. Everyone in the convent died.”
“My god,” I breathed.
“I was born a killer, I guess,” he said. Shame laced his voice, along with a strange, fierce pride. Conleth was a whole hot mess of crazy.
“How do you remember what happened? What the nuns said?”
Con shook his head. “No, someone played me the nine-one-one recording. Someone… who came later.”
“Later?”
“Yeah, when the lab… changed.”
“Oh,” I said. Then we sat in silence. He was probably thinking about what had been done to him under the new regime, but I was wondering how much he knew about the power structure behind his lab. And how to get him to tell me what I wanted to know.
“It was okay before that,” he said eventually.
“The lab?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I didn't know any better. And they treated me pretty well. I mean, some of the tests hurt or were scary, but the nurses were nice and the doctors, especially Dr. Silver, seemed to care.”
“They probably did care, Con. They'd raised you.”
He snorted. Unlike my snorts, his was made up of fire. “Whatever. I thought they cared because I didn't know any better. But none of them did. I was just a job for them, an experiment. They kept me happy because it made the testing easier. And because, although I didn't know it at the time, I could blow them all to hell.”
I nodded. He'd certainly illustrated his “blowing to hell” abilities.
“So what happened when the lab changed?”
He fell silent for a while, gathering himself. I waited, entertaining myself by crinkling my forehead to watch the dried blood flake onto my jeans.
“It was slow. Happened over time,” he answered finally. “The nurses began to change. Then the doctors. Finally it was all different. Even Silver was fired. That's when I realized how lucky I'd been.”
“What did they do?” I prompted gently.
He looked up to meet my eyes, and his were haunted. If he'd looked vulnerable before, now he looked… devastated.
“What didn't they do? Some of it was sort of like what they'd always done but some of it… I think it was just to hurt me. There was one doctor… he was the first to come to the lab that wasn't… human. Not the last, but the first. He's how I learned I wasn't alone. He called himself ‘the healer,' and that was it. I don't know what he was, and the humans all thought he looked normal. But he was using his magic, because he was anything but normal. He looked like he was part… lizard.”
Goblin? I thought, even as I asked Conleth for more details.
“Like I said, he looked half lizard. His nose was sort of flat and snakelike, and he was mostly sort of scaly. But his face had human flesh and his eyes were human. And his hands looked human… but for his claws…” Con's voice trailed off, and he wiped his palms on his jeans, as if trying to wipe away a bad memory. He had totally retreated inward at this point, and he was talking as much to himself as to me. In the meantime, I was still trying to figure out what this healer could have been. What had I met that looked half lizard?