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No. Ben was fine, I told myself. He would be fine. He had people who loved him, who would get him through losing me. Jane, Gabriel, all of their little family. They were all OK. My thoughts turned to each of their faces, of the last time we were all together, how we laughed. I would miss them all so much.
The car slowed to a stop, and I popped up my head. I'd been concentrating on Ben so hard that I really hadn't felt the pain in my arms. A break that was now over, because there was the pain again.
Ow.
Dr. Fortescue parked in front of a huge abandoned warehouse. Because where else would a supervillain in the backwoods establish his headquarters? Tina opened my door and cut my cuffs loose from the headrest. I slid out of the car, careful to keep my jacket tucked over the phone in my jeans.
While the lights were working, the warehouse was cold and empty and smelled like a basement. The windows just below the roofline had been spray-painted over. Scientific equipment occupied the one clean corner of the building. Chemistry setups bubbled, and machinery hummed. It felt . . . forced, like something a kid might expect a scientist's lair to look like. Was Fortescue putting on a show for me? To impress me?
Fortescue kept the gun on my head, while Tina removed the cuffs and shoved me into a sturdy metal chair that was bolted onto the floor. She put another set of the silver-laced plastic cuffs around my wrists, clipping them to the chair slats behind my back.
"I need to prepare," Dr. Fortescue told Tina as he slid into a pristine lab coat. He handed her his gun. "The auction begins in two hours. Shoot her if you have to but nowhere vital and nowhere near the face. It's better to leave her pretty."
He nodded to her and strode to the back of the warehouse to a door marked "Office." Why did I get the feeling that he was really going in there to rock out to Dr. Feelgood to pump himself up?
I twisted my wrists until I could fit my hands through the slats in the chair. I could feel the outline of the phone through my jeans. And it was not budging.
"Auction?" I asked Tina. "Is he going to sell me?"
"No, of course not," Tina assured me. "He wants proof that he can produce the kind of results he's promising. You are that proof. He needs more funding, Meagan, to do his work. And if the Council isn't going to give it to him, he has to find it somewhere."
"But the Council did give it to him, in a way, didn't they?" I asked her, trying not to move my arms too much as I nudged the phone up to the waistline of my jeans. "The money you embezzled, you handed it over to him, right?"
"I was his first investor," she said, preening. "They say behind every great man is a woman with a plan. And I am that woman, Meagan. Everything Allan has he has because of me. Everything you are you are because of me."
I lifted a brow. Was she monologuing now? Were henchmen allowed to do that? I should have watched more James Bond movies to prepare for this situation.
Wait, she was still talking.
"I'm the one who hired some nimrods willing to play Ultimate Frisbee on a college campus with a forty-five-pound weight every night for two weeks until you came out of the building. And paid another to stand by, ready to turn you."
"That does sound like something Ophelia's friends would do," I admitted. "But why me? What did I do to you?"
"We needed someone without a family, no connections, someone without loved ones to cause problems if the turning process went wrong."
Well, that hurt more than I would have expected it to.
I felt the bottom edge of the phone sliding out of my jeans. Now I just had to get it into my hand without making any noise.
"Of course, we didn't expect the Council to swoop in and claim the prize. Jane Jameson-Nightengale is a little more committed to being a ‘responsible' Council rep than I expected."
"So why are you here now? Cashing in on your investment?"
Tina pouted, throwing a petulant look toward the office. "Allan's gone rogue. He's lost focus. Instead of creating more supervamps like yourself, he kept trying to tweak the formula for his drug/gene therapy, like a dog worrying a bone. He buried himself in his work, wouldn't talk to me or return my calls. I mean, I funded that man's research, the process to turn you, and he just ghosted me? I had to do whatever it took to get his attention back. I set fire to his lab, all of his files, his backup drives. I even cleared his cloud, thinking that if he lost his research, all of the test carriers I'd gleaned from Ophelia's list, he'd have to return my calls. And I was right! I was, after all, the only one who could lead him to you, and then, when he found out that you'd made another supervamp, well, he just couldn't get enough of me."