Jack got to his feet and stared down at her. He looked so tall and imposing, and his fists were clenched. "Don't bother trying to burn your way out of here. I made sure those chains were designed specifically for your kind. You won't be able to produce a flame while you're in them."
He didn't say anything else. She really thought he would have more to tell her. To her shock, he just turned around and moved to the only door that was in the room she was in.
"Wait! What are you going to do to me?" she asked.
The hunter's box was still in the room, and she was terrified to go back into it. Into that cramped and black nothingness where she was blind and deaf and suffocating.
And what if Jack came back with all sorts of weird and sharp torture devices? Hunters were pretty much allowed to do whatever they wanted to their captives so long as they were alive in time for delivery, but even the hunters who killed their captives were barely held accountable since the hunters always claimed their catch had been fighting back.
Self defense only applied to real humans. Not paranormals who defended against them.
Cindy had never been taken by a hunter before. She'd been lucky, and never had to experience a fight for her life, or a narrow escape before the collectors could come.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. It especially wasn't supposed to happen with Jack. She was supposed to be braver against her attackers, and smart enough to be able to talk her way to freedom. She could barely speak at all. She couldn't think, and her lungs were having a difficult time drawing in oxygen.
There was nothing brave about the way she huddled on the floor.
Jack looked over his shoulder at her, one hand on the door handle. "I'm calling you in. Some people will be here to pick you up in a couple of hours."
Cindy's heart split in two pieces and her stomach dropped into her feet. It burned all the way down, and a harsh chill spidered up her spine that had nothing to do with the cold concrete on which she sat.
"You...you can't do that! They'll put me in a cage! They'll poke holes in me. They'll kill me! Jack!" Cindy yelled.
Jack's stare was cold again. If he really did love her as much as he once claimed to, then there was none of that love left inside of him. Not for her.
"It could be worse," he said. "I could pour gasoline on you and set you on fire, like you did to my father and brothers. Would you survive that as a pyro? Or would you burn?"
Cindy snapped her mouth shut. He knew perfectly well she could still burn. The really scary thing about the question was that he looked angry enough to actually do something like that.
Jack kept right on glaring at her. His body was trembling with the energy of his hatred for her, but then he shook his head in disgust right before he opened the door and left, slamming it behind him. A heavy lock slid into place. The sound echoed in her new prison, and it was almost as bad as the look that had been on his face. It all seemed so final.
"I'm sorry," Cindy said, and then she started to cry.
Chapter Three
"What do you mean you can't come today?" Jack snapped, clutching the phone so tightly the glass might crack any second. He paced in a wide circle as he listened to the woman on the other end, then paused and gripped his hair in a tight fist. "No! That's too far away! I need a Collector here for a pick up, now."
The secretary on the other end of the line, some woman who Jack imagined was hideously ugly with rat whiskers, just spouted the same thing she'd already told him. "A large team was already sent out on an emergency dispatch. There's no one left until they get back, and they won't be available for another three days. Two at best, so unless you can meet another team in Barhaven then there's nothing I can do."
Barhaven was nearly a ten hour drive outside of Lincoln Peak. It pissed Jack off to no end that this woman thought it was remotely a good idea to travel that long by car with a pyro, regardless of whether she was shackled and boxed or not. There would be too many opportunities for her to escape.
"What can be more of an emergency than a class four?" Jack snapped.
"A class six," the woman replied, and he could practically envision the little smile on her face.
A class six. A pack of werewolves near a populated area, with at least one member of that pack wanted for murder. That would certainly require an all-hands-on-deck sort of team, and put a damper in Jack's plans. Fuck.
"Oh," Jack replied.
The voice on the other end suddenly became a little more helpful. "Look, I'll make sure to call my boss about this right away. Someone might come back sooner and they can be sent to retrieve the paranormal. Head Office doesn't want to overlook anything, especially a class four."
"I don't exactly have proper a holding cell here," Jack said. "I never keep my catches overnight."
He'd always been too scared for that sort of thing. After waking up to his house burning down around him, he'd become somewhat paranoid about sleeping while a dangerous individual was nearby.
Cindy would need a bed and a toilet at the least, and those things weren't in his basement. Would he have to provide her with a shower in that time? Extra clothes?
"How are you holding her?" asked the secretary.
"Spelled chains to a concrete wall. There's nothing she can use to break free." For now.
"Is she isolated?"
"Yeah," Jack said. "It's an area of my basement that I sealed off. It's all concrete, and there's a box down there."
"Is she inside of it right now?"
"No, she's chained to the wall," Jack replied through his teeth.
"Then she should be fine. You might want to put her into the box anyway and leave her until pick up. You wouldn't even have to go down there and check on her."
In the box for two or three days straight? "It's a standard box. There's no bathroom in there," Jack thought that should have been obvious. Very few hunters could afford anything bigger, and those that could almost never bothered with them.
"If you're worried about clean up then you can let her out from time to time and she can use a bucket. Or you can keep her inside and let the handlers clean up the box after she's picked up. They'll decontaminate it before they return it to you."
That was an option? "Just leave her in there to piss and shit herself for three days? Are you serious?"
"I told you, you wouldn't have to clean it up. A lot of hunters use this method to lower the chances for escape."
Had his father or brothers ever used that method? He was pretty sure they hadn't. He'd never been interested in the family trade before the fire, but he was fairly certain something like that would've come up in the conversations they'd had over the years. It seemed so inhumane.
"If you don't want to use the box then put a bucket in the cell, leave enough water for hydration, and you won't have to check on her again until a proper team arrives to collect her and give you a check."
"I'm going to have to feed her, you know." Stupid, he thought, but he left that unsaid.
"Well, that's your decision to make if you want to keep her fed. Though, I don't think you would be compensated for the cost of food."
"Yeah, great, so I'll just starve her to save three days worth of food supplies."
"Three days without food is hardly starvation," the woman replied, her voice becoming stiff again. "It wouldn't kill the subject, just bring about some discomfort. So long as you keep her hydrated regularly with water then there's no real physical harm."
"Is that what happens in the labs?" Jack asked. There was a pamphlet that he'd read through about some of the programs the paranormals went into. He hadn't seen anything like that mentioned, but he also hadn't spoken to many secretaries, and so far he'd only caught maybe five paranormals to be picked up by the collectors.
What Head Office did with them after they were brought in depended on what they were accused of. If a paranormal was found guilty of murder, then there was almost always an instant decision for euthanasia. Paranormals accused of rape, torture and kidnapping might get away from the needle if their powers were unique enough that the lab rats wanted to study them.
Everyone else was put into cages. Some were studied. Some weren't. Jack had even heard of paranormals being brought in to work for Head Office itself, but that was rare, and it depended on the power and if the people in charge thought they could be of use.
The shackles that kept Cindy bound were made by the spells of a paranormal, after all. Though, Jack had no idea where that person was now. Maybe put down, or placed back into a cage. He didn't know, but he didn't want Cindy to be euthanized.
The only reason why Jack hadn't yet filled out that section of Cindy's paperwork-that she was accused of killing three hunters-was because he wasn't sure which would be a better punishment for her. Death, or a life inside the labs with the scientists and Handlers.