The man with the newspaper folded it down, but looked on dispassionately, as though he was completely uninterested in the woman holding the shoulder of the other woman, who was frothing at the mouth. Something in his look was calculating, but he was just frozen.
“Who are you?” Claire shrieked, trying to pull herself from Jill’s grip. “Why are you doing this to me? Who are you?”
“I’m Jill Appleton, and we met last night. You’re okay, we’re both fine, we’re here with our friend who got hurt.”
Her voice was so calm, so patient, that even in her blind rage, it quelled a little of the fury in Claire’s eyes. The younger, shorter woman blinked a few times, shook her head, and immediately sat down, hard.
“What... what happened?”
“You’ve been mind-controlled. Hold still.”
The man with the untucked flannel shirt tossed his paper aside, strode forward and forced Claire’s head backward so that he could stare... up her nose?
“Were you alone?” he asked. When she didn’t respond, he repeated the question slowly, calmly, but firmly. “At any point since you got here, have you been alone?”
Claire shook her head. Jill’s eyes widened. “Draven?”
“Shaving a mustache is a hell of a thing, especially when you had a split palate as a kid. Makes you feel all self-conscious.”
With that, Claire’s eyes rolled back in her head. Jill rushed forward to catch her, and did, just in time. Like a fly falling down a drip of molasses, Claire slumped to the side, and slid, ass-first, off the chair and to the floor.
“How did you,” Jill started and then shook her head. “Never mind. I’ve stopped bothering with applying normal physics to you.”
“Clever girl,” Draven said, his mustache-free lip, curling in a scarred smile. “You ever seen Jurassic Park? Great movie. Just caught it last weekend.”
“Yeah, I have, about twenty years ago when the rest of the world did.” Jill’s shock at seeing her old friend was slightly tempered by the fact that he’d fooled her, and also that she’d been ready to babble on about the bears and everything in front of a stranger. “But dinosaur movies aside, what the hell happened to her. Are you serious about mind control?”
“Hold her head,” Draven said. “This is going to look a lot more painful than it actually is. Although it’s good she’s as conscious as Elvis.”
As she tried to calculate exactly what that joke meant, Jill watched the old man insert what seemed to be a pair of six inch long tweezers into Claire’s nose. He rooted around, moving the tongs underneath her skin, and grunted with irritation.
“It’s gotta be here somewhere. I’d know that behavior anywhere.” He kept fiddling. “Seen it a thousand times. Anyway, she’s the one who escaped from GlasCorp. There’s no telling when they put it in her head.”
He stuck his tongue out, gnawing on it as a concentration aid. “Hold her tighter. Even knocked out, this might give her a start. So was she ever out of your eyeshot?”
Jill shook her head. “I went to the bathroom a couple times, but no, we pretty much landed, took Jacques to the desk, and they whisked him off for surgery. Any time she was alone, she was just in a waiting room.”
Draven grunted and bit down harder. “There,” he said. “I think I got it. I’m betting this thing’s been in here awhile for how tight it is.”
“How long what has been—holy shit.”
With a look of pride, the old bear extracted a small, cylindrical object, from Claire’s nose. It was shaped a bit like a spark plug, but instead of a firing coil inside the glass cylinder, there was a slim, intricate microchip.
Draven looked at Jill and gave her a wink. “Well, you know. Old men know things too. How you been?”
The casual nature of his voice took her a little by surprise. “Uh, good? Rogue and King being captured or lost or whatever happened to them notwithstanding, I guess. How did you get here? How did you find us?”
The little cylinder clicked, beeped in a pitch so high that Jill thought maybe she’d imagined it, and then it popped. She jumped slightly as the cylinder vanished into absolute nothingness.
“Kidnapped, huh?” Draven asked. “I’m guessing GlasCorp took them back?”
Jill shook her head. “No clue. Jacques and I dropped them off to grab those three,” she tilted her head toward the unconscious woman. “And there was some kind of fight. Lupines, of which I killed three, and then... yeah, they were just gone. She said she woke up alone in the woods, but had seen Rogue and King before that. So something happened to them in the chunk of time they were out in the woods and I was in a helicopter. And you never answered me – how did you get in here?”