“First things first. We get you on your feet again,” Lucas said.
Jerking Wren forward, Lucas gripped the leash. “And you.”
As they walked through the phlegmy muck, Wren tried not to focus on the men howling and screaming like chimpanzees. She tried not to focus on the elderly who had come to die or beg for the devil to answer their prayers.
She focused on the men because she knew they were the only ones who could protect her. If she died down here, their backs would be the last things she saw.
“You’ll be fine. Just don’t fucking run,” Killian said.
“Where—?” As Vash turned to force her cheeks together, her voice cut short.
“I am dying with fever,” he said. “If I don’t find this doctor in the next six hours, I will die.”
Wren braced for his fist to hit her face, but when the blow never came, she weakly succumbed to the clutch of their hands again. “What does that have to do with me?” she asked.
“Please,” Vash muttered. “I’m doing something I would normally never do. I’m asking for your help.”
“Okay… I will help you,” she said.
Vash held his gut and walked toward a set of stairs. “I needed your DNA to make the correct serum. All of that was just destroyed,” he said.
“It’s not the girl’s fault,” Killian muttered. “Cassian did this to you.”
The name burned Wren’s tongue. Nearly folding forward, she gave a sharp cry. This seemed to please the alphas. They chuckled and moved her up the stairs with the leash.
“You know him,” she said.
Vash cocked his head. “He killed my father,” he grunted.
“Y-you’re…” Wren stumbled forward as they dragged her up the metal steps. “The devil who kept me... Who is he?”
“Walk.”
At the top of the stairs, there was a door that led into a narrow passageway. As they moved deeper inside, they came across a man dressed in the same garb as the specialists that raise her. Nodding toward the girl, he asked, “You’re carrying the omega around with you? Are you out of your mind?”
“Our property. Our business,” Killian said.
“It’s worse than I thought,” Vash sneered.
Rolling up the front of his shirt, he showed the doctor his abdomen, now leaking infectious pus.
“The leader did this to you?”
Forcing Vash’s shirt back down, the doctor shoved him against the wall of the hallway. “If that beast fed you this parasite, I can’t be the one to help you.”
Both Killian and Lucas stepped forward. “Fix him, or we’ll fix you,” Killian said.
The doctor removed his hands from Vash’s trembling abdomen. “You know about his reputation,” he said.
“I was told you had the serum,” Vash barked. “If you’re going to waste my time, I’ll have the girl kill you instead.”
Wren blushed and cowered behind Killian’s massive calves. She held his hairy flesh, feeling dizzy again. Her medication. She wanted her sweet relief.
Glancing back at Vash’s wound and current state, the doctor held up a small box. Kneeling, he set the box on the musty concrete and touched a translucent button. The center opened into an oval shape.
“The parasite takes two weeks to conform to your nervous system. I can make the antibiotics necessary to kill it, but you ought to have the samples you were told to bring.
Vash’s heart sank. There was no way he could give him what he asked for. Not now. Cassian’s men wouldn’t avoid the pipes for long. They couldn’t wait for the samples to get analyzed and copied.