Sirens (Theo Raeken) [1]

Power

I shut the door and look over the roof of the car at Theo. "Ready?" I ask. I cock the gun.

"Do you even know how to use that thing?" he asks sceptically.

"No."

"Oh, god, this is going to be fun," he mutters. "So do you even know how you're going to shoot?"

I roll my eyes. "You pull the trigger," I tell him. "Easy."

"I have a bad feeling about this," he says for the hundredth time today.

I ignore him and approach the door. I shove the pistol in the back of my jeans and curl my fingers around the doorknob. I twist it slowly and am met with resistance.

"It's locked," I say.

"Well, obviously," he says. "You think they're going to leave a place like this open?"

"I'm sorry that I normally don't frequent abandoned laboratories," I mutter.

He shoulders past me. "Let me," he says. "Stand back."

"Are you sure -" I start, but I'm cut off by the enormous crash of the door falling in. Theo stands in the doorway looking extremely proud. "Good going," I tell him. "You just alerted the whole of Beacon Hills that we're here."

"If the Dread Doctors are here, they would know we're here," he says. "Don't underestimate them."

The way he says this is like it's a definite fact and I grow suspicious of how sure he sounds. It only then hits me how stupid it was to bring Theo along. If he is, in fact, associated in one way or another with the Dread Doctors, this could very much be nothing more than a trap.

"We'll split up," I say quietly. I slip away into the building before he has a chance to refuse. I pull out my phone and switch on the flashlight. I scan the surroundings.

Syringes and scalpels litter the floor and I have to multitask between keeping my eyes in front of me and dodging the surgical instruments on the ground.

Although the lab is an eerie maze of shelves and labs, it seems unlikely to be used for anything than human study. The syringes are filled with a stale smelling clear liquid, but it doesn't strike me as anything our of the ordinary in a place like this.

The shelves are lined with beakers and test tubes. So far I haven't encountered anything particularly unusual. The place is still is enough to send shivers through my body. Most of the windows are boarded up so the whole place is lacking in light. It's also incredibly cold - a sharp chill that cuts through to your marrow.

That's when I hear it.

Almost so quiet that at first I think I imagined it, but as I pause in my tracks and focus my ears, I realise that it definitely wasn't imagined.

I stalk around the corner. The shadow lurks through the shelves. I tread after it as fast as I can. It's not Theo. Theo's much shorter and broader in his shoulders. The figure stops in its tracks and turns halfway towards me.

I dive at the figure, and try to throw it down. It's definitely human, or at least has the physical attributes of one. I assume it's a male since his shoulders are too wide and his chest too muscular to be female.

His eyes spark up like a molten gold candle being lit. He charges at me, but I block his hits. I grab his shirt in my fist and slam him against a shelf. He groans and I dodge the glass equipment that rain down heavy from the shelf above me. I close my fingers around the gun in the back of my jeans.

I hold the gun to his head, my hands trembling as I rest my finger on the trigger. My breathing is laboured as I decide that he's too weak to do anything and reach for my phone for some light. It was the wrong thing to do, I realise.