Flares » Isaac Lahey [Book 3]

Chapter 20

Chapter 20 » no pain no gain

"What I'm about to show you," Deaton started, his eyes glancing over each one of us. After Malia had helped rescue him, we all had a brief reunion before getting down to business. "It isn't supposed to exist." One by one, he placed some pictures on the metal table, showing horrifying things. "This is the only surviving evidence of Dr. Valack's time as Chief Medical Officer of Eichen House. To call it human experimentation would be charitable." I frowned and reached over, picking up one of the pictures of a woman screaming, dry blood coating from her ears and head. "A Banshee," Deaton confirmed. "She died screaming."

"So he drilled holes into their heads?" Stiles asked, looking disgusted. "All of them?"

"That was the experimentation part. He did it to Werewolves, Banshees, Wendigos, any creature he could get his hands on. And Valack found that trepanation would initially heighten their powers, but to levels that couldn't be contained," Deaton explained.

"So he wants to make Lydia more powerful?" I asked, placing the picture back down with a shudder. The thought of that happening to our Lydia terrified me.

"Except she's going to end up like them," Stiles looked down at the pictures with a gulp.

"Worse, actually," Deaton corrected, causing my heart to drop even further into my stomach. "Lydia's abilities were already pretty exceptional to begin with. Putting a hole in her head will be like causing a leak in a nuclear reactor. She'll hear everything. Every death, every dying scream, all at once."

"That's going to kill her," Scott stated.

"Not only that. Her own dying scream could be so powerful that it might kill everyone around her as well."

Stiles looked down at a picture, shaking his head. Isaac turned to Deaton, his expression fearful. "So what do we do?"

Deaton's eyes flickered up at all of us. "We get her out."

And one look in Stiles' determined eyes told me he had a plan.

~

"There's four steps," Stiles informed the six of us about an hour later. We were in the McCall house, stood around a table. "We get into Eichen, we get into the closed unit, we get Lydia, we get out."

"And we have to do all of this while getting past orderlies, guards, electric door locks and a Mountain Ash barrier," Scott reminded.

"You have a plan for all of that?" Malia asked, seeming like she didn't believe there was any way we could pull this off. I had slight doubts too, but chose the optimistic route.

Stiles held up a keycard. "I stole this last night off an orderly. But it's useless 'cause they reset the codes each night."

"So why did you take it?" Kira questioned, asking the exact same question that was going through my mind.

"I'm getting to that, he said. "The only way to get Lydia out of Eichen is to make that key card work again."

"How are you going to do that?" Liam challenged, his eyebrows raised.

"I'm getting to that, okay, just listen," Stiles said, twisting his laptop around to face all of us. "I pulled all the history off the key card. Two weeks ago, there was a brownout and the security system rebooted. During a reboot, all of the key cards revert back to a default code. So, if we trigger a reboot-"

"The card goes back to the default code, it works again," I finished, beginning to realise and understand the plan.

"How are we going to cause a brownout?" Kira asked.