Daegelus | Volume One: Subject 0333

Chapter Nine | No Time To Waste

"What?" Jake grumbled.

"Get in here," she insisted, evidently pulling him inside as Jake protested. "I need to talk to you." And then she shut the door.

Now that he was alone, Elijah rolled onto his back and exhaled deeply. But then he heard Zoe say his name.

"It's all just...a little scary," the girl whispered.

Jake scoffed. "Zoe, I've known you like ten years. I know your family and what they do, so I was kinda expecting this sort of thing to happen at some point. Anyway, I sorta like your cousin. He's cool."

"Oh...you think he's cool?" she questioned with a disappointed tone.

"Yeah, he's like this mysterious rogue kinda guy. I didn't even know he existed until last night. Why were you hiding him all this time, huh?" he asked amusedly.

"There's just a lot of drama behind the scenes. I don't really wanna talk about it," she lied. "Of course you'd call him a rogue, though."

"But he is, though," Jake laughed. "Like...first he's got people trying to snipe him, then he knows all these secret tunnels and there's hellhounds after us, and now he takes us to a whole underground city we didn't even know was here. What else has he got going on, you know?"

That kid sounded a little too excited.

"I almost don't even want to know," Zoe mumbled. "I had to burn people."

Jake exclaimed in awe, "What? That's so cool! I wish I was there. What happened? Did you kill more of those detainer guys?"

"It's not cool, Jake," she whispered worriedly. "It's scary! I think I'm traumatized."

"But come on! This is the coolest shit that's happened to us since like forever. Don't you think it's even a tiny little bit cool?"

The girl sighed deeply. "Look...there's some stuff you don't know about all of this, okay?"

Elijah listened to her tell Jake about everything that happened a few hours ago. He wasn't going to stop her. These two were stuck with him and he'd rather them both know what was going on rather than have to repeat and re-explain everything. But when she told Jake about what Elijah revealed to her about his time in Lyca Corp., the demon tensed up and struggled to keep himself focused.

He didn't want to think about it.

"Wait..." Jake responded once Zoe was done getting him up to speed. "So...your cousin was locked up in one of the labs that you're trying to get evidence of...and he's also one of those apparent illegal experiments?" He sounded surprised and a little upset. "So, that's why all of this is happening?" He scoffed and questioned, "Why didn't you just tell me this last night?"

Zoe took a moment to reply; she was probably trying to muster up a lie. "B-because all of this is happening so fast and it's all fresh information. I don't know what to make of any of it."

"So...what are we really doing out here, then? Just hiding from those detainers so we don't all get captured or killed?"

"We need to get information about a lot of things. But Elijah found a lead that might get him closer to finding the person he's looking for, so I think we're all heading out once he wakes up."

Jake sighed heavily. "To think he spent thirteen years getting poked and prodded and cut and—"

"Stop," she insisted.

"Sorry."

Elijah tensed up and gripped the sheets. His heart became ensnared with angst, and the longer he lay there, the harder it became for him to fight off the memory of the beady-eyed doctors staring down at him as they cut his skin and tore his flesh—