Читать книгу The Beast Within - Suzanne Mcminn - Страница 4

Light blinded him as the lab exploded.

One second, he was performing a routine test procedure with his partner, Phil Bennett, and the next, Kieran Holt’s life blew apart. His hands flew up to shield his face as heat pushed at him, whirling past him in a thunderous roar. A mighty crack tore through his consciousness and he rocked backward.

Suddenly it wasn’t the fire outside his body he felt but within—fever, aching, cramps. An extreme stinging and itching took over his body, then gut-wrenching nausea and cell-ripping pain.

He was dying. He had to be dying. And he’d never see, hold, touch Paige again if he didn’t fight. He opened his eyes to find himself on the floor of the lab, slightly below the thick smoke.

Fire was everywhere, chemicals shattering in violent, changing light. He battled through the strange agony engorging his skin, humming pressure through his blood. He had to escape, and he had to find Phil. Every move he made came with slicing pain somewhere inside his body.

His vision cleared and he saw the booted leg sticking out from behind the work table. He crawled toward it and found his partner’s empty eyes staring up at him in the eerie, swarming inferno. Grief choked him along with noxious fumes.

Kieran struggled to his feet, but balance was impossible. He felt drunk, drugged, barely capable of walking on two legs. He stumbled back onto all fours as grayish ectoplasmic vapor erupted from his own skin.

Time and space lost all meaning. He knew a shifting, excruciating energy as a warm chill rushed through his body, and he stared in horror as a prickling burst out on his arms and legs. With a ferocious will, he forced himself onto his feet and exploded from the lab. Men—security officers—rushed toward him down the corridor. He stumbled past them, rushing from the building in dazed involuntary instinct. Cool night air struck his face, but the heat within didn’t die.

He felt his proportions change—his face stretch, his hips narrow, his shoulders evaporate into his torso. His senses splintered and he could no longer think in words but in emotions and sensations as if his mind had been taken apart and put back together all wrong.

All he knew was panic, and all he could do was run.