Made to Love by DL Kopp Read Free Book Online Page A

basement
anyway.
    Sullenly, I forced myself
to eat some of the horrible food.  “If Octavius was here, he
could get me out,” I muttered around a mouthful of fried
egg.
    When I finally put aside my
food, I put in a few more half-hearted attempts at picking the
lock.  The house was empty now, so I could make all the noise
I wanted, but banging and rattling at the lock didn’t improve
anything.
    Standing in the middle of
the room, I shivered and rubbed my arms.  Stupid drafty old
house.
    Wait… drafty?
    My door and windows were
shut, but air was getting in somewhere.  Holding my hand out
to feel the faint breeze, I followed it up to the bottom of the
tower.  There was a crack in the stone wall from which the air
was blowing.  It was a little too warm to be coming from
outside.
    I leaned close to the wall,
inspecting the stones.  There was a hole in the corner of one
of them, and I wiggled my finger into it to feel around.
    Something clicked, and the
wall swung open, revealing a steep staircase that ran down the back
of the house.
    I stepped back,
surprised.  A secret passage?  How cool!
    Fighting my urge to
immediately explore, I returned to my bedroom and dug up an old
flashlight, dressing quickly in a ruffled black skirt and striped
stockings, pulling on a tank top with a skull decal over my
head.  I wasn’t sure where the passage led—outside,
maybe.  If so, I wanted to be long gone before my parents got
back.  I bet I could stay with Octavius.
      I snuck into the
secret passage, pulling the wall shut behind me.  The hall was
narrow and there was no light, so I turned on my flashlight and ran
my hand along the wall to keep my balance.
    It felt like I walked down
the sloping path for hours, but a glance at my watch showed that it
really took no longer than five minutes.  At the bottom there
was another hinged wall, and I pushed it open cautiously, peeking
my head outside.
    It was the hall behind the
kitchen.  The passage must have been for servants back in the
day—a quick way to get around.
    “ Cool,” I
whispered.
    I started to hurry down the
hall toward the entryway, but I hesitated in front of the pantry
door.  The key was still heavy in my pocket.
    Maybe just a quick look
wouldn’t hurt.
    The key slipped smoothly
into the lock, and it opened with a quiet clunk.
    Faced with another dark
staircase, I decided this time to leave the door open a crack and
use the hallway light to navigate my way downstairs.  The
flashlight was maybe a little too conspicuous.
    I crept downstairs, keeping
my ears and eyes open, ready to bolt at the first hint of my
dad.
    The stairs opened up into a
lab at the bottom—not too unlike my dad’s workspace back in
Georgia.  There were alembics and calcinators, beakers in
metal racks dripping smoke and flickering with strange green
lights.  My dad had never liked new technology, so he had
papers, too, and lots of them—a thousand pages that recorded
formulas, procedures, and his thoughts as he worked.  He even
kept leather-bound journals, like some Victorian-obsessed
dork.
    But he had never been so
fiercely protective of his workspace before.  He had even let
me in once or twice.  Why freak out at me for even finding the
door?
    I turned a corner, and
froze.
    There was a bed of some
kind—some crazy, medieval table propped against the wall at a forty
five degree angle—and a man strapped to it at his arms and
thighs.  The man was sleeping peacefully, blonde bangs
shielding his eyes.  He wore nothing but a pair of Tidy
Whities, which wasn’t too surprising considering how humid and
muggy it was in the lab, with a thin mist rolling on the ground at
ankle-level.
    Considering the weird stuff
my dad did sometimes, finding a guy sleeping in his workspace
wasn’t really that weird.  He did have research
assistants.
    But this was no research assistant.
    There was something wrong
with his body.  He looked like a patchwork quilt—his right
shoulder wasn’t the same