A crow flew onto the table and strutted across it. A brown rat dashed past the bathroom doorway and out of sight, its long, bald tail whipping after it.
I held onto Jason’s arm and pulled my jacket onto my good arm and both shoulders. It was probably just as well that it was chilly in here considering the smell of the place, but the cold was not helping my aching body.
Milo mumbled something irritable along the lines of, “Yes, I’m taking care of it.” Metal clattered on metal, then he walked up, coming into my line of sight through the doorway.
A new thrill of horror shot through me at sight of him. He was now dressed in normal street clothes, a button-down and dark jeans, plus cowboy boots, hat, and cigarette, but none of this really registered. He had a strip of elastic cord in one hand and a syringe loaded with some pinkish liquid in the other.
Jason also caught his breath when he saw him, stepping back, moving in front of me.
“What’s that?” Jason asked.
“Not yours,” Milo said, still in a sort of bored-irritable tone. “It’s for the witch.”
“Wait—” Jason moved again. “What is it you want with us? We’ll help you. You don’t need stuff like that.”
Milo frowned. “This isn’t a truth-telling serum, wolf. It’s just a sedative and hallucinogen. Our own concoction. It defies focus; will keep your little friend from being able to use magic. That’s all. It wears off in six to twelve hours … usually.”
My heart seemed to hammer in my ears, my mind to blank out as I should be talking, or running, or fighting. I couldn’t beat them with magic, I couldn’t get away, I couldn’t think of a thing to say that any of them might listen to.
More than anything, though, I could not let a madman shoot me full of homemade drugs that I could vividly picture surging straight through my bloodstream and into my unborn child.
But Jason was talking, not missing a beat as Milo’s cigarette smoke filled the tiny room and I coughed instead of doing anything at all useful.
“You don’t need to worry about her,” Jason said. “We saw what you all can do with magic. It’s hardly as if you need to be afraid of us. If we can help you with something, like figuring out how she scried you, we’ll do that. We didn’t want any trouble coming here. Jacques saw us. You must believe that.”
Milo gave a little shrug, paused in the doorway in front of Jason, still holding the band and syringe ready, talking effortlessly with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Tayron wants her here. He needs your cooperation for his work. But we can’t risk interfering. She’s a witch—”
“Mostly a scry,” Jason said quickly. “Really, if there’s some secret to her having seen this place it’s just because she’s a bloody good scry. She’s not going to hurt you.”
“One way or another—”
“Please don’t give her that.”
They both moved at the same time like a dance, Milo stepping in, Jason back and more in front of me, pushing me into the hard edge of the pedestal sink as I coughed and tried to breathe against his shoulder.
Jason kept talking. “I know you’re not really afraid of us. Only Tayron said you have to give her something. Are you here to translate for him also? We’ll do what you want. We want to talk. But you don’t have to give her that. She’s really sensitive, medical reactions. Allergic to penicillin, can’t get a flu shot—you know, one of those canary in a coal mine people who just can’t handle all these drugs and toxins? The mold in here was making her sick, coughing, stuffed up nose. It seems mild to you, but think about it. They want to talk to her, right? They want to know how she saw this place? Give her that and you could make her so sick she doesn’t know her own name. She’s not going to use magic against you up here. You know that. You proved your point last night. Even if Tayron’s afraid of us, you don’t need to be.”
Milo regarded him coolly from very close, inhaling through the paper tube on one side of his mouth, blowing out from the other corner. He looked at me, partly hidden behind Jason and in the gloom, holding a flap of my coat over my nose while I tried not to breathe in the smoke.
He lifted the cigarette from his mouth with the hand on the cord and jabbed it at me. “No magic.” Narrowing his eyes.
“No.” I shook my head, dropping the jacket so I wasn’t concealing part of my face. “Of course not. We only want to talk to you. Not start trouble.”
“Hmm…” He stepped toward me.
Jason spun, knocking me sideways, my legs hitting the edge of the bathtub and almost falling into it, but he held onto me.
Milo had no interest in getting to me, however. He only leaned over the sink, flipping on the tap, which screeched and resisted, and depressed the plunger on the syringe. Not exactly heartwarming to see that stuff going into the water, either. He probably wanted his elder colleague to think he’d used it.
Milo yawned as he dragged the faucet off.
“Milo?” I tried not to sound as tentative as I felt. “Where are our things? Passports? Purse?” I had to stop myself mentioning phones.
“Back downstairs. Why? Think you’re needing a passport?” He rolled his eyes and wandered out to the lit room without another glance at us.
All the time, Tayron was talking to himself or his little animals in apparent glee.
I wrapped my left arm around Jason, leaning into his back, hugging as tight as I could while I shook.
“Thank you…” Which words, catching up to his smooth, fast, effortless words that had saved me—us—also made me understand. “How long have you known?”
“Since the airport.” Jason watched Milo, or whatever he could see, while he held my arm and I pressed my face between his shoulders. “How you were sick and how Switch behaved with you. Only made me wonder. Then I thought I could smell it on you… Wasn’t certain.”
“The airport was when I found out too.”
Jason gave a little cough of a laugh. He squeezed my hand against my chest. “What is it they’ll want to do with us? What do you really know about them?”
“In modern times? Nothing. They used to hold all kinds of magical experiments to build their own power. They would study alchemy and people and animals, magical or otherwise, to harness whichever powers and skills they wanted to add to their magic. The organization was built around magical extremes. How far could they push it? How much could they do? If they could make a pile of sand disappear, could they make a mountain disappear? If they could bring a caterpillar back to life, could they bring a dog, or human, back to life? They were the mad scientists, the power-hungry casters who didn’t mind who they used to get where they were going. But that was a thousand years ago. We’re not in Ancient Rome or the Dark Ages.”
“Yet…” Jason let out a slow breath. “Some studies never end.”
“Come along,” Milo snapped, obviously addressing us since it was in English.
“Can we have a pee?” Jason asked.
“Yes, yes, hurry it up.” Something thumping, papers rustling, Tayron still chatting.
Jason shut the door and turned to me, leaning in, his voice a breath in my ear, speaking very fast. “What can you do to block their magic? Get us past them?”
“To their faces? Nothing. Not with everyone here. There might even be more in the house. We don’t know. The only way we might be able to get out is talking or stealth. We can’t take them on directly.”
“Then we need to get through whatever it is they want now. Get them talking, or wait until we’re alone again to sort a way through. Maybe you can scry it? You scried the door. In the meantime, Milo is our only chance with these two to talk to someone. Make the best of it.”
“Wait—how? What are you wanting me to say?” Jason thought I was way ahead on these plans and ideas—like we both had the blueprint.
He still spoke in a breath, quick. “Milo doesn’t want to be an apprentice anymore. He’s past doing chores for the old mages, but he’s still stuck in the role. He doesn’t care about helping us. Don’t appea
l to his humanity. I’m not sure he has any. Appeal to his ego. Clearly he knows something. Clearly he’s heard about reavers. Clearly we’re no threat to someone like him. Understand?”
I nodded quickly.
“Either of us who can talk to him—”
“Come on!” From Milo, then more arguing in French between the two.
“Wait.” I grabbed Jason’s arm. “I really do need to pee.”
“Me too.” He turned away, leaning his forehead into his arm, which he leaned into the door. “Half roll of toilet paper and I doubt we’re getting any more. That bottle is not soap. It’s pure malt vinegar.”
“Oh … well … that’s cleansing. Nana used to scrub floors with it.” It was so dark in the room with only the light coming from below the door that it was a struggle even to find toilet and paper and bottle on the sink. At least the darkness gave some illusion of privacy, but it wasn’t much with someone standing in arm’s reach away.
Jason was breathing very hard as he leaned into his arm. He’d been perfectly charming with Milo—no distress. Now it was like he had to clear it out of his system, get ready for the next round.
Out of the bathroom with him a minute later, I got my first full look of the room. To the right was a door and dim hallway of dark wood floor and peeling, antique wallpaper. To the left was a shuttered window allowing in only strips of gray daylight. To one side was a workbench strewn with tools and diagrams. To the other and wrapping around to the wall we stood beside, hung an array of ropes and chains of all sorts, along with a range of other items so old, or so odd, I couldn’t tell the use of most. A couple were clear, like handcuffs and collars for various sized animals. Others looked like garden tools or farriers’ tools.
Tayron had a mess of tools he was still sorting out and talking over on his drafting table to our left—knives, wires, a hatchet, a stopwatch—and a notebook above them open to a fresh page. Milo sat directly in front of us from the bathroom doorway, his side to us, as he leaned a chair back on two legs, doodling with a gold fountain pen in a matching notebook to the leather-bound one of Tayron’s.
Beyond Milo and the table were the creatures in cages—or on them. A couple of crows and a ferret, at least, were loose. The room smelled strongly of those cages and the temperature felt more normal with a radiator by the door.
Even with all this to take in, I hardly looked. My gaze went to those knives and stayed there, gripping Jason’s arm, freezing in the doorway as if we’d hit another force wall.
“What is it you’d like to know about shifters?” Jason asked Tayron: calm.
He looked up, smiling through the rough beard to see us emerge, but glancing at Milo.
Milo translated, then relayed to us, “He’s been studying magical versus object trauma on living tissue.” Milo yawned again. “The healing properties of shifting fascinates him, but he’s never had the opportunity for a personal case study.”
Jason also stared at the knives.
I finally managed to look at Milo. “You mean—” I had to swallow. Still, my voice seemed to be squeezed through a keyhole. “He wants to hurt Jason with weapons and see how he heals with the change? Then with magic, and see how he heals with the change?”
“Basically.” Milo let his chair drop to all fours. “I don’t keep up with all his whims.” He flapped his hand at Tayron, who was apparently demanding a translation. “I’m only in his repulsive laboratory to assist and translate until I get to go to bed. Likewise, you are only here so the wolf behaves.”
“We can tell him all about shifter healing,” Jason said. “What heals, what doesn’t, how it works—”
“That would not fill his case book.” Milo rolled his eyes again at the stupidity and caught me stealing a glance at the door. “Damn you,” he said flatly and stood up. “I’m not shutting it. It stinks plenty in here already. But if either of you start moving toward it, you’ll make Tayron set something on fire.”
Tayron was still demanding and Milo snapped at him in French that it was nothing. Then a long, fast something with many gestures toward us and the door.
This ended with Milo snapping a cold steel cuff around my left wrist while Jason said I didn’t need to be involved in this and I wasn’t even a shifter. Didn’t they want to talk to me about scrying, and so on.
Milo, hitting me in the face with the brim of his hat and making me cough again on smoke, threaded the other side of the handcuffs through a wide chain which he padlocked to one of a series of heavy iron hooks screwed into the baseboard.
I had about five feet of space there by him and the bathroom door, close enough to the hall door to take a look, but far from the back wall and workbench.
“Milo?” I said softly while he was tending to cuff and chain and Tayron was wagging his finger at Jason, apparently lecturing. “Are you his apprentice? You have to do everything he says? What about the man downstairs? With the cat? He wanted to know how we got here. Wasn’t that the most important thing? Not this. This is just one man’s … hobby…”
“Milo!” Tayron shouted.
Milo clicked the lock and walked away.
More quick French and gesturing at Jason and around the room at the tools.
“You all right?” Jason spoke from the corner of his mouth, glancing to my left hand.
I nodded. “Jason, we need a way out of this. We can’t wait for—”
“What did we say?” He was still calm. Even his nearly black eyes looked calm.
“You could be dead before we get a break—” Still that gasp, that keyhole voice.
“Here—” Milo shoved stuff aside on the workbench and unearthed a thin chain with a ring in each end. “Problem solved.” He flung the chain, which I realized only then was a large dog’s choke chain, at Jason, who caught it.
Tayron clapped his hands and pulled a chain leash from the wall.
Jason looked to Milo, who was returning to his seat by me with the notebook. He had to wave a crow off it.
“Put it on. And take everything else off unless you plan to shape shift like that.” Milo cursed and had to fish another cigarette from his shirt pocket as the other one was failing him. He dropped the butt to smolder on the floor and set the pack ready for more beside the notebook.
“Jason, don’t,” I said, stepping to the corner of the table, as close as I could get to Milo. “Doesn’t he want to talk to us? The mage downstairs? He was so upset that we found the place. We don’t have to be enemies—”
“Do you only know a few lines of English yourself?” Milo, a disgusted look on his face, as if this were the last straw, threw up his hand in my face.
The pressure this time was like being batted with a manhole cover. The impact seemed to hit everywhere. I was thrown into the wall and edge of the bathroom as if kicked there by a horse. The breath was knocked from me in a gasp with the room itself as the chains clinked and cages rattled, and everything shook from the impact of my back on the wall.
“What the hell was that for?” Jason was suddenly between me—now sitting on the floor—and Milo in the chair.
“What the hell was that for?” Milo snapped, pointing at me with the cigarette he snatched from his mouth. “I’m just trying to get my work done and go to bed. If you all want to stay up all day, do it on your time. Put that on, take your clothes off, do whatever he wants, and we can all get some piece. Don’t do those things and we’ll have to put your witch friend to use—which use is to get you to behave yourself. Do you want to see how we use her to get you to behave, or do you just want to be a good wolf in the first place and save us all the trouble?”
Jason eased away, glancing down at me.
“I’m fine,” I panted.
He stepped back to Tayron, who waited happily for him, and slowly pulled off his own shirt before putting the collar on.
Chapter 37
“Please, please stop. He can’t keep changing. Please—they can only do it a few times in a row. It could kill him. You’re not going to learn anythi
ng if you kill him. Please stop—”
A blinding caffeine withdrawal headache had merged with my blow to the head headache until I could hardly see anyway, but the tears and frequently keeping my eyes shut didn’t help. Or they did. Because I had never wanted to see anything less than this.
I was on my knees against the wall I was chained to, hunched forward, left shoulder on the raw plaster where wallpaper had been torn away. Jason had told me to talk to Milo: work the room, advance our case, try to help, try to do something. I had promised I wouldn’t use magic. Now I wished Milo had given me the drug. I wished I could trade places with Jason. I wished the pain in my head were a saw blade instead of only feeling like one.
I couldn’t even think what I might say to Milo. While the idea of using magic to help either myself or Jason in front of them was nothing short of terrifying. Tayron would feel a shield of the sort I’d given to Kage in the reaver attack and take countermeasures. Against Jason. Not me. He believed I’d received a magic block through an injection.
I didn’t even have the strength of my wards, it turned out. I hadn’t noticed until I’d seen that the long chain necklace Jason always wore was missing. My own necklace was also gone. And my grandmother’s ring. And Zar’s bracelet, the belt from Jed: all the objects I had recently warded. Jason’s necklace had been another. Gone.
I don’t know if it was the fact of these things being gone or only my awareness of it that had helped to drive home my current feeling of the purest despair I’d ever felt in my life.
“Please, at least wait until tomorrow. He can’t—please. How can it help you if you just start tests and he dies?” I tried in French, stringing a few words together since Milo rarely bothered to translate anything I said. Or I would say fifty words and he would say two to Tayron.
Moonlight Whispers: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 8) Page 25