by Mason Sabre
Such a bad idea … a bad, bad idea. It was impossible for Crystal to get to the same spot the girl had got to. Adulthood had stolen that childish agility from her and replaced it with fear of falling. She had to race back along the path to where it forked and then double back on herself to get to the higher part. It was only a minute or two when the girl was out of sight, and only a few seconds to get to the same spot, but the girl was gone.
What was she doing? Crystal rubbed at her temples. Every sense in her body was alive, on fire, fused with a magical charge. Of course, she was seeing bloody ghosts, and she was sure that was all the girl was … a memory of something, someone who had been here long ago. If her magic was boiling over because of Jason, it was natural that her mind would be doing much the same.
Just as she turned to go back, the sobbing sound filled with a static buzz came again. This time behind her. It slammed a spike through her chest, twisting it. So much as she wanted to go back to Jason, she couldn’t. She sucked in a breath. “Okay …”
Not so far along the path, and god knows why they didn’t spot it before, but there was a shed. It wasn’t one of those small sheds. The ones people have in their yards to hold the mower in the winter and the odd tool. It was a big shed. The kind of shed, depending on how it is done out by the owner, can be made into a rather exquisite summer house. The kind where people come by on those long summer evenings, sit outside, drink wine and chat about things over an open fire. In the winter it could be used for mass storage, summer chairs, tables, bikes. All the ingredients for a happy summer’s day. A lot of shifters had sheds. Not that they ever used them as that. They were cover for rooms below.
Crystal had been over to Paris once where they had done such a thing with an underground car park. On the street level there was just a box, a lift that went down. That was it, below, level after level of car-parking space. Shifters did the same. They had these sheds, but they were just doorways to the room below where the real prize was hidden beneath the earth. Often it was a cage, or a small cell, something to punish those of their kind … somewhere they could put people to forget about them.
There was a large awning across the top of the door, and the way the building itself spanned back, Crystal mentally compared it to the structure that was probably hidden beneath her feet. This was why there were two levels of path, why there was a mound of earth that appeared to be nothing more than a hill.
Tipping her toe, she kicked at the earth beneath her foot. It was indeed softer, looser. It didn’t match the rest where time and nature had made everything hard, compacted it down so much that someone would need a digger to lift it out.
The shed was innocent looking enough. It was made from light coloured wood, beech maybe? She was no good with those kinds of things. Trees were trees, that was as much as she needed to know. At the front, there were three steps and the foundation was covered with a board all the way around so no one could peer under the place. She was damn sure she didn’t want to look anyway. Every bone in her body was already aching with the need for her to back up and get the hell out of there. She knew she’d regret not listening. She knew she’d regret a lot of things and following that girl was one of them, but to her better judgement and the weird curiosity she was feeling, she climbed the three steps. The wood was solid under her feet, good wood, well made. There were no creaks and sounds to give her away. It was too easy … too perfect.
A shed unguarded in the middle of nowhere?
She gripped the solid wooden rail and braced herself as she stepped onto the deck, and just as soon as her skin connected with the wood, she let out a hiss. Pain lanced through her hand, up along her arm and into her shoulder. It was almost a pleasurable pain, like standing in a shower that’s slightly too hot, but staying there anyway because damn it feels good.
She knew magic when she felt it. And that was what that was. Hot, hard magic. She went to lift her hand off the rail and for a panic-stricken moment, she couldn’t.
“What in the …”
A ringing started in her ears, like someone had just given her a case of tinnitus and turned on the television. She closed her eyes, let her body sway for a moment, and when she opened them again, the shed was gone, so was the rail. Instead of the wooden handrail she’d been holding, she had hold of an old bar. Rust had taken bites from the sides of it.
“Crystal,” a voice behind her said. “I’m so disappointed that you would fall for something so simple.”
She didn’t get a chance to respond. Whoever it was there, and for a very slow second that passed, Crystal was sure it was Zoey, hit her with something hard and heavy. Her brain rattled inside her skull. She was sure she felt it bounce off the side. Then her legs gave way and she was gone.
Out like a light.
Chapter 13
The world was dark, a shade so black that Crystal was sure she wouldn’t be able to see her hands if she were to lift them in front of her face … that was if she was actually able to lift them at all. She pulled, pulling her arms up, or at least trying to. She expected to find them bound, tied behind her back, or something equally as restrictive, but instead, her skin was covered with something warm and soft. It pulsated against her flesh like she had her hands in the loving womb of somewhere safe, or someone … God, she hoped not. The thought fell away like silk falling from a table and pooling down beneath her feet, and the conscious world seemed to slip from her mind, yet she was awake, she was aware.
The problem, she realised, was that she couldn’t hold onto her thoughts, and oddly it gave her no alarm. She couldn’t grasp them and darkness seemed to want to swallow her again. She let her head loll back as if that too were a burden on her shoulders. It was too heavy to keep up, and this was it, she was sure, but even that … even thinking that this was her final moment gave her no fear, no pit in the depths of her stomach. She greeted the thought with stark acceptance, and then just as fast, snapped out of it, like coming awake for the first time.
She blinked, trying to pull herself awake and finding that although she could think, she couldn’t see. She had no idea where she was. Something was covering her head—something dark and black and confining. She blew out a breath against it, and sure enough, fabric lifted from her face, if only for a brief second, and then it settled back against her skin, this time warmed from her breath.
“You’re awake,” a man said not too far away from her, his voice held a sing-song happy tone.
She shook her head from side to side in an odd manner, trying to lose the cover and shake it off. It wasn’t tied around her neck and didn’t seem to rest upon her shoulders, yet it wouldn’t fall loose. She sat forward, or at least tried to, trying to test out how well they’d secured her in place. She remembered that lesson. How prison was often a thing of the mind. Make someone think the door is locked and they’ll never test it and find they’re actually free.
No such luck, though. She couldn’t get the right kind of momentum about her to shake the bag free. She couldn’t move her legs, either. She tried. She wanted to kick out in the direction of the voice and show them that she had fight and they’d be more than sorry, but a little tug and she found that, unlike her hands, her feet were indeed tied to something.
Light suddenly blinded her, lasering the back of her eyeballs before she had time to close her eyes and protect herself. Not that it helped. Even with her eyes closed, she could still see the yellow spots that danced across her eyeballs no matter what way she moved.
“What the hell?” She angled her head, blinking, trying to shake off the blurred vision from the light that had temporarily scarred her sight.
“Good afternoon, Crystal,” the man said. A voice so deep that she expected him to have some colour to his skin. When she did manage to focus on him, she saw he was as white as a sick man. His hair was too. If he’d ever had colour or flecks of grey in his hair, they were gone now. He was slim enough that he was bordering on being classed as emaciated. He smiled at her, a perfect smile with a row o
f equally perfect white teeth. If his name turned out to be Mr White, she was sure as hell going to shoot herself with magic and wake herself up out of this dream. Only her imagination could think up something so bizarre as this. “I am Dr Moorley,” he said. “But you may call me Oliver.”
“Oliver.” She tested the name out from her memory, seeing if she could grasp onto it now.
He nodded, his ever-present smile stretching a little more across his face and lighting up his eyes, but she wasn’t interested in him. As much as her conscious mind began to drift back, so did her unease and the reminder of what they were doing and how she had come to be there.
She was in a room, a large room with a row of computers on a desk. They all beeped together, worked in a systematic way that was devoid of any human input. They bleeped, numbers ran across the screen, and occasionally, a little confirmation notice flashed telling the user that whatever it was doing had been successful.
There was a curtain in the middle of the room like the ones found hiding hospital beds to give the patients some privacy, but this one was just randomly there, hanging. The end of it was just a bit too far for Crystal to be able to see what it was they were hiding. She could guess. Her mind could run away with a million things they might have in there. “Dr Moorley?”
He stepped into view, around the bright light he had been shining at her. Behind him there was another man, a younger man, Human. Next to him, there was a woman … a woman with the face of a friend she once knew, Zoey. “Oliver, please,” the doctor said. “We don’t need formalities here.”
Crystal raised a brow and strained against the chair, putting her face almost in his. “Your friends call you Oliver?”
He gave a nod. “Indeed.”
She sneered at him. “Then you are Dr Moorley, and I am Miss Stoyanoff to you.”
The man stared for a long moment … a moment so long that it made Crystal want to move with unease, but she didn’t. No. Fuck him. She wasn’t giving him that satisfaction. She held his gaze and her expression. Staring down a dog. That was what you did, right? Show them who is boss. If he had to have her held down in a chair, then he knew what she was capable of and knowing that made something twist with delight in her guts. He was afraid of her. He was smiling, but he was afraid.
“As you wish.”
He nodded to the man who was standing away from them. He came over, stood behind Crystal and placed his hands on her shoulders, gripping them in a painful vice. She ground her teeth, refusing to wince from the pressure. She’d not give in. Not in a million years.
Moorley, who was in front of her, ran the tip of one finger down the edge of her cheek, along her jaw, down her neck, all the way in a cold trail of goosebumps to the dip of her cleavage. He hooked the front of her shirt with his finger and smiled as he peered. “Not bad,” he said. His tone changed from the one moments ago, an act perhaps, or maybe this one was.
She spat at him. “You even think that next thought, and it’ll be the second to last thing to go through your head.” She fixed him with a fierce, don’t fuck with me, glare.
“Second to last?”
“Yep. The last thing will be whatever I use to kill you.”
He stayed immobile for a few long seconds, then he chuckled. “Relax. My interest in you is not what you would think.” He took a handkerchief from his top pocket and brought it to his face, wiping away her saliva as he stayed bent over her. “But, you will co-operate here. You were, after all, on my property.”
“Then let me go, and I can be off your property in about five minutes.”
He snorted and then moved back to his computers, he flicked a hand in the direction of Zoey. She didn’t move from where she was, but she did raise her hands in front of her chest. She held them together like she was holding a bar, and then she pulled her fists apart. Crystal’s breath caught in her throat and she tensed as whatever was around her wrists, holding them in place, pierced her skin like needles and teeth all at the same time. She clenched her eyes closed, holding them tight and falling back on the silent chant her mother had taught her, until it was over.
Blood trickled down from the bites, warm and wet, and pooling on the arm of the chair, but Crystal refused to let a tear escape her eyes. No way. “I see you well and truly crossed to the other side then?” she ground out through her clenched teeth, and not liking the painful sound that clung onto the edge of her words.
“No,” Zoey said. “I’m on the same side I’ve always been on, mine.” She had one of those fake voices that women put on for guys, and they fall for it, or at least they seem to. When Zoey moved out of the way, on the counter behind her there was a large silver tray … a surgical tray. Fitting she supposed, that the guy claimed he was a doctor, but on it was her wand.
“You’ve been in my car,” Crystal said, straining forward. “That’s mine.”
“This?” It was Zoey who lifted it, although she had her hand gloved. She wasn’t stupid after all. To anyone, the wand was nothing more than a broken twig—a discarded branch that had been carved into with a knife. But Zoey knew what it was and what it meant. She had one herself. It was Crystal’s soul—the very essence of her that had been given over and replaced with magic when she was born.
Some people believed that wands came from the wood of the tree of life. Others, such as her, believed that the wood that birthed the wands came from a line of decedents of that tree. Only certain trees held magic, power. Eve may have taken the apple from it, but the witches took the wood.
Zoey held the wand across her palms. She closed her fingers over it.
“Please don’t,” Crystal said. She was going to snap it. She had that look about her that kids got when they were about to do something they shouldn’t, and they knew it too. If she broke that … one snap … one snap was enough that she would need months to heal. A crack would take long enough, but if she snapped it clean in half … “Please.”
Many believed that the wand held part of the soul of the witch. To break it would be to destroy her. Zoey ran the tip of her finger along the grooves of the wand like a lover caressing a partner. She smiled as she did it, her eyes flicking up so that she could see Crystal. The ridges were hand-carved by the coven. They signified her magical levels. Each new wand she got in her life was made from the wood of the old one and a blending of a new one. Without the wand, she feared she’d not be able to go on.
“Please, Zoey.”
Moorley was back, hunched over, a hungry look in his eyes. He gave Zoey a slow nod, but it wasn’t slow with wisdom or charm. His movements were deliberate, and malevolence peeked out through his smiling eyes. “Tell me what you were doing on my land?”
Her eyes darted from her wand to him and back again. She gripped the arm of the chair, wincing at the pain from the movement she gave. “I …” It was so hard to think and focus with her holding that. “I saw a girl.”
“Yes?”
“Nothing. I thought she was hurt. She was crying.” As the words left her mouth, she realised that she had been an idiot. That had been Zoey’s magic too. Everything from the girl, to the crying, to the house—it had been a rouse, a trick. The girl was a trap, and she had fallen for it.
“But what were you doing in the area, before you saw the girl?”
Jason.
Moorley smiled as if seeing the thought flash across her face. “Well?”
He was so close now that the putrid stench of his coffee tainted breath made her want to close her eyes and turn away from him, but she refused. She refused all of them. She was not the coward here. She was not afraid. Even Zoey, with the wand in her hand, she had come close, but not so close. She stood behind the good doctor. And it was then Crystal realised her friend … the girl she had idolised all this time and in some place in her head, mourned … did not exist. The child Zoey she had known hadn’t been stolen and brainwashed. She wasn’t acting against her will, no, she was as bad as the Humans she served. “Give me my wand.”
Moorley put his
hands on his hips and raised a brow. “What were you doing on my land?”
Crystal breathed heavily through her nose. “You have something I want. Someone who doesn’t belong to you.”
“I do?”
Crystal nodded. “Give me my wand.”
“Not yet. Who is it that you think I have?”
“A girl. Her name is Shayla.”
He said nothing for a moment and he remained motionless in front of Crystal as if he was thinking. Maybe he was. She hoped that inside his mind he was close to pissing himself, although she doubted it very much. No. A man like him thought they had the control. He thought he had everything, but, in the corner of the room, unseen to all but her, was the predatory form of Jason.
Chapter 14
The wolf was big, sleek. He moved with grace as he slipped around them. His eyes were bluer than they had been before, mesmerising. He looked like he was smiling too, but she didn’t smile back. Didn’t want to count that they had the victory they needed.
“I am afraid you’ve had a wasted trip,” Moorley said after a moment of silence.
Crystal switched her gaze to the doctor and cocked her head to one side in mockery. “You’re going to tell me she isn’t here?”
He laughed, shook his head at her … all of it fake, for her. “No. I am not a liar Miss Stoyanoff, no matter what you think of me.” He pushed himself back up from leaning over her, and then nodded to the man who had been standing back the whole time, the other Human. The man gripped the edge of the curtain and peeled it back slowly, for effect.
Crystal gasped, eyes going wide at the sight before her. Her attention immediately jumped to Jason who was sitting in the corner, waiting, and she had to swallow down the instant instinct she had to go to him. She shook her head as her stomach laced with knots and aches and a lump rose in her throat.