by Rhea Watson
And Gabriella had such a slappable face.
“But…” I licked my lips, opting to use my words instead. “But I—”
“You have been convicted of selling illegal love potions to humans from your café in Seattle, Washington, in the United States of—”
“What?”
“America,” Gabriella continued flatly, fixing me with a narrowed look from across the table. “You are therefore sentenced to a five-year stay in this penitentiary.”
“I-I… I never…” What absolute utter horseshit. I never brewed anywhere but my home kitchen, and even if I was growing some of my potion stock at the café, selling it to humans, unsuspecting humans at that, was worthy of a wand-snapping in the witch community. Never. Never. Humans had no idea we existed beyond the faint prickle of awareness they experienced around a supernatural entity, like some part of their reptilian brain realized they were standing next to a much stronger predator. Only a family member or lover could usher a human into our world, maybe a friend under extenuating circumstances, and even then, everything was so hush-hush.
I had never involved humans in magic. Never ever, ever, ever. I didn’t even brew anything for the few local witches I knew; they had their own covens to shop from, anyway.
“I’m afraid—”
“When was my trial?” I demanded, voice cracking, palms doused in a cold sweat. Gabriella flipped through what looked like a hundred sheets of paper wedged into her clipboard, seeming bored with my outrage already. “I want a lawyer…” I wriggled uselessly against my restraints, the metal on metal grating what was left of my frayed nerves. “And I want my familiar.”
Gabriella stared me down with a sigh, eyebrows creeping up her wrinkle-free forehead. Are you done? She didn’t say the words out loud, but her expression screamed them at me. When I sucked in my cheeks, biting hard, she nudged her clipboard aside and tapped the end of her pen against her chin.
“I’m afraid, Miss Fox, that you are not in a position to make demands. Evidence of your crime has been presented to the Xargi Penitentiary sentencing council, and you’ve been found guilty.”
“When? What evidence?” Trumped-up nonsense, that was what evidence—because it had never happened. Gabriella merely pursed her lips back at me, my questions pinging off her icy exterior, her perfectly smooth and flawless face. She then glanced pointedly down at my body.
“Do you have anything on you? Drugs? Weapons?”
“Excuse me?” Dumbfounded, I too looked down at my clothing, at a torn shirt that clung to my figure and ripped black stockings without pockets. Short in stature when I wasn’t strapped into my heels, I didn’t exactly possess the cleavage to hide anything in either. “I… No?”
“Right.” Gabriella pointed her pen at my throat. “That collar around your neck stunts your power as a witch. You will be unable to practice magic on these grounds.” She sounded bored again, like she had said this exact speech a thousand times before. That didn’t bode well for me. “I’ll take your fingerprints now and a drop of your blood to register you. After a cavity search, you will be issued your uniform. If you attempt to remove the collar, there are consequences.”
Her lips quirked at the last statement, and I swore something sick sparkled in her eyes. The hairs on the back of my neck shot up, goose bumps prickling down my body as my belly looped.
“What kind of… consequences?”
Her eyebrows arched like I was a moron again. “Consequences I promise you don’t want to experience. The last one who tried to test the collar is no longer with us, unfortunately.”
“This isn’t right.” I gripped the chair legs just to ground myself, breath coming harder and faster, Gabriella’s ice swimming through my veins. “It’s a lie. I… I don’t belong here.”
“That’s what everyone says,” she muttered with a dismissive wave. My right cuff suddenly fell off and clattered to the floor, and she snapped at me. “Give me your hand, Miss Fox.”
Numb with panic, I did as I was told. I let her fingerprint me, let her draw a droplet of blood to dribble on one of her many papers. The pitchy whine was back between my ears with a vengeance. Before, when my family had died one right after the other, shock gave me focus. I was able to block out the inconsequential and deal with the important issues. I had been strong—even if I did splinter apart behind closed doors. Here, I… I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t access my magic, my birthright as a witch, as the last of the Fox coven. Couldn’t feel Tully. Couldn’t move any of my limbs unless the aloof witch processing me removed my shackles.
I never made waves. Outside of the café, I steered clear of most people—supernatural and human. No big social gatherings. No sporting events. Just me and Tully and work. That had been my life for five long years, Dad’s paranoia about Lloyd Guthrie dusting off on me.
They thought I was a criminal.
The only link to the criminal underworld I maybe had was…
Lloyd Guthrie. New York mobster. Head of his crime family.
And that was all I even knew about him—all I’d been able to dig up five years ago when, in my grief, I had given some credence to Dad’s warning. Just rumors and tabloid articles and the odd mention on supernatural gossip websites.
Did this have anything to do with him? Had they finally caught the bastard? Would he be my cellmate? Was my family name somehow linked to his organization?
Gods. I closed my eyes tight when the room spun and blurred, holding back tears as best I could, refusing to let the witch across the table see even one spill down my cheek. No. This had nothing to do with Lloyd. I’d never seen or heard from him. Never felt someone lurking in the shadows or breathing down my neck. I distanced myself from the world as a precaution, not because I saw any real reason to do so, but because maybe, just maybe, I felt like I owed it to Dad to be overly cautious, if only to honor a rambling deathbed wish.
And now…
Now Dad’s fears came screeching into focus, bright and shiny and there, and my gut churned harder in response.
“I’m going to be sick,” I mumbled, clutching at my stomach with my one free hand, thumb still bleeding from the prick of her pen.
“On your feet, inmate,” Gabriella ordered as if she hadn’t even heard me—or, more likely, didn’t care. Another lazy flick of her hand had the rest of my restraints falling away, a whoosh of cold magic slithering across my body, but I just sat there. If I got up, it was over: I’d surrendered to the process. And… if I got up, I had serious doubts I’d stay up. Gabriella sneered down her nose at me, wrenching her jacket sleeves up to her elbows. In a flash, a pair of white gloves molded to her hands, and she shot me a cutting smile.
“Stand up against the wall, inmate… It’s time to strip, squat, and cough.”
3
Elijah
“Done.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. With twelve cards still in hand, I looked up and across the table, only to find my vampire counterpart was, in fact, finished.
“All right, new game,” I grumbled, tossing my leftover cards next to our twin piles, his substantially neater and taller than mine. “This is the last time I play Speed against a fucking vampire.”
“I told you,” Rafe mused. He grinned as he gathered the scattered deck into a single pile, organizing them for a reshuffle, so accustomed to winning that it made me want to clock him right in that stupidly square jaw all the ladies swooned over. “I think you’re a masochist, old friend.”
“And I think it’s cheating to use vamp speed—”
“Hardly.”
My eyes narrowed. While he was wearing one of the prison’s charmed collars around his neck, same as me, vampires were a little different in their abilities. From what I could tell, the sigils diminished a vampire’s speed, but most of the warlock guards at Xargi Penitentiary were still required to use magic to tame the fanged inmates. That and the sun, which streamed through the windows for most of the day, even in this godforsaken territory—wherever the fuck we were. R
afe and I had spent the last six months guessing, ever since they’d hauled us in here together, nicked from my property just outside the cozy English village that had been my home for the last decade.
Although the sun could be the death of my friend here, the one supernatural being who, in my opinion, wasn’t a jumped-up asshole hell-bent on ascending the ranks of his clan or coven or pack or whatever, that great glowing orb was also a giveaway as to where we were in the world. Somewhere north, close to the poles. Xargi had an eastern European twang to it, possibly Russian, maybe Mongolian. When we’d first arrived, there had been about an hour of sunlight each day, and the vampires inside this hellhole practically ran the show. Now, six months later, we had a good nine to ten hours of sunlight a day, which, for the most part, kept vampires in their blackout cells.
Northern Russia, perhaps.
Siberia was also a possibility.
No confirmation from the guards whenever I floated the options. Not a professional amongst them—just former criminals given a pinch of power over the rest of us. It was like Christmas came early for these fucks every goddamn day.
As Rafe shuffled the deck, mulling over a few other games we could play for the thousandth time, my inner dragon snored softly inside, constrained and confined for six long months. At this point, I was desperate to let him out, to stretch our wings and take to the skies. It was an itch I couldn’t scratch with this collar in place, the runes designed to prevent shifting of any kind. Me, I understood. A dragon could destroy every brick of this place ten times over, our fire the hottest in any realm. But there were plenty lesser shifters in other cellblocks—Willow, a rabbit shifter in Cellblock B for instance, posed zero threat, but she couldn’t stretch her legs either, couldn’t shift and zoom around.
Torture.
Absolute torture for a shifter to be cut off from their inner beast.
But that was the point of this place: torture. Why, I still had no clue. Most of us were innocent… Rafe insisted that was just the way of the world, and some days I almost believed him. After all, he had four long centuries on top of my two. Six hundred years on this planet, living amongst humans and supers alike, was bound to make anyone jaded.
“Gin rummy?” Rafe floated, scrubbing at his cheek stubble with a sigh. I crossed my arms and cracked my neck.
“Again?”
The vampire’s thick black brows shot up. “Sorry, what else are we doing? Too good for gin these days?”
I flipped him the V. “Calm down, you tit, we can play gin.”
Even though the Irish vamp could sometimes be the moodiest asshole on the planet, I loved him like a brother. Neither of us played the supernatural politics game, preferring the simplicity of human society to our own. He’d stumbled into my English hamlet eight years ago, and as the only two supers in town, we had eventually found each other—it was inevitable. Unlike every other supernatural bastard I’d ever come across, from dragons like me all the way down to uppity elves, he just wanted to exist. No games. No power struggles. He wrote for dozens of publications in Britain and Ireland under various pen names and just wanted a space to work. I offered him the caretaker’s cottage on my property, and Rafe paid for its upkeep.
In his human life, the man who looked like a modern-day supermodel, from the chiseled jaw to the startling sea-glass-blue eyes, was a poet. A deckhand working odd jobs in an old-world Dublin, sure, but a poet too. A lackluster predator today, Rafe used to order blood deliveries discreetly and quietly to my property. No feeding on the humans in the village, despite what his charges at Xargi read.
Over the years, we’d grown fond of each other—which, when it came to our current predicament, had been my undoing. The bounty hunters had come for him; vampires were just so easy to pin false charges on. Then, imagine their luck upon discovering the village jeweler was also a dragon shifter. Two birds, one stone—they hauled us both out here on bullshit.
Fucking silver cuffs and knockout hexes. Seriously. Nowhere near a fair fight.
By some stroke of luck, we’d ended up in the same cellblock after the vampire in Rafe’s original unit refused to share with one of her own kind. Psychotic bitch, that one.
Laughter erupted to my immediate left as Rafe dealt our hands, and as he rolled his eyes, I spared our fellow inmates a cursory glance. Cellblock C was almost full, eight of us occupying the ten available cells. Although I hadn’t seen any other cellblocks, I assumed they all looked the same: a huge circular room, the walls and floors made of fossil-grey stone. In its center were nondescript metal tables and stools—all bolted to the dusty ground, of course, so we didn’t use them to beat each other to bloody pulps. Some mornings, guards brought in board games and card decks, and every Thursday the library cart arrived with new books. Assigned work duty spread most of us throughout the prison grounds six days a week, which left the block mostly empty for nine hours or so each day. Individual cells made up the perimeter of the space, all the doors open during the day and locked tight each night.
Deimos tended to grab the center table first thing. It was a power move, classic of most supers: take the biggest table, the best real estate, and fill it with his cronies—make himself look like top dog of this block. The pasty tattooed demon had been pinched collecting human souls from crossroad deals well before their allotted deadlines in Chicago, and while most of us were innocent, I had no doubt the fucker was not. Demons never were.
Elbows on the table, Deimos in his black jumpsuit reveled in the laughter of his underlings, who were guffawing like he had just said the funniest shit in the world. Clockwise from him, there was warlock Avery in purple, maenad Constance in grey, and rat shifter Blake in navy blue, which was identical to mine. We were classified by our type, all shifters in blue, demons in black, vampires in red. Helped the guards keep clumps of like supers apart in prison common areas.
King Deimos had also recently collected the two other Cellblock C shifters: Faustus and Helen—some kind of bird shifters, but they were too meek to share the exact type with me. While they kept to themselves at first, they had eventually flocked to Deimos, swept up by his pretty words and fleeting kindness, by whatever demonic seductions left unmuted by his collar. I had no clue what the prison gangs did in here, but I assumed it was the usual: contraband smuggling, drug trades, fight rings, paid assassinations—all the leaders competing to be Xargi’s one true alpha.
Pathetic.
Alongside a few of his closest allies, Deimos had arrived after Rafe and me, and when he’d tried to float his let’s unite nonsense on us, I’d broken two of his teeth. Since then, there had been a very clear divide in Cellblock C, and that was the way we liked it. I had a six-year sentence, Rafe a twelve, and we intended to ride it out with as little drama as possible.
A siren erupted suddenly, blaring out of the speaker next to the bright white light that never dimmed in the conical ceiling. The block door burst open, and in charged guards in black uniforms, wands drawn. Months ago, the sight made my heart race. Now, it was standard fucking procedure; we all knew the drill.
“At your cell doors, inmates!” Blemmins, head guard for cellblocks A through D, barked at us, sparks erupting from the end of his wand. A fitting display, given he practically jizzed his pants anytime he got to order anyone around. Rafe tossed the cards on our little two-seater table with a scowl, and the siren continued to shriek as the rest of us rose and shuffled for our cells.
While there were several different alarms at Xargi, this one signaled the arrival of a new inmate on the block. As I leaned back against the wall between my cell door and Helen’s, the little bird shifter all squirrely and cowering against the noise, Rafe caught my eye from the opposite side of the circle. Although we were close, we couldn’t communicate telepathically like shifters within the same clan. But even without a glimpse inside his head, I knew what he was thinking; the twist of his mouth, the furrow of his brow, the hardness of his gaze—all a dead giveaway.
Here we fucking go again.
I offered him a one-shouldered shrug when the siren finally died down, my ears ringing and my inner dragon snarling softly. He hated everything in here, and if he had the chance to show himself, he would turn the prison and all its sadistic guards to ash.
Save the warden for last though. Guthrie deserved as much.
With our usual trio of guards situated around the room, the superfluous blocks of warlock muscle patrolled the cellblock slowly, looking us up and down, keeping us in line. Enforcers, this bunch, there to maintain peace if any fighting broke out beyond what the assigned security could handle.
The main door buzzed, locks unbolting again, and then swung open to reveal two warlocks from processing. They dragged in a purple-jumpsuited inmate between them, a redhaired witch that I couldn’t quite see properly—
But her scent struck hard, whizzing across the room and slamming into me like a fucking nuke. Briar rose and candle smoke and the air right before a cataclysmic storm…
Knees seconds from buckling, I clutched at the doorframe behind me. No one had ever knocked me off-balance just by their scent before, and yet this—I’d never smelled anything so strong, so fierce, so damn intoxicating that it took every bit of restraint I had to not launch across the room and tear her away from the fuckers death-gripping her arms. Bury my face in the coppery-red inferno blazing down her back. Drag my tongue up the delicate column of her throat.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
My inner dragon roared to life after months of forced docility and quiet. He bellowed so thunderously that my teeth chattered, and I gritted them hard, hoping no one had noticed. Even Rafe was distracted by the new arrival, tracking her with his calculating aquamarines as the guards marched her over to the vacant cell beside his. A surge of possessive need ripped through me, and I gulped down a deep breath, ignoring Helen’s meek but curious sidelong glance.
Holy fuck.
Was that witch my…
My…