Unus (Stone Mage Saga Book 1)

by Raven Whitney

  At the sound of my voice, she seemed to rouse and began to thrash against the bastard's hold.

  His grin widened even further as he wiggled his index finger through the air like a child with a sparkler. Closer and closer that finger got until he drew it in a quick, straight line through the air behind her neck.

  For a single, unending second, nothing happened, and all I could hear in the silence was my heartbeat roaring in my ears. Then the next thing I knew, Lexie's body was on the floor and her head wasn't. A thick, red liquid shot out from her neck in spurts. It was almost as though I was watching a video and there were a few frames missing.

  “Cleanup,” Unus called out over his shoulder, bored, and tossed Lexie's head to the floor. Her bright blue eyes were open and gazing at the wall behind me, but there was no light in them now. I desperately called her name again and again, trying in vain to get her to respond to me. To come back to me. Her eyes flickered to me and for a split second, I could have sworn that her gaze met mine.

  The clattering sound of a chain being pulled across the stone floor reached my ears through the thundering of my heart. I pried my eyes from Lexie to see a massive, hunched-over shape slinking out from under the same archway the zombies came from. A horrendous beast was revealed as it came into the light.

  Easily eight feet in height, it had a pronounced slouch like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and ribs that stuck out like it was starving. Its hairless skin was pale and mottled, with blotches of a sickening shade of blue gray and gaping holes exposing its pink muscles. An elongated, almost bear-like head housed a long, broad, fang-filled mouth. Its arms drooped listlessly at its sides and ended in long, narrow claws that nearly scraped the floor. Legs that were curved like an animals' supported the hulking beast and ended in misshapen feet with talons that clicked against the floor.

  The lumbering monster's cloudy blue fish-eyes fell on Lexie's still-twitching body on the floor. It plodded across the room to her with an awkward motion. Ice ran through my veins as I realized what it was going to do. With each step it took towards her, my mind and body protested more. No!

  Fury and pure intent like I'd never known came over me. I poured that energy into them, letting it fill every pore in their bodies. As more of my own rage infused their bodies, I felt another, darker energy being displaced. “Let me go!” I shrieked my command to the zombies that restrained me. Instantly, their sticky, vise-like hands released me. Without pausing to ponder why, I ran headlong towards Lexie.

  I grabbed her head with one arm and her body with the other. That thing would not violate her body. I had to keep her safe, get her away from here. She was my responsibility to protect.

  Mine!

  Beneath my fingertips, her body started to dissolve. I looked down to see her fading away into nothing but empty space.

  “Intriguing,” Octavius remarked after a moment of silence.

  My head snapped in his direction to glare at him with what I knew had to be utter malevolence in my eyes. “You,” I choked out, my throat closing up under the sheer force of the virulent hatred filling every pore of my soul.

  Meeting my gaze, he pointed at himself. “Me,” he confirmed with a glib little grin. “Sexus, escort our guest to the pits.”

  Sexus's vibrant, green eyes turned to me. “Sleep,” he ordered, and everything went black. The last image my eyes took in was that of the three eyes between the two zombies staring raptly at me.

  Welcome to Hell,” a warm, masculine, and slightly husky voice said with a sarcastic, cynical amusement. “Tell me, what'd a human do to end up here instead of the meat locker?” Though it was faint, my ears picked up a hint of a British accent.

  At the sound of that voice, I cracked my eyes open to take in my surroundings. Even before I opened my eyes, the first thing to hit my senses was the overpoweringly fetid smell of sweat, rot, urine, and feces. Grimacing, I looked around at the rough, gray stone walls and packed dirt floor strewn with discolored, moldy straw. At the top of the low, vaulted brick ceiling was a fist-sized glowing orb that lit the space with an almost fluorescent glow. Thick, lightly rusted iron bars trapped me in the dirty, disgusting cell with a man who looked almost equally filthy.

  He had a matted mess of what my mother would call “dishwater blond” hair. A thick beard that extended down to his mid-neck from a square, stubborn jawline. Bruises along his boxer's nose and high cheekbones said he'd been in a fight recently.

  He wore only a ripped and stained pair of brownish canvas pants held onto his lean hips by a drawstring. No shoes covered his dirty, callused feet and he wore no shirt over his grubby, but otherwise magnificent chest. He was a well-built man with thick, defined muscles that roped over his sculpted body. Marking that gorgeous chest, he had two tattoos: a little gecko that appeared to be crawling along his hip bone from his underwear and an ornate crimson pentacle over his heart. On his right forearm, he had an old-fashioned English longsword that extended from the hilt at his wrist to the tip at his elbow.

  I drew myself up into a sitting position against the uneven stone wall next to me, which made my cracked ribs explode with pain. To keep from screaming, I drew in a deep breath and immediately wished I hadn't. “Where am I?” I had to ask, although I almost didn't want to know. But I needed to have something to distract me from the burning in my chest.

  “The pits,” he answered, giving me an assessing once-over. I could only imagine how pathetic I must look: wearing dirty, bloody, mismatched polar wear in the wrong sizes, my cheeks and lips chapped from the dry arctic air, and my hair knotted from the winds.

  “I'm Liam and it looks like we're going to be cell-mates. So what's your name?” The look in his gunmetal gray eyes shifted from appraisal to sympathy. That look of sheer pity on his face abraded my pride. But in this situation, what did I really have to be proud of? I was all alone, with every breath I took burning in my chest, my best friend was dead, and my family probably hated me for vanishing off the face of the earth like I did. Who knew if anyone was even looking for me?

  It wasn't until I heard the droplets of my tears landing on my jacket sleeve that I realized I was crying. And once I'd noticed it, the dam burst and I started bawling hysterically. It began a vicious cycle: the great, racking sobs hurt my ribs, which made me cry even more, which hurt more, and so on and so forth until I felt a warm arm snake across my shoulders.

  For a long time, he just sat there patiently with his arm around me while I cried. But just having the touch of a non-hostile human being was of immeasurable comfort. Slowly, my breathing started to even out and the tears dried on my cheeks.

  “I'm not going to lie and say that it'll all be okay. You're in one of the most god-forsaken hellholes on the face of the planet.”

  If he was trying to make me feel better, he was doing a piss-poor job of it.

  “What I can promise you is that we have a chance of getting out of here. I'm a—” he paused, as though he were choosing his words carefully before continuing, “law enforcement officer of sorts. But if you ever want to see the light of day again, you'll have to tell me everything you know about what's going on out there.” He put his hand on my chin and turned my face towards his. “I need your help to get us home.” There was something in his eyes— an intensity— that lent him a hint of trustworthiness.

  Even though he could just be lying to me, his words did give me just a glimmer of hope. If there was any way out of this disaster, I had to take it. Removing one of the hands I was using to support my ribs to wipe my now crusty eyes, I asked, “What do you need?”

  “First, I need to know which members of the Eight are here.”

  I turned my head to his and gave him a look of confusion.

  Liam gave an exasperated sigh and rested his forehead against the hand that wasn't on my shoulder, like he'd tried to explain calculus to a six-year-old. “Right, I almost forgot you're a human, so of course you wouldn't know anything.”

  Offended, I was about to say something I probably sh
ouldn't have, but he interjected, “The Eight is the worst, most violent criminal syndicate for non-humans. As the name implies, there are eight members: Unus, Duo, Tresia, Quattore, Quinque, Sexus, Septimus, and their leader, Octavius.”

  “Non-humans,” I repeated, unsure I'd heard him correctly. But from the things I'd seen so far, I couldn't be sure that I'd misheard him. The monster from the throne room couldn't possibly be a human. It had to have been some kind of animal, maybe a radioactive mutant bear. Though the three men looked normal, they were capable of terrifying things that nobody should have been able to do. Nobody human, at least.

  Choosing his words carefully, Liam reiterated, “Yes, there are more intelligent species than just humans on earth.”

  With nothing to say, I nodded for him to keep going. What could I have said when the evidence was trying to kill me?

  He gave me an unsure look with drawn brows, like he wasn't certain whether or not I was about to crack. “The major categories of corporeal non-humans— or Paxians— are vampires, shapeshifters, faeries of all shapes and sizes, and last but not least, mages. I'm a mage, a species characterized by our ability to use magic. Most of the members of the Eight are mages as well.” He waited for a second to let his words sink in and looked at me, gauging my reaction.

  By this point, I think I'd gone numb from all the shocks that had been delivered to me over the last two days. So I waved for him to continue, hissing in pain when I took that hand away from my ribs. Too quickly, I tucked that hand back against my abdomen, causing another wave of pain. I couldn't stifle a whimper from sounding in the back of my throat.

  Liam politely ignored it. “We're in the dungeon of Octavius' castle, the Eight's stronghold. Each of them is incredibly strong and skilled in battle, so before we can try anything, I've got to know how many and which of them are here. If there are too many here, it'll be a suicide mission when the cavalry arrives.”

  I couldn't stop myself from asking, “Help is coming?”

  “As soon as they can. I'm sort of the scout so they know where to attack. The reason we've been unable to destroy this place so far is that this whole castle teleports to a new location every few days. So they sent me to find it with a special tracking device, but it was taken from me with all of my other belongings when I was tossed in here,” he admitted.

  Quickly, he added, “But I'm working on getting it back. When I send out a homing signal, the entire wrath of the Pax— the organization I work for— will rain down on this place. To tilt the odds in our favor, I need to send for help when there aren't many of the Eight here. For all the good it does me without my locator beacon, I try to keep an eye on which members are present by who's in the peanut gallery to observe the pit battles. But I haven't been picked to fight in a while and I can't see their observation platform from here, so I don't know.”

  “Pit battles?”

  He stood and helped me to my feet. Carefully, we walked over to the bars and looked out at the horrors that lay beyond. There were hundreds of other cells identical to this one, lining the entire inside of a massive, hollow tower. Lighting the inside were more of the floating orbs like the one in the cell, but larger and more luminous. They cells were packed in tightly: each tiny cell had neighbors extending horizontally around the circumference of the tower and vertically on different floors along the height of it. In the distant cells on the other end of the tower, I could make out shapes moving— some cells had many small shapes bouncing around, some had huge, single shapes, most had two or three human-like silhouettes. With my limited math skills, there must have been thousands here.

  Directly across from us, there was an entire section of wall with no cells above it. Looking down from a cell as high as the one we were in, all I could see was a black canvas awning. I assumed that this was supposed to be an observation platform because it was perfectly perched to watch whatever happened in the large, circular arena at the bottom of the tower.

  The single, sand-filled pit was reminiscent of a gladiatorial arena, with stone walls surrounding it that extended at least ten feet upwards. A thorny, wrought iron cage domed the top to prevent, I suppose, anyone from trying to climb out and kill the people in the viewing box.

  “I'm assuming that ring isn't for wrestling,” I stated grimly.

  “No, it's for exactly what it looks like— death matches. It's their favorite form of entertainment. They like to toss people from different species together and make them fight to the death.”

  I glanced over to look at his face. He scowled downwards at that pit and a deep hatred and thirst for vengeance was written in his eyes and the set of his brow. He turned to me and his intense gaze met mine. “You need to tell me who's here.”

  He was pressuring me for information that I would gladly give him, if it could get me back home again. I was hesitant to do so, though, because that would mean reliving watching my best friend in the whole world's head get cut off. Tears burned my eyes again as I dug in my mind against the block that had subconsciously been placed there to protect me from the pain. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to retrieve the names, but not the images of Lexie's lifeless eyes and choked out through my tightening throat, “Unus, Sexus, and Octavius.”

  Noticing what that information had cost me emotionally, he put his warm hand on my shoulder. “Thank you,” he murmured sincerely. Now that he had what he wanted, he changed the subject, digging for more information. “So what is a human like you doing in a place like this?”

  I paused, trying to think of some reason why I'd been lured here, why Lexie had been taken here, and couldn't come up with anything. “I don't know,” I responded in a quiet voice. I don't know if he heard me, but if I spoke any louder, my voice would have cracked and I wanted to keep whatever dignity I could.

  “Surely there has to be some reason,” he insisted. “They don't take humans to the pits for fighting.” His statement implied that there was another reason why a human would be here, and I had a general idea from the zombie guards, but I didn't want to know for certain. Having him confirm my dark hunch would just make it too real for me to handle right now.

  “I really have no idea. I just woke up like normal yesterday morning to go to work and found a note telling me Lexie was a hostage and to follow the instructions on the note if I ever wanted to see her again and I did what the stupid piece of paper told me to do and I came all the way out here and they killed her.” I knew I was babbling, but the words were just tumbling too quickly out of my mouth. If I gave any thought to them, it would just make me cry again. As it was, I was already shaking and on the verge of tears.

  Suddenly, it felt like the floor gave out beneath me. It wasn't until Liam grabbed my arm to steady me and my entire chest exploded in agony that I realized my knees had buckled. He slowly lowered me onto the dirty cot on the floor and sank down next to me.

  His warm hand wrapped around my shoulders again. “You're hyperventilating. Put your head between your knees. It'll keep you from passing out.” Though I could detect a note of pity in Liam's voice, it was still a balm to my cracking sanity.

  Between agonizing breaths, I shook my head and said in a quivering voice, “I can't. My ribs are broken.”

  “Right, then,” he muttered absently.

  “Hand me my purse,” I asked. I always kept a stash of ibuprofen in there, just in case, even though I almost never used it. Today, I needed it.

  “I'm sorry,” Liam began. “It was confiscated with anything else that was on your person when you were taken.”

  Well, that was perfect. Just freaking peachy. The one time I really needed pain medication and my purse got stolen.

  “Honestly, I'm surprised they left you with your clothes. Everyone else gets dumped in here naked with some burlap garb.”

  There was something to be grateful for, at least.

  “Just stay as still as you can and keep breathing,” he said in a soothing voice, putting his warm arm around me again and patting my shoulder awkwardly.

/>   “You don't have to do this.”

  “I'm fine right here,” Liam assured me, and though his voice was calm, I could feel how tense he was in his arm. “I'm not used to dealing with injured humans.

  “Just keep breathing,” he repeated, over and over again so softly I could barely hear him over my own panting. Despite the stiffness still in his body, his voice was so lulling.

  7

  The next thing I was aware of was a loud, obnoxious clanging sound. Despite the fierce aching in my ribs and a numb butt, I was surprisingly comfortable. A warming, spicy-sweet scent reminiscent of a pine forest in autumn reached my lungs. I tried to nuzzle into the firm nook that perfectly fit my head to escape that harsh noise.

  “Wake up. You've been chosen,” Liam urged with a heavy dread in his voice, shaking me gently. “If you don't walk yourself, they'll drag you out.”

  I opened my eyes, almost expecting this whole thing to have been a nightmare. When I saw the drab, dank stone wall opposite me, reality slapped me in the face. A tall, lean man with an angular face and long, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail stood before me. His angry brown eyes stared impatiently down at me.

  Liam stood and pulled me gently to my feet. The tall man roughly shoved me out of the open cell door, nearly knocking me to the floor. I barely heard Liam's protest through the growing din of other prisoners shouting raucously.

  Looking back at him, I saw the guard slam the cell door in his face, barring him from coming with me. Liam slammed his fist into the bars hard enough that they rang. Nearly vibrating with tension, he began pacing alongside the door like a tiger at the zoo, all the while never taking his burning gray eyes off me.

  The guard walked towards me and I reacted subconsciously, being herded by him like a sheep. He moved me down the corridor, past the rows of other cells. In those dark, cramped quarters were mostly normal-looking people, but also monstrous ones. In one cell, there were two men, both paler than death, snarling with vampire fangs and reaching through the bars towards me like rabid, ravening beasts.