Alas, the only way for Mitch to try it for himself was for him to be addicted again. I just hoped when and if that time came, the visualization I used and had taught him would help. We’d only get one shot to do this most likely, and it wouldn’t be a long one. We’d have to take advantage of the magical hit immediately.
Since Mitch explained the furies only addicted him when he became uncooperative, our task was simple—get uncooperative all over their asses.
Hell, I excelled at being uncooperative. I wasn’t so sure about what would happen afterward, but it eased my mind to remember Mitch wasn’t entirely lacking fighting skills. Despite my assurances, however, he wasn’t thrilled with the plan, but he had nothing better to offer. So that decided, all we could do was wait.
Our chance didn’t arrive until late in the evening. Heavily armed addicts came by once before then, dropping off more food and water. From the window, I watched the sun sink behind the trees, turning their many shades of green to gray and black. Shadows lengthened on the floor, and every noise inside and out grew louder. I didn’t like it. There was no lamp to turn on, and the darkness spread without streetlights and neon signs to fight it. I wasn’t used to truly dark nights. Not even a moon rose over the trees.
Mitch was confident that if we could break out of the building, we could steal one of the many cars, but the darkness made me wonder how far we’d get. He questioned my part of the plan. I questioned his. My better sense screamed it would never work, but the other option—stand idly by while the furies opened the Pit—wasn’t going to happen.
As the darkness consumed our last patch of warm floor, someone unlocked the door. I sprang to my feet, and Mitch got up slowly. He’d been expecting the addicts earlier, but this was obviously not part of the daily routine.
Four of them stood in the hallway, and one beckoned to us. “Come on. They’re ready.”
I held still, but the fear gnawing at me all day became more insistent. “For what?”
“Showtime.” The addict grinned in a way that should send shivers down the back of any mortal, and not just because he’d filed a couple of his teeth into points.
Mitch stepped forward, but I hesitated as it dawned on me that the addicts weren’t armed. Perhaps we wouldn’t have to deal with the furies yet. A nail clipper and a file weren’t much in the way of weapons, but if they were unexpected…
I simply had to get my hand in my pocket without being noticed. Easier said than done, especially since I wasn’t wearing the loosest of jeans.
“I said now.” The addict’s hand shot out and snatched my arm before I could respond.
I flew forward and bumped into Mitch, and the two of us plus a couple addicts jostled in the narrow hall. This was it. There was no way to signal my intentions to Mitch, so he’d have to follow my lead.
Pretending to lose my balance, I went down on one knee. Rather than get up immediately, I waited for a second addict to yank me to my feet. When he was bent over me and my arm shielded from view, I reached into my pocket.
I’d given the file to Mitch earlier, and my fingers snatched the clippers. Whirling around, I jabbed them into the addict’s arm.
He screamed a curse, though I suspected it was more from surprise than damage. The damn thing wasn’t sharp enough to break skin, but that was okay. His distraction would have to be enough. While he grasped his arm, I shoved him against the wall and kneed him in the groin.
Mitch caught on quickly. From the corner of my eye, I saw him spin around and deck the addict behind him.
I didn’t hang around to see more. Yelling to Mitch, I dashed down the hall, searching for the stairs that had brought me here. Mitch was right behind me, calling out directions. But the addicts weren’t far back either. The two unhurt ones had been temporarily stunned and inconvenienced by their friends flailing in the narrow corridor, but I could hear their heavy footsteps.
“This way.” Mitch bounded by me, and we practically skidded down the stairs.
When we reached the bottom, he tugged me in a new direction. Empty rooms flew by, and I had enough brainpower left to wonder where everyone was, but no more than that. Food and water had helped my exhaustion, but they weren’t enough. My muscles were tiring quickly. My lungs struggled for air, though this run should barely have taxed them.
I sucked in a deep breath, sending out my gift to feed on Mitch’s fear, but though it helped, it was far from ideal. Lucen had once told me one person wasn’t enough for him to feed on. Was it not enough for me either? My own fear should have helped, but maybe I was too drained for anything to make a difference.
Shouting echoed off the walls behind us, and I thought I heard new footsteps coming from the opposite direction. We were about to get cut off.
Mitch sensed it too, and we stumbled to a halt. I grabbed a nearby counter, belatedly realizing it was indeed a counter and that meant we were in a kitchen. Catching my breath, I scanned the area. Kitchen meant knives. Knives were useful. I wanted my knife back.
Damn, my brain was seriously starting to fail me.
“Knives.” I gasped the word, flinging myself around the center island, certain there had to be sharp, pointy objects somewhere.
Probably there were, but I had no time to find out. Five addicts burst through the doors at either end of the kitchen, all looking seriously pissed off. Out of options, I snatched one of the pans hanging above the center island, but the nearest fury grabbed my arm before I could swing it. Then he wrestled me to the wood floor.
Rough fingers dug into my arm, twisting skin and muscle. I clenched my teeth against the pain, searching in vain for an opening. But this guy was good. He had me pinned like a pro, preventing me from using his momentum against him.
Another hand wrested the pot handle from my grip, and I was finally brought to my feet, swearing. Three on one was no fair. Though I tried to twist out of the addicts’ hands, I was too weak, and they were just too much them.
Dragon shit on toast. Most pred races coveted addicts who could be useful for their position, profession or skills. Furies only seemed to choose ones who could successfully wrestle bears. My best self-defense moves were rendered totally useless in their bone-crushing grips.
With much grunting on the addicts’ parts, and scowling, kicking and swearing on mine, the addicts dragged me and Mitch out of the kitchen. I had no chance to get my bearings before we entered a new part of the building. One with a view that made my breath catch in my throat.
I wasn’t sure where to look first, but up was the least terrifying option, so my gaze lingered there.
A velvet-black, star-sprinkled sky twinkled over me. My first thought was that it was a trick, an illusion, but the night air was cool and damp. There was also no mistaking the breeze on my face. It blew stray hairs in my eyes.
As I traced the lines of the walls it became clear that once this room had supported a roof. Stone by stone, it appeared as though someone had removed it, leaving ragged edges and creepy gray teeth jutting into the night. The effect was stunning and otherworldly, and yet slightly sinister all the same. It reminded me of the cell I’d been in when I first woke up—old and decaying.
The walls that remained—all four of them—were tall and unadorned. The farthest of them had gaping, symmetrical holes, where someone had removed the windows. And to my right, farther down the enormous open space, the floor had been raised like a stage.
I squinted at it, the setup nagging my weary brain until it came to me. Quite possibly this space had once been a chapel. I could fill in the details in my mind. The holes were where the stained-glass windows would have been. The stage was the altar area. The arched alcove on the wall behind it had likely once held religious statues or paintings for the kneelers to gaze upon.
I stopped craning my neck and fixed my attention on the scene before me. No moon shone down, so the furies or their addicts had lit dozens of candle
s, and their flickering glow contributed to the eerie atmosphere. But what really set the scene was the floor.
The stones had been swept free of any natural debris and covered in glyphs. Thanks to my search for the Vessels, I’d seen glyphs strung together like sentences, and prior to that I’d seen glyphs merged to form new glyphs. But I’d never seen anything quite like what was before me—series of glyphs, lines of them making up lines of larger glyphs, like the letter A written in letter As, then looped into sentences. Maybe paragraphs. All meaningless to me, but full of meaning, no doubt.
And what the glyphs were written in? I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the low light. Some were red, others brown. White and silver. Some were like paint on the stones and others like powder. Without question, this was the most complex magical rendering I’d ever seen. And after what I’d thought of the magic used to disguise the Vessel we’d found, the shock of it left me numb.
Dazed, I closed my jaw and swallowed hard. The giant glyph of glyphs was drawn roughly in a circle, and spaced at odd intervals near the edge were three Vessels, similar in shape and color to the one at World.
“Have I actually rendered the soul swapper speechless?” Raj asked.
I shuddered back to reality, having been totally oblivious to his closeness until he spoke. “I told you, I don’t do that anymore.”
“You will always be the soul swapper to me, Jessica, because that night was momentous.” He motioned to the addicts, and they dropped my arms and slunk off into the candlelit perimeter.
I massaged my sore skin, wondering what would happen if I darted into the center of the glyph. Could I mess it up? Ruin its power?
Mitch seemed to be having the same thoughts. As soon as the addicts let go of him, he took off. But he didn’t get more than a foot closer to the target before another fury snatched him back with preternatural speed. The fury wrapped something around Mitch’s neck—a charm vial on a string—and Mitch froze in place.
I tensed, and thoughts of imitating Mitch vanished. It had to be some kind of paralysis curse they’d put on him.
“Much smarter, Jessica,” Raj said. “You don’t want the same treatment.”
“Fuck you. What do you want? To show off?”
“Not at all. Well.” Raj shrugged with mock modesty. “Maybe a little. But there’s a reason you’re here. We need you.”
I quit rubbing my arms, the dread in my stomach seeming to open into a dark pit. How appropriate I should feel such. “For what?”
Raj draped an arm around me, forcing me against him. My skin crawled with revulsion and tingled with his power. The rage his presence usually induced was oddly muted by my disgust, but my fear was ever growing—a panic building from a low wail into an ear-splitting shriek in my head.
“What I saw you do at the Match,” Raj said, his grin making it clear he was enjoying his effect on me, “that’s when I knew how useful you could be. It’s why you’ll always be the soul swapper to me. The Match was everything.”
To my left, Mitch blinked a couple times, and I could sense his confusion along with my own, but he could do nothing about it. “I don’t get you. Are you talking about when I attacked your fury?”
“He’s talking about you,” said another fury. “How he discovered what you are.”
I frowned. So few furies were women it always surprised me when I met one. She was nearly as tall as the men, well over six feet, her skin astoundingly dark and her eyes yellow gold.
“And what am I? Everyone has a different opinion.”
The female fury smiled. “That’s because they try to place you in a box. They define you by their idea of magic. But you cannot be defined that way. You’re not human, and you’re not satyr. You are the proverbial ‘none of the above’.”
“Better that than one of you.”
“Better for us. We are of magic. And humans are not-magic. So what does that make you?”
“A freak?”
“A bridge between the two. A channel.” She stalked off suddenly, calling out to an addict.
Raj watched her, his eyes narrowed, and I took the opportunity to worm out of his grip. “Well, gee, that was enlightening.”
Before I could demand he explain, Raj whipped a knife from seemingly nowhere and slashed one of my arms. I cried out, doubling over to protect myself from more damage. Blood seeped between my fingers. But Raj made no further attacks, and the pain vanished quickly. The knife had been sharp, the cut not too deep.
Seething, I straightened, clutching my arm. “What the hell?”
“I need some of your blood.” He waved the bloodied knife in my face, and I recognized it in a fresh wave of anger. My knife. The asshole had cut me with my own knife. “Now.”
Hands grabbed me from behind. Boiling-hot rage flooded my veins. I could feel it pouring through my open cut, dripping onto my hand.
Raj circled around the glyph, and I was forced to follow until he stopped between two of the Vessels. Forced to watch him coat his finger with my blood from the knife and draw a glyph with it in an empty spot in the spell space. He stepped aside then, and the fury holding me shoved me into the area.
Finally, a chance to do some damage. Ignoring my bleeding arm, I ran to the nearest glyph before they could stop me and swept it with my foot.
Or tried to. My foot collided with an invisible wall, and the force of the impact sent me bouncing back. What in the world? I kicked out a second time to no avail.
My heart seemed to beat in my throat. Frantically, I tried once more, and once more my foot smacked into some kind of magical shield. I pressed my hands against the area, banged on it with my fist.
I got nowhere. My lungs gasped for air, but there was no shortage. I only felt like I couldn’t breathe because panic was setting in. I was trapped, and I screamed with rage.
Raj’s face was all amusement. He smirked as I pounded on the barrier between us. “Be glad you’re not frozen.”
I spun around in time to see Mitch carried into a similar spot across from me. The fury pulled off the curse once Mitch was inside the trap. Released from his paralysis, he made the same mistake I did. He wailed against the walls holding him. I yelled his name, but Mitch didn’t seem to hear me.
Raj shook his head. “Don’t bother. Or, well, bother if you must, but all you’re going to do is give the rest of us a headache, and it won’t dissuade us from our purpose. Although you might get a sore throat.”
“Fuck you.” I threw myself at the barrier, though I knew it was pointless. For my useless rage, all I got was a banged-up shoulder.
“You become most inarticulate when you’re angry.”
“I said, fuck you.”
Raj signaled to someone behind me. “I heard you the first time, but go on. You’re adorable when you lose your shit. Did Lucen ever tell you that?”
My hands clenched into fists. Every muscle within me was contracting. “I’m going to kill you when I get out of here.”
“And you’ll fail, but I’ll enjoy your attempt.”
I felt it this time. A sharp sensation in my skull. A red-hot poker to my soul.
I screamed again as Raj’s magic tried working its way into me. This wasn’t like a sylph’s cold, slithering breach of my defenses or Claudius’s seductive, magical warmth. This was an incandescent sledgehammer to my brain.
So that’s what Raj had been doing all this time. Goading me. Working me up to this moment. My instinct was to resist, to fight him, and all the protective glyphs the Gryphons had drawn on me activated at the thought. I could feel them heating up like brands on my skin, claiming me.
But why? Wasn’t this what I’d told Mitch would be our advantage? This was what we needed to do. I had to let myself go, let Raj into my head. He was no Claudius, after all, though he was likely far more powerful than any other pred I’d tried my trick on. Nonetheless, I was confident I co
uld take control of him. And he’d built this cage, or parts of it. With his power in my grasp, maybe I could break free.
Calm, I willed myself. I took a deep breath and stopped resisting. Pressed against the magical wall, I closed my eyes and welcomed Raj’s power inside. Immediately, the hammer to my brain stopped. He flowed in smoothly. Hot and irritable, yes, but far more controlled than I’d have expected.
And for a second, it occurred to me to wonder why. I mean, Raj should know better. He’d even told me he’d seen what I did at the Match. Thus Raj should know the perils of making me his addict. So why risk it now?
The question vanished in a tidal wave of power that dropped me to my knees. My muscles relaxed, and my body swelled with it. The head rush left me dizzy, and oh God—the head rush.
I tried to stand, but my legs couldn’t hold me. The room swayed in my vision. Raj’s power didn’t tingle on my skin. It crawled and sparked so heavily that I swore I could see it dancing along my arm hair. I was drunk. I was lost as though hit with a disorientation curse. I was high and yet knocked on my ass.
I tried to funnel the power into something I could grasp, to channel it and maintain my grip on my body, but I flailed and failed. I was on the cold floor, yelling before I knew what happened to me. Caught somewhere between ecstasy and pain.
And Raj’s voice was there with me, in my head, and I couldn’t toss him out because I couldn’t break the bond. I’d never been able to break it, only to convince the pred to do so.
But Raj was not convinced.
“You know what goes into spells, Jessica?” His voice was between my ears, a disembodied intruder. My mind reeled, and I clawed at my hair, wanting to shove him out. My own will had never felt so violated, not even when Claudius had worked his mojo on me.
Was this what addicts had to deal with? Because holy shit. I’d never disparage one again. In fact, I’d smack Lucen myself if I learned he got into his addicts’ heads this way.
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