by E. A. Copen
My mind went numb. I went limp against my restraints and quit fighting the tears. My whole body shook with grief.
“This is your fault!” Warren screamed and stomped a foot. “You can’t blame me. You made me do this, Judah. You drove me to it! You have no one to blame but yourself!”
He was right. It was my fault. I should have saved her. I should have helped her. If I hadn’t been so weak, she might still be alive. The realization only hurt more. I exploded with a scream of rage, suddenly somehow finding the strength to fight. I hauled myself up and struggled to get to Warren, growling and spitting like an animal. “You monster! You’ll pay for this!”
He backhanded me across the mouth hard. “My hands are clean!” he insisted. “Now you hang there and think about what you’ve done. When I come back, you’d better be ready to do more than just hang there and insult me!”
Warren growled in frustration and went out the door. All the light and warmth went with him. If I hadn’t been so horribly dehydrated, I would have allowed myself to continue crying. This place is going to kill me, I realized and then I corrected myself, remembering my cellmate. No, Judah. There are things far worse than death.
Someone came to collect Mara shortly after. I should say, Mara’s body. After she fell, I didn’t see her move or hear her make a sound. With all those stab wounds, her chances of survival were slim.
I was left alone in that dark place, cold and wet, with nothing but my thoughts to occupy me. At first, all I could think about was what they might be doing to Ed after Warren said they caught him. I tried to listen for cries or screams of pain but I heard nothing through the stone. The silence was more frightening than the sounds of torture might have been.
Come on, Judah, I told myself eventually. What is it accomplishing, sitting here feeling sorry for yourself?
“What else can I do?” I muttered aloud. “Even if I wasn’t tired, cold and hungry, which I am, I’ve got no chance of getting out of here. What hope do I have? I’ve got nothing.”
Then don’t think about escape. Think about something else.
“But what?”
What about Seamus?
I sighed. Seamus telling Warren about me had started all of this. He might not have known Warren planned on keeping me prisoner and torturing me, but he probably knew the kid wasn’t mentally stable. He had to have planted some seeds in Warren’s mind of what to do. This was what I got for not helping him get Reed’s sword.
But I couldn’t blame Seamus for everything. Warren might have been a fanatic, maybe even insane, but that didn’t excuse him. His little fit earlier tipped me off that he knew what he was doing was wrong. The minute he saw Mara fall over, he’d panicked and tried to shift the blame to me. People who genuinely believe they’re innocent don’t bother doing that. He’d had his first taste of guilt. If I had my way, I’d give him a whole lot more than that.
The door opened again, and another figure, this one larger and more masculine, stood against the light in the room beyond. He took two steps into the room. A chain jingled around his ankle as light from above flooded the room. I scampered away from it, shielding my face. Whoever the man was, he stood, waiting in silence while my eyes adjusted. Once they had, I blinked away the pain and turned back.
“Espinoza?”
Espinoza’s stare was blank and distant. I’d seen that look before when I helped Tindall haul an overdose to the hospital one time. He looked high out of his mind.
He stepped forward, lowering his eyes to the wooden tray in his hands. It held a bowl with some kind of grainy, white gruel inside, and a bottle of water. “You need to eat,” he said and stepped up to me. He placed the tray on the ground, took up the spoon, filled it with the gruel, and held it out to me.
I shook my head, fighting back tears. “They’ve already gotten to you, haven’t they?”
He didn’t answer. He just held the spoon out to me more insistently.
“Warren’s done something to you, hasn’t he? You’re under his control.” I strained to the end of my chains suddenly, but he didn’t even flinch back. “You have to fight it. Whatever hold he’s got on you, you can fight it!”
“I am here of my own free will,” Espinoza said in a robotic tone. “I like it here. You need to eat.”
“Espinoza, please—” He interrupted me by shoving the spoon in my mouth. The gruel tasted as bad as it looked. I spat it out. “He’s using you!”
“I’m here of my own free will,” he repeated and shoved the spoon at me. “I am happy.”
When he shifted closer, I strained against my restraints to knock the bowl from his hands. It clattered loudly to the floor, the contents overturned. He stared down at the smear of chunky white on the floor. He blinked, but the blank stare in his eyes didn’t lift.
“Please, if you’re in there, if you can hear me, fight him. I know you’re strong, stronger than him. Whatever drugs he’s given you, you have got to think through them. Please, if there’s even a shred of the man I knew left in there—”
“There isn’t.” My head jerked up, and I saw Warren standing in the doorway flanked by Hector and Amanda. They looked as passive as Espinoza. He probably had them under his control now, too. “This one was very weak-minded. He wasn’t very hard to break. All it took was a little rem, a little toying with the mind. I wanted you to see for yourself. All that pain he was carrying is gone. It can be gone for you, too. He’s happy. Can’t you see?” He walked up and put a hand on Espinoza’s shoulder. He didn’t even react.
“If this is what you call happy, I think you need your head examined.”
He turned his eyes downward to the bloodstain on the floor. “Or, you can resist like Mara and Espinoza can die, too. You’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
He turned back to Espinoza and patted him on the shoulder. “I honestly don’t know why you’re fighting so hard. You’re all in such pain. Take this one, for example. All those jokes, it’s all a mask, a band-aid over a gaping wound. But it doesn’t have to be. All his pain is gone now, replaced with a calling of the highest order: to serve his betters.”
“You’re not his better. You’re a slimy asshole using power and religion to manipulate the broken. I see through your mask, Warren. You’re disgusting, and you’re going to get what you deserve in the end.”
“Won’t we all?” he said with a smile and turned his attention back to me. “This is the last time I will offer you an escape before I take more drastic measures.”
I shook my head and said in my best Luke Skywalker impression, “I’ll never join you!”
Warren wasn’t impressed. Either he didn’t get the reference or didn’t care. His response was a frustrated hiss through his teeth.
“Now is the part where you lament that I don’t know the power of the dark side.”
“Do you think you’re funny?” He smirked. “You know, I’m starting to think that maybe I should break you exactly as I did Mara. She fought me, too.” Warren leaned in close to whisper next to my ear. “In the end, she liked it. She begged me to put my hands on her.”
I snapped at him with my teeth, and he jerked back. “Do to others what you would have them do to you,” I muttered.
“What?”
I didn’t answer him.
He growled to the behind him, “Take her to the cross. I want her broken by dawn.”
Hector and Amanda came forward and reached for where my chains were bolted to the wall to undo them.
Now’s my chance, I thought. I can fight them. Even if I don’t overpower them, at least I’ll go down fighting. I watched them fight to pry the chains from the wall, waiting for my opportunity to strike.
It never came. Something hard slammed into my neck and sent a stunning bolt of electricity flowing down into my body. My brain stopped. My heart jumped. Everything stopped, everything except for the icy electric fingers of pain. Only after I fell over, groaning and completely unable to move, did they finally get the chains free from the wall.
Strong, calloused hands wrapped around either of my arms. I remained slumped over, groaning and fighting for breath as they dragged me forward. As soon as I could breathe steadily again, I fought to shout at Warren as they dragged me past him. They didn’t let me go but it caused a small pause in our procession, long enough for me to turn and squint at Warren. “It’s called the Golden Rule, asshole, and it’s going to come back and bite you in the ass.”
There was no sunlight in the hall, but there was the comforting hum of fluorescent lights. Beyond that and the buzzing feeling in my limbs and the pounding in my chest, I was barely aware of anything until they summarily dumped me on a slanted tile floor. I lifted my head weakly for a look around and found no sign of an actual cross. Instead, there was a big post in the middle of the room, just before the floor began its slant toward a metal grate. Ominous stains populated the floor in spatters and pools. Tables lined one side of the room where a man in one of those black ski masks stood decked out in camo gear. His tables were lined with silver pins, scalpels, and various other instruments crafted to maim and cause pain.
Torture it was, then. Great.
I lowered my head and tried to think about the best way to get through this. Their goal was to break my mind, which they must have thought they could do by first breaking my body. I wasn’t in any state where I could physically protect myself since the room was still warded against magick, but I could protect my mind.
There’s a method for steeling oneself against even the most brutal acts called compartmentalization. It involves mentally creating a safe place, be that a room, a chest, or wherever you might feel safe, and then going there, closing and locking a door behind you. Compartmentalization is a common technique used by children who are frequently abused and rape victims, and it’s also taught to Special Forces soldiers to guard against torture. It’s why in movies, they’re always spouting their name, rank, and serial numbers, because that’s the mantra that somehow takes them to their happy place.
I hadn’t had such training. I’d only read about it. Creating a safe place was going to be mentally taxing and take time, time that perhaps I didn’t have.
My captors came again and picked me up. Hector and Amanda did something that connected the shackles on my wrists together like handcuffs and then repeated the process with my ankles. Then, they lifted me and tied me—not to the post as I’d expected—but to a cold, metal bench. Still naked against the cold, I shivered at the contact and then again when I realized I wasn’t to be the object of their torture today.
Espinoza went to stand before the post in the center of the room and unbuttoned his shirt.
I looked at Warren with panic choking me. “Stop, please! Leave him alone. If you want me, then torture me and not him.”
Warren laughed as if we were having tea instead of witnessing torture. “Torture won’t break you. You’d shoulder it, use it as fuel to make you stronger. The key to breaking you is to break those you care about. We’ll start with him and move on to the others next.”
I fought to think of something, anything I could do to stop this, but I was out of options. I wasn’t going to sit there and watch them torture an innocent man.
As they worked to affix Espinoza to the post, I lowered my head and dug in deep, searching for the pit of anger and darkness at my core. It wasn’t hard to find, not after everything I’d just gone through. The power felt like it was on the other side of a brick wall, however, just out of reach. Warren might have cut me off from most of my magick, but not all. I was sure that if I concentrated hard enough, I could break through.
I closed off my mind, pushing out the chill in my bones, the hard bench underneath me, the sound of ropes tightening around Espinoza’s wrists as he went willingly to be beaten. It all came out in a breath, leaving behind nothing but a silent buzzing in my mind and the deep thrum of power just beyond my reach.
Warren’s backhand caught me off-guard. It struck with supernatural force, sending me tumbling to the side, my vision spinning. “Open your eyes and pay attention!”
I spat blood and forced myself to sit up, even though my head spun. The wall in my chest cracked as I glared at him, and the tiniest bit of power leaked through. “You want to see what I can do so badly?”
Black fire danced in my hands behind my back and raced up my arms, ready to devour anything it touched. With a word, I could have sent it after Warren. I could have torn his aura apart and left him a drooling mess. It was no less than he deserved.
Before I could send the fire, however, I remembered what I had seen before, the barbed wire weaving in and out of Warren’s skin. He was being tortured, too, every day of his life. Maybe I could save him. Maybe nobody had to die.
“Stop!” Warren screeched, and his voice cracked. He hit me again, this time hard enough to knock me off the bench.
The hold I had on my power slipped away as I crashed to the floor, all the wind knocked out of me, and struggled to draw a breath into my burning lungs. I turned my head and spat blood. “Not so fun when the power’s directed at you, huh?”
Warren leapt over the bench and grabbed a handful of my hair to haul me up. “So you can do it,” he hissed at me through clenched teeth. “Now that I know for certain, I don’t need you to show me. You’re going to serve me, Judah, whether you like it or not. And you’re going to wish you’d kept that smart mouth of yours shut.”
I swallowed and fought the urge cry. Me and my big mouth.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ed
“Nunchucks?” Angel arched an eyebrow. “As in, Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon nunchucks?”
Why is it that whenever you bring up nunchucks, that’s the movie everyone goes to? I rolled my eyes and sighed at the window. The house sat empty. Sal must have called Shauna and Daphne already. Otherwise, I would have called one of them to bring me what I needed. Angel and Bran might have been badass, but they had no clue when it came to gaming.
“No, not that kind of nunchuck. It’s like…” I tried to think of how to describe it and came up empty. “Look, have you never seen a Wii before? Seriously?”
Angel wrinkled her nose. “I don’t have time for games, kid. Tell me what you need, and I’ll find it.”
“It may be better for him to go and get it,” Bran said. “Is your behind healed?”
I frowned and rubbed the left cheek through my borrowed pair of sweats. It wasn’t completely healed, but it did feel a little better. I could walk on it, I’d just be stiff and slow going. And I didn’t know exactly where my nunchucks were. It could take a while to find them. Dammit, I should’ve listened to Daphne and cleaned my room last month. “Yeah, I think I can manage. Just don’t go anywhere without me, okay?”
“I think I’d better go with him just in case,” Angel volunteered. “I don’t like the idea of letting an injured werewolf buddy of mine walk into an unguarded house at night with predators around.”
“Buddy?”
She reached in front of me and opened the door before pushing me toward it. “Don’t get hung up on it. Let’s go.”
I stumbled out of the car and winced at the pain of putting weight on my left leg. It hurt, but it was bearable. Angel went up the stairs and propped open the storm door while I fumbled with the false rock that hid the spare key. I popped it open and found it empty inside. “The hell?”
“What is it?”
“Spare key’s gone.” I showed her the empty plastic rock.
Angel cursed and grabbed for the door, turning the knob. It went without protest and opened.
“That shouldn’t be open. Daphne always locks the door. She chews my ass if I don’t.” I bit my lower lip.
“I’ll go first,” Angel whispered. “You stay behind me.”
I huffed but obeyed. I still hadn’t figured Angel out. Granted, she wasn’t in my pack so I didn’t exactly have to bow to her commands, but she wasn’t a normal werewolf. She acted like Shauna or Sal, someone way up a hierarchy, but not quite. And what
she’d done with her eyes, reflecting that back on me… I’d never seen anything quite like it. She acted protective like an alpha but didn’t seem to get all worked up when other people challenged her position in a group. Maybe it was because she wasn’t in a pack. Hell if I know. I just like to chase rabbits and fetch balls under the full moon.
Inside the house, it was dark. Everything seemed in order. The living room smelled faintly of Daphne’s favorite powdered deodorizer and the tofu she’d probably made for dinner. I paused and sniffed. There was something else, a new, metallic smell with strong undertones of earthy decay, rust and… Was that Axe body spray?
“Smell that?” Angel whispered as she pawed at her nose.
I sneezed and nodded. “Can’t smell hardly anything through it. Yuck.”
“Probably the point. It’s what I’d spray to cover my scent from werewolves.” She stepped into the center of the living room and let out a loud snarl. “Whoever the hell is in here, show yourself right now, and I promise I’ll rip your head all the way off instead of leaving it dangling.”
A shotgun pumped right next to my head, forcing my heart to jump into my throat. “I could have killed you three times before you even knew I was here.”
Angel spun with a growl, but was blinded by the beam of a flashlight as it swept over us. “Who the hell are you?”
I squinted against the flashlight. “Abe?” It sounded like him and looked like him. At least, whoever it was had the big, floppy hat and long coat. Without my sense of smell, I couldn’t tell for sure.
“Abraham,” he corrected, sounding annoyed. “And you two should be more alert.”
It hit me suddenly that he’d broken into my home and deliberately tried to mask that he was there. My heart stopped beating in my throat and fell into my stomach. Shit. He had to be there for the hard drive. I clenched my fists and turned my head to glare at the half-vampire behind me. “If you’re here for the hard drive, it’s gone.”