Three rounds of rock-paper-scissors later, we were sitting on my bike and strapping on our helmets.
“You know, I’m not very good at being a passenger,” Rylan said, looping his arms around my waist, “but now that I’ve realized I get to hold you like this, I think I might lose more often.”
“Oh, please.” I rolled my eyes and started up the engine.
As I shot into the street, Rylan leaned into me, pressing his torso against my back. Even through the leather jacket, I could feel the ripple of hard, lean muscle, and his body heat seeped through my clothes, wrapping me in his delicious scent.
Focus, Annia, I ordered myself. The last thing I needed was to crash my bike into a streetlamp because my body was turning into a puddle of goo. I obviously needed to get laid.
We parked at the end of the block, and Rylan’s hands lingered on my waist for the briefest moment before he hopped off the bike.
“This’ll work better if I’m in animal form,” he said.
“Makes sense.” Sunaya had told me her shifter senses were ten times stronger as a panther than as a human. “Do your thing.”
Rylan crouched on the sidewalk and closed his eyes, his brow furrowed in concentration. His skin began to glow, softly at first, then brighter and brighter until I was forced to look away. I wondered if the blinding light was there to spare people the unnerving sight—it had to be creepy, watching muscle, skin, and bone shift and rearrange itself into a new shape—or if it was to stun potential enemies and buy the shifter time to complete the transformation. Either way, it worked. I threw my arm over my eyes and kept my face averted.
After a few minutes, a whiskered snout gently butted against my thigh. Dropping my arm, I looked down to see a jaguar standing in front of me, black-spotted golden fur rippling in the sunlight. He was huge, the top of his head nearly reaching my waist, and judging by the size of him, I guessed he had to be close to three hundred pounds.
“By the Ur-God,” I said, hesitantly running a hand over his thick fur. It was luxuriously soft, but I could feel the strength coiled beneath. “I didn’t realize you were so massive.”
Rylan let out a rumbling purr as he continued to rub his giant head against my leg, and I knew he was trying to make himself less intimidating. Laughing, I scratched beneath his chin, and the purring intensified until I could feel it vibrating through my entire body.
“Yes, I get it, you’re a good boy and you won’t hurt me.” I patted him on the head. “Now put your scary face on. It’s time to intimidate some assholes.”
Rylan rose onto his hind legs, which brought him up to eye level with me. Baring his fangs, he pawed at the air as if to say, “Ooh, look! Scary shifter,” then he dropped to all fours and padded away.
“Yeah, you’re a real comedian,” I said, following him around the corner and into the paper store.
“You again!” the shopkeeper snarled as I walked in. “How many times—” He cut himself off, the blood draining from his face as he caught sight of Rylan. “What the hell?”
“Hello,” I said pleasantly. “This is my friend Rylan. He’s agreed to help me find Yolian, but we need something of his to help track him down. Do you have anything here that he might have handled a lot? Maybe a tool, or an apron, or something?”
The shopkeeper warily eyed Rylan, who was sniffing a rack display with great interest. “Yolian dusted the shelves every day,” he said, reaching for a duster hanging on the wall behind the counter. “This might work.”
He handed the duster to me, and I offered it to Rylan. The jaguar sniffed it eagerly, then trotted toward the door.
“We’ll be keeping this until we find him,” I said, waving the duster at the shopkeeper as I followed Rylan out. “You’re welcome, by the way!”
I hurried down the street after Rylan, who was already half a block ahead, his nose pressed to the ground as he followed the scent. Not wanting to interrupt his flow, I jogged behind him in silence for several blocks until he stopped outside a squat one-story home with peeling white paint and overgrown flowerbeds.
“How can I— The Ur-God have mercy!” the woman who answered the door shrieked as she caught sight of Rylan. “Go away!”
She tried to slam the door, but I wedged my boot in the doorjamb before she could. “Sorry, ma’am, just ignore him,” I said, shifting my body to block her view of Rylan. Dammit, I wished I’d asked him to change back! “That’s my friend Rylan, and I’m Annia. I’m looking for my friend Yolian. Does he live here with you?”
The woman narrowed her faded blue eyes. “Why are you asking? I don’t want any trouble.”
I pulled Yolian’s note out of my pocket and showed it to her. “He left this at my place last night, and when I went to his work to talk to him, he wasn’t there.”
“Oh dear.” The woman’s face sagged, and she opened the door wider. “That sounds so unlike Yolian. He is such a reliable young man, never one to shirk his duties.”
Rylan, back in human form, moved close to stand next to me. “Does he live here with you?” he asked. “I tracked his scent from the shop to here, and it’s quite strong.”
The woman’s mouth flattened as she took Rylan in, but when I cleared my throat, she answered. “He’s been renting a room here for the past six months,” she said, her face falling. “His family owns a farm some fifty miles from Solantha, and Yolian moved here because he wanted to do something else with his life. He’s talked to me a few times about getting an apprenticeship with a tradesman, and I was going to ask a carpenter friend of mine if he would consider taking him on.” Her lower lip trembled. “Do you think he’s all right? When he didn’t come home last night, I’d hoped he was just with a friend, but for him to not show up at work either…”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to do everything I can to find him,” I said. “Can we come in and look at his room?”
“Yes, of course.” She stepped back to let us through. “Take as much time as you need.”
We checked Yolian’s room to see if there were any clues that could lead us to him, but it was spartan, with nothing out of the ordinary.
“This is getting more and more worrying,” I said, biting my lip as we left the house. “And it doesn’t sound like Yolian made any friends aside from his landlady, so I have no idea who to ask either.”
“We can try searching for a bit longer,” Rylan offered, “see if I can pick up a scent trail again. But if we don’t find anything, I think you need to go to the Guild and get someone to put out a Missing Person’s Alert.”
He shifted back into jaguar form, and we spent the next hour prowling Maintown, starting in the residential area Yolian lived in and moving toward the seedier areas. I was just about to call it a day when Rylan stopped short outside a lurid purple building.
“What is it?” I asked as he lifted his head.
He pulled back his upper lip, letting the air wash over the scent gland there as he sniffed fiercely. After a moment, he dropped his head, then shifted back into human form.
“It’s not Yolian,” he said once the bright light faded, “but I’m catching the scent of a wolf shifter.”
“You think it might be Terpan?” I frowned as I studied the building, which appeared to be a third-rate night club covered in garish-looking street art.
“Well, you did say he didn’t turn up for work today. He might have come here to interrogate someone yesterday and found a lead that he’s chasing down right now. Besides, my senses are tingling. I think we should investigate.”
I bit my lip as I considered that. While Maintown was a human-only zone, the businesses around here did employ shifters from time to time as they made for good bouncers and security. Just because Rylan scented a wolf shifter didn’t mean it was Terpan. And yet, it wasn’t as if we had anything else to go on, right?
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Let’s check it out.”
The club was closed, so we entered by way of a cellar window in the back.
“I smell death,” Rylan sn
arled as he landed behind me.
“Death?” I glanced around. We were in a large basement filled with caskets and crates of liquor. “What kind of death are we talking? Like a dead rat or something?”
“No. Human death.” He pushed past me, stalking toward a door on the opposite side of the room.
I followed him, my sense of trepidation rising. He tried the door handle, but when it wouldn’t budge, he gave the door a single, powerful kick and shattered it off its hinges.
“Fuck!” I swore as the scent of blood, urine, and death washed over me. Tears sprang to my eyes at the sight of a crumpled body lying in a pool of blood in the corner of the room.
I skirted a metal table stained with dried blood and a shelf filled with rusty-looking instruments, and dropped to my knees to roll the body face-up. Sure enough, it was Yolian. His dead eyes stared sightlessly at me, his mouth open in a silent cry for help.
“He’s been tortured,” Rylan said in disgust, his gaze roaming over the missing fingernails, the burns and cuts all over his body.
The boy had been stripped of his clothes, left only in his underwear, with the cruelty inflicted upon him on full display. The brutal slash across his throat was the obvious cause of death, likely inflicted when the torturer decided he could get no more information out of him.
Bile rushed up my throat, and it took everything I had not to hurl my donuts all over Yolian’s battered body. “This is all my fault,” I croaked, tears coursing down my cheeks.
“Come on now.” Gently, Rylan tugged me away from the body, wrapping his strong arms around me in a comforting embrace. “This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known this would happen.”
“No, but I could have prevented it.” I yanked myself out of Rylan’s arms—I didn’t deserve his sympathy. If only I’d listened to Garalina and used magic to force the shopkeepers to tell me what was really going on, I could have found the gang members before Yolian could stick his neck out and get himself killed. “Garalina!” I called out, my voice thick with grief. “Is there anything you can do for him?”
Garalina manifested next to Yolian. “His spirit is long gone,” she said quietly, running a ghostly hand through his blood-encrusted hair. “And even if it did linger, I would not be able to put him back. His body is too badly damaged.”
“W-wh-wha—” Rylan stammered, backing away. Judging by the way his golden eyes were popping out of his skull, I gathered Garalina had chosen not to make herself invisible. “Is that a ghost?”
I sighed tiredly. “Rylan, meet Garalina of Ymal. She’s the ghost of a shaman. I met her in Southia, and, to make a long story short, she saved my life in exchange for letting her travel around with me and search for her killer.”
“I— Someone’s here!” Rylan whispered, and whirled toward the doorway.
I reached for my sword, but before I could draw it, an explosion knocked me into the wall. Huge chunks of plaster and brick rained down from the ceiling, and one landed on my head, sending a burst of blinding pain through my skull. Darkness rippled across my vision, and the last thing I saw was the door opening before I passed out.
13
Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
The headache pounding at my temples dragged me from blissful darkness, and I groaned as waves of dull pain rippled through my skull. The smell of burning flesh tugged at my senses, and I opened my eyes to find myself looking down at the rusty metal table, at the pool of blood, at Yolian’s dead body still crumpled on the floor.
Wait a minute. Why am I looking down?
I tried to move, and a wave of dizziness swept through me as I realized I couldn’t. Glancing around, I saw Rylan and Terpan were next to me, suspended by butcher hooks protruding from the ceiling. They hung limply, unconscious, their mouths gagged and their wrists shackled with heavy silver cuffs inscribed with runes.
I stared at the raw skin peeking out from beneath the cuffs and shuddered. No wonder I’m smelling burning flesh. Shifters were highly allergic to silver. How were they still asleep? Those things had to be excruciatingly painful.
“Rylan!” I hissed through my own gag, trying to get their attention without alerting anyone who might be nearby. “Terpan! Wake up!”
Why weren’t they reacting? Shifters had super-sensitive hearing; they should have woken up by now.
“Their ears were badly damaged by that blast.” Garalina appeared before me, her eyes glittering with pent-up anger. “I was able to understand some of what the Garaians were saying as they tied you up. They used some kind of mechanical explosive device that shatters the eardrums and can even cause brain damage. Their eardrums are ruptured, and the healing is slowed by those silver cuffs.”
“What about me?” I asked via mindspeech, unable to talk properly around the gag. “Why aren’t my eardrums damaged?”
“They were,” Garalina said crossly, “and your skull was fractured as well. I used my magic to heal both, though you’ll need a few more hours to recover from the lingering headache. I have not healed the others because of your asinine insistence that I not do magic without your permission.”
“Like that’s ever stopped you before.” I rolled my eyes, then instantly regretted it when my head throbbed again. “Go ahead and heal them already so we can get out of here!”
“No.”
My eardrums must not have fully healed after all. “What did you say?”
“I said, no.” Garalina crossed her arms over her chest, her gold eyes boring into me. “If you want me to save your friends and get you out of here, the terms of our bargain need to change. No more holding back and using magic only in dire circumstances. You could have prevented this entire scenario if you’d used my abilities from the start! Instead, here you are, hanging from a hook like a pig carcass while your friends are suffering. Did you know that the Garaians—there are at least a dozen of them, by the way—intend to torture and kill them, like they did with poor Yolian? And as for you, they plan to pass you around for a bit before selling you off as a sex slave.”
“I’d like to see them try,” I snarled, white-hot rage ripping through me. But it faded quickly as I looked down at Yolian, at Rylan and Terpan dangling next to me. This was all my fault, wasn’t it? I’d dragged the two of them into this mess with me and hadn’t used all the resources at my disposal to keep everyone safe. I’d been fighting with one hand tied behind my back, and a boy was dead because of it.
“You’re right,” I said softly. “I can’t keep handicapping myself just because I’m afraid of what other people will think.” There were plenty of people who would kill to wield the kind of power I had—I needed to start thinking of it as a blessing, not an albatross hanging around my neck. “I accept the new terms.”
“Excellent!” Garalina beamed. “It’s unfortunate that it took this”—she gestured around the torture chamber—“to bring you around, but now we can finally get some real work done around here.”
Terpan groaned, his eyes fluttering open.
“Well, that’s a pity,” Garalina said as Rylan began to stir as well. “Both of them are going to see you use magic now.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
Terpan’s eyes widened with horror as he realized what was happening, and he began to struggle against his bindings. “Just get us out of here already!”
Garalina clapped her hands, and the manacles around my wrists fell away. Relief surged through me as I ripped the gag from my throat, then reached behind me to grasp the hook. Pulling on Garalina’s magic, I separated the hook from the chain, then flung it aside as I landed on my feet.
“Mmph!” Rylan and Terpan were both staring at me now, their faces pale with shock—or maybe pain, since they were both still concussed and burning. Reaching up, I touched the shackles at their wrists and used Garalina’s magic on them. They fell away easily despite the magic runes soldered into them.
Rylan and Terpan wasted no time removing their gags and wriggling free of the hooks.
�
��What the hell?” Rylan croaked as he landed, bracing his hand against the wall. Sweat beaded at his temples, his yellow eyes glazed with pain. “How did you do that, Annia?”
“Because she’s a fucking cheater,” Terpan spat, glaring up at me. He hadn’t landed quite as gracefully and was on one knee, staring up at me as if I were a monster. “I knew you were using magic, Melcott.”
“That’s a funny way of thanking me for saving your life, asshole,” I snarled, resisting the temptation to kick him in his smug face. “Now will the two of you hurry up and shift so you can heal yourselves? We need to get the fuck out of here.”
Terpan growled, but the two men did as I asked. Twin explosions of bright light dazzled me, forcing me to throw my hands up. I flattened myself against the wall just in case someone came in, but no one seemed to notice the movement down here.
When I opened my eyes again, a huge white wolf was staring up at me, nearly as big as the jaguar behind him.
“Garalina,” I asked aloud. “Are you able to talk to them via mindspeech?”
Garalina’s ghostly form rippled, and the two shifters jumped back, snarling. She must have just made herself visible to them. “Yes, I can do that,” she said, cocking her head as she studied them. “They are both prime specimens, aren’t they?”
“You can admire them after we’ve escaped from this charnel house.” I glanced at Yolian’s body, and a wave of guilt and horror swept through me again, leaving me cold and shivering. “For now, just tell me what they’re saying.”
I briefed Rylan and Terpan on the situation, including the strange weapon they’d used on us and how many men Garalina had said we were up against. By the time I finished, both shifters were snarling, their lips curled back to reveal terrifyingly sharp teeth and fangs.
“Terpan says he saw them kill the boy, and that he is going to punish the gang members if it’s the last thing he does,” Garalina said. “Rylan says that they should stay in animal form as it will give us a better fighting chance.”
“Agreed.” We all went still at the sound of multiple pairs of feet thundering down the steps. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a handsaw and a cleaver from an array of torture instruments. Rage sparked in my chest as I thought about what they might have been used for, and I channeled it toward our objective. “Let’s do this.”
Tempted by Magic: Mischief and Magic: Book One Page 14
