by A. D. Ryan
Coarse hair started to grow along the sides of her jaws, and her canines had begun to elongate as her eyes glowed a brilliant shade of amber. The dark circles around them made them appear even brighter, and the shape of her face was changing.
Had being forced to repress her wolf side caused this drastic change in her transformation? Or was it that she was still so young and didn’t have a handle on it yet? I seemed to recall hearing that Corbin had this figured out before he was fifteen, and at seventeen, Colby was still getting the hang of it all. How old did a full-blood have to be when they experienced their first change? Toddlerhood? Puberty? Maybe being held captive by a group of sadistic vampires had forced her transformations sooner than usual, and this was the result.
I continued to coach her as best I could from my cell, and eventually, the transformation reverted. Her forehead—as well as mine—was covered with a light sheen of sweat, and my nerves were rattled. Cordelia fell to her knees, sobbing into her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I didn’t mean to do that. The change…it started a couple years ago, but I don’t get to shift often. I’m forced to miss the night of the full moon, and it throws my cycles completely out of whack.” Her breaths were heavy, and she swallowed thickly. “It’s unpredictable.”
I nodded. “I can relate.” The minute the words left my mouth, I wanted to take them back.
Of course I couldn’t relate. Did I know what it felt like to lose control of my emotions at the drop of a hat and shift? Yes. But Cordelia’s situation was completely unlike mine. She was a girl—barely a teenager—being held against her will and forced to miss something that should come naturally to her at this age, having been born into this life.
No, I had absolutely no right to claim to know what she might be feeling…but she looked up at me, her eyes hopeful, like maybe she’d found someone she could share some part of what she was going through with. I decided to be that person. I was still so new to this that I couldn’t possibly expect to get through this alone, and after seven years of being held hostage, I assumed she needed someone she could rely on to make her feel safe.
Until I could get us both out of here, and that was Objective One.
Before I could formulate a plan, I needed to know exactly what I was up against and where we were. Some heavy reconnaissance was in order.
Getting as close to the bars as I could, the heat of the silver enough to keep me from pressing against them, I tried to look down the hall. My eyesight since being turned had improved tenfold. Now that my senses had recovered from whatever drugs were running through my blood, I could make things out a little more clearly. As I had suspected upon waking, we were definitely underground, or somewhere deep in a cave—inside the mountains, perhaps? I could smell the mildew from the water that continually seeped through the jagged stone walls, and the scent of old blood was most dominant…wolf and human, alike.
“Cordelia?” I queried, glancing down past her cell to find another one like it—empty.
“Hmm?”
I looked the other way. On the other side of her cell was a dark corridor. I couldn’t see where it led or how long it was given my disadvantage of being caged, but I could see a shimmer of light coming from farther down. “What exactly goes on here?” I paused. “I mean, you’ve been here a while, right?” She confirmed this with a series of hums. “So, aside from keeping you in the cage, what else do they do?” I feared her response for more reasons than I cared to admit.
She grew quiet as I tried to see what was next to my cell. I couldn’t get a clear look, but I was pretty sure it was another cage. Looking back over at her, I found her fiddling with the hem of her oversized shirt. “Cordelia?” Her eyes rose, grabbing mine. “You can trust me,” I promised.
“I’m not always in this cage,” she whispered, her little voice cracking with emotion. “S-sometimes they let me out.”
“Out where?”
She inhaled deeply, releasing the breath shakily. “Other rooms…rooms with big mirrors on the walls.”
Two-way mirrors like the ones we had at the Scottsdale PD precinct for interrogations, most likely. But what need would these creatures possibly have for two-way mirrors?
“They watch,” she said carefully, almost like she knew they were watching now.
“Watch…what?” I asked, nervous for the answer. Was this a case of pedophilia? Or was something else at work here?
“How I react.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. But only a small one. There could still be more to this.
“They take the collar off and watch me change,” she continued, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering. She knew what a violation it was, and it repulsed her as much as it did me.
“Do you know why?”
“They want to know how we work,” she replied casually, but when her eyes met mine again, she looked terrified. “So they can mix the bloodlines.”
My eyebrows pulled together in confusion. “Mix…the bloodlines?” I let this information swirl around in my head, trying to grasp what that even meant…then if it was even possible. “You don’t mean…?”
Cordelia nodded. She knew what I was struggling to voice. “Imagine it,” she said, eyes darting around warily, like she was waiting for one of our captors to come flying in at an inhuman speed. “The freedom to walk in the day, to not be affected by our bite. It’s appealing to them.”
“It’s revolting,” I scoffed, trying to keep myself from retching. The thought of one of them violating my body with their poison was disgusting…but the wolf was suddenly curious. “How would we benefit from this?”
Eyes zoning out, Cordelia reached out toward the bars of her cell, pulling back with a grimace before the pads of her fingers could even meet the silver-laced steel. “I imagine silver wouldn’t bother us the way it does.”
It wasn’t enough to appease the wolf, thankfully. “That’s it? Sounds like we’d get the raw end of the deal.”
Cordelia shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re strong.”
“So are we,” I argued, briefly stunned that she would even think there was something in it for us.
“They’re fast.”
I shook my head. “We’re fast.”
Her eyes met mine, holding them with an intensity that gave me chills. “Not like them.”
When I broke free of her stare, I took a step back. “They’re monsters…dead. There’s no warmth there. Their bodies are cold…they don’t even have a heartbeat.”
Across from me, Cordelia was silent, hopefully considering everything I was telling her. The longer she went without saying anything, the more I wondered if I was dealing with a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome. She seemed so conflicted, and it took me until that exact moment to remember that this was all she knew for seven years. Maybe they promised her freedom if she cooperated, and this was her way of hoping for a way out. To get back to her family.
Cordelia opened her mouth to say something else when a heavy door—possibly iron—creaked down the corridor. The beam of light widened as the door scraped across the stone floors, and heavy footsteps moved toward our area. I counted them. Eighteen. Eighteen steps before he reached the corner. Even in the dark, I could see his onyx eyes focus on me. He seemed familiar, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, place from where. I felt like I’d only seen him recently—within the last couple months.
His grin widened, his fangs glimmering even in the blackness, and he turned his head to the left. Cordelia gasped, scurrying back into the corner of her cell. Into the shadows.
With a cold, calculating stare, the man stepped forward, reaching into his right pocket and retrieving a key ring. There were four keys on it. I knew that if I could get my hand on them, my chances of escaping were much greater. Four keys meant a maximum of four locks to get us out of here. I liked those odds. Now to figure out a way—
“No, please,” Cordelia cried out as the key prepared to slide into the lock. Her pleas derail
ed my train of thought, and I was forced back into the here and now. The vampire turned the key, his grin sadistic as he pulled open the door. The hinges groaned, meaning our eventual escape wouldn’t be unheard. But I could work around that if it meant getting us away from whatever the hell this was.
Cordelia screamed, the shrill sound echoing off the cavern walls as the over-sized brute grabbed her by the hair on top of her head and forced her from her cell. I raced forward without thinking and slammed against the bars to get his attention.
“Hey! Leave her alone!” I shouted, a growl quickly building in my belly and rising into my throat. Despite the burning, I continued to beat the palms of my hands against the cage door. The hinges rattled, but they didn’t give. They must have been reinforced regularly. My hands burned, the skin blistered and raw with every slam against the metal. “Let her go!”
“No! Nonononono!” Cordelia continued to shriek as he hauled her from her cage and headed for the corridor. Her feet dragged behind her as he pulled; I could smell her blood as the stone floor tore at her flesh. Her tiny hands grabbed at his wrists, claws broken through the ends of her fingers and gouging at his skin. His foul blood polluted the air, burning my nostrils, and he hissed in pain, whipping around and using his free hand to backhand Cordelia across the face. Stunned, her body went limp for a minute, lessening her struggles as he continued on.
Desperate, I wrapped my hands around the bars—they were so beyond charred that I couldn’t really feel much of anything anymore, anyway. “Wait!” I screamed as he turned the corner and disappeared from my line of vision. “Take me instead!”
With a sinister laugh, he replied. “Don’t worry. Your turn is coming.”
The iron door slammed shut behind them, leaving me with nothing but the sound of my pounding heart and Cordelia’s open and empty cage across from me.
Chapter2 | defy
Hours passed. Or maybe it was only minutes. Without a clock or even the sun, there was no way for me to really tell. There I sat, locked in a cold, dank prison with no light source, afraid about what was going to happen. Fear wasn’t new for me. I’d been plenty afraid throughout the years—a lot of that being in the past few months, especially.
My stomach growled, and I glanced over at the dog dishes that still sat by my cage door. Yes, I briefly contemplated eating the somewhat spoiled meat. My stomach growled again, and I wondered if my digestion would keep me from getting sick. I mean, dogs ate anything and everything, right? And, technically, I was part wolf, which was in the same class of species.
Groaning, I pressed my forehead into my knees; I couldn’t believe I was even contemplating it.
Hunger-driven, I scurried across the room and picked up a slice of the funky smelling meat and shoved it in my mouth. I instantly gagged and spit it out. There was no way I could even force that shit down. I would die before I did…
That was when I realized I very well might die in my prison.
“No,” I told myself firmly. “You can’t think like that.” I tried to channel the wolf; she was usually stronger and more confident, but even she was cowering somewhere deep in my subconscious, and I couldn’t seem to reach her. Had that part of me given up? Could I do this without her? I’d finally just accepted what I was and what this life entailed; I needed her. We were one and the same. We made each other stronger.
I stood up, trying to hold onto what little confidence I had left. I inspected the bars of my cell from a safe distance. I tried to look at it like a puzzle. The mechanics of the door were no different than a regular prison cell—something I was familiar with given my career choice in Arizona. A large metal pin was placed in the hinges, holding the door on. Realizing this, I glanced around my cell. Maybe if I could find something thin and strong enough, I could push it out. I could probably tear some of my over-sized shirt off and wrap it around my hands to lessen the burning.
I began searching my cell, hoping to find something, but I came up empty. Angry and frustrated, I balled up my fist and slammed it into the stone wall. My rage continued to build, reminding me of the day of David’s funeral when I destroyed the tile in my parents’ shower. Like then, I couldn’t stop, and the wall chipped away, the shards falling around my bare feet. White hot pain shot up my arm with every blow, and blood flowed freely from the cuts that split my skin.
With every punch, I thought of the events that brought me here. I thought of the night of my birthday, when Nick showed up unannounced. Then the night in the park when I was attacked by a wolf. The night of my first transformation came next, and I surprisingly recalled more of the details. Nick telling me what I had become replayed in Technicolor surround sound. My back muscles burned, and each punch became more aggressive when I recalled the night that David died. So much had happened, and just when I thought I had overcome all of that and accepted this life, something threw a wrench in the gears, grinding my progress to a staggering halt.
Finding out Nick had been the one to turn me was that wrench.
In the moments that followed that revelation, I felt betrayed. He let me go on thinking it was Jackson who’d attacked me. Those first few weeks, the tension between Jackson and I was palpable. Thinking about how I used to look his way or treat him caused a ball of guilt to slam around in my belly. Sure, we had been able to find some common ground when he told me the story of how he’d stumbled into Pack life, and we’d grown as close as siblings, but…
Actually, thinking about it, should that even matter? How I acted toward Jackson was in the past. True, while I’d been misled about the details of that night in Chaparral Park, Jackson didn’t seem too upset by it. He knew I blamed him, and he didn’t stop trying to pursue a friendship with me. Did that mean I should just forgive Nick for lying all this time? I wasn’t sure. What he did was wrong. It was deceitful. But if I really thought back to our time together, he was right; there was never a right moment to tell me. I remembered how his tone would turn serious just before something bad happened, interrupting the conversation he had tried to start. He’d been telling the truth about trying to tell me.
Realizing this, I pulled my mangled hand away and clutched it to my chest as I sank to the floor. I could barely hold it closed, indicating I’d likely broken a bone or several. I fell to the ground, tears burning my eyes. I tried to keep them from falling as I thought about Nick and how worried he must be—how worried the whole Pack must be—and how I might never get to make things right.
The fact that the Pack had been searching for this place—for Cordelia—for years with no success didn’t bode well for my own rescue. I knew that, even if acknowledging that only meant I was admitting defeat.
The first tear fell down my cheek as nausea rolled in my uneasy stomach. I clutched it as I dry-heaved. Had I actually eaten something in the past few days, perhaps I’d have something to throw up, satisfying the urge. Instead, it left me queasy and weak.
Finding I needed strength, I closed my eyes and visualized Nick’s face. I tried to imagine our reunion. How he would find me—or I, him—and he’d pull me into his arms, kissing me and telling me how relieved he was that I was okay. Not that he would have to tell me, of course. I would be able to sense it. He was always pretty easy to read. He would tell me I was safe, that he’d never let me go…
Thinking about Nick gave me a renewed sense of determination. Sniffling and wiping the tears away with the back of my hands, I stood up and looked at the shards of rock around my feet. Most of them were small and pebble like, but there were a couple larger pieces, long and jagged. I could use them as weapons or to try and pop the pins from the cage door hinges.
The iron door at the end of the corridor scraped against the cavern floors again, and I shoved a long, jagged piece of rock into the pocket of my over-sized jeans. The parasite told me my turn was coming…was that time now? If it was, I planned on being prepared.
Soft whimpers accompanied the heavy footfalls. I smelled Cordelia—she was bleeding and her fear was heady—as well as th
e toxic scent of her torturer. He reveled in her misery, and the wolf stirred inside me finally. She sensed his joy at harming one of her own, and she wanted to rip him apart. I suddenly hoped he’d open my cage door and try to take me next.
When they rounded the corner, I recognized him as the same man who had taken her. Cordelia’s hair was damp with sweat, and it hung over her downcast face like a curtain. She cradled one of her arms against her stomach, and I could hear the soft drips as her blood fell to the ground from several lacerations. Her neck, from what I could see of it behind the collar and her hair, looked red and raw, and her eyes were swollen from crying. What had they done to her? This was more than just watching her transformation for their sick and demented “research.”
Once at her cell door, the vampire tossed her inside. She stumbled before collapsing in the dark corner, breathing heavily. She didn’t turn to me. Didn’t speak. She instead slumped to the floor and curled up into the fetal position, stunned or in a state of shock after whatever she’d just endured.
When the vampire turned around again, his eyes looked me up and down, almost appraisingly, and he smirked. Something about his smile—even with the fangs—hit me, and I suddenly knew where I had recognized him from: Scottsdale. His name was Jason Smith, and he was one of the four victims whose deaths I had been investigating before I took an extended leave of absence.
Shocked, I took a few steps back away from the cage doors, realizing this was bigger than I thought; if he was here, maybe I wasn’t just dealing with Gianna’s leftover coven members. Maybe the vampires we’d killed in the ambush last week weren’t the last, but were actually a small part of a much larger army we’d sorely underestimated.
Without a word, Jason moved toward my cage, keys in hand. My heart pounded furiously as he continued to advance on me. My fight or flight instincts kicked in, and I remembered the rock shard in my pocket. Even with my senses and abilities muted slightly, I knew I had to do everything in my power to get the hell out of here and get Cordelia somewhere safe. I couldn’t worry about not getting very far.
