by Helen Scott
The woman that stood on the platform was petite in every sense of the word. She looked almost fairy or pixie-like, though I knew that both of those supes hated the stereotypes that went along with their names. Her hair was white with a blue tint to it, reminding me of the blue rinses my grandmother used to get. The rinses always gave her hair an almost purple hue, whereas Ethel's was a true blue. Her eyes were a violet color that I'd never seen before, the effect of which was only enhanced by her hair. Her skin was pale and crepey, which was not unexpected if she was as old as Christian was claiming. Her knit cardigan was embroidered with little flowers, each one with a gem at its center, winking in the dim light of the storage closet.
"So you're the seer that's got everyone up in arms, hm?" Ethel asked.
"I guess?" I replied, glancing over at Christian.
"Thank you for meeting with us, Ethel, I know it's not easy for you."
"I'm here to meet with her, not you, so you can skedaddle. I'm not going to harm a fellow witch, let alone a seer, so she's safe while she's here. I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of witchy business with a vamp hanging around, though." She harrumphed and all but turned her nose up at Christian.
I looked over at the alpha vampire. He looked a little flustered as though he'd been expecting a meek old lady. Didn't he know anything about witches? We're made of sterner stuff than that.
"It's okay, Christian. You can go, I'll be fine."
"People have been trying to kill you since you got here, don't make a habit of trusting someone just because they say they're not going to do something." He growled at me.
I looked at him and scowled. "I'm not, but I also would like to speak with Ethel. If she doesn't want to talk around you, then that's fair. My understanding is that the two of you don't really know each other, so why should she trust you? I'll be fine, I promise. I always land on my feet, don't I?"
"Usually because I'm there to get you to Doc," Christian grumbled before dropping a kiss on my forehead. "I'll wait by the stairs for you."
I nodded.
Once he was gone and the door was shut, Ethel looked me up and down before saying, "So I hear you're cavorting with an alpha shifter and alpha vampire?"
I bristled at the tone of her statement but tried not to let it show as I said, "I'm in a relationship with them, if that's what you mean by cavorting."
"You're a seer?"
I nodded.
"Makes sense. Seers always attract the dominant ones. You make their need to protect stand up and take notice. Based on what the vamp just said, you've been having some trouble which likely has only intensified that need to protect you."
"So what they feel for me isn't real? It's just my seer abilities activating their protective natures?" Dread curled in my stomach as I spoke. I started to pace, which basically meant shifting from foot to foot in the small closet.
"No, your feelings are all real. They are just heightened by your baser natures, that's all. It's what seers do, even though it's not intentional. Christian said you don't know much about seers, even though you are one?"
"My grandmother was a seer, but she died while I was young and my mother never talked about her magic. When I started having visions, she started making me tinctures that would suppress them. I lived that way for most of my life, until I found myself here, that is."
"Suppressing your child's magic, what hogwash. The two strike law thoroughly fucked us all over, didn't it?"
I nodded, a little surprised that this prim looking older lady had just dropped an f-bomb.
"Your seer nature is strong, I can sense it, but you need to learn how to control it. Meditation is going to be the safest answer, at least while we are trapped in here. When you go into a meditative state you open yourself up to the visions and can experience them in a more controlled way. It can also give you access to visions of the near future as well, not just far off stuff.”
Ethel gave me a kind look before she went on. “Your gift is complicated and I'm sure you wish you could return it, but it will be your greatest strength, next to the love in your heart, if you let it."
I’d spent all my life hiding my gift, and hiding from it. Suddenly I found my eyes blurring with tears. Focus, Nas.
"Can I ask you about Nightstone?" I pulled up a bag of paper towels over, one that hadn't been touched in years if the dust sticking to my fingers was anything to go by, and sat down opposite her.
"What are you curious about?"
"In my visions, I've seen blood be spilled and the floor glow and seem to absorb it. Have you ever seen anything like that?"
"You mean the Karma effect?" she asked as she picked at a little loose thread on her cardigan, carefully tucking it back into place so it wouldn't unravel.
"Karma effect? I've never heard of that."
She sighed and seemed to prepare herself for another long speech. "The prison was built to house supernaturals and also kill them if needs be. But they discovered something in the early days: the energy that supernaturals give off when they are all packed together like this messes with technology. So they built restrictions, shielded areas from the supernatural energy.”
I frowned, trying to understand how Nightstone worked. I’d never heard any of this before.
“Eventually, it was a witch who discovered how to siphon the energy off and convert it into something the humans could use. It's the only thing that's kept us alive. For a few years, they were just killing us left and right, with no regard to who we were or what crime we had committed. It was genocide. The grounds the village is built on, and the shifter yard in your area, were mass graves for those that were put down.”
The thought that I was walking over graves during my moments in the sunshine left my mouth dry.
“After the discovery, the killings stopped, on the condition that there would always be a witch who could make the conversion within the prison. Once the energy is converted, it can be fed into the power grid or developed into a drug that the elite have kept for themselves.”
“A drug?” My mind was reeling. “I never heard any of this.”
“They call it Karma, because they believe they are getting what they're owed,” she said grimly.
"You're saying that the floor, walls, everything, can absorb magic and then someone turns it into a drug?" I asked, unable to accept what she was saying.
"That about sums it up. Makes it sound easy. Of course, the witch who does that conversion would probably say different."
"Who does that now?"
"Well, that's where your side of the prison messed up. It was Nana, but I hear that she finally pissed off the wrong person."
"Nana?" I gulped. “But she was an elemental.”
“Witch, elemental, seer, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re powerful enough to manipulate the energy correctly.” Ethel shrugged. "A new one will be assigned soon, I have no doubt. The warden and his cronies won't let it go too long without someone filling that position. Now I think I'm going to go and take a nap. You've dredged up a lot of old memories. I prefer to let them rest. It was a pleasure meeting you, Nasima. If you have further questions you can ask another time, although I can't promise I'll know the answer." The older woman stood and placed her hand on the brick wall before muttering an incantation.
"It was nice meeting you too," I said as the wall spun and she disappeared from sight.
I wasn't sure how long I stayed sitting on the paper towel, but it felt like a long time before I was able to move again, before my mind was able to think about anything other than the words she'd spoken. It was a lot to process.
When I made it out of the closet and down toward where Christian would be waiting, I tried to think about how to explain everything to him, but it all seemed too insane to put into words. Somehow Ethel telling me about it had made it seem reasonable, but now, in my head, it just sounded outlandish. But I knew it was the truth..
Christian looked up when he saw me and I gave him a tight smile. "So, how'd it go?"
he asked when I was close enough.
I shook my head, my smile turning into a grimace. "We are so fucked."
16
Nasima
Christian and Ambrose had taken Lake to neutral territory to interrogate him. From what Tisha had said last night, that was causing more rumblings in the pack. They wanted Ambrose out for blood, not working with Christian.
For my part, I was sick of the bloody laundry room.
Literally. Lake had clearly resisted telling the alphas whatever he knew, because he was strung up from one of the overhead beams, pale and sweating and bleeding. I knew I’d do whatever it took to find out who hurt one of these males I loved, so I wasn’t exactly angry.
I definitely did feel the same sense of panic wash over me that had the last time I was here, though. Seeing blood streaked across the linoleum floor made it hard for me not to panic. The room seemed to flicker around me, bringing me back to a time when it was my blood.
“Nas.” Christian’s voice broke into my thoughts.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Two alphas stared me down.
“You may not lie to me, Nasima,” Christian warned me. “I’m not hiding who I am from you, and you needn’t hide from me either. You are allowed to have your moments of weakness.”
I snorted. “It seems that’s all I have.”
“Oh, knock it off,” Ambrose warned me. “You wouldn’t be ours if you weren’t strong enough to hold your own. You just need to realize it.”
Christian rubbed his hand across his temple in the way he so often did when Ambrose was talking. “Ambrose, would you fetch our shifter friend so she can join the conversation please?”
“No,” Lake pleaded. “Please. I’ll tell you everything, just leave Tali out of it.”
His pleading fell behind us as we all stepped out into the hallway. The anguish in his voice made me think that I was right after all: he did love the shifter that he was involved with.
It felt like I could breathe once I was out of that damned room. I could tell from the look on his face that Christian didn’t want me to stay there and watch the interrogation, and honestly, part of me didn’t want to be there either. It was definitely going to trigger my PTSD. But I also wanted to be fully a part of their lives, of what it meant to be alphas in Nightstone. If I couldn’t stand beside them without being destroyed by my damned visions and my own trauma, then I could never be their equal, could I? And I couldn’t have a relationship like that.
Then Sasha glided up to us. She gave him a look, and Christian squeezed my arm before he moved away to talk to her.
The two of them had a quiet conversation. Then Christian turned to me.
“Bane is up to something,” he said. “He’s headed toward the far side of Nightstone, the abandoned area.”
My heart jumped at the possibility of figuring out why Bane was really here. But I glanced back at the door to the laundry room, which was shut now. “What’s the abandoned area?”
“It’s a long story,” Christian hedged. “For now let’s just say it’s an area that isn’t safe to use or live in or anything like that.”
“Okay, that doesn’t sound creepy at all.” I wondered why the hell Bane would be going somewhere like that. Was it the only place he felt safe?
“It’s up to you, Nasima,” Christian said. “Sasha is going to tail Bane to make sure he’s safe. He doesn’t know his way around or have the sense to accept help,” his voice went icy at this thought, “so she can easily catch up to him. But it’s up to you if you want to go with her to watch over Bane and puzzle out what he’s up to, or if you want to stay here.”
My lips parted. He knew how hard a choice that was, and knowing him, he would never dangle the option for me to wander Nightstone in front of me--even with a bodyguard--if he wasn't eager to get me away from the interrogation scene.
“You controlling bastard,” I told him, and he just smiled.
“Guilty,” he said with a shrug. “Your call, Nasima. I’m sure we’ll find out what Bane is up to eventually, even if you stay here. Sasha doesn’t know him as well, of course, but she’ll report back.”
I stared him down. “I love you, but you’re impossible.”
“I feel the same about you,” he promised me, “So I have little sympathy.”
I turned to face the female vampire. “Well, lead on, Sasha.”
I wanted to ask what happened to the abandoned side of Nightstone. Space was at a premium and there must be something truly awful to have caused the factions to leave that territory untouched. But as soon as I agreed, she grabbed me and the next thing I knew, we were moving at that vamp-blur speed. The two of us emerged a few moments later in another part of Nightstone, one that was eerie and broken.
The roof had caved in over some cells, and it looked like there had been a massive fire at some point, or possibly even small explosives that went off. The three floors that I was used to making up the supermax area of Nightstone were mostly just… gone. The whole place looked like a hollowed out pumpkin or something, with the destruction that remained being those weird stringy bits that I could never get out completely. The top two floors were just stubs of cells, sticking out from the wall. The ceiling of the bottom floor was mostly gone, rubble sitting on what I figured had once been beds.
Most of what remained of the cells was twisted metal and scorched concrete, or maybe that was just smoke that had stained the walls. Here and there small bits of nature were trying to reclaim the area. Weeds poked their heads up out of the cracks on the floor and unfurled their spiky leaves in the small patches of sunlight that shone through. The whole place smelled like mold but there was also a faint whiff of smoke and… sex? Who the hell would come out here to have sex?
“Where’s Bane?” I asked as we walked through the area and I picked my foot placement carefully, trying not to disturb anything. I didn’t want to accidentally anger one of the rodents I could hear scurrying about in the rubble. The last thing we needed was a swarm of rats being pissed that a witch and vamp were all up in their business.
“He was headed this way, I thought we should get ahead of him,” she said. “That way we can hide and see what he’s doing.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I never would have imagined the day I followed a human without trying to eat him, but here we are.”
I decided to ignore that interesting thought. “So why was it abandoned?”
“The supes in it were all nuked by the guards a long time ago. Some people think it's haunted, but everyone thinks there’s still something dangerous about it.”
“This seems like the ultimate neutral territory,” I mused. “Why don’t Christian and Ambrose come here?”
“Because some people consider this cursed ground, or maybe poisoned,” she said. “Some folks have tried to live out here, but they never live long. People who spend much time here turn up dead sooner or later, in gruesome ways. Kind of similar to the way they say everyone died on this side of Nightstone a long time ago.”
Well, that didn’t make me feel cozy in our hiding place.
“I don’t like staying here long,” she said. “I plan to live a long, long life.”
“What’s the point?” I asked lightly. “If we live it all here.”
Sasha just gave me a look that said You’re seriously wanting to have that conversation now?
I turned away, focusing on where we were hiding and trying not to be paranoid about the rat situation. When I thought about the future, with Ambrose and Christian, I wanted to believe there was more to it than these walls and this ugly metal space. I wanted to go to the movies with them, to take them to cheesy overly Italian restaurants or to get pad Thai, something that they wouldn’t have had since they arrived at Nightstone. Hell, I wanted to take them both to the beach even if we could only go out at night, or up into the mountains where Ambrose could shift and run and not see the same patch of grass and trees every damn day for the rest of his life. There was so much I wanted to do with them, b
ut would never have the opportunity to do, at least not as long as we remained in Nightstone, and I didn’t think that was going to change any time soon.
We watched as Bane entered the area and picked his way along. He was clearly looking for something, moving aside metal and searching through the zone along the wall.
“Has he done this before?” I asked Sasha.
She nodded. “Yesterday.”
I was glad Christian had made good on his promise to watch out for Bane, even if Bane didn’t deserve it. It was strange seeing him again, especially as the day grew warm and he peeled his shirt off. The way he moved, the look of his body, it was all so familiar that it gave me a pang of an unnamed emotion in my heart.
No matter what he said, I was sure he was here for a reason, that he was working with someone. Whatever his reason must be out here. But what was he looking for?
Finally, he moved a metal beam aside--groaning with effort--and twisted portions of the walkway, and uncovered the remnants of a guard station and door. It looked just like the one I’d come through when I arrived at Nightstone, and I wondered if Bane was planning an escape attempt. Maybe it was time for him to head to Canada, the bastard.
It would be just like him to run and leave the rest of us behind. He’d saved himself before after all, when our relationship almost caused him to lose his rep as a bounty hunter and be examined by the black guard. Fury washed over me all over again as Bane disappeared searching for a way into the guard shack.
Now here I was, and as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t protect my men. I hadn’t even seen Jonah’s murder coming, and I couldn’t see who the murderer was. Why wasn’t my damned gift making itself useful? Ethel had made it seem like it had the power to be such a good thing, but it had only ever made things worse. If I could use it to protect Ambrose and Christian and stop the war brewing in Nightstone, then I would embrace it.
When I felt the vision starting to sweep over me, I pressed my eyes closed and tried to force it away. No, no, I was going to be in control of the visions now, not the other way around. This was the wrong time.
