by May Dawson
The door swung open, and two men came in.
The first one in was slender, dressed in a witch’s dark robes with a hood up to obscure his face. Maybe I’d finally get my long-awaited chance to ask a witch about the logistics of their costume. Did they take off the robes when they finished tormenting shifters so they could stop off at the post office or the dry cleaner’s on their way home? Even the wicked have to run errands. Did they go through the grocery store like that, with the train of their robe sweeping up bits of debris and stray grapes?
Speaking of which, how often did they launder those things?
The next man in was grizzled, in his late forties, I’d guess, but fit. With his craggy face and salt-and-pepper hair, brown utility trousers and shirt cuffed to reveal tanned, muscular forearms, he reminded me of an old-school adventurer. Like Indiana Jones, only evil.
He stopped just inside the door and leaned against the wall, as if he had no interest in what was coming next. But his bright eyes watched us curiously.
“We’re not going to hurt you.” The voice was musical and feminine—it startled me—and then the witch pulled back her hood, revealing tousled, short dark hair. She looked like she wasn’t too much older than I was. “We just have some questions.”
Ty stared back at her without answering, then in one smooth, relaxed motion, stretched out on his back on the hard concrete floor. He cocked his arm beneath his head to pillow it, his eyes closing.
Right. We weren’t talking to the witches.
“I see,” she said, not sounding particularly offended. “Well then, let me do the talking for now. My name is Alice Munroe, and I used to be like you.”
She waited a beat for that to land. If she hoped for a reaction, she’d be disappointed.
Taking a note from Tyson, I yawned, then rested my head on his shoulder. His arm closed around me, his fingertips drifting up my side. No matter where we were, the stroke of his fingertips still pulsed through my blood.
As I was closing my eyes like he had, Indy’s eyes sharpened on Ty’s hand. Fuck. I shouldn’t have gotten so close to Ty. They’d know what he meant to me. They’d know how to hurt me.
“I used to be a shifter,” she added, as if we were too stupid to have picked up on what she meant.
The thought that someone could stop being a shifter—or that they might want to—made my heart beat faster in my chest, but I clung to my blank silence.
God, what if the witches weren’t just going to bleed me for my magic?
What if they wanted to use our knowledge to get into the academy? To use us to destroy our friends?
Maybe instead of healing Tyson, I should’ve taken myself out too rather than be captured.
Too late now.
“I’ll assume from this adorable act that you are not going to tell me your names. Or anything else. Brave front and all that.” She did not seem particularly concerned. “Well, I know you, obviously, Maddie Sullivan. It’s been our intention to bring you in for a long time.”
She called me by my old name, when I’d carried the name of the witch who had kept me captive. My mouth was suddenly dry, and I had to swallow hard to get the sudden throb in the back of my throat. Maybe they couldn’t see it.
“And as for you…” I could almost feel her gaze lingering on Tyson, and it made my chest harden in fear. But she sounded amused. “I’ll call you Lover Boy for now, I guess. Unnamed Wolf 32? It’s hard to choose.”
She went on, sounding more sober, “It’s my job to question you for now. But you have nothing to fear from me. If you think I’m going to torture you, you’re wrong. This coven is not like that.”
I’d believe it when I saw it.
“We leave the brutality and the cruelty for your wolf packs,” she went on. There was a smile in her voice when she said, “We have magic.”
Chapter Thirty-One
For her magic to work, she’d have to get close to us. And when she got close to us, she might find herself unpleasantly surprised. If I could get her against the bars, if we could choke her, maybe I could force her or Indy to release the magic that held us bound.
Then she began to chant, her voice so musical and eerie that it seemed to roll through the room like a hymn. Tyson squeezed my hip gently in a gesture of solidarity.
What fresh hell was this? Singing witches?
The words of her music fell away. Nothing happened. The relief almost made me want to smile, although we still weren’t exactly winning this round.
Suddenly, pain sparked across my chest, and I sat up with a jerk. Tyson’s eyes flew open. As I ran my hand across my chest to soothe the pain—which cooled as suddenly as it had flared—he seemed to search for his own wound.
Ty’s chest was covered in blood. But, suddenly sure of himself, he reached out and raised my shirt.
There were runes marked in blood across my bare skin. My blood, no doubt. They’d laid the groundwork for their spell while we were asleep.
“I’m sorry if that was uncomfortable for you,” she said. “But look! You’ve recovered from your narcolepsy.”
What did they do to us? What kind of spell? I wanted to know, but I stared at her without speaking.
“I’m not sure the little wolves are going to appreciate your sense of humor while they fear their imminent execution, Alice.” Indy spoke from the corner.
She turned as if she’d forgotten him. “Well, I did say we aren’t planning to kill them. I doubt anything is going to convince them of the fact, though, except for getting through a few cycles of breakfast-lunch-and-dinner.”
Indy seemed to sigh to himself, but quieted.
Alice’s gaze fixed on Ty again. “What’s your name?”
“Tyson Atlas,” he said, and then his gaze widened as he glanced to me.
I gave him an encouraging look. The gig was up. The witches put a spell on us to force us to answer their questions. Now it was just a matter of figuring out how much we could resist telling them and how we could trick the spell.
“And what’s your name?” She looked at me, even though she knew it.
“Maddie Nothsea.” The name tore from my lips before I could stop myself.
“Great.” She clapped her hands together. “This will be much more fruitful a conversation now.”
“What do you want from us?” I demanded. I’d rather keep her talking.
“I want to cure you,” she said, her eyes wide-eyed and innocent. “Like the Day cured me.”
“The Day?”
“Our coven.” She studied us. “I know right now it seems like we must be the bad guys. I’d probably see things that way if I were in a cell.”
Ty rolled his eyes at her generous sense of empathy. The dismissive gesture, when the two of us were behind bars, almost made me smile. Ty was hard to impress.
“It’s hard not to see you as bad guys when you make a habit of murdering our kind,” I said.
“It’s hard not to see you as bad guys when you make a habit of murdering our kind,” she shot back. “But I understand it’s just a difference in perspective.”
She was trying so hard to seem reasonable.
Reasonable people who do not lay elaborate traps to kidnap other people, though.
“You went to a lot of trouble to capture us,” I said. “Why?”
“You know you’re special,” she said, her lips arching up at the corners. “Half-witch. Half-shifter. When we cure the wolf, you won’t just be human. You’ll be a witch.”
“How are you so sure I’m half-witch?”
“Well.” Her lips arched. “We had a demonstration.”
She stepped closer to the bars, holding out her cell phone. Despite myself, I got reluctantly to my feet and crossed the distance between us, until she and I were just a few feet apart.
A grainy video played—there must have been a camera planted in the bathroom—that showed me working to say Ty’s life. My hands glowed, casting light over his wounds as they healed.
My stomach turned.
That video could end my career at the academy in less time than the two minutes it took that bloody scene to play.
“You shot him to see if I could cure him,” I repeated.
“We were confident in you.”
“You would have killed him otherwise.” I grabbed the bars. “You’re waxing on about how you’re not cruel like we are when you tried to kill him.”
She turned away before I could read the expression on her face and headed toward a table along the wall. Indy flashed her a sympathetic look, but then his gaze went back to us.
No, to me. Indy was studying me curiously, and it made my skin crawl.
“What?” I asked, meeting Indy’s gaze across the room. “What do you want, old man?”
Indy stared back at me. He was just opening his mouth to answer when the door opened again.
The witch who entered was tall, broad-shouldered. His hair had gone gray prematurely, and it was brushed back from a chiseled, dangerous face, even though he looked like he couldn’t be older than his forties.
Alice bowed forward at the waist. “Winter.”
“Do they give each other stupid code names to go with the stupid robes?” I asked Tyson in a stage whisper.
Ty gave me a look back that said please don’t antagonize the witches while we’re helpless.
“How’s the interrogation going?” Winter asked Alice.
“I haven’t gotten much out of them yet,” Alice admitted.
Winter’s face went tight with disappointment, and Alice, who had been so confident a few minutes before, almost seemed to shrivel in on herself.
“The two of them are rather useless,” Indy cut in. Alice looked at him, surprise written across her face, but Winter had already turned to Indy and didn’t see it. “They’re just students—rather bad students at that, from the sounds of things. They don’t have any idea how the security wards work at the academy or how to breach them.”
Now my competence as a student was being insulted not just by the instructors at school, but by random passing witches as well. Dandy.
When Winter looked back at Alice, some of the tension had left his face. “All right. Well, at least we can get some use of them today. I came down to see your efforts pay off, Alice.”
The last was said in a way that might have been fond or might have been threatening.
The cure? Was he talking about the ‘cure’ that neither Tyson nor I wanted?
She nodded briskly. With confidence that seemed feigned now, she took quick strides to a table in the back corner, near where Indy had lingered this whole time. He turned to watch her, his hand still in his pocket, while she prepared something in the corner.
She raised a black fabric face mask from the front of her robe, covering her mouth and nose. “This isn’t harmful, but it doesn’t smell pleasant,” she warned Indy and Winter.
No point in saying it to us. It was definitely harmful to us.
“What is that?” I asked as she carried it toward us. She set it on the ground right outside the bars.
Ty and I exchanged a look, moving toward her in one synchronized motion. She jumped to her feet and backed away a step.
“They’re always dangerous, Alice,” Indy said. “You have to be careful.”
“I am,” she said, her gaze troubled as she looked at us. She headed back across the room and came back with a box of matches. Still standing back, carefully out of our reach, she swiped a match across the box. The tiny stick flamed to life.
I assumed it was some kind of spell, but when she dropped a match into the bowl and the thing began giving off dense, acrid-smelling smoke, I didn’t feel pain burn through my blood like a blood magic had just been cast.
It was just…smoke.
“Maddie,” Tyson said, his voice warning. He pressed the bloody fragments of his t-shirt over his mouth and nose, and he tugged at the hem of my t-shirt meaningfully.
Right. I pulled my t-shirt off in one quick motion. Indy averted his gaze as I pressed it over my nose and mouth. Together, Tyson and I backed into the furthest corner of the cell.
“I don’t know what you think that’s going to accomplish,” she said.
Well, she had a point, but I was still not going to stand there and breathe in as much of her smoke as I possibly could.
Winter impatiently lifted his fingers through the air, and the smoke rising from the bowl twisted through the air, like a snake on its way to us.
“Unless you intend to ask the coven to babysit your smoke-bombs, you’ll have to find yourself a better method of delivery,” he told Alice sternly.
“I was going to create something more like a bomb—”
“I was going to create.” he repeated, a mocking edge in his voice. Then more gently, Winter said, “What matters is what you’ve done. We’re in a fight for our very existence. I appreciate your efforts to cure them so we don’t have to kill them, Alice, but there’s a matter of pragmatism here.”
“I could help her with the bombs,” Indy said.
Winter twisted to look at Indy as if he had almost forgotten he was there. “Right. Yes. Except I need you at the academy.”
They were going to attack the academy.
The smoke curling around us made it hard to think. My head was growing heavy. No matter where we moved, the smoke still followed us.
“I can do both. I’ll take care of our friend at the academy,” Indy promised.
Ty captured my hand in his. I looked up at him, at his face as the smoke drifted around us. I heard myself choke, low in the base of my throat, as I could barely breathe anymore.
I squeezed his hand tight in mine, knowing we were both going to succumb to the smoke. Together, we sank down the wall to the cold concrete. We could try to minimize our injuries—on the off-chance we ever woke again.
I thought my life would flash through my eyes.
In the back of my mind, a figure rose. I couldn’t make out his face, just the shape of his body; a bigger man, gone slightly to seed.
Maddie.
The voice was familiar. The voice from my necklace. From somewhere else too. I jolted awake, almost enough to fight off the smoke, and frowned as I tried to place the voice. But the smoke kept coming, and I coughed weakly, my lungs too aching now to even expand to fight off the poison.
When you wake, don’t shift. Don’t let him shift. If you do, they’ll know the spell didn’t work.
How did he know where I was? I tried to fight off the sleep that crowded my brain.
But that was one fight I couldn’t win.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Tyson
I woke up drowning.
I bolted to my feet, panicked. The witch, Winter, stood at the edge of the bars, studying me. His magic swirled in the air, and I charged for him, only to stumble. My legs were weak and unsteady.
“He’s stronger than that last batch,” Winter said to Alice. “There you go. They should be awake now.”
Maddie. Where was Maddie?
She lay against the wall, her mouth slack. My heart jolted with fear, but then she struggled up, her beautiful blue eyes blinking open slowly. Ignoring the witches, she focused on me as if I was the only person in the universe.
“Ty?” It sounded like a plea, and I dropped to my knees beside her.
“I’m right here,” I said, teasing my fingers into her soft blond hair. “We’re still together.”
She rose with a shudder and fell against my chest. As I closed my arms around her, she whispered, “Whatever they say or do, don’t shift. Pretend you can’t. Trust me.”
Why? What the hell was going on? But then, that was why she’d added the second part. Trust me.
I squeezed her tight. “I’ve got you.”
She leaned into my chest as a shiver ran through her body. I gathered her into my lap, holding her tight. I wasn’t sure how much of her weakness was an act for the witches’ benefit and how much was real.
“Now the test.” Winter looked to Indy. “Would you do
the honors?”
Indy nodded although he looked disinterested in the entire endeavor. He came toward us, his hands rising, and magic sparked at his fingertips.
Suddenly, a new level of anxiety curled through my bones. There was something wrong. My wolf senses were all awakened, my nostrils flaring as I breathed deeper trying to take in the scents around me, trying to make sense of the flare of fear and tension.
Maddie’s hand was on my arm. As I looked into her face, cataloguing her worried eyes and the dimple of a frown between her brows, her words came back to me. I wanted to protect her from whatever was coming next. It was an urge as deep as instinct, almost impossible to overcome. A call to shift to fight for her.
But I told her I’d trust her.
I’ve got you.
I gazed back into her crystal-blue gaze, and then abruptly turned away, grabbing my head. “Why can’t I shift? What did you do to me?”
I still had to fight the rise of the wolf as he tried to take me over. I was usually in control of the shift as a full-grown male who had shifted hundreds of times, but right now as I fought waves of fear, my body reacted as if I were a teenager again. I could barely hang on, and the copper tang in my mouth was my own blood, my fangs trying to break through…
But Winter turned away from the bars, his face satisfied. Indy stared at me, and I met his gaze, my eyes narrowing hatefully. He seemed to be studying us the most intensely. As if we were a zoo exhibit.
Let me get free, and I’d show him how much fun a day at the zoo could be.
“Good work, Alice,” Winter said. “That was far easier than your own cure, if it is a cure indeed. Only time will tell.”
Alice nodded. “We’ll need to watch them and stress them regularly.”
Winter gave her a small smile. “I’ll review your records when I come home.”
She nodded, her chin rising. “Be careful out there.”
“Of course I will,” he told her fondly. “I’ve got to come home to my children.”
Did he view his coven as his children? Or did the dramatic bastard actually have children?
