by Ashley Meira
Then, the world went dark.
I woke up with a headache that kicked the last one’s ass. It was nice to know that no matter how bad things were, they could always get worse. Somewhere to the left were torches emitting a warm orange glow, but they didn’t reach far enough to illuminate all the way over here. I was hanging from the ceiling. My wrists were tied over my head and the heavy weight of chains around my ankles pulled me down, leaving me with a burning ache in my shoulders as I swung around.
Unlike the rest of the underground rooms, this area smelled of dirt, sweat, feces, and blood, all of which was underpinned by the stale scent of pure damp that would’ve made me hurl if I’d eaten within the last two hours. Suddenly, I didn’t regret only nibbling on a few pieces of bacon for breakfast.
My arms were numb, but when I tried to adjust myself into a more comfortable position, pins and needles shot through them. Everything was pure pain. I couldn’t even string a coherent thought together, much less a spell to get me out of here. I strained my ears, but the only sounds were the chains when I moved.
I remembered getting my head slammed against the wall. These guys didn’t hold back. Then again, maybe they did, since my skull wasn’t completely smashed in. Though being strung up like a piece of meat, along with the screaming I heard earlier, told me I would rather be dead by the time they were finished with me.
It took me a few more minutes, but I could finally blink without feeling like someone was shoving an ice pick through my eye. I still couldn’t cast anything. Maybe a small, unfocused burst of something from my fingertips, though I’d have to be physically touching my target; anything that needed concentration was out of the question.
But what should I cast? Any fire I conjured now would heat the chains up and burn through the skin they were wrapped around. There was no way I was going to melt through my wrists just to get free. It would heal, sure, but I had never actually mutilated myself in that way, and I wasn’t in a hurry to find out what it’d be like. Ice would give me full-on frostbite and electricity would do nothing. Force magic would work if I could focus enough power, which I couldn’t at the moment, but it would probably shatter every bone in my wrist. Another handful of layers on a cake of shitty options. Just one good choice. Is that too much to ask?
Coming here alone was a mistake I was long past admitting, though it did earn a place in my Hall of Fail. I wanted Alex to be with me. Actually, no, I didn’t want him to be chained up, too. We should be at my place, in my bed, curled up in a buttload of blankets. Not here, where my childhood pains were coming back to haunt me and my head got bounced off walls.
“Hey,” a male voice whispered. “You awake?”
It took a few tries before I managed to form something more than some raspy pants.
“Yeah,” I whispered back, my throat burning with each word. “Are we alone?”
“Technically,” he said in a voice that was even scratchier than mine. “There aren’t any guards patrolling around, but Garou are fast.”
Awesome. After meeting Marshall, I wasn’t hopeful about getting the shifters on our side, but it didn’t seem like the werewolves were going to be friendly, either. Then again, I did sneak onto their territory, so maybe this was all just a big misunderstanding.
Yeah. Totally.
“How long have I been out?” I asked.
“A guy came in and interrupted his friend’s ‘questioning’ of me to announce he caught you. That was about two hours ago.”
Two hours. If it’s been that long, I may have recovered more energy than I thought. “How long have you been here?”
“No idea. Three days, maybe? Did Wright send you?” he asked before groaning in pain. “Not exactly the rescue squad I was hoping for.”
“Wright?”
“Wallace. Shit, don’t tell me you’re a civilian. How’d you get caught up in this?”
The thought that this was some sort of trap – a soft interrogation from the werewolves – crossed my mind, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. What did I have to hide?
“I’m a hunter,” I said. “I know who Wright is, I just don’t get what he has to do with anything. Sullivan sent me.” Technically. “I tracked one of the missing hunters here and ended up getting knocked out.”
“Wright’s the one who– Never mind, all that shit they’re doing is taking its toll on me. How’d you track us?”
“Magic. I’m a witch.”
“How much juice you got left?”
“What’s zero minus zero?”
He let out a breathy laugh that descended into coughs followed by another pained groan. “I’m hoping there’s some fancy math loophole that makes it one hundred.”
“It might. I suck at math,” I said. “Where’s the rest of your group?”
“The last guy – girl, actually – died this morning, so I guess you found the only hunter left.”
“It may not sound like it,” I said unenthusiastically, “but I’m glad.”
“Hi, Glad. I’m Tom.”
I snorted out a laugh, whining at the pain that shot through my chest. “Thanks, now I know how that feels.”
“Sorry, um…”
“Morgan.”
“Nice to meet ya.”
I tilted my head back in an attempt to alleviate the crick in my neck. “Likewise. Why’d they take you?”
“‘Cause they’re batshit?”
“If that was it, you’d have been killed on sight. There has to be more to it.”
“There isn’t,” he insisted. “We were in the woods. They caught us and decided playing ‘torture the humans’ would be a fun weekend game.”
Considering he’d been tortured by werewolves for days, Tom was sure to be biased against them. I didn’t buy his words, but I wasn’t familiar enough with anything here to throw them out the window. Why would the Garou take a bunch of humans to torture for no reason? Marshall mentioned karma and said the hunters were dead. But he was a shifter – why would the Garou tell the people they were supposedly going to war with anything? Is everyone going mad? Forget it, all this thinking made my head hurt even more. I could figure it all out after we escaped.
If we escaped.
“Did they say anything?” I asked. “Did they mention the murders or shifters?”
“No, man. I told you, they just wanted to fuck us up. Are you sure you’ve got nothing left? You’re the only hope we’ve got of getting out of here.”
No pressure, right? I did feel a little more rested, which upgraded me from dead roadkill to slightly less dead roadkill. Baby steps. With the mother of all migraines, having drained most of my magic, and now regretting only eating those few pieces of bacon for breakfast, I’d trust a five-year-old to produce better results.
But I didn’t want to stick around and get tortured, and I definitely didn’t want to die. I wiggled a hand around to see if I could get it loose. The pain was unbearable – seriously, fuck gravity – but I managed to form a small gap between my wrists and the chain. This was going to hurt like hell, but it’s not like I had a better choice. I buried my face into my shoulder to muffle the scream and focused on forming a small orb of pure force in the gap I made. My eyes were squeezed shut in concentration, but the pain didn’t even register over my flashflood headache. A second later, the headache lost out to the agony that blasted through me as I blew the orb up, shattering both the chains and my wrists.
My body hit the ground with a deafening thud, my shoulder muffling what would have been an ear piercing scream. Everything burned like an army of pissed off fire ants decided to make a buffet of my body. My head, torso, arms, wrists – especially wrists – all throbbed in tandem. My back hunched, curling me into a ball as the blood flowed through my previously blocked off joints, sending a million acid dipped needles over my arms. This was literally the worst idea, and it was still the best one I had.
“Are you okay?” Tom asked.
I gave him a low whine. The tears that fell down my face should have b
een hot, but with the way I was burning up, they were a cool relief against my skin. It took some additional maneuvering, and by that I meant wiggling around and trying not to sob like a baby, but I managed to get into the fetal position to touch the chain around my ankles.
“Can you carry me out?” I groaned out.
“Get us out of here and I’ll marry you.”
While I appreciated the spunk, he just spent who knows how long getting tortured less than two hours ago. I doubt he could even walk on his own.
Burying my face back into my shoulder, I took a deep breath and formed another orb between my ankles and the chain, ripping apart the metal with a cacophony of sharp clinks. Maybe it was because I was too distracted by the pain I was already in, but it didn’t hurt as much this time. It could also be due to the small protection my boots afforded – thank everything for leather. I used what little magic that trickled out to patch my bones up as best I could; at this level of exhaustion, I wasn’t sure how effective my regeneration abilities would be. If I was dying, they’d kick in immediately, but no matter how much it may have felt like it, breaking these bones wouldn’t kill me. Shame.
My body went limp for a few seconds, and I reveled in the small break – pun unintended – before dragging myself by the elbows to the cell bars. My mangled fingers touched the cold metal, and this time, I couldn’t mute the shout of pain that raced through my hand and up my arm. I waited for a long, tense moment, my ears perked for any incoming footsteps.
When nothing happened, I steeled myself once more. This wasn’t the time to give up. I needed to push myself harder, to go past my normal limits. With a deep breath, I lifted my arm up as high as I could and trailed my fire infused fingertips down, watching as the metal glowed a bright orange and began to melt. The heat brushed against my face and being so close to the bars seared my fingers, but I fought through the pain; my entire body was burning anyway.
Unless I let it affect me, I was immune to the heat – or cold – from my magic, but not from the objects it affected. Molten metal dribbled over my skin and fat tears slid down my face once more. I could barely hold back my whimpers of pain. Hopefully, the Garou would just assume it was one of their own whimpering over a stubbed toe or something, though I wasn’t sure anything they’d do to me would compare to what I was doing to myself. I pushed myself back and repeated the action with the bars next to the ones I had already melted until there was a medium sized hole.
I could feel the skin on my elbows tear, my blood trailing over the ground, as I dragged myself to the next cell. “Please tell me you’re in this one.”
“You sound like you’re in front of me,” he said. I get that he’d been through a lot, but this habit of being painfully unhelpful wasn’t doing either of us any favors right now.
It was torturous, but I managed to melt a hole through his bars, too. A single ghost light floated into the room and vanished a moment before reappearing in Tom’s open palm. I guess the werewolves didn’t think they needed to chain him up after days of torture. The light wasn’t strong enough for me to make out his appearance, but he could have three heads for all I cared right now.
“Did you get a chance to look around the place when they brought you in?” I panted out. Please, please tell me he was as good a hunter as Alex said he was.
“Kind of,” he said, crawling through the hole.
“There’s a room with some stairs leading up. Do you know where it is?”
“If I remember correctly, yeah.”
I gave him instructions on how to get back to the tunnel from the stair room. When I was finished, I reached over and placed my hand on his shoulder, sending as much healing magic as I could into him. It wasn’t much, but it was enough that he was able to carry me, however sluggish our pace.
The trip from our cells to the storage room was a huge blur. All the worry I had about getting caught or Tom not being able to carry me the whole way was lost as I let myself be claimed by exhaustion.
I awoke to the smell of cured meats and the sight of a disheveled brunette. Tom was of average size, with curly brown hair and hazel eyes. Thick stubble covered his hollowed cheeks and deep, dark bags pulled at his bloodshot eyes. He was barefoot, and what remained of his tattered clothing was caked in blood and dirt.
“You’re gonna have to crawl the rest of the way,” he whispered, his eyes trained on the doorway. “Think you can do that?”
I managed a blunt nod and followed after him even as the world dimmed around me. I knew I had no choice but to make it out or die trying.
If I thought crawling into this place was tough, then crawling out of it was torture in a ten-gallon cup made of wasps. Mutant wasps. That shot lasers out of their fucking eyes. My ruined elbows did most of the grunt work, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see nothing but bone left when I made it out. Especially after those stupid upward slopes that made me feel like I was scaling Everest. I was able to occasionally work my knees to give myself a boost, but it wasn’t really necessary; Tom wasn’t moving much faster than I was.
I had no idea how long it’d been since we started crawling, but I was frustrated enough to consider blowing this whole tunnel up. There was no way I had the strength to do that, but thinking of ways to bring this mother down distracted me enough to keep me going. I was in a fugue state as we moved forward, and with the tunnel being so dark, I couldn’t tell if I was blacking out or if my eyes were still open.
It could have been minutes, hours, or even days later, but finally, as if by a miracle, light began to trickle past Tom’s shoulder and a soft breeze danced across my skin. I didn’t have the energy to speak, but Tom did.
“Holy shit,” he whispered, his voice so low I could barely hear him. “We made it… We fucking made it.”
The sight of freedom boosted him forward and soon the soft breeze turned into an icy wind that cut across my skin. I didn’t care. After all the pain coursing through me and crawling through the tunnel that might as well have been Satan’s asshole, it was literally a breath of fresh air. My palm relished in the texture of the dry leaves on the ground, soft and prickly at the same time. It hurt, but it meant I was almost out. Freedom was right there, just a few feet away. But I couldn’t any more. My body felt like it was made of solid lead, and I went limp halfway out of the tunnel.
“Alex?” Tom sounded ten light years away. “Dude, what are you–”
“Morgan!”
Out of everything that was happening, how I looked should be last on the list, but I couldn’t help thinking how horrible Alex must find me right now. I was covered in dirt, blood, sweat, and God knows what else. My hair was disheveled, sticking out in odd places and matted with blood in others. Lord knows what I smelled like, but it certainly wasn’t soap. I wasn’t even sure if I still had all my fingernails, though I was pretty sure one wrist was doing a weird, floppy, boneless thing.
“Broken,” I managed to utter out.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said as he pulled me out by my shoulders.
I cried out in pain and he pressed my face against his chest. “It’s okay. It’s over. I’m going to get you back to safety, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, equal parts delirious and out of breath. I wasn’t even sure if the words I was trying to say were translating properly. “Are you okay?”
He gave me a sad look and lifted me bridal style, pressing me closely against him. I curled into him with a satisfied groan. “I’m fine, Morgan. Of course I am. You’re the one who went through everything and you’re asking about me?” He swore under his breath. “What the hell were you thinking? How could you go off by yourself like that?”
I wanted to remind him that splitting up was his idea in the first place, that I was just scouting the area like he asked, but I didn’t want to fight. I never wanted us to fight again. All I wanted was to stay in his arms forever. My eyes closed and I went limp, pressing a weak kiss to his chest.
“We got to go, man,” said Tom.
“Yeah,” Alex
breathed. “I can find the way back, just lean on me.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“I have a compass. I can navigate,” said Alex. “What did they do to you?”
“Bastards tortured me and my friends.” Tom spat. “I’m the only one who made it out. Thanks to Morgan here.”
“Did they hurt her? Did they–”
“Nah, man. They didn’t get to her. All they did was knock her out.”
“I’m going to kill them,” Alex growled. “They’re going to fucking pay.”
I chose to believe at least part of his rage was out of concern for me and enjoyed the warmth the revelation brought. How close had I come to losing him today, to never seeing him again? The thought brought tears to my eyes, followed by more tears as the initial bout of crying made every nerve in my body light up with pain.
“Morgan?” Alex’s voice was heavy with concern.
“Pretty sure she broke a few bones,” said Tom. “Can’t blame her for crying. She’s tough as hell, though – broke us out and still managed to crawl through those tunnels.” They were quiet for a while before Tom spoke up again. “Is she single?”
“Dude.”
“What? I’m just asking.”
“You’ve spent the last two days getting tortured.”
“It’s given me a new perspective on life.”
I didn’t need to open my eyes to know Alex was rolling his. “It doesn’t sound any different than the perspective you had before, Tom.”
“Dude, if you’re into her, just say so.”
“Tom–”
“Guys,” I groaned, the sound louder than I thought I could manage in this condition. “If you’re going to fight over me, wait until I’m awake and have jell-o to throw on you.”
9
The beeping that invaded my mind made me think I’d dozed off during an episode of 24. I hadn’t made a habit of watching TV while high since I was twenty, though, and this dopey feeling I was currently experiencing was even more of a trip than when Rowan and I accidentally set an entire shipment of marijuana on fire. Okay, when I accidentally set an entire shipment of marijuana on fire.
