by Jayla Kane
Like Baby. She got all the most important shit about me wrong.
“I thought you were smart,” she snapped at one point. “All they had to do was point you to this book, and you were like, sure, sign me up?”
“All they had to do—have to do,” I reminded her, letting some of the warning in my mind seep into my voice, “is mention Molly.”
She stared at me, her eyes sparking in the low light. “You couldn’t think of a single thing to—”
“No,” I said, cutting her off with a shake of my head, and she clicked her teeth together audibly in frustration. “Molly’s non-negotiable. That’s it.”
“She’s your Achilles heel,” Baby said nastily. “I’ve seen her. She’s a decent kid, sure, but she’s just—”
“Watch your fucking mouth,” I said, and this time I didn’t bother hiding what the magic had done to me. Baby spun towards me, her eyes wide, her heart beating so fast I could see her pulse in her throat. I let my head move forward, the way it wanted to, as if I were about to go down into a crouch—I could feel the claws sliding out of my fingertips with a gruesome squelching sound, a dribble of blood landing on the floor. Baby backed up a step and stared at me, covering her mouth with her hand.
But what she said surprised me, made it all go away—made me even more ashamed of what I was.
“Hunter… What did they do to you?”
A fire is not tender. Fire devours, it consumes. It engulfs, it destroys, it ends. It does not look at you with pity. It does not make your heart cringe and fade, it does not make you grieve for things you cannot name.
So Baby was more than just fire, to me.
I swallowed, hard. This was the first time I tried to explain what had happened—to anybody. It should’ve been Jake. I felt so fucking foolish… And scared, when I realized there was every chance some kind of fucked transformation was happening to him, too, something that had finally been too much for him to share. I squared my shoulders and looked her in the eye. “I signed the book. I didn’t think… I should’ve known something like this might happen, but I had no idea. So I signed, because I felt like I had no choice, and it started that night.”
“What started?” My claws were slowly retracting back into my hands. More blood dripped onto the floor.
“These showed up first,” I said letting my eyes flicker downwards. “And I… I can… I guess it’s teleportation.”
“You guess.” She was gaping at me, open-mouthed.
“Only small distances, only when I can see or into a place I’ve been before… I think of it as jumping—it feels kind of the same as taking a really big fucking leap.”
She watched me for a full minute. And then she smiled, and I felt my fucking heart stop beating in my chest—it was a real smile, one I’d never seen before. Darkly amused, a world-weary wit. “Like a comic book superhero.” I had nothing to say to that. She just shook her head at me and chuckled to herself. “So could you jump us out of here?”
Us. “I don’t know,” I said, thinking. “Probably—well, I would be able to get us out of the cell door and up the stairs at least. I don’t know… The place to get in here, the entrance, is under some kind of spell. The door to it isn’t always there.”
“What?”
“It’s gone,” I said, struggling. I felt like a fucking idiot. “Sometimes the room looks different, I don’t know. I don’t know how they do it.”
“Okay, one more time. What the hell are you saying?”
“The room changes,” I said, at a loss. “It… It looks like a regular office sometimes, and then sometimes—when the door is in the wall—it looks like something from another century.” Or it had, before I shredded it to bits.
“But… But this is all real,” she said, and her bottom lip trembled.
Fuck. Oh, fuck. “Yes,” I said, swallowing down the dozens of things I wanted to say, wanted to do, when I saw the fear grip her.
“That’s real.” She pointed to the blood on the floor. “What I saw—this room… This is all real.”
“Yes, I promise.”
“And you did this to me.”
I swallowed again, then got ready for her next assault. “Yes.”
But she didn’t strike me again. She chewed on her lip and shut her eyes like she was making a wish, like she was trying desperately to make it all disappear. “I fucking hate you,” she hissed, her eyes still clamped shut. “I want you to know that, Hunter Black. I am your enemy now, and forever.”
It wasn’t a surprise. It was exactly what I expected—exactly how I would feel in her position.
And it hurt.
It wasn’t just a hook, a fishing line she’d cast that caught the chamber of my heart. It was something else, a seed, maybe, something she planted when her tongue slid against mine, and it was growing inside of me, ripping my chest apart from within. A nest of thorns that spelled out her name. A curse made of roses. I would be empty; I would be nothing. And I deserved it.
I just swallowed and watched her, waiting. There was nothing I could say. Nothing I could do. My heart ached, but the rest of me went completely still.
“Fine, you bastard,” she murmured, her eyes raking over my face. “Let’s see if we can figure this out.”
Chapter Nine
Baby
Hunter Black was magic.
I knew it when I saw those animalistic talons shearing through the flesh on his fingers, the bright red drops of blood on the floor. I’m not into drugs; I’ve never done any, and I left a party when they arrived. I’m also pretty good with reality—my reality has some dark corners, some rough edges, sure, like everybody else’s. But I’d never had a reason to doubt my own sanity. Ever. And I saw that happening and thought girl, you have lost your damn mind.
I hadn’t though, was the thing. I was looking at a man I knew—knew in a way I wished, with all my heart and aching pussy—that I didn’t know. And he was just a man. Definitely a bit of the feral beast about him, sure, if you were into that kind of thing—and I would never admit out loud that I was, thankssomuch—but Hunter was just a human man. Except that now he wasn’t.
Now, he was turning into a monster right in front of me. Claws. His eyes elongated at the corners and his pupils grew so wide there was no visible white around his iris. He began to lower into an animal’s prowl.
And then he stopped. It all began, then stopped on a dime. I tried to shake the image from my head but I couldn’t—couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and couldn’t help but believe it.
It was all real.
I was so angry.
I remember my mother’s daydreams and promises so well I can repeat some of the highlights back to you verbatim: we’re magic, sweet girls. Go to sleep—let yourself dream about all the fantastic tricks you can do. Dream about being able to breathe underwater. About flying. About spinning yarn into gold. She’s great, my mom. Worst fucking mother in the universe, but a really nice lady. Zelle and Raven are devoted to her, which is tragic, because I’m pretty sure she’s taken advantage of them more than she has anyone else alive—even the guys she slept with to have us and then never told we existed. Charlie’s hip to her shit; she’s stopped sleeping at our house, for the most part, and I know Zella knows why but no one will talk about it. Just like no one will talk about the sudden rift between Raven and her, which is like saying the moon fell out of the sky. Zelle and Raven are best friends. Best, best friends. I love Christa, don’t get me wrong, but they have a bond that makes them almost twin-like.
Maybe partly because they’ve been absorbing my mother’s bullshit for the longest.
Yarn into gold—that’s a good one. Because what I was looking at was a monster, shredding through the flesh of a man so loyal he sold his life and his soul to save the ones he loved.
Exactly the opposite of my mom, by the way. She couldn’t be bothered to make a phone call explaining to the doctor why we missed yet another appointment, let alone kidnap someone for me.
Fucked up,
but I got it. The flip-side of having a mom that so obviously doesn’t give a shit about anything but herself is that you understand, with a painful clarity, how important loyalty really is. How much it matters when someone has your back. How desperate you’ll become to find someone like that, to become someone like that.
So I hated Hunter, sure, but I mostly told him to punish him. Just like I joked about him being a rapist and a serial killer—I know he’s not.
But fuck him.
I needed to use my head. Raven is the brains, out of the four of us—and not only because of books. She’s quick, is Raven. Zelle has always been withdrawn, more reserved than the rest of us—at least as long as I can remember, anyway, but she might be able to show off her brain a little more if she wasn’t the one making sure we all got fed. She was a workhorse. Charlie was always a little bit apart, and again, I didn’t blame her at all; as much as I resented my mom on those days when she completely dropped the ball and forgot we existed, at least I knew her. Charlie’s mom disappeared. In another family, that might mean that something bad happened, but in ours it was just as likely that she never wanted the party to stop. My mom and her sister were out in the world, following the Grateful Dead and selling tie-dye and palm readings for years; my mom got knocked up twice and I guess that’s what dragged her back to Ashwood, but her sister just didn’t come home. So poor Charlie has always been with us, and always apart. She’s besties with Zelle too, but still so damn lonely.
I wasn’t as smart as Raven. I was spoiled by my sisters, when it came down to it. I had to enjoy every second of my privileges because I understood every sacrifice they made, right down to driving me miles out of the way so I could go to school somewhere no one would call me names. I worked as hard as I could to make it worth it, to squeeze the lifeblood of normalcy out of my existence, and never shut up about it. They’d given me everything they could. I would never let them think I was ever less than satisfied.
But I wasn’t strong like Zelle, as a result; I wasn’t as resourceful as Charlie. I didn’t think on my feet the same way Raven did, hadn’t read even a third as many books.
I was brash, and they were not; I recognized the fault lines in society better than they did, and I gripped them in my fists and pulled—this way to make my teachers dance, that way to make the boys beg. I knew how to scramble to the top of the heap with blood in my teeth, but it wasn’t the skillset that would get us out of this.
Us.
I kept including him. Ugh.
All the same, I thought, biting my lip and thinking as hard as I could. They wanted something—but what? Why make us wait so long? By now, they had to know Hunter was in here with me; cameras must have captured our descent. “Hunter, you carried me in here?”
“Yes,” he said; he knew I was asking if he’d teleported in, or walked. Just to clarify that whole thing about how we could never leave unless the mysterious door that was open at the top of the stairs sometimes was there or not.
I gritted my teeth. I had nothing to bargain with until they announced themselves; I had to pee and my stomach was about to start growling. I did not want to pee in front of Hunter Black. Gross.
“We have to wait until they tell us what they want,” I said, as if he didn’t know. “I have no idea what that could be, but maybe if they make some kind of offer…” Unless we were a sacrifice of some kind—or I was. My mother’s fairy tales didn’t look half so benign with his blood pooling on the floor. “Why are you here?” I turned and studied that face, now that it was fully human again. His beautiful eyes were still hidden in the shadows, only the barest reflection telling me when they ticked back and forth across the room. I wondered when the last time he slept was. “You could leave at any time, right?” And go get my ass some doughnuts. Least he could do, damn.
“Probably,” he said, frowning. “The door locked behind me, but I think I could teleport out.”
“You might not make it through the door, though, right?”
“Right,” he said, then crossed his arms. “But if it was just me, I might be able to jump to the Commons.”
“Why?”
“I don’t… I wouldn’t trust myself to carry you that far,” he said, the brief hesitation his personal version of inflection; otherwise, his voice was impossibly deep and barren of emotion. “It’s dangerous.”
“It’s how you got me here,” I snapped, but he nodded like I’d said it all friendly-like. “But it’s too dangerous to go back the same way?”
“It’s too dangerous because I’m still learning how to do it, and because Molly—”
“Alright, alright,” I said, spinning away from him. That’s what I needed. I needed to figure out why they wanted me—and Hunter, because he could leave at any moment and he refused because he felt responsible for me… I didn’t need to take Psych 101 to figure that out. The shitheads holding me here probably knew it too. The second part was breaking that bond, though, because Hunter also felt responsible for Molly. She needed to be safe.
My stomach sank; I was pretty sure none of us would ever be safe now that the Society had plans for us. If Hunter was in the beginner phase of whatever they were doing to him, I could only imagine the rest of the creatures at their disposal. The flash of terror seized my chest and I forced myself to slowly inhale and exhale, fighting hard for control.
Power. Everything always came down to power.
Power is a fickle thing—we imagine we understand what it is, where it comes from and even how to get more of it, but the truth of the matter is it’s fluid. It changes from moment to moment depending on where we’re standing and who we’re with. Right now, I was mostly powerless—except for the fact that Hunter Black would never leave me here to die, because the hold of his own integrity was too strong. He was risking his sister’s life just by being here, and he had to know that; he was bending the rules they’d given him, if not breaking them outright.
He was my power, at the moment. That, and whatever bizarre reason the Society might have to take me in the first place.
“Goddamnit,” I muttered, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want him to see how stressed out I was, and I hate to admit it, but that was partly because I didn’t want to let him down. As fucked up as the idea was, he wanted me to help get us out of this situation. He didn’t have to tell me anything. He didn’t have to stay. But he did it because he was aligning himself with me, instead of the Society.
I was mulling all of this over when I heard that sound on the other side of the door again. I rushed over and slammed my hand against it, then backed off and waited; I’d been in here for hours. I was glad there wasn’t any water here because I would’ve drunk it and then I would’ve peed in front of the man that kidnapped me—but the assholes in charge must have been counting down the minutes, preying on my desperation. They’d be relying on the fact that I felt like this: hungry, furious, frightened and parched.
Maybe they wouldn’t know Hunter was in here with me.
The locks on the door began to crank and I backed up, preparing for them to reveal themselves. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hunter lower into that crouch, further down, this time, letting the animal inside of him slither out with a wet, painful rip as claws tore through his skin all over again. I moved further into the room at an angle, steering clear of his path towards the door, and waited.
No one was there.
Hunter vanished. If I hadn’t been looking right at him, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do, I would never have been able to believe it. But one minute he was low to the ground, teeth bared, eyes black, and then he sprang—
And was gone.
I heard a clatter out in the hallway and raced through the open door, spinning on my bare feet to make sure no one was behind me when I did, waiting with a weapon to take me out of the equation altogether. Nothing. No one. And then Hunter slunk back down the stairs towards me, his body molting the animal appearance as he did—the shadows swept around him with each step, as he stood t
aller and taller, the claws retracting a bit and his eyes returning to normal. “What is it? Where are they?”
“I think you’re supposed to go up to the office,” he told me, a quick glance over his shoulder directing me towards the place where he’d descended from, the place, he’d explained, that sometimes had no door.
“Are you coming with me?”
“Yes.” There was no question in his tone, no reassurance either; he felt he had no choice.
“But you can’t go inside,” another voice called, the tone mildly taunting, as if he were amused by us. A tall, thin guy with an expensive haircut and too much cologne came striding out of one of the cells and smiled at us; he must have keys, I realized. He must be the one that was showing up and periodically moving something around out here so he could listen to me scrabble against my cell walls like a rat in a cage. I flew at him, ready to scratch his damn eyes out… And fell to my knees.
All my words, my voice—all gone. Sucked right out of my chest—my air was gone! Everything, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe--
“What are you doing?” That was Hunter, his voice a boom in my ear. My eyes began to water as I collapsed, the world closing in on me—it was so fast! I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do-- He was leaning over me, sniffing me, like some kind of dog. “What are you doing?”
“Jeez, guy, whose side are you on?” The other man laughed, as if something was funny. I started to see stars—I desperately tried to suck in a breath and heard my chest rattle as long, drawn out pulls of nothing filled my lungs. I couldn’t stop myself from uselessly clawing at my throat, soundless, breathless sobs filling me up from the inside... I was dying… I was going to die… And then--
