The only thing that royally sucked was that I hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye to Daisy.
I was in human form, eating the last of a burger I’d bought with panhandled money. It had been my only food for three days. I usually did pretty well with panhandling but it had been raining for a week and no one was outside. I was fourteen and cute and if I batted my eyes just right and looked innocent enough I could get a few bucks out of motherly types. I knew that wouldn’t lost long. I was small for my age, not having hit a solid growth spurt yet and skinny from malnourishment. I knew when I got older and I finally put on a little muscle not to mention height, I’d look like just another hooligan on the street and then the motherly types would be gripping their handbags more tightly instead of cooing and handing over some cash.
I was hiding inside a giant cardboard box while I ate my burger when I saw the spell. Most spells aren’t visible. No bright lights or flashes or bolts of lightning. But a very powerful spell sent with enough force can make a blur of light, which was what I saw go by. I swallowed the last of my burger and crept out to investigate. I’d never seen a magic caster before and had only heard about them. Now I saw a tall, dark figure standing in the rain, hands outstretched. He was wearing a long dark coat that flapped open in the wind and rain. He was soaked and didn’t seem to care at all. He was muttering under his breath, his brows turned down with determination and now he sent another burst of power through his fingers and I watched the spell strike an empty shopping cart which promptly exploded in a burst of light, becoming a tiny pile of ash on the ground. I gasped and the wizard looked at me.
When I saw his face, I was terrified. There was nothing obviously monstrous about him, only that as lightning struck and I looked into his eyes I saw how fearsome he was. He was only a few inches taller than me yet he seemed to loom large, made greater by his power. He had short black hair and a pointed gray beard. But it was all neatly trimmed. He was quite severe looking, his cheeks sunken in and a little gaunt.
“Hello,” he said simply. “Come here.”
I found myself unable to resist. He wasn’t using magic on me. It was just sheer curiosity that made me crawl out of my box and walk up to him. Besides, if he meant to kill me there’d be little I could do unless I could shift and run fast enough away from the kind of spell that could blow up a shopping cart.
“You’re a good looking boy,” he said, sizing me up. “How are you with girls?”
I was easy with girls. Another way I’d gotten by on the streets when I was cleaned up enough was to sweet talk girls anywhere near my age. Sometimes they gave me money or bus tokens and sometimes they kissed me and wanted to hang around, but none of them were Daisy who I missed so much it was agonizing.
I shrugged at the wizard. “What about em’?” I said. “Girls are easy. They like me.”
“I’ll bet they do.” He saw me clearly as a starving kid who was much more desperate than I wanted to let on. “I’ll pay you to talk to girls. You talk to them and you get them to come to me. One hundred dollars per girl. And I have a place for you to sleep. Free.”
One hundred dollars by itself plus free rent was unfathomable to me. I was cold and hungry and the thought of a warm bed would have had me doing a million terrible things. I nodded dumbly and the wizard laughed and an hour later, I had a new home.
The job wasn’t quite as easy as Haldo had made it seem. Sometimes he wanted human girls and sometimes he wanted shifters. Sometimes he wanted specific kinds of shifters. He talked about wanting girls with “magical properties” but it was impossible for me to sniff that out.
The actual luring wasn’t hard once I found my target. If they were alone or even with a couple of friends, I could cozy up to them easily enough. They were so often immediately curious about me if nothing else. I looked pretty innocent but just dangerous enough to be interesting if you were a teenage girl. Sometimes all I had to do was lean on a wall nearby and smoke and the girl would approach me first.
The object was to take them to whatever location Haldo designated, which was sometimes his house and sometimes not. Then he’d take them away to his place.
I had lured girl number three before I thought to ask what he was doing with them. I’d been half insane with hunger and not known it until I was finally properly fed, which only came after I procured the first girl for Haldo. He gave me a bed to sleep in. My room was a shed behind the foreboding gray house on the edge of the woods outside town. But he told me hunger would get me working quickly. He was right, I suppose. It took every bit of effort but I got the human teenager he wanted to his house.
“I’m not doing anything untoward with them,” Haldo said simply, as he placed two crisp fifty dollar bills in my hand. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”
“What does untoward mean?” I said flatly.
“I’m not hurting them, Miguel,” Haldo said.
He meant it was nothing sexual, I supposed. But after the third girl, I found myself too curious to just go back to my shed with the book I’d bought with my new money. I’d never been a big reader before I’d runaway. But living on the street in the cold, the warmth of a library where you could hang out for free had made me a little more prone to picking up a book or two. I bought a couple now just because I could.
The night I lured a bear shifter girl to Haldo’s garage where I left her alone before quickly exiting and locking the door behind me, I snooped.
Haldo’s house was dim and drafty, dusty and cluttered. It was what you might expect from a wizard who didn’t actually live in a castle or some cave. It was full of strange artifacts and things like dead animals in jars or boxes full of teeth. There were all kinds of bottles that put off terrible smells if you opened them. I kept seeing him go down a steep flight of stairs into the basement and I suspected that was where he took the girls.
The night that I brought him the third girl who looked at me with betrayal in her eyes as I calmly walked out of the garage just as Haldo was walking in, I pretended I was going out. I’d just been handed one hundred dollars and I still had most of the two hundred I’d been paid already. I walked about three blocks and waited a while and then I came back, sneaking around the back of the house.
Haldo had given me a key in case I needed it for bringing girls inside.
I’d suspected he would be down in his basement now that I’d just brought him victim number three.
My heart pounded in my chest as I crept down the stairs. There were double doors at the bottom and they were cracked open. That was curious to me. Wouldn’t he be afraid the girls would get out?
But when I peeked through the small opening in the door, I saw why he wasn’t afraid of an escape. He had cages for the girls.
His lab, I guess you’d call it, was massive. It wasn’t so much a basement as an underground compound. There were cages all along the back wall and tables covered with the same kind of magical detritus as the upstairs. The first girl I’d brought in looked unconscious in her cage, curled in a ball and unmoving. The others were awake, huddled in the corners of their cages, and trembling. I couldn’t tell if they were hurt or not. Not that it mattered. It was the reality of what I’d done staring me in the face. It didn’t matter what he was doing to the girls. I was bringing them here against their will.
“I need to see your face,” Haldo said darkly. He appeared from behind a desk and approached the cage holding the third girl. Out of his coat, he wore a crisp white shirt and suspenders with slacks. He looked more like a banker than a wizard. He clapped his hands in the face of the third girl. Her name was Lara. She’d really seemed to like me.
I felt like the bottom of a shoe suddenly.
“I need to see your face, girl!” Haldo thundered. There was magic even in his voice. Everything seemed to tremble when he spoke.
Lara raised her head. Her eyes were red. She had clearly been sobbing.
Haldo outstretched his hand and sent magic through the cage and straight into her and the piercing t
error of her scream made me gasp and I ran up the stairs, dashing back to my shed.
He had lied. He was hurting them, for whatever his own nefarious purposes were. But then again, he had been hurting them all along. I just hadn’t wanted to think about it.
I wish I could say I stopped luring the girls in then and there.
I almost did. But I was eating better than I ever had in my life. I had my own room with a comfortable bed, a private bathroom, and even a little kitchenette. I’d bought myself some new clothes, and this was only a few hundred dollars in.
The thought of living in a box under a bridge again made my stomach turn.
So I kept luring in girls for Haldo.
Six months rolled by like nothing. I never crept down to the basement again. I turned my heart off and just didn’t think about it. I talked to the girls Haldo wanted me to talk to and brought them to the house. A few times I brought them to Haldo’s van and shoved them inside. He didn’t even keep things a secret anymore. He talked about his plans to impart magical powers on his victims before perfecting a form of mind control. Then he would send them out to do his bidding and they would be powerful yet unable to resist his will. I tried not to listen. I didn’t want to know.
After three months, he raised my fee to two hundred girls a head. I took myself out to dinner. I bought nicer clothes.
I felt dead inside.
“Find a lion shifter,” Haldo said one day.
That took me aback. It shouldn’t have made any difference. But it felt personal somehow. Haldo seemed to sense this. He said he’d suspected I might have a problem with it, which made me feel worse. It wasn’t as if humans or bear shifters or anyone else was worth less than a lion shifter.
“I’ll give you five hundred,” he said.
My mouth watered at the very idea.
Just one more, I told myself. Just this one and I’ll quit.
That was what I promised myself. I’d saved a bunch of the money. I had enough now that I could go out on my own and start a life somewhere. All I’d traded for it was a lifetime of knowing what I’d done to those girls. I hadn’t kept count but after six months, there had been a lot of girls. Haldo’s basement was big but it wasn’t that big and I couldn’t imagine he’d let any go.
That meant some had died under whatever magical experimentation Haldo had subjected them too.
It took me two weeks to find a single young female lion shifter and when I did, I wished I hadn’t.
It was Daisy.
I met her outside of a bar so divey that it would even let in a teenager without even a fake ID and who didn’t look remotely of age. It was there I found Daisy. I didn’t recognize her at first. But I did smell her immediately. She was wearing a big, baggy sweatshirt and nursing a coffee in a dark corner, looking like she wanted to disappear. When she saw me she pushed the hood of her sweatshirt back and I didn’t need to ask to know that hungry look in her eyes. She’d run away from our pride too. She was on the streets just like me.
“Miguel.” She smiled when she said it and I already knew I was going to take her to Haldo because she was the only lion shifter I could find.
But I sat down with her and for a while we shot the breeze. By now I was seventeen. Daisy had run off because her mother had tried to match her up with an older shifter and pulled her out of school. She wasn’t having it.
“Who was it?” I said. I was chewing on a straw and refusing to think about what I was going to do. I just wanted to pretend everything was normal. It’s easier to do that when you’re so young.
“Jeremy,” Daisy said, scrunching up her nose.
“Ugh.” I rolled my eyes. Jeremy was one of the shifters that used to “challenge” me on the regular which was a euphemism for pretending to duel younger shifters and just creaming them for fun. It was supposed to “toughen you up.” All it did was make me increasingly angry at everyone. Jeremy had to be at least ten years older than Daisy and he wasn’t even good looking on top of it.
“I hate Jeremy,” Daisy said. “Had to get out.”
We ended up talking for hours which was much longer than necessary. The truth was, I kept putting off what I needed to do. Five hundred dollars. With five hundred more dollars I’d have enough to get a place of my own somewhere else where I could find a real job.
All I had to do was sell out my best friend and the girl I’d always been secretly in love with.
But that night we ended up walking to Haldo’s place. I was vague. I told her I knew a good place for her to squat. She could tell I was well fed and my clothes were decent. She kept asking where I worked. I put it off. Still, she followed me. Why wouldn’t she? Daisy had always trusted me.
“Um, just in here,” I muttered. I pushed open the door to the garage. Haldo kept all the lights out in most of the house at night because that was when I brought girls in. Anyway, he was usually in the basement.
It was all routine by now. We had a pull cord system these days. I covertly yanked on a little rope just inside the door of the garage which was musty and dusty and didn’t contain much beyond a tarped over old Chevy Nova. The rope rang a bell down in the basement that told Haldo to come up for a “delivery.”
“What is this place?” Daisy said, laughing. I could just barely make out her profile in the dark of the garage. I was glad I couldn’t see her clearly.
“Just stay here a minute,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I walked outside and I couldn’t breathe. I could hear the other door between the house and the garage slam shut as Haldo walked in to fetch Daisy and then I heard her scream.
Twenty-four hours later I hadn’t stopped feeling nauseated. I’d thrown up twice, had not slept a wink, and I was tempted to rip up the five hundred dollars that Haldo had paid me that afternoon.
By the next night, I’d decided to free all of them or die trying.
I had told myself this was the price of freedom but the price was too high. I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t fix this. I was seventeen and I’d cornered myself into a suicide mission.
There was a thunderstorm the next night. Lately, Haldo had taken to going to the woods during thunderstorms to cast. Apparently there was a lot of magic in the air then. That was good, since I had keys to the house. Haldo was terrifying and dangerous but he was also cocky as hell. He thought he had me in his thrall either with money or intimidation. That meant that freeing the girls was just a matter of summing up the will to do so.
On the other hand, it also meant putting myself in the crosshairs of an enraged dark wizard for the rest of my life.
But I did anyway. It wasn’t raining and I’d never gotten used to the feel of that kind of weather when thunder and lightning crackled in a gray clouded sky without a drop of rain falling.
Once I decided to move, it was easy. I just started moving. I stood up from the bed I’d been sitting on for hours as I imagined what I would do. I changed into jeans, a sweater, and the vintage leather jacket I’d bought with blood money. I packed my backpack and grabbed the keys to Haldo’s house and I crossed the muddy yard to the back porch.
I knew for a fact that Haldo wasn’t home, yet I still felt as if he could jump out at any moment and turn me into a frog that he would keep in a terrarium with his other treasures. The place was eerily quiet. I heard no sound from the basement below even though I knew there must be a couple of dozen girls down there. Maybe he had it sound proofed now.
I didn’t run into any trouble until I was downstairs and found those double doors to the basement locked up tight.
Shit.
He hadn’t given me a key to the basement. I tried the key I had; nothing. It was the kind of obvious wrinkle that an adult probably would have thought of. But all I had was some courage and guilt along with the ever present sense of invincibility so common with teenagers.
I ran my shoulder into the door until my arm felt like it was about to fall off.
Shift, dumbass.
I shook my
head. It was so obvious, I felt stupid. I shifted quickly. I was much stronger as a lion than I could ever be in a human body. A full grown mountain lion could knock down the doors easily enough and a shifter was stronger than any regular animal. There wasn’t much room to take a running start but I didn’t need it. With all the strength of my lion, I splintered the lab doors and inside I found the couple dozen girls imprisoned, some of them two to a cage. I looked around, unable to breathe until I saw Daisy in her cage at the very end. She met my eyes, her mouth a straight line. I couldn’t read her expression.
“I’m getting you out of here!” I announced, looking around the room for more keys. The cages must have keys, right? I found the ring of keys on a hook by the door and it took next to forever to match each key to each lock. The entire time I was sure Haldo was going to come home and find me as thunder roared overhead.
“I know a place,” I said, as I unlocked all the cages. “An empty building outside of town. You can stay there now. Like a safehouse.” I ran to the hall and grabbed my backpack. I was on the run too after all.
The girls were all out except Lara.. Some of them looked hurt in some vague way that was not immediately obvious; they trembled or limped or needed help to walk.
I couldn’t open the last cell that held Lara. None of the keys seemed to fit. A few of the girls had already run off, though I’d planned to take them all to a safehouse where they might rest at least for the night but I could hardly blame them for not trusting me. But Daisy and several others who couldn’t move as fast remained, waiting but looking nervous. Lara was unconscious in her cell. She wasn’t awake to scream at me to hurry and get her out.
I shifted and tried to break the cage open but it was much stronger than the doors. Meanwhile Daisy and the other girls remaining searched for a key that didn’t seem to exist.
“Miguel!” Daisy said. She grabbed my arm. Too much time had gone by. “We need you,” she said calmly. She looked at me steadily.
Miguel's Secret Cub Page 3
