Imprisoned (Book Five of the Castle Coven Series): A Witch and Warlock Romance Novel

by Hazel Hunter

  They both came to a shuddering calm, their breaths slowing and their bodies shaking.

  For a long moment, Hailey rested on top of Kieran’s form, her cheek snug against his chest. She felt a peace and wellness she had never known suffusing her being. She had never been safe before, not like this. There was nothing outside of this room, nothing beyond the circle of his arms.

  After a while, Hailey pulled away before standing up. She stretched the kinks out of her legs and lower back for a moment before offering Kieran a hand.

  “Come on,” she said, a soft smile on her face.

  “Where are we going?” he yawned, climbing to his feet.

  “We’re going to get a shower. Then I think we’ll do something like that again.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THEIR HOUSE WAS beautiful. It was large and airy with plenty of rooms for the both of them to enjoy. There was an entertainment area with an enormous television and a media computer that held all of Kieran’s music. To Hailey’s surprise, he had a shy fondness for bluegrass that she would never have suspected.

  There was a library for her, full of all of the books that she had ever read or wanted to read. Sometimes, she would find a reference that she needed to look up. She would despair of ever finding it, but then a quick search revealed that she must have purchased it on one bookstore trip or another. She could do all of the translating and all of the reading that she wanted to do, something she had never had the time for.

  They would spend time on their own interests, but mostly, they simply were in each other’s company. She would join Kieran for a movie in the entertainment center, or he would bring headphones to keep her company when she was on a particularly stubborn document. They would go to the large kitchen together, making simple meals of roasted meat, cheese and steamed vegetables.

  Of course the room that they loved the most was the bedroom. In that room more than any other, they were connected to each other. Sometimes, Hailey would play the stern mistress, and other times, they would simply make love, falling into a sleep that was full of good dreams. Hailey had never in her life been free of nightmares, but in their house, she was.

  Their cat, a small skinny, disgruntled thing, meowed angrily from time to time, but it was easy enough to ignore. It would twine around their ankles, but even when given food and treats, it obviously thought that there was something wrong.

  Beyond that, however, Hailey’s life was like a pool of warm salty water, lit by the day’s last sunbeams. She could sink down into this sweet pleasure and never leave it.

  She wondered why she didn’t.

  One night, lying in their bed, she turned to Kieran.

  “What’s missing?” she asked, her voice resonant in the darkness. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to say it while they were making food or enjoying a movie, but in the dark, where she could see nothing, the question became important.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think I know, exactly. Sometimes, I look around, and it’s wonderful. I love our life together, and you make me more happy than I have ever been before. But then I get the feeling that there is something missing there. There’s something that is always escaping me, like a mouse sneaking around a cat.”

  “You’re becoming as bad as the cat,” Kieran teased. “Next thing you know, I’ll never be able to comfort you no matter how much I pet you.”

  She smiled briefly at his joke.

  “No, it’s not something I’m imagining. There’s something missing. There’s something wrong.”

  “Well, if you can think of what it is, let me know. Then we can fix it.”

  That night, Hailey didn’t sleep at all. Kieran’s breathing slowly evened out as he fell into a deeper slumber. She envied his ease, curled up against his back. They had a lovely life, an amazing one. There was nothing missing at all.

  A few nights later, another thought occurred to her in the dark.

  “Kieran, what’s our cat’s name?”

  In the darkness, she could feel Kieran shift as he considered her question.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is our cat’s name? Surely we gave him a name at some point, right? Like normal people with a loving pet do?”

  “We…we must have forgot,” said Kieran, his voice uncertain. “Is that something that could happen?”

  “Us forgetting to name him or us forgetting his name because we haven’t used it enough? Neither sounds particularly likely.”

  She lay in the darkness, aware of the cat in question jumping up lightly on the bed. She reached down to pet it, but there was something a little odd about the way it felt. It was lighter and thinner than a cat should be, and a bit smaller as well.

  In confusion, she turned on the light. It was just their cat, a tabby with green eyes and a rather surly expression. She turned off the light again. In the split second before the light shut down, she didn’t see a cat at all. She saw a little weasel with a lean body and black oil droplet eyes. She cried out in surprise, making Kieran wrap his arms around her.

  “Darling, what’s the matter?”

  “I…I think our cat is actually a weasel.”

  No, not a weasel. Was it a ferret?

  The feelings were coming harder and faster now. She turned on the light, putting on her silk nightgown and walking out of the bedroom. It was hard to put her thoughts together somehow. Kieran followed her, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. There’s just something wrong here. Something is missing, and I don’t know what.”

  The nameless cat mewed loudly, weaving in and out of their legs. It looked like it was trying to tell them something. She lifted it in her arms as much to comfort herself as to comfort it.

  “What does the yard look like?” Kieran said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The yard outside. What does it look like? Do we have a pool? Do we have a garden? Surely we have something.”

  There was something deeply unnatural about the gaps in their knowledge. Looking at each other, they nodded solemnly and approached a window. The airy curtains were still. To Hailey, there was something dead about them, something that made her skin crawl when she touched them.

  She and Kieran pulled them aside together. For a long moment, they both stared dumbfounded at the brick wall that lay behind them. Moving as one, they moved through the house, ripping down curtains and finding the same thing.

  “What is this place?” Hailey asked wildly. “What’s going on?”

  “This isn’t where we’re supposed to be,” Kieran said slowly. “All of this…”

  “It’s all a lie,” Hailey finished softly for him. “Everything here is just a lie.”

  It broke her heart to say it, but perhaps broken hearts were useful because they allowed things in that had been kept out. Suddenly she could remember the coven in Wyoming, the fact that she, Kieran and Piers––oh god, she had forgotten Piers––lay in a drugged stupor in the mountains. She could remember the demons that they had fought, she could remember everything.

  Looking at Kieran, she could see that the same thing was happening to him. There was a sickened look on his face, fear and shame both.

  As one they turned to the door, but Kieran took her hand before they could walk through it.

  “Hailey, be very sure that this is what you want to do.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her green eyes lighting up with anger. “Piers is out there, he is suffering just as you were suffering, and I need to go to him. This place isn’t real, Kieran. It’s… It’s just a strange set piece where we can be held until our bodies die.”

  “Has it occurred to you that that might already have happened?”

  At Hailey’s startled look, Kieran waved his hand, encompassing everything about the house where they had been so happy.

  “We have been here for what feels like months, if not years. We have been happy, and time has gone by for us
. We have to accept the possibility that time might have passed for others. For our bodies.”

  Hailey’s stomach dropped when she thought of what he was saying. She had read fairy tales when she was younger. As a young witch only allowed to translate and research in coven libraries, she had read darker reports of the faerie folk, very real, very dangerous and very present in some parts of the world. They would carry away a man or a woman to dance for a single night, only to return them a thousand years later. Something very similar could have happened while she and Kieran enjoyed their domestic idyll. She didn’t know that it had, but the idea of leaving Piers alone, lost and frightened sickened her.

  “I don’t care,” she said softly. “I don’t care what might be on the other side of that door. All I know is this is a place without Piers. It’s a place where I’ve run away and forgotten someone I love. I need to go through that door, Kieran.”

  There was such an expression of grief in Kieran’s face that she almost relented. As he opened his mouth to speak, however, the bedroom door behind him opened.

  Hailey gasped out loud. The woman who opened the door was her twin from the red hair to the green eyes to the diminutive stature.

  “Piers, what’s going on? Come back to bed, I miss you.” Even the voice was a dead match for hers.

  “A demon,” Hailey whispered.

  Kieran looked at the demon, a slightly glassy look in his eyes. She could see the desire in him, plain as day. This was the life that some part of him had always wanted. It was as safe for him as it had been for her, nothing to do but to love the person he wanted endlessly with no trouble in sight.

  “Kieran, Kieran, that’s not me,” Hailey said, trying to keep her voice calm. “That’s an impostor, that’s not me at all.”

  “Kieran, who is that with you? Is…is it a demon?” The false-Hailey’s face was suddenly a mask of fear. “Make it go away, please, Kieran. I need you here. Don’t leave me.”

  “Kieran, please don’t stay with her.”

  Hailey could feel terror rise up in the back of her throat. She could see the game that the demon was playing. If Kieran thought that someone needed him, he would never leave. Given the fact that the demon wore Hailey’s face, that was bound to make it even harder.

  “Stay with me. There’s nothing beyond that door for you. There is no one who needs you like I do. There is no one who deserves you the way that I do. Please, I have been so sad. Please come to me?”

  Kieran shook his head as if he had been aroused from a deep stupor. To Hailey’s shock, he took a step closer to the false Hailey in the bedroom. She could barely stand to watch her man walk away from her.

  She blinked when she realized that the temperature in the house was dropping quickly.

  “You overplayed your hand, demon,” he said, his voice cold and true. “Hailey would never tell me she was the only one who needed me. She would never say that.”

  The false Hailey stammered, but something about Kieran’s cold tone seemed to throw her off. She was losing control of her own illusion. Her eyes flickered from Hailey’s green to blue to something that looked like a slit cat’s eye. She backed away slowly, still trying to use soothing words to calm Kieran, but there was no calming him.

  Rage seemed to radiate from him like a heat wave. It even made Hailey a little afraid to approach her lover.

  “She would never keep me from my duty. You have played your hand badly, demon, and now you are going to die for it.”

  The ice crystals spun from his hands faster than Hailey had ever seen them. They seemed to be forming even as they whipped through the air. The glittering blades of ice pierced the false Hailey’s chest, but the resistance there was nothing at all like the blades entering flesh.

  Instead they flew through her body as if she was nothing but mist and sugar floss, though she screamed as loudly as a human. The pain made her form shift, and for a moment, Hailey could see her true form.

  The demon might have been a human once, but that was a long time ago. In that brief flicker, Hailey could see dry-dust skin stretched over a mostly complete skeleton, crooked bat wings that seemed to replace the demon’s arms, and a face with a sucker of sorts instead of a mouth. She nearly gagged on her own fear and disgust, but in a moment, the false Hailey vanished in a foul puff of smoke and the house started collapsing.

  Out of panic, Hailey tried to duck underneath a desk, but Kieran held her in place, quickly forming a disc of extremely cold, very clear, very thick ice over their heads. The entire house came down in a shower of broken shards, a muted roar that deafened both of them.

  Hailey crowded against Kieran to stay away from the splinters, holding her hands over her ears until it was all over. When the last sounds of snapping wood and shattering glass had ceased, she carefully opened her eyes. All around them was the wreckage of the life that they had been living in comfort and ease. Above them was that same bruised, dark sky under which she had found Kieran.

  “I can’t believe I forgot it all,” Hailey said, a terrible guilt and pain clenching her heart. “I forgot everyone except you. I forgot Piers, Julie, Beatrice, Liona, everyone. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care.”

  Kieran spun the ice away, taking her in his arms.

  “It is this place. There are so many traps for the unwary. I believe that this is a place that is meant to prey on human thoughts and dreams of every stripe. The stronger a desire is, the more powerful the trap.”

  Hailey shook her head.

  “Does that mean that I’m heartless?” she asked. “Does that mean that I simply don’t have enough care for any of the other people in my life?”

  Kieran thought for a moment, and then shook his head no.

  “If you simply did not have enough love for others, I think we would still be living that life.”

  “Yeah, and I’d still be a goddamn cat,” said a small voice.

  “Ferret!”

  The little animal squirmed his way out from under a pile of shingles, shaking his fur indignantly. Hailey knelt to scoop him up, squeaking with surprise when he simply swarmed up her reaching hand and arm, finding his accustomed place on her shoulder.

  “That was a close one, girl,” he said, stretching out. “They almost had you.”

  “What would have happened if we had been caught?” she asked.

  Ferret shrugged, an odd thing on an animal so far from human.

  “In my experience? Lived in stupid bliss until your spirits faded away to senseless wraiths. It’s no heaven or hell or anything like that for those wraiths, they simply drift around the Shadow Walk Prison like a lot of idiot smoke. Outside of course, your bodies would have ceased to function and your guts gone to mush years ago, though, so there’s nothing worth coming back to anyway.”

  Kieran raised an eyebrow at the little animal.

  “Did you pick up a new friend while you were looking for us?”

  “I did as a matter of fact,” Hailey said. “Kieran, this is Ferret. Ferret, this is Major Kieran McCallen of the Magus Corps.”

  Both Kieran and Ferret sized each other up, looking over each other cautiously before shrugging and proceeding to cordially ignore each other. Hailey hid a smile.

  “We need to get moving,” she said. “We need to find Piers, and then we need to get out of here.”

  “Piers is in here too?” Kieran wondered. “Will…we find him as you found me?”

  Hailey shrugged helplessly.

  “You are both men of passion and you have pasts just like everyone else. I don’t want to see these private places of yours until you show them to me, but right now, we might not have a choice.”

  “Hailey…”

  “Yes, Kieran?”

  “Living in a house entirely constrained to the two of us. Was that a trap for me or a trap for you?”

  There were a dozen unasked questions in his voice. Hailey thought for a long moment before shaking her head.

  “I don’t know, love. I couldn’t tell you.”

&
nbsp; They stood together for a moment. Finally, Kieran nodded and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Let’s go find Piers,” he said, and she turned with relief.

  She was still wearing a nightgown and Kieran was dressed in nothing at all. She showed him how to concentrate on the idea of clothes. She chose her usual uniform of jeans, hoodie and boots, and she waited as he experimented with the idea himself.

  When he was done, Hailey raised her eyebrow. He was dressed not in the dark modern clothes that were the de facto uniform of the Magus Corps, but instead in the clothing of a Viking warrior prince. His clothing was mostly made of black wool, with tall boots that came up to his knees. Over his shoulders, he wore a massive black fur, something that made him look even larger. Across his back was a shield, and at his hip was a sword.

  “I’ve not seen you in the clothing of your youth before.”

  “It seems fitting. If the past can harm me, it should also be able to turn those fangs outwards and heal me.”

  With Ferret on her shoulder and Kieran by her side, she took a deep breath. She summoned up Piers’s face in her mind, the sardonic good humored twist of his mouth, his long blonde hair, the assured way he floated in the sky, and the feel of his sweet mouth across the back of her neck.

  Oh darling, what will they have done with you? Hailey wondered.

  She started walking, keeping the vision of Piers in front of her. She would find him. She had to.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THEY WALKED FOR a timeless distance, and slowly around them, the world changed. The sky was the same as it always was, but the ground turned hard and flinty, making them walk carefully. Soon they started seeing cairns, piles of blackened rocks that designated graves. There were small wooden staves around each cairn, each with a name. Hailey shivered when she realized that each grave marked the passing of at least eight people. Some marked as many as fifteen.

  “What kind of place is this?” she murmured, keeping her voice deliberately low.

  Kieran shook his head.

  “It’s a killing field,” he said flatly. “These people died all at once. That doesn’t happen in peace time. The only other thing it could be is a sickness.”