by Sam Hall
Down the steps, past the cells. Defer to the commandant or whoever is in charge. You can tell the difference by their insignias. One pip means a captain, three means the commandant. Feed who they want fed first, then they’re likely to leave you alone as you clean out the latrine buckets. Time to talk then, though circumspectly. Adam’s instructions played over and over in my mind as I firmed my grip on the bucket handles I was carrying and followed Slade and Hawk, with the rest of the pack at my back.
“Well, well, what do we have here?” A tall man in the usual black armour stepped out of a room as we got to the bottom. One silver pip, a captain. Adam had expected as much with most of the Volken upstairs celebrating. It was a skeleton staff down here, right when we needed it. He pulled a knife out from his belt, snickering when we all stiffened, and then dragged the silvery point through one of Hawk’s buckets. “Pâté, bread, fruit! Rich pickings indeed. Too good for this scum. And what have you brought me?”
“Dinner from the big table, m’lord,” Finn said with a much broader accent, one that was scarily close to Adam’s. Where had he learned to do that? He held out a silver tray covered with a pure white napkin, his head bowed. “Adam said that you were to have some of the best cuts. Kept them to one side.”
“And so he should. Only right, being relegated to the bowels of the earth.” The captain took the tray and then pulled the napkin back. “Fish roe, cloud bread, marinated alatha skewers. Mm…my compliments to the chef.” He glanced up at us for a second, almost irritated by our presence. “Well, go on. The miserable sods have just been released from the women’s clutches. Not sure if they can summon the energy to eat, but feed them we must. Mind you empty those latrines as well. The last lot have been neglecting that and the place stinks to high heaven.”
“Of course, m’lord. Very good, m’lord,” we all said, hopefully suitably servile. The captain just nodded and then turned to return to his office.
I struggled to take in the details as we entered the Volken cell network for the first time. My heart pounded loud in my ears as we moved around to the cages, removing the keys from the hooks we were instructed to use by Adam. My hands shook as I put one of the buckets down so I could take those Brandon handed me. He looked grimly determined after the shared vision. But it was this place—the cells and the bodies within them all too similar to the way we’d looked in the Uldariel cage—that got to me. We’d dreamed about this place, thought about it countless times once we realised it existed. The visions and the angst overlaid the reality in a way that was hard to reconcile.
“These have to be the bowls he mentioned,” Hawk said, pulling down a stack of metal dishes. We all flinched at the sight of them. Crusted with rotten food and partially rusting, they didn’t look fit for a dog, let alone people.
We shook our heads and moved to dish out the food, but Hawk pulled the worst dishes to one side and tried to scrape free the leftover mess behind the wall of our bodies as we set to work divvying the supplies up.
“You gonna fucking feed us or what?” We all froze at the sound of someone shouting from the cells. “Stop fucking around and get it in here. My mate’s starving.”
Slade grabbed two bowls and marched over to the cell, not heeding the system we’d been given. He didn’t have the keys, forcing Jack to run over and put them into the lock that opened the slot in each cell. Jack’s eyes flicked around the room, at the captain’s office and the other cells, especially now that the inhabitants were starting to rouse. The captain’s door remained resolutely closed.
“Kerry?” Slade said, and the man in the cage froze.
“Slade?”
My mate’s name rang clearly through the complex in a horrible mixture of disbelief and despair. We all clustered around the cell, hissing for quiet, but there was no getting this cat back into its bag.
“Slade? What the fuck, man? What are you—”
“If you don’t all shut the fuck up right now, we’re in the cells with you, rather than getting you out of them.”
Finn uttered the words in a low monotone, but the effect was instantaneous. I could no more have made a peep than turned into a chicken.
“We’re here to get the lot of you out, but we can’t do it today,” Finn said, glancing down the rows of cells. Aaron looked up at that. We hadn’t decided that with what we now knew. “We’re doing reconnaissance, finding out how many are down here, and formulating a plan. It’s going to take time, but we’re going to get you home.”
“Finn…?”
The voice was thin and ragged, sounding more like the creaking of stones than a human larynx, but the effect was stark. Finn’s head whipped around, his eyes searching the cells, looking for the location the voice came from. I moved to his side, following him as he took long strides down the cells, until we pulled up somewhere near the end. The light was poor here, lit only by torches on the walls, but that was enough for Finn. His fingers wrapped around the cell bars, his just above the internees. The man inside looked at him like he was an angel, the lost city of Atlantis, and a twelve-course meal all rolled into one.
“My…” The man’s hand reached up, then pulled back, flinching away from contact. Finn’s hand jerked up, catching the fingers before they could retreat further.
“Dad?” he said. “Dad, is that you?”
“No, no, no, not my boy, not here. We made a deal. She promised, promised he would never come,” the man started to babble. He jerked out of Finn’s grip, his fingers beginning to claw at his face. “No, Max, no. It can’t be happening. This can’t happen!”
“Dad,” Finn hissed, and my hand shot out to take his. The confident alpha of moments ago had been quickly replaced by a child desperately trying to reach out to their parent. I felt the tight tangle of emotions inside him—frustration, anger, shame, but overwhelmingly, there was need. “Dad,” he said, his voice beginning to shake. “Dad!”
His father came to a standstill as Finn’s will beat down on him.
“You’re going to be calm. Do nothing to draw the attention of the guard. Sit down and talk to me, while the others serve up the food.”
Finn’s father sat in a neat cross-legged pose and looked up at his son. It was all still there though, shining in his green eyes. Inside, this man screamed, but for the moment, I was glad for the silence. Now that he was managed, I listened to the rest of the pack as they delivered the food, talked to the inmates, and learned about how this fucking prison was run.
“We’re the only lifers,” Johnno said to Aaron. “From what I can see, any of the ones on the surface that commit infractions are taken straight down to that fucking wolf they got captive. No mess, no fuss, and the lot of them get a power boost, don't they? But not us. Gotta get sons on the women, don’t they?” The man looked at the ground for a second. “Mate, I know I said I’d never turn away free pussy, but Aaron, these women—"
“It’s OK,” Aaron said. “Don’t worry about that now. We’ll get you out, and then we can sort through that stuff. Where’s the weak points? What’s the personnel like?”
“Is that…?” Finn asked, pointing a shaking finger at a figure lying flat on the ground.
“Rhydian? Yes, son,” Finn’s dad replied. “He’s… There’s no other way to say it, son. He’s not doing so well. I’ve told them and told them—this is too much. We could keep pushing out sons forever if they just took better care of us, but I can’t get them to let him see a medic. The prick ran off by all accounts.”
“How…how bad is it?”
“He’s running on empty. We all are, but Rhydian’s run down. That’s why the cells aren’t that full. They wring everything they can get out of us, and then we go into decline. Max’s trying his best. That fucker Lian has made him his pet. He asks for us, for medical help, but they just laugh. They want us as studs, need us to keep giving them sons, but they won’t even give us basic care.”
I watched Grey, because that’d be who he was, the last of Grace’s mates. His hands balled into fists, th
e tendons and bones pushing out through the surface of his thin skin, the muscles shaking with the effort. Rhydian lay in a messy heap of long stringy hair and ragged clothing. I reached for and took Finn’s hand, fishing the crystal out with the other, and it gleamed with a gentle green glow in the low light. The Volken seemed to be able to use the crystals as a means to channel the Great Wolf’s power. I thought of those green tendrils in the darkness… Perhaps we could do the same?
Both men’s eyes turned to it, with quite different reactions. Finn nodded, a desperate need burning inside him. He held my hand tight, the power of the bond throbbing through us like an electrical current. But Grey’s reaction was something else altogether. He scrabbled back, obviously seeing it as yet another means to coerce him.
“No, Grey,” I said, “this will…”
He shifted over to hunch protectively over Rhydian’s prone form, the other man groaning in response.
“Dad, it's not that kind of crystal,” Finn said. “Look at the colour, Dad. This comes from the White Wolf.”
We weren’t getting through to him. His lips pulled back to reveal broken fangs, a growl building in his chest. I closed my eyes, the sudden all-encompassing blackness uncomfortable in ways it hadn’t been before, especially when I felt a low rumble below us. Death, I thought, regrowth.
I was never good at meditation or visualisation. My mind went in a million different directions as the instructor spoke in even, sleep-inducing tones. The crystal piano and dolphin soundtrack playing in the yoga studio I’d gone to made me wonder why dolphins were seen to be so spiritual. Like, there was no cow mooing or cats mating in meditation music. But the never-ending blackness motivated me. God knows how I was going to sleep tonight, but right now, I wanted that darkness gone.
Green tendrils in the dark, green shoots, green plants, green…
I tried to talk myself through it, tried to imagine the same explosion of plant life I’d seen in my dreams. Why? I wasn’t sure, but I figured—as we seemed to be led around by the nose by the Great Wolves—I may as well use what abilities they’d gifted us for good. Green spots appeared in the seamless black, then disappeared, smothered by the gloom. I sighed.
Like this? my Tirian said, and my internal landscape erupted. Green, formless, and growing rapidly, the spots spun and spiralled in my mind’s eye, chasing the black away and eating up each speck of darkness like some kind of verdant vacuum cleaner.
“Jules… Jules!”
My eyes snapped open to see both Rhydian and Grey were sitting up, blinking as they inspected each other, wide eyed.
“Rhy?” Grey said, reaching out to touch the other man and then jerking his hand away. Rhydian looked a million times better. He was still too thin, particularly for a man from Sanctuary, but his cheeks were no longer as sunken and there was a little more padding on his ribs and torso.
“Grey…” The other man’s voice was no more than a whisper, easing out of his chest as he wrapped his arms around his mate. They clawed at each other, fighting to get closer as if needing that skin to skin contact.
“Get the keys.”
Finn’s voice was the sound of hell’s doors creaking open. His fingers dug into the corroding bars, sending flakes of rust to the ground. His eyes glowed phosphorescent green as he watched his fathers embrace.
“Get the keys, now!”
I planted my feet, imagining them rooted there, no more able to move than blocks of stone. The command smashed into me, shoving me over and over to do his will. But I couldn’t. I knew if it was my parents in there, I’d be using whatever damn mystical bullshit I had in my arsenal to raze this place to the ground.
Which would only further feed Lonan.
We had to be smart about this. I glanced down the rows of cells and saw the guys ferrying the food around while conducting hushed conversations. Aaron was scoping out the breadth of the building, creating a mental map in his head and conferring with his team, while Sylvan’s eyes were on the captain’s office door. We had to stick to the plan, which is what I told Finn.
He just stared at me for a second, as if unable to believe I hadn’t moved, hadn’t rushed to do his bidding. He kept a lid on using his alpha powers, using them as sparingly as possible, but I think a small part of him held on to the fact that he could force things if he wanted to. I’m not sure how he felt about the fact he couldn’t do that with me.
“Finn?” Rhydian finally seemed to see that his son stood there, peeling his body from Grey’s and approaching the bars. “Son?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Finn replied, his voice breaking. The tears shone, then fell openly, and I touched his hand to feel why. I gulped air in as it all hit.
I’d buried both my parents—Mum dying of cancer, Dad of a heart attack some time later—so I lived in that weird space orphans did. You love someone who you’re never going to see again, the very bond you have with them ripping you open and wounding you at odd times.
I often wondered if my lack of concern about having kids came partly from that. That when I had a baby, I’d be where Mum was, taking the same steps she took, more or less, only to at some point leave my child like she had, just as unwillingly. It certainly affected my openness in a relationship.
It’d taken a while, but that had to be what held me back when the guys had been falling all over themselves to give me their dicks and their hearts. Love is pain. It’s both the most intense joining you can have with another being, and as a result, the most painful. You place so much of your self-worth, your identity, your wants and needs, your being into the other person, who then places that in you. And then comes the magic—what they give you becomes more important, transcending the almighty ego and need to survive, and becoming something so much bigger. So, I felt Finn’s burning need as if my own, partially through the lens that I’d give body parts to dark gods for another chance to hold my parents, while realising I needed to deny Finn just that. Tears slid down my own cheeks as all he felt pulsed inside me, and I just held that, treasuring that for a moment before I pushed back with what I knew.
“Finn, we have to—”
“I know.”
“At least for a day or two. We’ve just got to—”
“I know.”
“This is your mate, son?” Rhydian said, his grey eyes creasing, as if he wanted to keep the love and pain that shone there from his child. “She’s beautiful.”
“This is Jules,” he said, choking the words out. His hands whipped out, and he wrapped his arms around me, holding me hard to his chest. I half closed my eyes, feeling that god awful longing in him rise and meet my own.
“Jules, who’s been touched by the White Wolf.” He nodded. “You love our boy?”
I looked sideways at Finn, almost shyly. Of course I loved him, the feeling more raw and immediate after what we’d been through since coming through the portal, but it hit me so intensely in that moment, it was a struggle to make eye contact.
“You do,” Rhydian said. “Good, he’s going to need your strength for what’s coming.”
And with that, they sat down to strategise. I returned to the tables and distributed food, while Sylvan maintained lookout and the others sorted the latrine buckets. A silence fell over the cells when we started putting the keys back on the correct hooks and packed the bowls away, scraped as clean as we could get them. We, the bringers of hope, were going back to Sylvan’s mother’s house, where no one would touch us against our will, feed us scraps, or make us shit in a bucket. But not for long, I thought. We would find a way to get everyone out of here.
“Finished?” the captain said when we knocked on his door to take his tray away. Finn nodded. “Good, good. Well, you know you’ll need to come down, even during the…festivities? Don’t try and find a little bolthole to hide in. I’ll come for you myself if you don’t feed the inmates and clean the cells.” His eyes roamed across the lot of us. “And you wouldn’t want that.”
“Of course, m’lord. Wouldn’t think of it, m’lord,” Finn repl
ied.
“Good, and don’t think none of us will check. You might have run of the place, such as it is, but any skiving and you’ll be down the Great Wolf’s throat in a second.”
Brandon and I shuddered at that, remembering the feel of just that from our dream. The captain noted us reaching for the other’s hand, and nodded as if satisfied.
“You get what you needed?” Adam asked in a low voice as we returned to the kitchen. It was late and things were slowing down, most of the staff having gone home, and only the boys prepping food for the next day were left.
We nodded.
“Lian,” Finn said. “They say he has my father, Max.”
“That one?” Adam shook his head. “You’ll not retrieve that one. He’s kept in much better conditions nowadays. Only sees to Lian’s daughters when his master wishes it, and no others. No, you’d have a better chance of riding out of here on Lonan’s back than freeing him.”
Finn went to protest, but Slade put a hand on his arm.
“Thank you for today,” Sylvan said, taking Adam’s hand and placing a small clinking bag in the palm. “For your family.”
“That’s not needed,” flustered Adam, but when Sylvan closed his fingers over the bag, he looked pleased. “Take some food for yours and Tsarra’s dinner, please.”
“So, we move during this Great Rite,” Aaron said as we sat around Sylvan’s mother’s table. She hadn’t returned from her work yet, but we’d left a plate of food for her on the kitchen bench.
“Every Volken attends?” Finn said.
Sylvan nodded, but said, “Doesn’t that seem awfully neat? I didn’t intend to arrive back any time near Longest Night. I was hoping to avoid it like the plague. Yet, here we are. Right at the moment when the Volken will be both their most powerful and least attentive. We time this wrong, we’ll get caught up in the slaughter after, like all the other inhabitants.” His eyes narrowed as they scanned the room. “We time this right, we waltz out of here, your people in tow, and put as much distance between us and Lonan as possible.”
