The Silver Cage

by Mathilde Madden

  Oh, but it hurt now. Even as his ecstasy began to build, he could feel a tight ache in his balls, which turned into a stabbing emptiness.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ he whispered, his dry throat rasping. Had she said she’d give him water? ‘There’s nothing left.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Your body obeys me. It will give me what I desire. It can do nothing else. Don’t you dare think of her, werewolf. Your woman. You think she’s alive, don’t you? I know you lied to me when you said you’d never loved her. You just wanted to spill your filthy seed. You still have feelings for her, don’t you? Even though you have the honour of being with your Divine. I saw the gold in your eyes turn grey when I made you chain her up. I think the only way I held you in my control was because part of you aches to control her. Part of you wanted to fulfil that command. But you never can. You’ll never control that one. Oh, her connections to you are so twisted and varied. She killed your sire. She’s your life mate. She’s your first true love, your sworn enemy. She’ll be here. She’ll want to stop us. Do you think she’ll kill you in the end, that woman of yours? Either way it’s bound to be interesting.’

  Alfie couldn’t resist the way the Divine was milking his cock. She had slipped her other hand slowly and sinuously over his balls and was pressing on his taint. Then, as she squeezed tighter with her fist, making him moan as his sore cock got yet harder, she slipped two fingers into his arse, twisting around, jamming against his prostate, magnifying his painful climax as he came into the collection device she had slipped on to his cock.

  Alfie was panting. The Divine looked unimpressed as she held up the translucent sack. ‘Barely a teaspoon full,’ she said, eyeing the bluey-milky liquid. ‘You don’t get any water in return for that. We’ve still nowhere near enough for the potion.’

  Alfie was still speechless, rolling his head against the bars, as the Divine turned and stalked away.

  40

  IRIS KNEW TOBIAS’S house well. It was set in a large garden, stretching away green and damply lush behind the house. Even at the front the house was set well back with generous space and, best of all, it was sheltered from the busy Banbury Road by a high boxy hedge. Iris didn’t have Blake’s skills at breaking and entering, but this place was a burglar’s wet dream.

  Iris chose a window round the back and put it in with a deft elbow; then she used her sleeve to protect her hand as she reached in and found the catch. She didn’t even think about alarms until she had both feet on the carpet of the familiar dining room.

  The soft bleeping early warning made her heart sink. How could she have forgotten?

  She dashed out of the dining room, along a short hallway and into the lobby by the front door. There was the alarm on the wall. A white box with a light flashing red on the front.

  She trawled her brain. The code. It must be in her head somewhere.

  Way back when she had been a trainee werewolf hunter, they had trained here. She had come here every day and worked and worked in the vast basement. Worked until she could hit a pinprick of a target with a blade or a bullet. Until she could dive and roll and kick and beat any of them hand to hand. But none of that told her the alarm combination. She’d never let herself in, never been here when there wasn’t someone else in the house.

  She had memories of Tobias turning to that box and pecking his long fingers on the panel, but she’d never paid any attention to that.

  Had there been any time she’d seen it? Any time she’d seen anyone else turning off the alarm?

  Oh.

  Yes.

  One night on a full moon sweep not far from here. They’d left Jude burying a hound’s body and chased another out into open country. Panting and screaming with exertion they’d eventually had to let it go.

  They’d both thrown themselves on the ground to try to get their breath. And then Blake had been on top of her, as flushed and sweat-sticky as she was.

  ‘It’s when you’re like this,’ he’d said through ragged breaths, ‘nothing in your mind but how much you want to kill, that I most want to be inside you. Feel that dirty heat and hate.’

  Iris didn’t reply. She knew the lust burning into her from his eyes was reflected right back. She pulled her dark-red combat fatigues down and shifted, opening her legs under Blake’s hard narrow hips.

  Iris moaned, thrust her hips up on to him, bringing him deeper, harder, home. She arched her back and rolled her head, showing her neck to him, and he dipped. He pushed his head into the well, pressed his tongue to her skin in the almost pitch dark and then pulled back, startled. ‘Fuck!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Iris, you’re bleeding. Your neck.’

  ‘What? Well, it must just be from the fight.’ Earlier that evening the hound Jude was now burying had sprung from the trees and slammed into Iris’s from behind, flooring her.

  Blake was still inside Iris, He swirled his hips making her moan. ‘Claws or jaws, Iris?’ And then, with a smooth soft motion, he drew his silver gun from his shoulder holster and held it to Iris’s temple.

  Iris felt a vicious rush of fear like a shock wave. Her eyes were tight on Blake’s. The two of them had played all sorts of games with guns since then, but this had been the very first time Blake had held a gun to her head. It felt strangely normal.

  ‘Claws or jaws?’ Blake said again, fucking her now, harder than ever inside her.

  Iris couldn’t speak. All she could feel was the gun on the side of her head and Blake’s cock inside her. Both steel hard, invading. Blake came with a cry and then pushed his face back into the wound at her neck, slipping one hand between her legs and stroking her clit, keeping the gun tight in place with the other. After Iris had come he said, ‘OK, I have some kit at Tobias’s house that can test for lyc saliva in your wound. You’re not going to run, are you?’

  ‘Why would I run?’ Iris said, staring up at his wild hard face.

  ‘Because, if it turns out that lyc bit you, I’ll have to shoot you.’

  So they’d gone back to Tobias’s house, found the kit and Iris had tested negative. But Dr Tobias hadn’t been at home; he was at a meeting in London, Blake said. And so, he unlocked the door with what seemed to be his own key, and the alarms started that soft bleeping. He pushed Iris up against the wall, still holding the gun on her, kissing her hard, back into the pseudo-William Morris wallpaper, and with his free hand he jabbed at the keys.

  Iris was remembering this right now as she stood in that same hallway, looking at that same wallpaper: Blake pressing the keys, Iris rolling her head, idly looking at the numbers he punched. At that moment, when she’d been watching, Iris thought she might well have been bitten. And she knew that, if she had been, she would far rather Blake shot her than become the thing she hated most in the world.

  But still she had watched him jab the keys. She must know.

  She felt as if her brain would break she stretched it so hard trying to recover that memory from nearly a dozen years ago. But she dredged up something: four numbers that were her best hope. She flipped open the front panel of the white box and the keys she pressed made eerily familiar electronic tones.

  The bleeping stopped.

  Iris began to wander through the house full of ghosts. She’d eaten in this dining room, rested on this sofa, browsed in this library. Here was the bedroom where she’d once overheard Jude and Dr Tobias fucking. Blake had told her once that he’d slept with Jude too, about a year before Iris joined. He’d said, ‘Jude’s a crazy bitch in bed. But not in a good way, baby. Not like you.’

  Iris wondered then, as she climbed the stairs to the top floor, if Blake had ever slept with Dr Tobias. It was an odd sort of out-of-nowhere thought, but their relationship had always been strangely overly close. Dr Tobias had been closer to Blake than to her or to Jude. Blake had had his own key to the house. Iris had never had that. Then Tobias had left the place to Blake. And Blake had known Tobias was a werewolf, an Ancient Beast. He had known Tobias was the wolf Iris most wanted to destroy in a
ll the world, the creature that had killed her brother. And he had never told her.

  And Iris realised that she was standing outside the room where she and Blake had first had sex, the spare bedroom full of junk. The kind of place where Dr Tobias may well have stored his Silver Crown.

  41

  IN THE BEDROOM Iris pushed the spike of nostalgia out of her head and started to search. She emptied out box and after box. Most contained paperwork. There were only a few artefacts. Dusty junk. Nothing that looked anything like the twisted metal wire of the Silver Crowns.

  A piece of paper with the Cobalt letterhead caught Iris’s eye. She picked it up. It was a letter about the suggestion that Cobalt should fund the Institute’s running costs. One short paragraph explained that, now one of the werewolf-hunting team was dead, Cobalt would be far more likely to consider the application favourably.

  Iris swallowed. Jude had died just before they had secured the funding that had moved them to the new building, died in the wolf-jaws of Dr Tobias’s wolf-self. She knew Beasts were fully aware of themselves when they changed. She knew Dr Tobias had deliberately killed Iris’s brother in order to seduce Iris into becoming one of his team of werewolf hunters. But it had never occurred to her that Tobias would have killed Jude – one of his own – in order to get the funding deal from Cobalt.

  ‘Fuck,’ she whispered. ‘Jude.’ She tried to find some more information about the dealings with Cobalt. She had tipped out box after box of paperwork, and they were strewn over the bed and the floor. Tears were pricking her eyes. Tears that were for Alfie as much as they were for Jude. And tears that were for herself as much as either of them. ‘The crown’s not here, is it?’ she said to herself, still not crying, but kind of close.

  ‘No,’ said a voice behind her.

  She turned, knowing already. ‘Blake!’

  ‘Hi, Iris,’ Blake said, his voice soft and low, ‘you seem to have broken into my house.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I was looking for . . .’

  ‘I know what you were looking for. And you’re right, it isn’t here. I think the Silver Crown – the Council of Ancient Beasts themselves – took it. Or he made arrangements. It isn’t here. It probably is the one they put on Alfie’s head.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But that’s not the point really, Iris. The point is what on earth you are doing here searching for a Silver Crown that was pretty unlikely to be here, when you had all the sacred silver you needed to fix the trace signal back at Cobalt.’

  Iris’s eyes went wide. ‘What?’

  When Blake had carried Iris out of the tunnels under Oxford, tipping the landlord of The Bishop to use the entrance at the back of his pub, no questions asked, she had been close to death.

  His first thought had been the John Radcliffe Hospital. The place the Institute always used for injuries that were beyond their basic skills. But Iris was grey, her breath rasping; her shoulders weren’t lying right and the abrasions on her wrists were horribly infected, as was the incision on her bicep where she had put the chip into her own arm.

  Blake knew Iris. Knew her body, her mind, what she was capable of. And he knew she might not make it through this.

  That was why he decided to take her to Cobalt. He knew how much money they had. The facilities – the cutting edge of medical science. Things that were untested and unlicensed. Plus magic. They’d have magic.

  When he walked into Cobalt’s reception with Iris like a baby in his arms, he’d known he was walking into the lion’s den. Pepper, at reception, said, ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ as she pulled a gun on him.

  ‘It’s OK, Pepper,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve had your instructions.’

  And then Blake found that being handcuffed to a chair in a dirty basement room that reeked of one purpose and one purpose alone was made so much worse if the woman approaching with the familiar gleam of torture-lust in her eyes had a bandage across her face from an earlier head butt.

  Blake nodded at it. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘What? This?’ Erin Cobalt touched the fabric swathing the nose that Blake had felt crunch under his cranium. ‘I quite understand, Mr Tabernacle. You had to go and find Iris. You brought her back to us. All very procedure.’

  ‘Procedure? This place? Really? What’s with the Midnight Express chic then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Erin, squeezing herself into the gap between the small metal table in front of Blake and his knees to perch there, ‘I just thought I ought to check what information you have that we might need.’

  ‘Before you kill me?’

  ‘Well, we could hardly do it afterwards.’ She reached behind her back and grabbed the item Blake had already seen on the table before she came in. A bunch of wires attached to sticky pads. Blake knew there was also a large box on the table covered with dials. Erin leant forwards and ripped open Blake’s shirt.

  Blake fought to keep his breathing even. As she began to stick the pads on to his chest, she said, ‘Does electricity work on werewolves?’

  ‘It hurts them,’ Blake said evenly. ‘But it won’t kill them. And nothing hurts them like silver anyway.’

  ‘Hmm, yes, vamps are similar. You can hurt them with things that would hurt a human, but nothing makes them squirm like holy water, crosses, light boxes.’ She reached behind her and flipped a switch without even looking at what she was doing and Blake’s entire body turned to pain.

  When she flipped the switch back and the pain stopped, everything was different. Blake could feel the sweat covering his body, running down his brow and into his eyes. He was scared. Erin had more power over him than he could stand. He inhaled hard through his nose. ‘So you decided against torturing me with sexual arousal then?’ he managed.

  Erin lifted one foot from the floor and planted the toe of her pointed shoe right in Blake’s crotch. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  She slipped the shoe further and lifted his balls. Her hand crept back behind her to the machine and Blake felt his breath getting heavy. A second later he couldn’t feel her foot jammed into his crotch any more.

  ‘Jesus. Fuck! Damn!’ Blake shouted as the pain subsided enough for him to speak.

  Erin smiled. ‘And I thought you were a fan of torture.’

  ‘This isn’t torture,’ Blake said, grimacing.

  ‘Oh really? You want me to turn it up?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. It isn’t torture because you haven’t fucking asked me anything.’

  ‘Oh, right, sorry. I thought you knew. I want the unstable lyc. Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is. I thought he’d be with Iris. In fact, if you want him I’ve already brought you your best chance of finding him. Iris. Fix her up and I reckon she’ll be pretty motivated by that insane puppy love of hers.’

  ‘Huh,’ Erin said and Blake flinched, assuming his unsatisfactory answer would earn him another blast of electricity. But it didn’t. Erin just said, ‘She doesn’t know where he is any more than you do.’

  ‘No. I didn’t say that. I said she’d be pretty motivated to find him.’

  ‘And you’re not? You’re not finding this situation in any way motivating.’

  Blake inhaled again. ‘It’s not the same.’

  Erin shrugged. She reached behind her again and Blake didn’t bother to hide his flinch. But she didn’t touch the electro-box; she brought out another item Blake had forgotten lay on the table – a wooden stake. Erin placed the blunt wooden point against Blake’s chest.

  ‘I’m not a vampire, Dr Cobalt,’ Blake said softly.

  ‘You’d be surprised what a stake through the heart will kill,’ Erin deadpanned. ‘It’s an incredibly painful death for a human. It’s happened by mistake too many times. I haven’t done field work for a long time. But back in the day I had easily enough strength to drive this right into your chest and fix you to that chair. It’s the bluntness that makes it hurt so much.’

  ‘That isn’t torture either,’ said Blake. ‘That’d kill me. Th
ere’s a skill to real torture. And it’s mostly about not killing your victim.’

  ‘Very true, but you’re boring me now, Tabernacle. Tell me how to find Friday. You know full well sleeping beauty upstairs doesn’t cut it. Give me something concrete or I decide there’s no further use for you here.’

  Erin moved her foot out from under Blake’s balls and ran the sole of her shoe over his cock. It stirred a little. He didn’t exactly get hard but he felt a rush of blood there. God, this was a frightening woman. He had no doubt at all she would kill him. And in exactly the horrible brutal manner she had just described. He knew when he brought Iris back here that he was risking something like this, knew almost exactly how it might play out. But Blake, being Blake, had always thought he’d find a chink. A way out. He said, ‘The Silver Crown, the Council of Ancient Beasts that Iris killed – you know about them, right?’

  ‘I’ve read your report.’

  ‘It seems likely that Alfie is an Ancient Beast himself now. That he ascended somehow. Iris was muttering something in the truck about it. The Silver Crown all wear Sacred Silvers. I don’t know if they are magical or just totems, but they are part of the cache of Sacred Silver objects that werewolves revere. Iris killed ten Beasts – eleven if you count Tobias. I collected ten of their Silver Crowns from the caves along with Alfie’s Silver Collar. That’s a sacred silver too. If I’m right about where Alfie is – who’s taken him – the Sacred Silvers could help. They’re your best chance.’

  ‘You have ten crowns, the unstable has another. Where’s the twelfth?’

  Blake shrugged. ‘Good question. But a better question would be where are my ten?’

  ‘Where are your ten?’

  ‘I walk away,’ said Blake. ‘You won’t see me again. You have Iris. I walk away. In return for the crowns.’

  Erin’s throat moved as she swallowed. ‘Fine. Tell me where they are.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t trust you.’