“Okay.” I seriously need to do some research on these eastern shifters. I only know about North American ones, and rumors of others in South America and Canada. “I get it. So what’s the deal?”
“Another Hunt’s forming. I’m sure of it. Much harder to track than Janus’s ones, suggesting they’ve got some expensive resources protecting it.” Tim stares mournfully at his empty tankard, and I take it as a cue to order him one. One for myself as well. House special. “Which tells me that this Hunt is likely run by wealthy connoisseurs. The elite of shifter societies, should we say.”
“Really?” The drinks arrive, and I thank the bartender, crossing my legs and letting the creamy form coat my upper lip. “So you think the other council members of Animusa are on it?”
“Perhaps. But it’s more than that. I think shifters all over the world are on it.”
I gape at him for a moment. “Why here?”
“Because Animusa is the only shifter country that’s legally endorsed by humans. The other shifters tend to keep their locations secret, not drawn on maps. It’s likely a kill a shit-ton of birds with one stone. Get everyone to a location that everyone knows. See the international game for itself. Promote trade, and maybe encourage more shifter groups to hurry up their legalization processes with the human governments. Could you imagine if humans started using djinni portals?”
“I know for a fact that businesses specifically paid djinni millions for them to not do that,” I reply, with a fierce grin. “It would undermine the transport industry today.”
“Yeah, well.” Tim waves his hand dismissively. “It’ll likely happen at some point in the future. Chances are, you may receive an invitation. You make millions, you’re a respected figure, slightly feared in the underworld, and people high above know about you, but don’t do anything, because you’re useful to one another. So, because they’re being annoyingly hidden, I honestly suggest waiting for the invite.”
I don’t particularly like this approach, or the idea of something operating in our back yard without knowledge. “This was what you wanted to tell me over the phone? It hardly seems big.”
He raises one finger now, looking like a conspirator. “Better safe than sorry. I don’t know how heavy they are with their protection. Even me mentioning this might be enough to get me canned.” He glances to the window, once, and instantly, suspicion rings inside me. Something’s not right about his words. Something’s not adding up. I might be paying Tim for information, but he’s not the most trustworthy person on the planet. He looks at his phone again, I assume to see what’s happening with the baseball, but I can’t shake off that nagging suspicion.
“Thanks for the info,” I tell him, getting up. I’ve barely touched my drink. “I better get heading back now.”
Tim does a tiny shiver of his arm, as if he holds an impulse to stop me going, and I stop, looking at him.
“There’s still more I have to tell you. Don’t go now.”
“Is there?”
No doubt about it. He’s trying to hold me back. But why?
He’s been on his phone the whole time. He got me to fly out of Animusa. In short, I’m out of Animusa. For details that even an idiot could pick up.
“Who else is paying you?” I move to him and glare, and he shrinks back into his seat. “Who paid you to keep me here?”
He begins to form a protest, then realizes it’s pointless, because I’m not budging. “Janus Stronghand.”
I curse. “He wanted you to keep me here?”
To his credit, Tim doesn’t look frightened, just resigned. Even though I could technically gut him right now. “He’s got my daughter under ‘watch’ at the moment. I needed to comply.”
“How did he even find out about you in the first place?”
“Had someone watching in one of our meetings last time,” he says, with a trace of bitterness. “You must have something incredibly valuable to him. He needed you out the way long enough.”
Doesn’t take me long to put the numbers together. I’m out of the city. Richard’s working.
Emma’s alone. I beat up the spotter, but it’s not enough.
He’s after Emma.
“Fuck!” I slam my fist on the table, making my drink overspill itself. “I need to get going. Will your daughter be okay?”
“I… I think so,” he says, doubtful. “I did what he asked. But you shouldn’t come into contact with me again.”
“Move out if Janus isn’t dealt with in the next few weeks,” I say. I can’t hate him. I’d do the same if it was her.
But now I’ve got to dash back to Emma before it’s too late. I frantically dial her number, hoping to get an answer, but it cuts off instantly. I leave a voice message. I get the same result from Richard.
Fuck. I can’t fly fast enough for this.
Emma
It happened so fast. One moment, I’m just going down to the shop. I’m trying to be careful, sticking to busy streets, making sure I don’t end up wandering down any areas where I can be snatched without preamble.
I walked past a taxi cab with blacked out windows, however, and next thing I know, I’m being yanked into it.
Screaming and kicking, I fight against my captors as they veer off the sidewalk. Surely someone noticed the snatch, even though my screams were muffled. Surely someone noticed – and one of them’s now pressing something against my mouth and nose. Chloroform – oh fuck. I’m forced to take whiffs of it. It doesn’t work instantly, I feel capable of functioning, but they continue to press it against me, and the more gasps of air I take as I struggle, the more I start to feel it edging me.
Must stay awake. Need to identify – who took me. Two men. Another driving. Being constrained. Struggling weakening. Bursts of color forming in my eyes, swirling, warping the visual input of my eyes…
Waking up, the first thing I see is the iron dark of a low ceiling. The second's the squares on each side of me – and I realize that I'm in a dog cage. I gasp, scrabbling upright and ridding myself of a thin blanket.
“You need to piss,” a voice says next to me, “then ya ask. But don't try nuthin' when we get you out, or you'll be shot in the back of the head.” The voice belongs to a mean looking man with yellow eyes, and a cut on his lip that looks like the stretch between a valley. He's clutching a bayonet gun.
A fucking bayonet. Oh sweet Jesus, where the fuck am I? My eyes rove wildly around, and I see that there's people in cages next to me. Women, men. All, with a sinking feeling in my stomach as I observe – human. The guard himself – he's not the only guard, either, appears to have the hint of a tattoo poking out of his collarbone, but I can't see the animal it represents. Thirty cages. Like a zoo. We're a menagerie of people that have our cages actually slotted into fucking shelves – all of us raised up on a table, including me. We're arranged to three sides of a rectangle, so the guards pace in the box that's formed in the center. A box with coffee, cookies, a place for them to sit, and iPad tablets for them to tap away upon.
Oh fuck no. It's useless, but I want to scream and scream, smash against the walls of my cage, demand for them to let me out. But what good will that do me? I lie there in silence, furiously demanding my foggy brain to work past whatever the fuck it is they injected in me.
I'm trapped in the dark heart of the city. The ugly corruption that permeates the world of the shifters – and now I'm likely about to become a statistic.
Do they eat people? Can't help but think that we're caged like animals ready for slaughter. Can't help but keep my eyes roaming, looking for anything telling, like meat hooks, or bloodstains upon the floor.
There's dark spots, particularly speckled around the cages. People clawing, people hurting themselves, people being punished, maybe.
My breathing's coming fast, but I'm fighting to keep it under control.
“This one ain't a screamer at least, Kit,” the shifter with the bayonet says, giving me a rather nasty smirk. “Thought I'd have to break her in.”
&nb
sp; “Likely dumb with shock,” the other shifter replies. They both now come to crowd my cage, ignoring the soft cries of the other humans in their cages. Many of them are unkempt, look as if they've been snatched rough off the streets.
“She's an immune. Doubt we're eating this baby.” The shifter closest takes big, invasive sniffs, no doubt lapping up my scent. I form names for them in my mind. Scar-Lip and Barrel, since the other one has a shapeless splodge of body. Overweight, with little piggy eyes and a wobbling jawline. Needs to stay off the peanut butter.
“Yeah, total waste. Bet boss has something special for her.” Scar-lip flicks a glance at his companion. “Kinda want to sample the goods. But he'll have our heads.”
“Well, maybe we do a good job of looking after them, he will.” Barrel gives a belly laugh, the rolls of fat on his stomach moving with the effort.
Instantly, my brain wars. Part of me prepares to go hysterical, and the word raped embroiders itself over the forefront of my brain. That's how vulnerable I am. Tarren's warned me about this. How I'm valuable, how people will pay tens of thousands to have sex with an immune, how someone sold her body and her first child for forty million. I might had been considering his offer, but come to think of it –
How fucking stupid am I?
God, I want to curl up, start sobbing, but these two disgusting creatures are staring and leering, and I don't want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me broken.
I'm so stupid. Stupid, because I should have seen this coming. City like this. People like Tarren and Richard, making themselves prime targets. Of course I'm hostage worthy material. I can't be like other people coming into Animusa and attempting to start a new life.
I should never have come here. What the hell was I thinking? I'm an immune. I'm candy to these people. I was stupid the first time I came here, unaware of how important I might be, just vaguely aware that oh, I can resist their hypnosis, and oh, they find immunes quite attractive.
I should never have come here. But no. I had stars in my eyes. Thinking about the hot and heavy times of being with Richard and Tarren. Blinded by the offer of being holed up in an apartment without needing to pay the price.
Guess I'm paying a different sort of price now.
Well, whilst I'm running through all my personal regrets, the shifters eyeroll one another, before leaving me to check on their other prisoners. Maybe they're unhappy I didn't react the way they wanted. I can imagine them being used to negative reactions, in lapping up the misery of others.
They bang the cages of some of the other humans, who seem to have perfected the art of cringing like dogs. As if the cringing will somehow make them a smaller, less threatening target. But it's that kind of weakness display that makes people like these feel they have permission to do anything.
I stare blankly, as if I'm zoning out, but I'm taking in the room. Considering if I have any chance of getting out of here at all.
The meter remains pointing at zero percent. I'm not getting out of this. Not with my value.
That means I need to start preparing for trauma. I see it now, in my head, and bile forms in my stomach. No, don't avoid thinking about it, don't curl up into a pathetic ball and pretend that nothing's going to happen. I can be beaten. Tortured. Raped. Passed around like a chewtoy, treated like a piece of meat. I can have my every statement slapped back at me, be leered at, mocked, threatened with death.
These are my options, my possibilities, and it makes me want to scream and gibber to imagine these things. I already feel an awful stab between my thighs, and my fingers curl into the square slots, with the cold metal forming raw chafing along where I've gripped.
With a few more breaths, I force myself to be calm. Or as calm as possible, considering. Prepare. Don't fall into panic. Don't let that thumping in your chest pound right out of your body. Don't let that foggy, cotton wool sensation clamp harder on your brain, and the stress turn hair gray.
Despite all my brave thinking, my attempt to posture myself into strength, I end up wrapped into myself anyway like a protective ball, breathing hard and fast, biting back the sobs that want to claw themselves out of my throat.
* * *
I don't sleep like this. Hard to do it when the axe of impending doom hovers like a ghost above my head, and there's the soft whimpers and heavings of the other humans. Some I think have been in their cages for a while, since they're dull eyed and sunken into themselves. We're not allowed to hold conversations with one another – as soon as we try, the guards yell and bang the cage until we shrink back in sullen or fearful silence. It's enough to drive some people crazy. Isolation in company is awful.
The guards perk up when the double doors on the other side of the warehouse styled room open, and a figure comes sweeping in, trailed by two bodyguards.
I recognize the swagger from this distance, and then the distinctive golden mane of hair.
Janus.
Not that I expected it to be anyone else, but my stomach does several flips anyway upon seeing him. He wears that calm, coiled persona that he did in the illegal Hunt arena. Lord of his domain, confident in the fact that he won't be caught.
And Tarren let this bastard slip out from his hands like an eel. He warned Janus about the police, got himself frozen out of a big section of the underworld. All for the sake of making sure Richard's brother made it to the next day alive.
I keep my body stiff as I lay upon my side, though my bottom thigh and hip is throbbing already from dull pressure, and there's a slight tingling of pins and needles along my right arm. Not to mention the crick in my neck, and the way the blanket does shit fuck all to keep out the real cold. It's better off underneath, what little I have, since it makes the floor marginally more bearable.
“We'll inspect the immune last,” Janus says, straight to business. His voice is a low, musical growl. A charmer. Someone who can bend others to his will with his sharp tongue. “Let's go through the others and see what use we can make of them. Come.” He clicks his fingers imperiously, and one of his bodyguards, a hulking bear shifter with a tattoo on his face, is holding a clipboard.
A clipboard. Like the humans in front of him are part of a fucking shopping list.
The fear inside me quickly saturates itself in anger as well. Obviously it's inhumane. When humans are turned into processed goods like this, there's always going to be an element of disgust.
I'm not at the far end, I'm about a third of the way through, but they start on the side furthest from me. A man. Janus has a casual conversation with his bodyguards like they're just fussing over the quality of the product in question.
“Strong specimen here. Handsome if we get some of that filth off. Maybe put him in one of the Hunts, engineer a story, of course. Audience will probably bet a fortune on him.”
Scratching sounds on the clipboard. Maybe a tick on a list. He moves to each human in turn, holding that degrading conversation with his bodyguards.
Butcher. Hunter. Hunted. Whorehouse. Those are the four I'm hearing. Guess not that many humans are willing to risk their lives for a few thousand dollars.
I wonder if they're not just killed after they “win” a Hunt anyway. The more I listen, the more sickened I become. They skirt over my cage, only paying me a small, smug glance, categorizing the other humans. Turning them into objects, rather than potential living people with dreams. How do they get stolen? Shunted over the borders in crates? Raids through slum areas to find the broken ones? Luring them with false promises into Animusa?
I don't know. Everyone's got a tale. But that's not a tale available to me.
Every announcement is either greeted by blank faces, wails, or flares of defiance – which get beaten down with the loud, brain vibrating clangs when they bash at the cage in punishment. One person who spat in defiance got changed from whorehouse to butcher, which quickly persuaded the rest not to show defiance again, since she broke down crying, sobbing, begging them to rescind the decision.
No chance of that. When the la
st woman Hunter, is sorted, they saunter over to my cage. The bear shifter, the unknown, and Janus, all smiling like Cheshire cats.
Scar-Lip and Barrel are gurning from their positions on the table with their coffee strainer, clearly looking forward to whatever's about to unfold.
“This little immune here happens to be Tarren's little mistress,” Janus says, close enough to the cage to almost press his nose through the squares. If he does, I'm not sure if I'd be able to resist myself trying to break it. “So naturally, I'm inclined to claim her for myself. Most people consider an immune the ultimate reward in terms of their lineage.” He gives me a rather wicked smile, and I have to swallow nervously. “What do you say about that, little immune?”
He expects me to answer him. My mouth opens and closes, all the boldness in me disappearing in the bat of an eyelid. “I, uh,” flushing furiously, I attempt, “could be ransomed instead?”
Janus barks out a laugh. “Ransomed! Ha. That's a joke and a half. Well, that's settled, then. I can't wait to see Tarren's face when he realizes I have his whore.”
“Boss,” the bear shifter next to Janus says, sulky. “Don't we get a turn? Immunes are expensive as shit to fuck. Can we sample the goods?”
The tiger shifter whirls on the bear shifter and slaps him on the cheek. His golden eyes glint. “You dare try to stake a claim on someone I've just taken for myself? You forget your place.”
There's more than a hint of evil in the bear's gaze when he bows to Janus, and says, “Right. My apologies, Janus. Please forgive me for stepping out of bounds.”
Meanwhile, I'm still stinging from the whore statement, angry that he's labeled me as such, and scared because I can't see a way out of this. Just like that, the head honcho's taken me for his own. What's next for me? Being chained to a bed and turned into a baby fuck machine? Locked in a cell?
I want to threaten him. Say that a dragon's wrath will fall upon them all. But I say nothing. Only glare resentfully, a lump in my throat, as they unlock my cage door, yank me out by under my armpits, and bundle me along, after dumping a sack over my head, to wherever Janus intends to place me.
Seducing Two Serial Killers Page 14
