“The boss asked me to check on two of the women,” he said, once more pulling up to his tallest height.
The other guard grinned. He was newer, and there was a lecherous bend to his lips. “Check on them, hey?”
The first guard, George, leaned across and smacked the new one. “Never talk to them like that.”
“You called him short stack!”
“I didn’t imply he was going to fuck one of the inmates, dumbass,” George said.
Ernest flushed red, because he hadn’t realized that was what the other guard was implying.
“I won’t be long. Ten or maybe fifteen minutes.” He managed to get the words out without choking on them, but barely. Sex with an abnormal? That would be . . . an abomination of the highest order.
It struck him again that he was being foolish in coming down to this level. Why did he feel the need to check on her now, after all this time? Did he just want to see her in person before she was taken away? Or was part of him worried the boss had the truth of it—that he’d been duped and would pay the price?
Yes, that was the core of it. He was good at reading faces, but in person, not across a screen. He would look her in the eyes and see the truth of her soul, and that would be that.
He would see once and for all that Fiona was exactly as he thought she was, and not the monster Gardreel and the others believed.
5
The invisible claws digging into my skull dissipated into nothing. Was the other one back then? I waited to see if the ghostly sensation I’d been living with for the last year returned.
Like a breeze against my skin, the handler’s fingers curled around my mind. Yes. He was back. I nodded to myself and picked up my pace. Slightly. Every instinct I had screamed at me to hurry, but I couldn’t hurry. I had to be what they wanted me to be. And I needed help to do it. His help. If my handler only knew that I was a good one . . .
He would know if he looked into my eyes.
I nodded at another guard pacing the hall intersection ahead of me but said nothing. They were used to me flitting about the areas we were allowed to roam.
The current of my emotions and who I really was boiled inside me, the waves getting larger, and I had to fight to keep the two sections of my mind separate. One quiet and calm for the handler, the other wild with apprehension.
Each passing second brought me closer to being found out, to being caught. Getting out of here would not be easy, but the moment was now. The Magelore, Peter, had shown me that. But maybe the three of us . . .
Sixteen attempts, sixteen, and he was in a hole in the ground so deep, I wasn’t sure even I could get him out of it.
I gritted my teeth and fought to get my head back on straight. The handler was quiet again, not fully in my head which gave me a little breathing room. But that other person who’d been in my head—I was sure it was a woman—had only been in my head for a moment, but she’d cut through the walls I’d put up. What if I’d been with her from the beginning?
I stopped in my tracks, the realization hitting me like a baseball bat to the head. “I’d be like Easter if I’d been with her.” Fuck, I’d slipped up and used her real name.
“I would never do that to you.”
The voice was soft. I’d never heard it before with my ears, but I recognized it as surely as if he’d spoken to me every day. I turned and found myself looking at a man who barely stood above my belly button. He was just under five feet tall with completely white hair and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. I’d even call them purple in a different light. Round face, round eyes, chubby body with limbs that seemed screwed on. Beautiful, though, like the beauty of a child untouched by the world.
Part of me wondered if I was seeing things. Part of me had thought my handler would look like a troll, a monster in the flesh who’d been willing to destroy a mind for their own purposes.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this beautiful child in front of me.
He pursed perfectly plump lips. “I’ve turned the cameras off. I’d like to speak to you.”
I did a quick glance at the camera to my left, anchored above my head in the hall. No blinking red light. Hot damn, my call to him had worked.
“Why?”
“Because . . . I need to see if the others are right about you. Are you cagey? I see your thoughts every day and they are always about helping people. Keeping them from suffering. A noble cause, and you shine forth a noble light.”
“A noble light?” I repeated the words back to him because I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. Was I asleep? Was this some sort of fever dream from all the sedatives in the food?
His pale face turned a light shade of green. “They’re sedating you still?”
I tipped my head to the side and frowned. There was something under his arm that was . . . moving, wiggling. “Do you think that any of us would be trusted? Even with you in our heads? We are monsters to you, I know that. Do you trust me?”
He blinked and smiled up at me as if that would make what he said next okay. “Oh, not just me. There are many of us that helped to ease you through this transition. You, Peter, and Easter are special. Strong.”
I blinked, not sure I’d heard him right. He’d said Easter, not Esther. Something akin to hope flared in my chest. Would he help me? I’d called him to me, but I hadn’t been sure it would work.
The touch of his fingers in my mind was light, and he was only picking up what I wanted him to. This was better than I could have hoped.
“I would help you with anything. You are a good person.” He smiled. “I would know. There is no darkness in you.”
The thing under his arm squirmed and he put a hand on it, the black butt of it as familiar to me as my own skin. But I asked anyway. Shocked that he would bring it here, down to where the patients were. “What is that?”
“This? It’s a token. It belongs to Easter. It helped us connect with her. To help her the way we helped you. I am taking over helping her. Susan has been far too cruel to her.” He frowned and shook his head
I had never met anyone like him and his powers of mind control were beyond even that of a Magelore, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t beat him at his own game.
He touched something around his neck and I caught a flash of silver.
The wings that Bear gave you.
The thought was there and gone so fast I tried to block him from it, but my guard had dropped and he was quick. Far too quick.
“Who is Bear?” he asked softly, and those fingers in my mind tugged at the memories that wanted to surface. Not hard like the other one. There was no cruelty in him, and for that alone, I would let him . . . help.
I had no doubt he knew who Bear was, but he wanted me to talk. He wanted me to show him that I trusted him.
“Can we talk in my room? I feel exposed here,” I said. It was a risk to trust him, but I had to do it. I needed a friend.
He smiled. “I am your friend. You can trust me. I turned the cameras off in your hallway and room, so we would have privacy.”
He walked at my side, all the way to my room. I sat on my bed and he sat beside me and my thoughts were perfectly schooled. “I would like to meditate with you,” I said softly.
“Of course, that is an excellent idea!” He beamed at me as if I’d told him I was about to blow him.
He closed his eyes. I kept mine open and spoke softly. “What is your name?”
“The name they gave me is Ernest, but that is not my real name.” He gasped and pursed his lips as if he’d said something he wasn’t supposed to.
“You can trust me,” I parroted his words back at him and he relaxed, as did the fingers inside my skull.
“My real name is Eligor.”
The thing under his arm squirmed again. Matte black steel.
“Eligor,” I whispered his name and he shivered, his eyes fluttering open. “I know that name.”
Damn it. I clamped down on my thoughts, keeping them to myself as a chill whispered down my spi
ne. If his name was on point, then I knew what he was, but I would not say the word. Not out loud and not even in my mind. I’d faced his kind before, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to do it again. Still, he was young. Maybe that meant he was malleable too. Maybe it meant I could use him.
I let a slow breath slide out. “I am very well read, you see, on certain subjects. I believe I know who you are. More importantly, I know what you are.”
Slowly his eyes opened. I had leaned in close enough to kiss him, had I any desire to do so. Dark lines drew my eyes to his neck. I lifted a hand slowly and touched his left cheek, turning his face away from mine, baring his neck fully to me. The tail end of a tattoo peeked above the edge of his collar and then swept away, likely straight down his spine. The tip of it looked like feathers.
A tattoo matching my own.
“I have a mark like that,” I said, my heart rate spiking to where even I couldn’t control it. “Have you seen it?” Mine was a tattoo; I doubted his was, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the similarities to my benefit.
Eligor shook his head slowly, his eyes widening. “No. That can’t be.”
“Have you not seen me naked when I meditate?” Shocking if he hadn’t looked. His cheeks flushed.
“I’m not like that. I don’t look at you like that.”
I breathed in, and with that breath, I tasted fear in the air. A smile slid over my face. “Eligor, I like you. I want to trust you. I realize that you could have destroyed my mind, like what happened to Easter.” I waited for him to correct me on her name and when he didn’t I went on. “By all accounts, I should hate you for holding me here. For watching my every move. For caging me. But I don’t. I should, but I don’t. Because you kept me from losing myself.”
The waves inside of me crashed against the shore, demanding action, demanding that this was the time and the moment. I’d waited long enough and every instinct in me was rising to the surface.
“I can see your soul,” he whispered.
That was interesting. “I don’t think I have a soul, Eligor. Not with my past.”
“Everyone has a soul.” He frowned as if I’d said something to upset him. “Even abnormals.”
I raised my eyebrows, his admission as shocking as anything else. “You don’t want me to think my past is not my past any longer? You are saying that I am an abnormal?”
His jaw opened and he stuttered. “I didn’t mean—”
“I won’t tell.” I smiled, the closest I’d come to a real smile in this place. “After all, who would believe me? I’m not supposed to believe I am anything but a crazy human who lost her mind to drugs and found herself locked up here for her own good, right?”
We sat there and he stared into my face as if he were trying to read a book in which all of the words were jumbled. Even though it didn’t make any sense to him, he was trying. He was trying so hard to make me a better person than I was.
“And what do you see when you look at my soul?” I lifted my hand and cupped his face between my fingers and thumb.
“I see fire,” he whispered. “You burn bright, your soul is like nothing I’ve ever touched before. Destruction and creation in one. It is . . . mesmerizing.”
Tears filled those strange blue eyes and his whispered confession was all it took to break the last of the barrier. Words tumbled from him. “I don’t like it here. I’m always afraid. They hurt the others. Like Easter. She was hurt so much, and I didn’t know. I would have tried to stop them!” A cry slid out of him and I circled an arm around his shoulders.
The tide turned, and the power between us shifted. His thoughts no longer felt like fingers gripping my mind but like the wings of a bird. Frantic. Afraid. Alone. Bits and pieces of why he was afraid filtered through our connection, and it made me understand why he’d come to me now, of all times. I saw the boss he feared, who was more powerful than any of his kind I’d encountered before. And that was saying something.
I squeezed his shoulders tightly and took the leap into the abyss with a frail rope to hold me if I fell. “Are you going to help me escape?”
“How?” The question was asked with difficulty. “I can’t even help myself.”
“Let me guess, your boss is thinking of terminating me? That he doesn’t trust me?”
He gasped and his eyes filled with tears. “Yes, I think so.”
“And when they do that? You die as well?”
His lips trembled. “How do you know? How could you possibly know?”
I tightened my grip on him. “I know your name, Eligor. I know what you are. I have hunted your kind before, and I have killed them.” I bit the words off as the current swept over the banks of the river, the rage rising.
“You’re going to guide me out of this place,” I said softly, pushing the intent into his mind, backward through our connection.
He nodded slowly and then faster as if it were his idea. “Yes. I can do that.”
“You see, now that I know what you are, I understand how this works. I understand the ties that bind your kind and mine. You are going to help me get out of this shithole. And you are coming with me.”
He would have the information I needed to find my boy.
His jaw flapped. “I’m . . . coming with you?”
I nodded. “Wait here. I’m going to gather two others and then we will go. It will be our best chance to work together.”
He slowly nodded. “I can guide you if you get lost.”
“Don’t leave this room.” I stood and he didn’t move. I held a hand out and he put his hand in it as if we were making a pact. I grimaced. “Give her to me.”
“Her? The gun?”
“She’s mine; she was always mine.”
“But she is bonded to Easter.” The confusion in his voice was almost comical, but he handed her over to me. My gun. The gun I’d sent with Easter to help her on a journey into grave danger because we were friends and I’d wanted her to succeed. A loan, it had been a loan and these idiots thought Easter had bonded with the gun.
Dinah, bound up with the soul of my long-dead sister. She was a sidekick like no other.
“Hello, lovely,” I said as the grip slid into my palm. She shivered but said nothing. I tipped her up and saw the wad of wax jammed into her barrel. “That blow out with the first shot?”
She shivered twice for yes, and I turned from Eligor. “Stay.”
Things were about to get . . . messy. We were getting out of here one way or another. My mind was no longer bound with having to be careful. The plans I’d been running through whenever I meditated came fully alive.
I stepped out of my room and walked down the hall to Cowboy’s room first. His door was unlocked and I pushed it open. He was still flat out on his face.
He would have to be last, then.
I paused, considering Easter.
She is broken beyond repair. You can’t save her. Eligor’s voice was soft but audible in my head. It is forbidden to speak to our charges. We are not to bond with them even though our lives are twined and the fate of one becomes the fate of the other.
“Well, that other one had no problem speaking to me and apparently neither do you.” I turned away from Cowboy’s room and strode toward the stairwell that would lead me down to Peter’s lair. A few turns of the hall and I was there, approaching the guard. He smiled when he saw me, and I was glad it wasn’t George. I would save him to the last to kill, and not because he was a nice guy. No, he was one of the worst.
“I’m going to check on him. I feel bad that I got him into trouble earlier.” I kept my voice low and penitent.
“How you survived out there is beyond me,” the guard said. He didn’t have a nametag on, and he just waved me down the stairs. I hurried, skipping stairs where I could, all but running down them.
Be careful! Eligor’s warning caught me off guard and I nearly fell.
“Shut up!” I snapped.
Sorry, you were running so fast! I wasn’t sure you’d be okay!
> “That you, George?” Peter called out. “I’m being good. Honest.”
“I’m not. Keep it quiet, Dinah,” I said as I lifted Dinah and sighted down the barrel of the gun. The chains that held Peter exploded on his left side as I squeezed off the first round, the boom muffled with her built-in silencer. The thick steel door should’ve blocked any sound. The second round took the right and he was free except for a bit of chain dangling from each wrist.
“Fucking hell, you could have warned me!” he snapped.
“Can they see through your eyes?” I asked.
“Shit. Maybe.” His eyes snapped shut.
Awesome. I grabbed his hand and dragged him up the stairs.
“What happened to meeting tonight?” he asked as he hurried after me, navigating the stairs easily even with his eyes closed. Of course, he was a creature of the night so that worked in his favor.
“A new player,” I said.
“Who?”
We reached the top of the stairs and the guard turned toward me, his eyes widening as I lifted Dinah.
“Me,” Dinah said as I squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught him between the eyes and dropped him backward like a tree falling. I bent and scooped up the key cards on the guard, the Taser, and a set of vehicle keys that looked promising.
“Never liked Chevrolet much, but it will do.” I tossed them in my hand and then tucked them into my pants pocket.
“Dinah, nice to have you back,” I said.
“Bitch, where the hell have you been, fucker?” she snapped, shivering in my hand as I led the way back to my room. “Seriously, I’ve had wax jammed in my barrel for a motherfucking year!”
“I didn’t know you were here,” I said, checking around a corner before tugging Peter after me.
No alarms had gone off yet, but it wouldn’t be long.
Two more corners and we’d be back in my room.
I checked the next hall and jerked backward. “Fuck.”
Oh . . . that felt good to say out loud.
“What?” Peter was right up against my back and he took a deep breath. “Shit, is that Easter?”
“Yes.”
A Savage Spell (The Nix Series Book 4) Page 5
