Caged, page 27
“How far away are Vincent and Blake?” I asked.
“Not far. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes behind us.”
Ten minutes was a long time when we were facing the possibility of taking on a kitchen witch. I cleared my throat. “We should wait for them.”
“We don’t have time to wait for them, Ruth could be in trouble.” Liam punched the gas pedal, making the SUV leap forward to emphasize his point.
My heart lodged in my throat, and I gripped the door handle. If I could have made myself let go, I’d have texted Kylie. We really needed that antidote for Liam. Now.
On the upside, his driving meant we arrived at our destination in no time. It seemed like only a few minutes before we were right on top of the red dot blinking on the GPS. My heart skipped a beat, then continued at a faster rate than before. I stared out the windshield at the view illuminated by the SUV’s headlights.
Ruth’s jeep was parked next to an unmarked green car I didn’t recognize. Since May had abandoned her Paw Patrollers vehicle, it was possible the green car was her personal vehicle, and she’d switched so we couldn’t track her. Or, it could be a shifter who was working with May. Someone who’d lured Ruth out here alone.
Or it could be a college kid looking for late night thrills who happened upon a choice parking spot.
I squinted, trying to see if there was anyone inside either vehicle. “I don’t see Ruth.”
Liam’s door slammed, and I jumped. Every nerve ached as adrenaline surged through my body, my heart pounding as I watched the alpha stalk up to the mystery car and try the door. It opened and he leaned inside.
Brenna barked.
I jumped again, wincing as a second adrenaline bath washed through my system on an acidic tide. “Please don’t do that,” I said hoarsely.
Liam jerked open my door. I would have jumped again, but my body didn’t have any adrenaline left to release.
“It’s May’s car,” Liam rasped. “Ruth found her.”
“Blood and bone.” I slid out of my seat to land on the grassy forest floor. “What on earth possessed her to go after her on her own?”
“She wouldn’t.” Liam looked out at the trees, eyes glinting with gold as he scented the air. “She was lured here.”
He was making assumptions again, but I didn’t point it out. My mind insisted on reminiscing about the dream shard I’d faced down the last time I’d been in this forest, and it was making my blood run cold. I flexed my fingers, calling on my magic. Best be ready.
Brenna prowled ahead, scenting first Ruth’s jeep, then the air. A moment later, she headed with purpose into the shadows of the forest, the bright white of her fur making her stand out in the darkness like a ghost. Liam followed her, moving with a surprising lack of noise considering his size and current temperament.
A bloodcurdling scream exploded in the air.
I ran before I made the conscious decision to do so. The scream that had pierced the silence so suddenly ended just as abruptly. I thought I heard the heavy clank of metal slamming a second later, but that sound was quickly followed by the smash of wood hitting wood, splintering as something heavy hit it.
Or someone.
Peasblossom yelped and strained to hold on to my hair as she almost lost her balance. I held up a hand to steady her, but didn’t slow my pace. “Get in the pouch,” I snapped at her.
She smacked my hand away. “I’m not leaving you to fight a kitchen witch alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
Peasblossom snorted. “An alpha who’s a paw’s step away from rabid dog, and a bound shifter.”
I didn’t have time to argue with her. The darkness was much thicker now that we’d moved away from the SUV’s headlights. Only a few thin fingers of moonlight pierced the layers of foliage, but my night vision was as good as Liam’s. Good enough to spot the shack up ahead.
It was small, the size of a miniature barn or a large garden shed, and covered in dead branches. The smell of decaying foliage almost made me sneeze, and I wrinkled my nose to fend it off. Liam was nowhere to be seen—already inside the shack. I held out my hand. “Lumens.”
Pink balls of light burst to life above my palm, and I waved them ahead of me to spill through the open doorway as Brenna followed her brother inside. I was still a few feet away from the threshold when the smell of blood hit me.
Witches, and most other Otherworldly beings, can smell fresh blood, and not just the decaying coppery scent humans could smell. But even without that questionable gift, I would have smelled this blood. It was enough to make me slow down, enough to make me hesitate before approaching the doorway.
“Ruth!”
Liam’s voice drove me to cross the last few steps and enter the shack. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I saw where the smell of blood had come from.
May lay on the moldy wood floor, the gash in her throat responsible for the majority of the blood. It pooled around her in a sticky puddle that belonged in a horror movie along with the rest of the dilapidated building. Her eyes rolled in her head, and her mouth opened and closed, making a wet, sucking sound before her body went limp. Liam knelt on the floor beside her, one hand on her neck in a vain attempt to stop the flow of blood.
“Too late,” he rasped.
I wanted to close my eyes, observe a small, quiet moment to mark the passing of a life. I hadn’t known May, and indeed had considered her a murder suspect for most of the time I had known her. But the loss of life was never something to be taken lightly, or ignored.
I didn’t close my eyes, because Liam’s first exclamation still rang in my ears. And something shiny in the corner of the shack dragged my attention to the reason for his outburst.
The cage that took up one corner of the building was too bright to be steel. Instinct told me it was silver. Instinct, and the fact that it was being used to hold a werewolf prisoner. My stomach tightened as I met the eyes of the wolf inside the cage.
Ruth was a large reddish brown wolf with amber eyes. She ignored me, her full focus on Liam. He rose from the floor beside May, wiping his blood-slicked hands on his jeans. Her gaze burned with an emotion I couldn’t quite identify.
The blood Liam had knelt in made his jeans stick to his knees when he stood, but he didn’t seem to notice as he strode to the cage, one hand rising to grab the lock.
“Wait!” I held up a hand.
Liam stopped, his eyes narrowing. “What?”
I pointed at the floor between May’s body and the silver cage. Liam followed the gesture, frowning at the circle that had been drawn onto the wood with chalk. “Someone worked magic here.” I strode to his side, careful to leave him as much personal space as I could, and flicked my fingers at the silver cage, letting the spell roll out in a wash of silver light. “The cage could be spelled. I need to—”
I froze. Peasblossom leaned closer to my neck, so close it was easy to hear her voice even when she whispered. “Shade?”
It took me two tries to speak past the lump in my throat. “I see it.”
The silver wash of my spell had fallen not just over the cage, but Ruth as well. And she was glowing. Not just her eyes, and not just a reflection of my pink lights or the moon. She was glowing with a vibrant rainbow of colors, a shimmer of magic so thick it seemed like it would stick to my hand if I touched her. That much magic wasn’t just a spell. Not a single spell.
The lump in my throat swelled, making speech impossible. Fortunately, I’d used Vincent’s forensic spell so many times that it came as naturally to me as the spell I used to detect magic. I sent power rolling over the floor like a blanket of fog only Peasblossom and I could see. Smoky shapes rose like macabre flags telling me where there were traces of DNA, identifying the species and sex of the sources of said DNA. And in the air over Ruth, there was the shape of a woman. Tiny flickers of light played around in the smoke.
“She’s a witch,” I whispered.
Ruth snarled at me, then barked so loud the sound hurt the nerves in my arms as they all spasmed at once. She stared me down, the fur on the back of her neck standing straight up, her claws tight against the bottom of the cage. If looks could kill…
And if she really was the kitchen witch, then they might.
Liam took another step closer to the cage. The hairs on my arms and neck lifted as his aura flexed. The air in the small shack thickened, and between the overwhelming scent of blood and the rising power from Liam, it was difficult to breathe. He was trying to get her to shift.
“It’s not working. She’s bound, just like the others.” Liam flexed his hands at his sides, visibly fighting not to open the cage. “She’s a victim.”
“Vincent’s spell suggests otherwise,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and as empty of emotion as I could manage. “His spell says Ruth’s a witch.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I’d feel a lot better if I held a spell ready in case Ruth wasn’t as trapped as we thought she was, but I was also painfully aware of the tight line I was walking. Liam did not want to believe Ruth was the traitor. On a normal day, I’d trust him to withhold judgment and listen to the facts. The addition of the parasite and the exponential increase in testosterone made that…tricky.
“I thought you said kitchen witches could hide their magic from you. If she’s the witch, why isn’t she hiding her magic now?”
I gestured at the silver. “If she’s a beast witch, silver affects her the same as any other shifter. It’s possible she can’t hide because she’s in that cage.”
“If she’s the witch, why is she in the cage at all?” Liam pointed out.
I thought of the slam of metal I’d heard after May’s scream, but before Liam’s violent entrance into the shack. Ruth would have heard us coming. Silver or no silver, she may have put herself in the cage, knowing Liam was on his way and he’d let her out.
My mind whirled, and I stared at Ruth, her figure crackling with magic. Stared at the lights from my own detection spell that screamed the female werewolf was a beacon of magic, and the fading remnants of Vincent’s spell that confirmed she was a witch.
“Hold on,” I said slowly. “Let’s think about this.” I looked toward May. Her throat had been torn out, and it didn’t take a cop to figure out what killed her. Not when Ruth’s reddish brown muzzle looked suspiciously wet. I drew on my magic again, using the same spell I’d used to communicate with Brenna. “Ruth, what happened to May?”
“Let me out,” Ruth snarled.
I motioned toward May to expand my spells. The forensics spell flared, revealing a human shape above May’s body. There was no spark of color to betray magic of any kind on the dead woman.
Ruth made a sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “The witch was here,” she ground out. “She… She took over my body somehow. She used me to kill May, then left me in this cage.”
There was something in her voice that tugged at me. A horror she was trying to smother beneath her anger. My stomach rolled as I tried to imagine what it would be like to have someone take over my body, use me to kill someone and then leave me trapped with the taste of the victim all over my mouth. In my mouth. Bile washed the back of my throat, and I had to swallow twice before I could speak. “Where is she now?” I asked.
“She teleported out of here, you’re too late.” She gritted her teeth. “Now let me out.”
If I’d thought there was any chance of saving my professional relationship with Ruth, I’d have felt more pressure to release her. But she was never going to like me, and right now, I felt a lot more comfortable with silver bars between us.
“What made you come out here?” I asked evenly. “How did you know about this place?”
Ruth’s eyes glowed as her temper rose higher. “I received a call.” She spoke carefully, as if she didn’t trust what she’d do if she raised her voice. “One of my clients was panicking. She said she was terrified of Liam, that Stephen had said he was a danger to anyone who disagreed with him. I convinced her to tell me where she was so I could meet with her, calm her down. This is where she told me to meet her.”
Her voice dropped to a growl. “When I got here, there was no shifter. Only May. And she was terrified. I was trying to get her to tell me what she was doing here, when a woman showed up out of nowhere. She didn’t smell like anything, didn’t look familiar.” She started to look away, then forced herself to meet my eyes. “You know the rest.”
I told Liam what she’d said. He rolled his shoulders, looking from Ruth to May’s bloody corpse, then back again. “Leaving her in that cage will hurt her. Is there any way you could be wrong? About what she is?”
I started to say no, then stopped. There were ways to fool detection spells. Especially if the witch was as strong as I suspected Ruth was. Or, if it wasn’t Ruth, then whoever had framed her.
Liam read my expression, and the energy shimmering around him grew hotter. “You’re not sure.”
I bit the inside of my lip, unable to keep from glancing at Ruth. The wolf was staring at me, and there was unmistakable hatred in her eyes. I was the only thing standing between her and freedom.
“There is a way to know for certain,” Peasblossom said quietly. She tilted her tiny pink face up to look at me. “You could—”
“No,” I rasped. “No.”
“You did it earlier,” Peasblossom reminded me, her voice gentle, but firm. “You can do this.”
“What?” Liam demanded.
“She wants me to open my third eye again.” I couldn’t look at Liam. I couldn’t stand to see the demand I knew would be in his eyes when he found out I had another trick up my sleeve—one I intended to keep there. Whether Ruth was the witch or not, the fact remained that we were standing in a building the kitchen witch had used for magic, the place she’d brought her victims—the place she’d killed May. If Ruth was the witch, then the silver of the cage would interfere with her magic, but it wouldn’t stop it completely. Opening my third eye would leave me painfully vulnerable to nightmares I couldn’t begin to imagine.
Or rather, nightmares I didn’t want to imagine.
“Why won’t you do it?”
I’d expected anger—and there was definitely anger. But there was something else in Liam’s voice too. Genuine concern. A hesitation that said he wanted me to do whatever I could to find the witch, prove Ruth’s innocence, but maybe—just maybe—he wouldn’t ask me to do it if it was too dangerous.
I opened my mouth to tell him about the danger. To tell him how easy it was to become a target when you were so foolish as to open yourself up to two worlds at once with only a tenuous grasp on either. Especially here, especially now. Instead what came out was, “I’ll try.”
For most witches, opening their third eye was as simple as blinking. Most witches trained early on, learned to defend themselves, to anchor themselves in their bodies to fight if something tried to overtake them.
It was different if you’d had your third eye ripped open before you knew you were a witch. When all you could do once it was open was lie there as a parade of creatures danced before you, each one more terrifying than the last. I’d learned fear before I’d learned control, and that had colored my relationship to my third eye, had weakened my ability to control it.
Back then, at least I’d had the bond to my sister to save me. The golden thread tying me to her had the happy benefit of putting up a big “no vacancy” sign for the astral threats.
But that was gone now.
My chest ached with the reminder of the golden thread, no longer connected to anyone. I focused on that pain, used it to drive away the fear of what I was about to do.
I pried open my third eye for the second time that day. I tried to keep it small, a tiny concentrated window like before. But opening it had felt good, the way it felt good to relax a muscle you’ve been flexing too long. It wanted to open wider. To stretch. My control slipped, and my third eye blinked.
Vertigo spun me around, disorienting me and sending me swaying on my feet. It was as though something shoved me upward, lifting me above a curtain I hadn’t known was there. I could see everything. Physical and astral. I blinked, trying to reorient myself.
The astral plane hovered over the physical world like a kaleidoscope lens. Colors were more vivid, and the auras around living things glowed with awe-inspiring rainbows. Even inanimate objects had auras, memories of their creation, and the lingering energy of important events that had occurred around them. There was so much to see.
So much to distract the mind.
Pain stabbed me in the back of my neck. A sharp piercing sensation just above my spine, followed by a feeling of boiling water trickling down my vertebrae…and then nothing. Warm, fuzzy nothing spread out from the wound, stealing control of my body and leaving me frozen, unable to move, to blink, even to speak. I tried to scream, but only a tiny gagging sound made it out of my throat.
“Shade!” Peasblossom screamed. I felt her slide down my shirt to land on top of the pouch, screaming again as she tugged at the zipper. “Bizbee! Bizbee, the gauntlet! Hurry!”
I couldn’t see her pink face, but I felt her grab my shirt. “Shade? Shade! Close your third eye!”
I tried to tell her I couldn’t, but no sound would pass my frozen lips.
Blood and bone, why couldn’t I move? Who’d hit me?
“What’s going on?”
Liam’s voice cut through my panic. I wanted to tell him to calm down, warn him that if the rage in his voice was any indication, he was a hair’s breadth from losing control. If Ruth was the witch, losing control now would be the end of him.
Peasblossom tugged on the pouch as she answered, no doubt urging the grig to hurry up with the gauntlet she’d demanded. “It was a spinner. She stabbed Shade, and if we don’t hurry, she’s going to trap her on the astral plane.”
