Chapter 17: They Just Felt Like a Bad Idea

Chapter 17

They Just Felt Like a Bad Idea

A few minutes later, we trooped into “the house,” which turned out to be a two-story, sprawling ranch-style thing with ramshackle additions sticking off of it, a lot of peeling paint, and a million grimy windows. Ian had Drew slung over his shoulders, and he seemed to be taking a fair amount of care not to bash his head into anything. He also had the resigned expression of someone who’d done this a few times before.

That actually made me feel a lot better. If they didn’t find my situation all that unusual or worrisome, then maybe everything really would be all right.

“Basement?” Ian asked, interrupting Nate’s flow of chatter, mostly about how he needed to make some more coffee and wondered if it’d be safe to go upstairs and find someone he called Arik.

I thought that might be the shaman, maybe? And I really wanted to know why he’d be afraid of going upstairs. But Nate hadn’t exactly let me get a word in edgewise to ask anything at all since we’d gotten in the car.

Nate cut off mid-sentence to say, “Yeah, I think so. Sorry,” he added, turning to me. “The basement kind of sucks. But if he’s really gone nuts, we can’t have him upstairs. Kids come in and out, you know?”

I did not, in fact, know. “Sure,” I said, and followed them through a large living area and down a hall.

Nate opened a door, revealing a narrow set of stairs leading down into the impenetrable dark. Dark, a dead end, I could be trapped. Locked in there.

No one knew where I was. No one but Drew, and he was insane and unconscious and couldn’t protect me, and if they left me with him I didn’t know what he’d do to me. A warlock, locking me up in the dark.

I stopped dead, my feet stuck to the floor even though every cell in my body screamed at me to run, fucking run, as fast as I could, get away…

“Ash, Ash, hey, look at me! Ian, I think there’s something really fucking wrong with him too. Ash!”

The words came at me like they’d been spiraled down a long, echoing tunnel, hitting me at odd angles and speeds. My breath rushed in my ears, my chest clenched tight, I couldn’t breathe…and then I managed to suck in air, and my eyes half-focused again.

Nate, a couple of feet away with his hands out like he didn’t know if he should touch me or not.

Ian, lips drawn back in a snarl, maneuvering himself between me and Nate, with Nate shoving him out of the way in his turn. He didn’t have Drew over his shoulders anymore.

Drew, fuck, where was Drew?

Something hard at my back.

The wall. I’d backed up against the wall, and I had my whole body plastered to it as if I meant to try to melt into it and disappear.

“Ash? You with me?” Nate asked, dark eyes wide with concern. For me, or because of me? Almost certainly because of me. “The hell’s going on?”

“Can’t—be—” I choked out. “Locked up. Trapped.”

Ian’s face went hard. “Was this asshole keeping you prisoner?” he demanded.

This asshole? Drew. He meant Drew, and the laugh that tore its way out of my too-tight throat came out more like a sob. I looked around, suddenly frantic to see him. I craned my neck and found him lying on the floor a few feet away, where Ian had probably dumped him the second I started freaking out.

Alpha. Drew was an alpha werewolf. He’d survive a drop to a wooden floor.

I looked back up to find Ian and Nate both staring at me expectantly.

“No, he wasn’t, he—the opposite, I—shit, I can’t explain, I’ll sound like I’ve lost my mind.” Because who in their right minds would believe our story, without knowing us, without having any context at all?

Nate snorted and tossed his head like an irritated horse. “Yeah, you look so fucking sane right now, dude. Sorry, sorry,” he said quickly, “that was a low blow. Sorry. Try us, okay?”

I sucked in a deep breath, holding it until spots danced in front of my eyes, and blew it out as slowly and evenly as I could.

“Drew rescued me. We were both prisoners, I guess we escaped together. But he was in better shape than me, and I wouldn’t have gotten out unless he’d saved me. Some kind of—this seriously is going to sound nuts, but I swear it’s the truth, okay? Some kind of weird magical prison, with warlocks experimenting on us. I don’t know how I got there. I have amnesia. And some other things. Nothing dangerous!” I protested, as Ian shifted his weight, his clawed hands flexing. “Bad for me, not for anyone else. Drew started getting—he’s been, like, like his alpha-ness has been turned up to eleven. He needs help. The way he’s been acting isn’t his fault. They did something to him, and I don’t know what, and—”

“Okay, we get it,” Nate cut in, and I stuttered to a stop. “We get it,” he repeated grimly, with a quick, speaking glance at Ian, who had a similarly shocked look on his face. “What the fuck are the odds? Christ. I think we should get Calder down here.”

Calder? Was he the shaman? How many people lived here? And were they all terrifying?

“Go ahead,” Ian said, without moving.

“I meant you!”

“I’m not leaving you alone with them.” Uncompromising. I knew that tone, and I bit my lip, fighting a wave of misery. Drew sounded like that sometimes when he talked to me, when he wanted to keep me safe. God, I hoped I’d hear him sound like that again.

Nate sighed, muttered, and stomped off.

Ian eyed me thoughtfully, one red eyebrow raised, lips pursed. “Warlock prison, huh?” he said at last. “And somehow the two of you managed to get out? You have magic?”

“God, no,” I said, with a shaky laugh that sounded insane even to me. “But Drew’s kind of a badass. We had help, too. Some other prisoners. I don’t know what happened to them, they took off on their own.”

“Huh,” Ian said. Oddly, a half-smile teased at the corner of his lips. He didn’t hold a candle to Drew, of course, but when his expression softened like that, I could see the appeal. No wonder Nate put up with all the grunting and stomping around.

Heavy footsteps, far too heavy to belong to Nate, thumped and creaked on the stairs above us, followed by yet another set.

Two new voices, including one much lower than Nate’s, raspy and rumbling…I’d heard that voice before. I knew it. It belonged to…

The footsteps drew closer, coming down the hall.

And then the biggest, most intimidating person I’d ever seen—with one memorable exception—filled the doorway to the hall and stood there staring at me.

White-blond hair down to his massive shoulders, and a hard-featured, square-jawed face. No fangs, and no claws out at the moment, and not drenched in blood, but…his eyes glowed silver.

And I knew him. I knew him. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been helping us escape. Killing the men who’d imprisoned and hurt and tortured us.

I slumped back against the wall, the fear draining out of me and leaving me heavy and helpless.

“Oh, thank God,” I whispered. “It’s you!”

Nate’s head appeared, craning around Calder, and Ian let out a huff of amused surprise.

“No offense, Calder, but that is not a normal reaction to you,” Nate said.

“Let me through!” Another voice coming from behind the traffic jam in the doorway.

Nate disappeared with an annoyed eep, and someone else pushed past Calder, nudging him with an elbow in a way that seemed mildly suicidal. Calder only grunted, wrapping an arm around him and pulling him close the second he got next to him. Tallish—compared to me, anyway, not Calder—and muscular, with nondescript brown hair and a nice-looking but average face.

But something about him was familiar…

And then it twigged. “You were there too, weren’t you? He was carrying you.”

The guy’s blue eyes went a little distant. “Yeah. That was me.” He tried to move, but Calder pinned him to his side. “Let go, will you? Jesus.” He tugged himself away, Calder reluctantly allowing it. “I’m Jared,” he said. “And you’re safe here. Completely. I was going to call you soon, I’d gotten distracted. We had some trouble, and then we went to freaking Canada—anyway. Long story.”

He’d come close enough to touch. Jared. Who’d been in the same place as me, had been broken enough, like me, to be useless in the escape—but stood here in front of me, looking mostly recovered, at home, safe and sound.

No one else in the world but him could understand how I felt right then.

I lurched forward and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his shoulder. Someone growled, probably Calder, but Jared said something—it didn’t even matter what—and wrapped his arms around me, holding me close.

He leaned his head down, murmuring in my ear, “No worries, all right? No worries.”

I closed my eyes and leaned into him, finally feeling like I might be able to follow his advice.

***

That didn’t last long, unfortunately.

We ended up in the basement after all, but with Jared walking down the stairs right in front of me, it didn’t seem so daunting at first.

Calder carried Drew down the stairs, setting him on the carpet near the wall—a lot more carefully than Ian would’ve, I thought. Drew had been the only one who’d done any damage during our escape other than Calder. I hoped that meant Calder saw him as an ally rather than a threat. I kept shooting glances at him, at his closed eyes and limp limbs. I had to keep telling myself that he was safer unconscious, and that I couldn’t just snuggle up to him and hold him. Not if I wanted to help us both longer-term.

Two more people trooped down the stairs, too, appearing from nowhere in this clown car of a house: a heavily tattooed guy with long blond hair who turned out to be Arik, the mysterious shaman, and a serious, dark-haired alpha named Matthew whom everyone deferred to, it seemed like.

And then they stuck me on an ancient, ratty plaid couch, pulled a bunch of rusty folding chairs out of a closet so they could sit around me, and told me to tell the whole story.

The words stuck in my throat—and then Jared got off his chair, squeezed Calder’s shoulder, and came to sit next to me.

“It’s all right, Ash. Just tell it the best you can. I’ve been where you are,” he added in an undervoice.

And that gave me the courage to spit it all out, in fits and starts and not very coherently, but from beginning to end.

Well, with some gaps. I did tell them we’d been having sex to deal with Drew’s increased aggression and libido, but I glossed over all the details, even though I suspected everyone in the room knew a lot more about werewolf sex than I did.

“…and we kept driving, but Drew kept getting worse. And I found Nate’s website, so, yeah.” I swallowed hard, feeling like a tiny, vulnerable goldfish in a bowl surrounded by cats. Did wolves eat fish? Predators were predators, I figured, and given the number of sets of glowing eyes, plus the two magic-using badasses, I didn’t like my odds if they didn’t like my story. “Here we are,” I finished lamely.

No one said anything for a second, sitting there and continuing to watch me with expressions ranging from surprise to frowns to a neutrality I couldn’t begin to penetrate.

To my surprise, Calder spoke up first. “How did you say you found Nate’s website, exactly?”

His suspicion hurt, and my eyes prickled. God, he’d been there with me. And he doubted me?

“Google. I mean, don’t tell me you’re a Bing user.”

Jared, awesome guy that he was, chuckled softly. No one else cracked a smile.

“Hell of a coincidence,” Calder said heavily. “You said you passed over a lot of other websites before Nate’s. That sounds like an excuse to me. Seems like you might have already known where you were going. And I want to know why.”

The silver glow in his eyes had intensified, going from shimmery to opaque.

“How the hell would I have known about you? You took off and left us there! I didn’t even know your names, let alone where you were from. You were supposed to call us!”

Calder leaned forward, fixing me with a stare that seemed to go all the way through me, piercing me down to whatever ragged bit of soul I had left.

“Someone would have had to tell you.”

That got a reaction from the rest of the room. Nate and Ian both looked horrified, Matthew thoughtful, and Jared started to protest. “Calder, we got them this time, you killed the last of them—”

Fuck, “This time”? The last of them? My blood ran cold, but before I could say anything, Arik interjected with, “They left the facility at the same time as you, and if they’d been in touch with the other faction, wouldn’t they know better than to come here—”

Nate cut him off in turn, and they were all yelling and arguing within seconds, except for Calder, who didn’t yell but argued with the best of them, and Matthew, who sat back silently, pinching the bridge of his nose.

The other faction. This time. I leaned back on the couch, fighting a new bout of nausea. From that and bits and pieces I could pick up from the argument raging around me, not all of the warlocks had died that day. There had been more.

And some of these people thought I might be working with them.

Abruptly, I’d had more than fucking enough. Drew lay unconscious on the floor, maybe dying, because who the hell knew what was happening to his body? He could be having a stroke, or a heart attack, or…I had no idea. They were supposed to do magical healing, for a hefty fee I might add, and instead they were yelling at each other like a bunch of preschoolers.

“Could you all fucking shut up for a second?” I didn’t know I could shout that loudly until the words burst out of me, even rising over Nate’s strident bitching.

Six heads swiveled like they were on strings, and six sets of variously angry, annoyed, or disbelieving eyes fixed on my face.

I knew it had to be glowing red, because it felt all hot and tight. How absurd did I look, all small and blushing and flustered?

But it didn’t matter, and I didn’t quail. Because Drew’s life hung in the balance. I’d been the one to bring him here. He trusted me. My judgment.

God help him.

“Am I your prisoner, or a paying client?” I demanded.

“You haven’t actually paid ye—” Nate began, but Arik cut in with, “Shut up, Nate, for fuck’s sake!” and Jared snapped, “Hey, we don’t need the money as much as we used to, and besides, he was a prisoner too!”

They all glared at each other long enough to give me an opening.

“Everything I’ve told you is true. If we were working with someone, why wouldn’t I have come up with a better cover story for how I found you? And why would I have let Nate hit Drew with his weird purple hand thing—I mean, I asked him to knock Drew out! Why would I want the only person with me who could do any damage to any of you unconscious? It’s not like I’m a threat on my own!”

“We’re assuming anyone can be a threat—” Matthew began, in a tone of authority that Nate completely ignored, interrupting loudly, “Wait, weird purple hand thing? No, seriously, Matthew, can it, this is important!”

Matthew subsided in his chair with a long-suffering sigh and waved at Nate as if to cede the floor.

“What exactly did you see when I whammied him?” Nate demanded, leaning forward, eyes narrowed.

“Not much?” I stammered. “I mean…you waved your hand. There was a little puff of purple light. Drew passed out cold. Should I have seen something else?”

Nate and Arik exchanged a look that raised the hair on the back of my neck. “Calder, you’re sure he was locked in a cell?” Arik asked, very evenly. Too calmly. “In bad shape. Not faked.”

“He smelled like death,” Calder said slowly. I shuddered. He was talking about me. “Not the way the warlocks smelled like death, though. Like someone dying. I don’t think that could’ve been faked. Nothing else they did fooled my senses.”

Arik subsided with a humph, and he and Nate had another one of their weird silent conversations. Extra weird, because their other conversations seemed to be so loud and filled with shouted insults.

“Okay,” Nate said, turning back to me. “Okay. Tell me how you found me—no, I’m not fucking asking about Google or Bing, and anyway they both suck for different reasons, so let me finish. The other search results you skipped over completely. And the ones you looked at and rejected. Why?”

The question was clearly so important to him—and by extension, possibly very important to whether or not they’d believe me—that I really considered it, trying to go beyond not liking the idea of putting Drew’s life in the hands of someone in a pompadour wig (which seemed like a reasonable boundary on its own).

Why had I skipped over them? Okay, the sites that looked defunct, with broken links, that made sense.

But the penis rock man? Maybe it was a fertility symbol. Or he had a sense of humor. I’d nixed him instantly, on whatever pretext I could find.

Why, though? And I had no answer to that whatsoever.

“I’m not really sure, now that I think about it,” I said reluctantly, wishing I could give them something. Anything. “They all seemed wrong. I didn’t want to call them. They just—felt like a bad idea.”

“Huh.” Nate’s eyes lit up, and if anything he seemed pleased. How could something so vague and useless be the answer he’d wanted? “Arik, what do you think?”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, since you’re wrong so fucking often, but I completely agree with you.”

“Agree with what?” Ian asked, sounding as bewildered as I felt. “What am I missing?”

“Nearly everything, as usual,” Arik muttered snidely, and then they were all off again, snarling at each other.

I caught a few snatches here and there.

“If they were fucking with his senses—”

“—doesn’t work like that, Nate, you know that!”

“They were trying to isolate the neural pathways—”

“…warlocks always think they can use standard scientific—”

And I gave up, because none of it made any sense to me.

Jared leaned in closer to me and said, “They’re always like this. Don’t let it bother you.”

“They’re deciding if they’re going to help me or kill me,” I muttered back. “I’m bothered.”

He nudged me with his elbow. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you, Ash. When we came back, they thought the same thing about us, that we might be working with the enemy. They weren’t there. They don’t get it. Watch. Calder’s about to shut them down.”

I had no idea how he knew, because Calder’s ferocious scowl didn’t seem like the expression of someone about to help me. But Jared looked at Calder, and he smiled, and when I glanced back at Calder—well, he was gazing at Jared, and he’d gone…soft. Even the glow in his eyes went a little misty.

It was almost more terrifying than when he’d killed a bunch of people.

“Enough,” Calder said simply.

And silence fell like he’d muted them.

“Ash came to us for help, however he got here,” Calder went on into the ringing quiet. “I think he at least deserves to hear what you’re thinking about his situation. Clearly, and not both of you at once,” he added.

Nate blushed and Arik sat back and rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, fair enough,” Nate mumbled, and then looked right at me and said, “We think you have magic.”