Chapter 34

34

EVANGELINE

C onsciousness came slowly and unpleasantly. My head throbbed, a relentless ball of pain growing and shrinking in my skull. My mouth tasted strongly like bile. Where my magic should have been, there was nothing. Just a void in my chest. I tried to reach out to the magic around me, but I couldn't feel it at all. I swallowed hard, then immediately regretted it as the bile burned my throat. Okay. I had to stay calm and take stock of the situation. Panicking wouldn't get me anywhere.

I felt hollowed-out and weak. The giddy rush of power that had overwhelmed me was well and truly gone, but it seemed like that horrible spiky thing that had taken me over was gone too, or at least dormant. My chest ached like a bruise that had been pressed, not a fresh raw wound.

The room was pitch black, cool, and humid as hell. It smelled faintly musty, with a tang of old blood. I was in a chair, my arms cuffed behind my back. When I tried to move, I discovered my ankles were restrained too. Frustrating, but not surprising. The restraints keeping my feet in place were cold and solid. Metal, not zip ties or rope. Built into the chair, maybe? Running my fingers over the little bit of the chair I could reach didn't tell me as much as I would have liked. It felt like the chair was made of wood, but when I tried to dig my nails in, they couldn't find any purchase on the surface. Something strong, then? Figured that I wouldn't have enough luck to get chained to something made out of shitty, flat-pack pine. Vampires probably didn't decorate their secret dungeons with stuff from Ikea.

Behind me there was a creak of metal—hinges? A lock?—and light flooded the room. The sudden brightness made me feel as though a spike was being shoved through my head, but I forced my eyes to remain open, anyway. I didn't know how long I'd have visibility, and I needed to use it. The room around me was made of grimy stone, and there were traces of blood still on the flagstones at my feet. I was restrained in a chair of age-blackened wood that looked sturdy as iron. Thick brackets made out of darkened metal were bolted into the legs and floor, keeping the chair from moving if I tried to squirm and scoot it around. The cuffs around my ankles were built into the chair, and the metal was easily half an inch thick. I bit the inside of my cheek. Having information was good, I reminded myself, even if it was shitty, shitty information.

Don't panic.

"Finally awake, I see," a deep voice said behind me. I tried to crane my head around to see who was talking, but the chair back was too high. "You've been out for some time. I suppose without access to your magic, you recover just as slowly as any other human would."

I thought about what Gabriel's mother had told me: never let them see your weaknesses. Footsteps rang out on the flagstones, and I frowned a little. Huh. Gabriel's father paced a slow semicircle around me, pausing when we were face to face.

"You're looking good, considering the last time we met I nearly killed you. It's funny, every vampire I've met normally walks silently," I told him with my most annoyingly patronizing smile. "Which means you're walking louder just for dramatic effect. Do you think stomping around is going to help you intimidate me? Because I've seen kindergarteners try that same method."

He gave me a stony look, but a muscle in his jaw jumped just a little. Most people probably wouldn't have spotted it, but I'd gotten pretty good at reading Gabriel's micro expressions, and his father's were just barely more subtle.

"Do you think irritating me will help you?" he asked flatly.

"No, but it's fun."

His hand whipped out and cracked hard against my cheek, throwing my head to the side. The entire side of my face blossomed with pain, and I tasted iron. One of my teeth must have cut the inside of my cheek. I spat out a glob of saliva and blood onto the floor.

"I've always been fond of magic suppressant cuffs," he said calmly, adjusting his jacket. "Quick and effective. Definitely worth the price for anyone who needs to restrain one of your kind. The same manufacturing process as the wards on the sanctum of my Tranquility Pavilion but much more portable. I'm shocked you fell for that, by the way. It seems that curse really did a number on you."

"What did you do to me?" I asked. He had no real reason to tell me, but I was banking on his ego. Guys like him always liked having an excuse to gloat, especially at a woman's expense.

There was a mean little spark in Roland's eye. He took the bait. "I used a rather elegant little artifact my lady wife left behind when she departed. Iskra was something of a collector, you see. The blade was made by witch-hunters. When used on a witch, it imparts a curse that acts as a sort of parasite. It feeds on the target's magic, twists it, turns the witch against itself. It climbs into the witch's mind, makes the witch isolate itself. Usually it works over a matter of weeks, making the target easier to pick off. Don't worry, it's quite dormant while your power is locked away."

I hissed out a breath through my teeth. If the curse fed off the host's magic, and I had more power than I knew what to do with… No wonder it had gotten to me so quickly. In a matter of hours, I'd turned on everyone around me. The sound of Marcus's fingers breaking replayed in my mind, along with the noise Theo's skull had made when it hit the fireplace. I couldn't let myself think about the look on Gabriel's face, or I'd lose what little composure I was still managing to hang on to.

The slap had worsened my headache, and the harsh light in the room wasn't helping. "Do you want to gloat some more? Maybe grow a mustache so you can twiddle it like some evil supervillain? Or can we just get on with things and skip to the part where you tell me what you want?" I wasn't exactly proud of it, but there was a tiny little part of me—the part that had read countless adventure books as a kid and had slunk around the house trying to find closets that led to magical worlds or mysteries to solve—that was pretty excited about actually getting to hear a villainous monologue. It was a teeny, tiny part of me, though. The rest had the sort of splitting headache that made me want to take my brain out and run it through the dishwasher, and had absolutely no interest in indulging Lord De Montclair's ego. In times of stress, I resorted to sarcasm, and I thought it was reasonable that I was pretty fucking stressed.

He leaned in close, bracing his hands on the arms of the chair. I could smell the blood on his breath, and I would've been willing to bet anything that it wasn't synthetic or animal. "I want to know what makes you tick. I want to find out exactly how your magic works before I tear it out of you and return it to where it truly belongs."

"Where, exactly, do you think it belongs?"

"In vampires. The creatures who were birthed from it. The true heirs of its power. You're corrupting it, keeping it from those for whom it was always meant. Magic created us so that it could live in us, feed us, and make us as powerful as we deserve." His voice was getting unsteady, and something manic glimmered in his eyes. I didn't know if cult shit was better or worse than a classic power grab, but I suspected I was going to find out.

"Huh," I said, then I reared back as much as I could, and head butted him in the nose. The pain in my head was agonizing, but it was worth it to hear the crunch of his face under my forehead. He reeled back with a howl, clutching his bleeding nose with one dainty hand.

"You insolent little bitch," he snarled.

"Magic didn't create vampires," I said. "Witches created you, and it was a fucking accident."

Lord De Montclair threw himself forward, slamming a hand into the back of the chair right next to my head. It splintered under the blow, and the chair jolted backward, crashing to the floor. The sound was horrible; a groan of tortured wood, and a shriek of metal and stone. My head was thrown back against the chair, and I saw stars. I let out a cry of pain as my elbows hit the floor with the full weight of my body and the heavy-ass chair on top of them, crushing the joints into the stone. It was actually pretty lucky that I had the cuffs on. The thick metal protected my wrists and kept the chair from smashing my hands.

I let out pained, gasping breaths through bloody teeth. More information, I reminded myself. I had more information. I ‘d learned that Lord De Montclair was strong enough to crack the wood of the chair and to break it free from the brackets that kept it anchored to the floor. If I craned my head back, I might be able to see more of the room, but I didn't like the idea of stretching out my throat like that with an enraged vampire in the room.

Gingerly, I tried to shift my elbows. They both radiated pain that jolted up and down my arms. Were the bones broken, or would I just be severely bruised? Was the joint dislocated? I couldn't move enough to tell.

In this new position, my blood flowed to my head. My skull felt like it was about to burst. What did a concussion feel like? I wished I'd bothered to brush up on more first aid stuff, but I'd been a little busy with other things. I felt woozy, and I was having a pretty hard time getting my eyes to focus on the ceiling, which seemed like a not-great sign.

Above me, the vampire lord's blurry shape ran a hand through his hair, slicking the strands that had fallen over his high forehead back into place. "We'll continue our conversation when you're feeling more cooperative," he said.

"Can't wait," I croaked.

Footsteps, and then he was out of sight.

Once I heard the creak of the hinges again, I tilted my head back as far as I could. I could see the fuzzy upside-down shape of a thick, metal vault door, and Roland De Montclair's silhouette disappearing through the doorway. I closed my eyes for just a moment, trying to get some relief from the way the harsh light made it feel like someone was stabbing me in the frontal lobe by way of my retinas.

The man who I'd thought was a double agent, someone who might be on our side, had knocked me out and dragged me in here. I'd maimed the man who taught me everything I knew about magic. I'd killed Theo—someone my best friend had been making increasingly moony eyes at. Thank fuck they were a vampire so it wouldn't actually stick, but still… I didn't know if there was any coming back from that.

Gabriel, who was loyal to a fault, and had seen me kill one of his best friends. He cared about me; I knew that. Hell, he probably cared a lot more than he should have. But Theo was his family, and I had just…

Theo had looked so small, sprawled on the floor like that. I'd done things I wasn't proud of before, and I'd hurt people over the years, but it had only ever been in self-defense. It had never been out of anger—not until now.

My eyes stung. I had found something good, and I had destroyed it. I had absorbed the power two people had died to save for me, and I had lost it. I was alone, I was cold, and I was terrified. I wanted to go home. I wanted someone to fix it. I wanted to turn back time, undo the hurt the curse had caused.

It hadn't just been the curse, though, had it? The curse had made me say those things, but I'd been the one who'd thought them. It had watered the seeds and grown them, but I had been the one who planted them in the first place.

The lights clicked off, plunging the room into glorious, blessed darkness. I closed my eyes and cried, breathing raggedly. I didn't let myself sob. I didn't let myself make any noise at all.

Never let them see your weaknesses.

Lying there in the cold and the dark, I cried myself out. My head throbbed, and I knew that it was foolish, a waste of water, to let myself cry, but I didn't care. It helped. Even with the pain, my head felt clearer, lighter. I took deep breaths of the musty dungeon air.

Wait. Something felt different. I tried to see past the pain, to focus my senses on what had changed. It was damn near impossible, but I kept trying. The sensation was faint, barely there at all. Deep within me, in the place that was usually filled with the warm glow of magic, was the tiniest little flicker of energy. It was barely a spark where I'd gotten used to a bonfire, but it was something.

I huffed out a tiny laugh, which was a mistake. It sent another roiling mass of pain through my head. Vampires and their egos , I thought. I'd seen anti-magic cuffs in a museum Marcus and I had visited during my apprenticeship. The cuffs had been on display in their own case. A few of the runes on them had been scratched through, and according to the plaque, that had been enough to give the witch a chance to escape.

Lord De Montclair had been so sure that pissing him off wouldn't help me out of this mess. Well, that showed what he knew. He'd thrown me back against the rough stone floor, and that hard, jagged stone against the cuffs must have been enough to scratch one of the engravings that made his goddamn expensive cuffs work. For the first time since I'd woken up, I didn't have to focus quite so hard on not panicking.

Now, I just had to focus on gathering my magic faster than the curse could turn it against me. I was a time bomb, and I had just started ticking.

***END OF PART ONE***

Soulbound Shadows Part Two is available here .