Chapter 9
What does a witch do when she’s locked in a paranormal prison cell for over three hours without the use of her badass magic?
She pulls and kicks at the bars and screams, that’s what.
“Motherfrackers!” I yelled as I kicked at the bars again. “We had a deal!”
The iron rattled under my boot. Nothing else happened. Figured. If someone was going to imprison me, the least they could do was provide information and maybe something to eat.
“They’re gone,” said Iris next to me.
I turned toward my Dark witch friend. Somewhere around hour two, she’d apparently accepted our imprisonment and entered whatever strange Dark witch goth meditation state she naturally lived in.
I, meanwhile, had gone through anger, bargaining, pacing, more anger, and what I was pretty sure had briefly become interpretive prison rage.
With her fingers pinched together carefully, Iris pulled on something and held it up.
“What is that?” I asked her, moving away from the bars.
“A strand of blonde hair,” she answered. “Allison’s.”
“Looks like they missed it,” I said, glancing around the spotless cell. Which felt weird now that I really looked at it. Prison clean wasn’t normal clean. This looked scrubbed. Purposely scrubbed, like someone had gone through every inch and made sure nothing stayed behind.
Nothing except apparently one stubborn blonde hair.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked. “Souvenir?”
Iris flipped open Doris, her album, and carefully placed the strand on a new page. “Yes. But I think with this I can figure out what poison her sister used. Or Ruth can. Anyway, it’ll help with Darian.”
My pulse throbbed. “Because whatever Addison did to her sister, she also did to my kid.” I hated saying it out loud. Hated hearing it. Because saying it made it real. It made Darian lying on the couch shivering suddenly slam back into my brain hard enough my chest tightened.
Tiny fingers. Tiny gorilla noises. Marcus holding him. The shifting. The shaking. The way his little body couldn’t settle.
Iris looked at me. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“Don’t we?” I turned and stared at the bars. “She’s just as nuts as her sister. This is payback.”
“But why kill her sister?” asked Iris after a moment.
Now that was the question I’d kept playing around in my head for the past three hours. “I don’t know.”
And that was the worst part. Because revenge? Revenge I understood. Addison blaming me. Hating me. I got that. Showing up in Hollow Cove carrying years of anger and grief and deciding I deserved to suffer? I got that too.
It was crazy. Psychotic. But understandable psychotic.
Poisoning your own twin sister? That lived somewhere else entirely.
I leaned against the stone wall. Cold pressed through my sweater. “Twins are supposed to like each other.”
“Not always,” said Iris.
“Okay, fine. Tolerate each other.”
“No.”
“Exist beside each other peacefully?”
“Also no.”
I looked over. “You’re weirdly anti-twin.”
Iris pressed the thin plastic sheet over Allison’s hair and leaned back to look at me. “My cousins were twins.”
“And?”
“One tried to kill the other over some Dark warlock boyfriend,” said Iris. “She got caught, but her twin was never the same again.”
I snorted. “No kidding.”
Silence settled around us again. Somewhere deeper inside Grimway, something metal slammed hard enough to echo through containment. A distant yell followed. Then quiet.
I gritted my teeth. I hated this place. I hated everything about this place. The walls. The magic suppression. The smell. The way time moved strangely.
I hated being trapped, but I didn’t regret coming here because now we had real information. True information. We had the truth that Addison killed her sister and we had, hopefully, the source of whatever poison she’d used.
“How long has it been?” I asked, looking around.
Iris checked her cell phone. “Three hours and seventeen minutes.”
My foot bounced against the stone floor. Nervous foot bouncing usually meant one of two things—problem solving or emotional collapse. And right now? Could go either way. “They cleaned this place.”
Iris lifted her eyes. “What?”
“The cell.” I motioned around us. “You noticed it too.”
“Yes. They didn’t want anyone to know about how Allison died.”
I nodded. “Because they think it’s contagious.”
Iris pressed her lips together. “Do you think she knew you’d come here and get trapped?”
I thought about it. “Maybe. But I don’t think she thought me stupid enough to try it.
” And, apparently, I was just the right amount of stupid.
Not full stupid. Not “lick the glowing cursed artifact” stupid.
More like emotionally compromised mother stupid, which felt unfair because that kind came with very little warning and a lot of adrenaline.
I’d walked right into Grimway because my son was sick, and Addison had practically handed me a trail of breadcrumbs.
“So, what’s the plan?” Iris asked.
I looked down the dark corridor. “Well, I’d hoped to see the guards’ snickering faces back by now. Maybe try something that didn’t require any magical skill.”
Iris laughed. “A Beverly something?”
I smiled at her. “Maybe. She barely ever uses her magic and gets everything she wants.” But there was also the issue where I didn’t look like my sexy aunt right now.
I looked like a worried mom. My hair had done that thing where stress made it cling to my face in sad little pieces, my sweater had a smear of something from Darian’s elixir on the sleeve, and I was pretty sure one of my boots still had festival mud on it.
Beverly could walk into a prison cell, toss her hair, call a guard “darling,” and somehow leave with the keys, a marriage proposal, and possibly ownership of a small island.
I’d try the same thing and probably get offered a pamphlet about emotional regulation.
Something else occurred to me. “They say this prison is escape-proof. Right? But we managed to escape with Marcus only because the wards were temporarily lowered.”
Iris nodded and pushed herself back up. “That’s true. So, what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” I said, hitting my thumb on the cold bars. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do again. We need to find the wards. The last time we were here, they were near the gate to the sewer system.”
“You want to go through the sewers again?”
“No.” I grinned. “We came in through the front doors, and we’re going to leave through them. There’s got to be a source of the wards near them.”
“Okay,” said Iris. “And you think you can dismantle the wards?”
No. “Yes,” I told her, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “With a bit of luck and physical strength, I think we can manage to disable them temporarily. Enough so we can get the hell out of here.”
Iris studied me for a second too long, which told me she absolutely read through some of my bullshit. “That was not your confident voice,” she said.
“I have several confident voices.”
“That was your panic voice wearing a hat,” she added with a smile.
I glared at her. “Fine. Maybe I’m not completely certain. Maybe I’m operating on instinct, maternal rage, and one half-formed magical theory I came up with while trapped in a prison cell that smells like wet stone and emotional damage.”
The bars gave off a faint hum beneath my fingertips, a cold metallic vibration that traveled up my arm and made the tiny hairs at the back of my neck stand on end.
The magic wasn’t just in the bars. It threaded through them, layered and old, folded into the iron like someone had taught the metal how to remember every prisoner it had ever held.
“All right then.” Iris exhaled. “So… the only question now is… how do we get out of this place first?”
I looked at the cell door. “We pick the lock.”
Iris looked at the thick iron lock built into the cell bars. “Do you know how to pick locks?”
“No.”
“Do you have lock-picking tools?”
“No.”
“Then when you say we, you mean…”
I gave a one shoulder shrug. “You.”
Iris cocked a brow. “I don’t pick locks either.”
“You’re a Dark witch.”
Iris gave me a look. “That’s not a skill set.”
“It totally is,” I told her. I gestured to her bag. “Don’t you have something in there that could help?”
Iris opened Doris again, flipping through pages filled with scraps, pressed flowers, small bits of thread, strange stains I had never asked about, and enough deeply concerning objects to make the Gray Council collectively develop stress hives. “I may have something useful,” she said.
I looked over. “You have lock picks?”
“No.”
“Tiny prison saw?”
“No.”
“Acid?”
“No.”
“Explosives?”
Iris gave me a look.
I shrugged. “I’m brainstorming.”
She flipped another page. Then another. Then another. “Oh,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“I forgot this was here.” She pulled something free.
I blinked. “You brought a screwdriver to prison.”
“A small screwdriver.”
“It’s a screwdriver.”
“I use it for Doris.”
“Your haunted scrapbook needs maintenance?”
“She’s sensitive.”
“Of course she is.” I stared at the tiny flat screwdriver sitting in Iris’s hand. Then I stared at the bars. Then the lock. Then the bars again.
“What?” asked Iris.
“I have an idea,” I told her, running it through my head. “I’m not picking the lock.”
Iris frowned. “You’re not?”
“I’m removing the door.”
Iris blinked once. “Excuse me?”
I crouched near the hinges. Old iron. Big and solid and heavy. But prison doors still needed hinges. And hinges still needed screws.
“Okay,” Iris said slowly. “I hate that I think this might work.”
“Right?” I grabbed the screwdriver. “Hold the door steady,” I whispered. I shoved the tiny screwdriver into the first hinge screw… and turned.
Nothing.
“Come on,” I hissed.
Nothing.
“Move.” I adjusted my grip and pushed harder.
The screw gave suddenly.
My knuckles slammed directly into cold iron.
Pain shot through my hand. “Motherfracker.” Then I grabbed the screwdriver again. Slowly, carefully, the screw turned. Once. Twice. Then it moved.
“Holy crap,” I whispered.
“It’s working,” Iris breathed.