Chapter 49
Lionel
Duct tape was awesome. I’d once had this backpack I picked out from the hand-me-down box at the orphanage, and by the time I got to my second year at the Collegium, it was mostly made out of duct tape.
It had still been good, but I’d thrown it out because my roommate had complained that it gave him nightmares.
I don’t think he had an issue with the duct tape though.
Duct tape was about to become something that would give me nightmares. If I lived long enough to dream again.
I felt the tape cutting into my bound wrists and ankles as I came to, sort of achy all over, feeling stiff because I was taped tighter than I’d ever taped that backpack.
I had a sense that I was indoors, but it smelled here, smelled so bad.
I knew exactly what I was smelling from all my experience as a consultant, and it was death and decay.
Someone was talking. I couldn’t quite make out the words, and my eyes wouldn’t focus.
I had no idea what kind of horse tranquilizer Sexy Mitch had stuck me with, but boy, it was effective.
I probably shouldn’t call him Sexy Mitch anymore. Clearly, he was Crazy Motherfucker Mitch. Was he the one talking? I tried to turn my head toward the source of the noise.
“Wake up!”
Huh. That wasn’t Mitch. Too desperate, too…scared. I needed to be scared. Fear was good at keeping people alive. I needed adrenaline. Adrenaline would wake me up.
“Oh, fuck, just… Man, he’s going to come back any minute now. Wake up!”
I told my brain to listen to that voice.
My brain deigned to inform me that I would not be in this situation—which was a pretty fucked-up situation even without knowing all the specifics—if I’d just stayed in bed with Lucy.
Fuck my brain. What good was a brain if it didn’t even give you the adrenaline to be scared for your life when you really needed it?
Blinking and sort of rotating my head to help me focus, I tried to look at the speaker again. My eyes decided to cooperate, to a point.
He was the smith from earlier today—yesterday.
He still had his eyes magicked purple, but cold sweat had made his makeup run and smudge.
There was desperation in those purple eyes.
I couldn’t quite feel the fear, but I knew I had to get him out of here, and not as a corpse.
There was a pretty deep cut on his left cheek, and the blood had gotten all the way to his collar before drying there.
He was bound like I was, but he’d been here longer.
Here. I looked around. There were fluorescent lights above that blinded me. I was on the ground, which was tiled and bleached clean, but I had the sense that it was filthy in so many other ways.
I focused on the tiles. They had been carved with warding runes; not amateur work but professional-grade warding.
The wards were meant for containment, like something you’d see in exam rooms at the Collegium or in holding cells for magic users.
Unless I could overload them, using magic to solve this mess I had gotten myself into wasn’t an option.
I huffed, straining against the duct tape and the sluggishness.
There was a counter I couldn’t really see tucked against a wall, and a thick plastic curtain separated the tiled area from the rest of wherever we were.
I saw wards on the curtain as well, though the waves of the plastic distorted them.
“Come on, you awake finally?” the smith asked.
“Can’t…magic,” I said. I’d meant to share my findings about all the warding with him, but that was more than I was currently capable of. My tongue felt swollen and stiff, like a lump of dried meat.
“Yeah, the place is warded. Look around. Some heavy-duty stuff. I think my old boss did some of them.”
“Boss?”
The smith looked at me. “He taught me how to run a business. Vanished a few weeks ago, but I got a text saying it was a family emergency and he was staying with his sister for a while.” He ground his teeth.
“I don’t think he ever left Brunswick. Who knows you’re here?
You’re with the cops, right? He pretended to be one.
He wanted to know about a coin and got really interested when I mentioned I’d talked to you.
Tell me the real cops are on their way to get us out of here, please. ”
Shit. “We need to get out ourselves.” My words came out slurred. “No one’s coming. He really is a cop.”
The smith stared at me. “That’s a joke, right? Tell me you’re joking. That guy is one of you?”
“Not one of me, but a cop. Help me get the tape off.” I shuffled over to him as best as I could with bound arms and legs.
There was a drain set in the floor right by my head.
I emphatically did not want to think about what the drain was for.
Or why it was all tiles in here. Easy-to-clean tiles, tiles you could bleach.
“You can’t,” the smith said.
As he spoke, a chain around my ankle snapped tight and stopped my glacial progress.
“Shit.”
And as if the situation weren’t bad enough already, I heard footsteps.
“No, no, no, no, no…”
The smith’s voice broke when his tears started flowing, and I couldn’t even blame him.
The footsteps grew closer, like a bomb ticking down to zero, and then the curtains rattled open.
There he was, Crazy Motherfucker Mitch, standing there outlined in his butcher’s costume, complete with boots and gloves and safety glasses.
My brain, still not on board with getting survival mode going, was letting me know that he’d look great in that for a Halloween couples costume with me as a bloody corpse.
Seemed like gallows humor really did die last.
What bothered me was that I had no idea how Brunswick PD had missed this.
I shouldn’t be here. I didn’t want to die, oh sweet gods, I didn’t want to die, not before telling Lucifer I wouldn’t let him use me like that, damn it.
I was worth more than one night of pleasure, and it had been…
nice. I wanted to tell him that, even if it made me pathetic.
“Lionel,” Mitch said. “You’re awake finally.”
The smith was crying quietly while pressing his body against the wall opposite the curtain. I heard a chain rattle. He was duct taped and shackled same as I was, magical peas in a heavily warded pod.
When Mitch looked at me with his bloodlust barely hidden behind his eyes, something odd happened.
I had a sort of out-of-body experience. I left my body, and then I was looking down at myself, scrawny-assed me cowering on the bleached-clean yet filthy floor, being looked down on by the man who wanted to murder and do heavens knew what else to me.
Except…I did know what else he would do. He’d asked about magic. He’d been interested in the coin. He’d been so damn nice to me. That was because he’d wanted me, except not in the way I had thought.
Mitch had burned Lily, and Mitch had murdered all those people in the salt marshes.
In my moment of preternatural clarity, I saw all of that.
The parts of all the bodies I had examined came together into what and who they had been, and each of them pointed at Mitch.
I saw Lily too, wreathed in fire, her accusing finger aimed at Mitch while her flame eyes met mine.
They had all been magic users, and Mitch had killed them for that.
I didn’t know how I knew all of that, but I did.
And he enjoyed it, I “heard,” and knew it was Joanne Frazer telling me this.
It wasn’t my necromancy that showed me these truths, giving me these hallucinations.
Maybe it was all in my head, my mind preparing me for what was to come.
Maybe it was the aftereffects of whatever Mitch had dosed me with.
All I knew was that I would end up like them, like all the other magic users. Worse, maybe. After all, there were so many ways to kill a witch, according to cruel superstition, and I got the sense Mitch knew all of them, had researched them. Gotten off on them, maybe.
The out-of-body thing ended, leaving me lightheaded and sagging against the tiles.
“You can’t get away with this,” I told him. My voice sounded weak.
Mitch’s eyes twinkled. “Don’t try your magic on me, witch. That won’t work here.” Yeah, he was a crazy motherfucker all right.
I wiggled my arms. I was beginning to feel pins and needles in my hands. “Mitch, I work with you. You know me. Don’t do this.”
Mitch took two quick steps toward me, then he kicked me in the side. I gasped for air even as I rolled into a ball. The chain pulled against my ankle, the noise of it scraping over the tiles a promise of worse things to come.
“You’re not human, witch, and I will make you face your wicked ways and repent.” He crouched and grabbed a handful of my hair with his gloved hand. “In the end, your soul will thank me.”
“Souls…aren’t real,” I spat out, struggling to get breath into my lungs. I hoped my ribs would have time to bruise.
His eyes were lit with the unnatural fire of zealotry.
“You will doubt no more once I have shown you.” He let go of me and walked over to the counter.
“You’ll watch, Lionel. And then maybe you’ll understand.
” I heard him pick something up with a scrape of metal against metal.
Mitch turned, and the scalpel in his hand reflected the light.
“If I could just cut all the wickedness out of you and be done with it, I would. If I could make you normal, I would. I’m doing this for you, for the good of everyone. ”
He walked over to the smith, who let out a pitiable wail.
That got the adrenaline going finally. “Hey! Wait, stop that! Leave him alone. You were talking to me.” I was not going to let the smith join the dead, not without at least trying to save him.
Mitch’s hand was on the smith’s shoulder, but he was looking at me. “I cannot stop, Lionel. For the sake of everyone. You are wicked, and you don’t even know it. You need my help. You need to be saved.”
His scalpel descended.