Chapter 5
BAILEY
My eyes feel as if they’re glued shut. It takes effort to pry them open. I reach to rub them, but I can’t. I’m… stuck? Something is cutting into my wrists.
The fuzzy feeling snaps to dizzy anxiety as reality zooms into focus. I’m on a cold concrete floor, restrained with my wrists attached to something behind me.
I squint against light spilling in through a window ahead of me.
Jason is also straight ahead, halfway to that window.
He’s restrained! To a pillar. His eyes are on me, his mouth tight. There’s hellfire in his eyes.
Who? What?
We’re in a basement.
“Jase?” I rasp.
His nostrils are flaring and his hair has flopped into his eyes. His chest is rising and falling with big breaths. He’s as angry as he was when he opened the hotel room door to me. No, worse. The look on his face has me sure he’s blaming me for this.
This… whatever this is.
Something heavily floral in the air knocked me unconscious in that car and it obviously did the same to Jase by the current evidence that suggests we were brought here and restrained.
His chest expands even bigger underneath his chocolate-colored button-down shirt as he blows out another angry breath.
“Wh-what the fuck” I whisper, taking in that the support he’s attached to has a diameter of at least a foot.
I look up and can see the one I’m attached to, which is metal and around the thickness of a broomstick.
Attached to the wooden ceiling beams directly over me hangs an aromatic tree bough with charms and crystals dangling from it.
Witchcraft.
Wide-eyed now, I’m panicking as my eyes pivot around the large space that’s obviously an unfinished basement in a house, I’m guessing by the furnace and water heater in the corner.
The floors and walls are concrete and there are exposed beams overhead.
The concrete floor is dusty and the air smells stale and a little musty.
Near the window, which is about halfway up the wall, there are around half a dozen paint cans.
My eyes examine Jase more thoroughly and I note his support beam has a light green trumpet bloom ivy wound around it. Some of those same flowers are attached to ivy that’s wound around his cuffed ankles.
He’s got a thick silver ring around his neck, attached to the post behind him.
No flowers are attached to me; there’s nothing around my neck.
And I think my wrists might have cable ties around them, though I’m not sure.
It feels like something thin is slightly cutting in, which might mean I can get out of this.
I can’t see what Jase’s arms are attached to the other beam with but judging by the ring around his neck and the thick cuffs around his ankles, I suspect he’s more carefully restrained than I am, likely with metal cuffs.
His eyes work over me and his nostrils flare again as he pulls in a big breath and lets it out slowly, like he’s trying to calm himself.
I retrace my steps starting from the time I left the hotel. That car was supposed to take us to the airport, but I didn’t check the car make and model against the app. I was fuming so hard, I just got in, assuming it was our rideshare.
So, this is my fault.
But whoever abducted us prepared for this. This was intentional, not random, and it’s likely they prepared for this with plans that it would be a wolf shifter and a witch, not wolf with a half-shifter/half-human.
So, yeah, I put us in the wrong car, but it’s not my fault. I just made it easy, I guess, because this was premeditated and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who’s behind this.
“What in the–” I clamp my mouth shut as I hear footsteps overhead. He’s looking up as well. And the way his lip curls as he aims a glare at the ceiling, I’d hate to be the owner of those footsteps. Jase is flippin’ scary right now.
The door squeaks and my eyes bug out as I brace.
Jase’s eyes focus on me in a way that makes me feel strange. Almost like he’s communicating and I should know what he’s thinking.
“Shift?” I inquire by mouthing it.
He gives a sharp no shake of his head in answer and jiggles his feet to draw my attention there. The vines wrapped around his ankles – are they stopping him from shifting?
I don’t know a whole lot about the inner workings of witchcraft or what these can do to a wolf shifter, but I do know nightshade plants that look like this trumpet flower can be very toxic to all beings; definitely us.
I know there are angel’s trumpets and devil trumpets and I can’t remember right now which is which, but I do know I’ve never seen one this shade of green before.
The wand… the cauldron…
The danger Vivica and Erica spoke of.
My mouth is a desert while my heartrate gallops even harder.
I hope Danica, wherever she had to run off to, is okay.
I hope this, whatever this is that’s stopping Jase from being able to simply shift to break free, that it’s not going to do more than keep him attached to that pole. Will it harm him?
Jase has a high level of brute strength.
While Linc might be the buffest of the council (maybe not so much now that Tyson is home as Ty’s muscles are pretty massive, too) Jase is undoubtedly 100% super alpha.
He’s six foot four, muscled, and I’ve seen him show his strength many times including when he wrestles or competes in pack games.
I’ve had so many fantasies about losing a wrestling match to Jase…
When Linc and Jase wrestle, Jase can certainly hold his own.
He loves to roughhouse in both his wolf and human states nearly as much as Linc.
I’ve seen Jase throw a giant tree trunk farther than everyone in the annual pack games year after year.
I’ve seen him heave big, heavy things like they weigh nothing.
Breaking out of these binds would be a piece of cake for someone as athletic and competitive as he is, except for the fact that he’s obviously been disabled.
My heartrate kicks up even higher as the footsteps get closer.
“You’re awake. Good. I want answers.”
I look sideways to take in the person behind the voice.
An angry-looking woman with a mass of chin-length curly black hair descends the stairs, eyes bouncing between Jase and me.
She wears heavy, dark makeup and I’m not usually one to be critical of something as superficial as looks but given she’s behind our abduction I don’t feel bad for thinking it looks like the years haven’t been kind to her.
She’s wearing a loose, patchwork multicolored, but predominantly eggplant-colored harem-pant style jumpsuit and combat boots.
She has full sleeves of colorful tattoos on both arms.
She might be forty, no… maybe older, but it’s hard to say. A witch with a scent reminiscent enough of Aphra that I’m sure she’s a Starling coven witch. But of course… who else would she be?
The Starling coven wants their ancestor’s stuff. They’re also probably holding a grudge because of the recent death of one of their elder witches, Aviva Starling, who worked with the SCC. Aviva died during a conflict with us when she fell off a cliff and washed-up dead.
But according to those who were there, the river punished her, we didn’t.
And it happened after she tried to drain Erica of her power, which is why the SCC wants the wand and cauldron sent to protected archives – so nobody else can dabble with the dark magic associated with those tools.
I heard they belonged to a dark magic practitioner in the Starling coven that went crazy.
After all that happened with Aviva, I did a little digging to learn about the Starling coven and it’s heaps bigger than the Young coven, which has dwindled to just one branch: the five Young sisters, their great aunt, and now the addition of my brother.
I read an old SCC report from over twenty years ago by SCC witch Lucinda Walsh that prophesied that the coven would grow again, that the Young sisters and their offspring would be prolific in baby-making.
As for the Starling coven, beyond having a covenstead a several hour drive from Arcana Falls, they’ve also got hundreds of members living in several states in the U.S.
and Mexico as well as two provinces in Canada with a sprinkling of branches in Eastern Europe.
They have annual retreats and weekly video calls and based on some conversations in my group chat with gal pals from summer camp as well as some other pack librarians I started a book club with.
This coven is known for having people in both high and low places.
I’m shuddering with the knowledge that our presence here means that a Starling witch now holds that wand. So, if she has it, what’ll she do with it? And with us?
My pulse races as I think about the things I brought for Jase. Where are they?
Is this the danger Vivica and Erica were talking about? If so, why in the world would they send us on a mission with those implements when neither Jase nor I have the ability to fight off Starling coven magic? What in the world?
My racing thoughts are interrupted by the witch who demands, “Where is it?”
She’s glaring at Jase.
He glares right back with rage bubbling in his eyes, but he doesn’t answer.
“Where’s what?” I ask.
Her gaze swings my way and Jase immediately growls.
She ignores this and asks, “Who are you? Why are you accompanying him instead of that Young bitch?” She walks toward me.
Jase’s voice is lethal when he demands, “Step. The fuck. Off.”
The woman turns just her head toward him.
“This one?” She points to me. “Does she matter to you?”
She moves closer to me.
He bares his teeth as he struggles against the binds, veins protruding from his throat and his arms as metal-on-metal clangs ominously.
If he wasn’t Jase, I’d be terrified of him.
But she doesn’t look afraid, seems confident in the way she’s restrained and disabled him.
When she takes another step toward me, Jase growls a deep, guttural noise.