Chapter 4
SOMEWHERE IN THE NORTH SEA
***
It wasn’t the easiest thing, scraping at mortar behind my back, but I couldn’t take the chance that my actions would be seen.
So over the years, I’d gotten very flexible.
One arm constantly twisted behind me as I lay on my terrible makeshift bed, one finger extended into a claw.
Scraping that claw, over and over, against the mortar that held the stones together.
When eventually the claw dulled, I used the next finger.
They never stayed dull for so long that I ran out of claws to scratch with—they were strong things, dragon claws.
It had been a while, though, this time. Weeks since I’d been drained dry of the will to live. Maybe months. I was feeling . . . not well, exactly, but shockingly alive.
That could only mean that the time was coming, and too damned soon. It was always too soon.
“It’s his son, I’m sure,” a tinny, crackling voice said through a speaker from somewhere down the hall.
“How?” the usual strident, authoritative voice demanded in return.
That voice. The one that still made me jerk away and shudder, ready for strikes that no longer came, because I now lived inside a magical glass case, a trinket on a shelf, not to be touched.
Only continually zapped with whatever magic device it was that he’d wired into the cell itself.
A device that periodically drained me of every scrap of life I managed to regain.
No one had touched me in a long time, I thought, and the realization was distant, like a dark thing I could hold in my hand and examine, rather than a horror that left me sobbing myself to sleep most nights.
“There are pictures of Rían with the Knight woman before his capture, and tonight, the boy came to save Darragh’s son. He looks like the vampire, but there’s a certain similarity there.”
Rían.
Because moving forward was too much work, apparently, even though Rían was a name from another lifetime, centuries before.
As the words coalesced in my mind, though, something unfortunate started to form there. The Knight woman. The vampire. Similarity. Saved Darragh’s son.
He saved Darragh’s son?
That was . . . nice, strangely enough, even though I’d taken some pains to make sure that Darragh’s only son, Sexton, would never come within a thousand miles of . . .
“Fine, then. Take them both. No reason to wait. Darragh’s son and Rían’s. That will fill the last two cells. The machine will be complete.”
Take them both.
Darragh’s son and Rían’s.
Except that Rían didn’t have a son, because Rían had ceased to exist hundreds of years ago.
Mercer Devlin, though? He had a son. A son these monsters were never supposed to find.
I didn’t even want to contemplate the horror of “the machine” being “complete,” whatever the fuck that meant.
It didn’t matter.
What mattered was that those fuckers were planning to add him to their menagerie, and that couldn’t be allowed at all.
It was time. My years of scraping had to have worked, or . . . well, no, that was it.
They had to have worked.
Because those assholes were going to take Flynn if they hadn’t.
I turned toward the wall, to truly look at the stones there, for the first time in . . . well, I had no idea how long. My progress didn’t look especially impressive, but it was. It had to be. The bottom stone shifted now and then, so I knew it was loose.
Time to push, and pray to deities I’d never believed in, that the other side of the wall wasn’t a sheer cliff face that was going to have me falling to my death in a moment.
I had to save my son.