Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
CALEB
Iopened my eyes, and everything fucking hurt.
Shadows swam above me. I closed my eyes again.
Nope. That was worse.
I forced them open and took stock. I was flat on my back on a floor cold enough to double as a meat locker. My hoodie and T-shirt were missing, but I still had my jeans. No shoes, though.
Darkness pressed in from every side, but my eyes did their werewolf thing, pulling shapes out of the black. Four stone walls. A metal door with bars for a window.
So, a prison cell. Perfect.
Silver was close. It had to be. Nothing else had ever made me feel like someone had broken all my bones and taped them back together in the wrong order. At least I wasn’t burning. My skin was sticky in that gross way that meant I’d sweated through something and dried out again.
Jesse.
Those assholes had taken him down with silver, and now I didn’t know where he was.
Nausea surged, flooding my mouth with saliva, and I rolled onto my side before I could choke on my own vomit.
I swallowed convulsively. Don’t puke. Don’t puke. Don’t puke.
When my stomach settled into a low simmer, I struggled to a sitting position. The room tilted like a carnival ride.
“Fuck,” I whimpered, and waited for the world to stop spinning. Slowly, my surroundings slid into place.
Prison cell: confirmed. The blocks were rough-cut and ancient like the walls I’d seen touring the Tower of London with Jesse. But this place didn’t come with a cheerful Beefeater in a bonnet.
The cell was bare. No toilet. Not even a cot bolted to the wall. The door was the only modern-looking thing in the room, the steel like something in a bank vault. No sound drifted through the opening.
And no light entered, so either the power was out or Carlo was really leaning into the whole Dracula’s dungeon aesthetic.
Because this was the opera house. It had to be. The guys who’d rushed us on the embankment had smelled faintly human, which meant pets. And they hadn’t been weak, even if they’d cheated with those darts. Strong pets meant favorites, and favorites meant Carlo.
So where the fuck was Jesse?
I thought about screaming for him. Opened my mouth and everything. Then I closed it. I had no idea who would answer that call, and right now the options looked grim.
I scooted on my butt to the nearest wall and leaned against it.
My skin lit up like I’d pressed my back to a stove. I jerked away with a hiss and stared at the concrete.
The silver was in the walls. Somehow, some way, Carlo had built silver into a dungeon, and I was sitting in the middle of it like a rotisserie chicken.
Pyotr Zarins’s dead, unseeing eyes surfaced in my head.
I’d killed him. He’d landed a lucky punch on Jesse, and I’d snapped his neck.
So fast and easy. Like it was nothing except it wasn’t.
It didn’t matter that he’d probably killed that woman from the cab.
The scratches on his hands hadn’t gotten there by accident, but my brain didn’t care about any of that.
It just kept serving up his eyes, open and empty, and the sharp crack of his vertebrae echoing off the river.
I drew my knees to my chest and rested my chin on them.
How the fuck had he worn Ulfrik’s skin? What kind of Frankenstein shit was Carlo running down here?
Because Pyotr hadn’t been a werewolf. He’d been human all the way through, sweaty and drunk and pathetic.
But I’d watched him ripple like hot asphalt and turn into a dead Viking.
I pressed my forehead to my knees and breathed in my own stale sweat. A second later, I lifted my head.
Jesse wouldn’t just sit around. He’d use his senses, the same way he told me to listen for the absence of heartbeats in the theater.
I closed my eyes and cast my senses outward, feeling for scents and sounds beyond the cell.
Nothing. The silver had wrung me out. My nose might as well have been decorative.
I squeezed my shins as a lump formed in my throat.
The last time I’d ended up in a prison cell, I’d left with Jesse.
The next time I saw him, I was going to tell him we really had to stop meeting like this.
And he’d smile that slow smile that started in his eyes before it curved his mouth.
The lump tightened. Tears burned my eyes.
I scrubbed them away before they could fall. Because I wasn’t helpless. The last time somebody threw me in a cell, I hadn’t known anything about magic. Now I had a lot of it—rare shit that made every supernatural creature I encountered comment on it.
I looked at the wall.
I had to be relaxed for my gift to work. Receptive, not pushy, just like Jesse and I had practiced.
Fuck Carlo Gesualdo. I was going to see whatever there was to see, and then I was going to save my man.
I scooted closer to the wall and took deep breaths, my brain carrying me back to the time Coach Gannon hired a yoga instructor to work with the team.
We’d screwed around for the first twenty minutes, making asses of ourselves until Coach screamed at us to stop being dicks and pay attention.
Nobody took it seriously until the instructor kicked up into a handstand on her forearms and held it, core tight as an oil drum, and shut up sixty football players for good.
I drew on that training now, sitting criss-cross applesauce just like the yoga instructor had demonstrated. Letting my eyes drift shut, I pushed air from my lungs and pictured my worry flowing out with it.
Then I pressed my palm to the wall.
Pain sliced into my skull.
Darkness.
An ice pick buried itself between my eyes. Every instinct screamed at me to yank my hand back.
I clenched my jaw and pressed harder.
Weakness spread through me, sinking into every atom like I was a washcloth someone had wrung out and left on the side of the sink.
But it wasn’t mine. Because my body wasn’t mine. Now that I’d fallen into Jesse’s skin I knew the difference. The pain didn’t belong to me, but I sat in it, caged in someone else’s bones.
But why couldn’t I see?
I dragged in a breath, and scents came with it—human, but faint. Thready heartbeats moved somewhere nearby. Pets. They were close, moving toward the body I squatted in.
I smoothed my hands down my legs, my fingers bumping over ridged, crusted skin. I’d earned enough scabs on the football field to know what they felt like.
The pain was familiar, too. The blackness. The bone-deep ache of silver. I’d felt it before, precisely like this, when I touched the mirror in the foyer and the service door that led to the alley. It had been dark then, too.
A horrible suspicion formed in my mind, a dark cloud coalescing, reluctant to be named.
With shaking hands, I touched my face and slowly patted upward. Something hard and flat covered my eye sockets, the edges soldered to my skin.
My eyes were gone.
I yanked my hand off the wall, and the cell snapped back around me. I could see again. My heart hammered, and my head went light and floaty, dark spots dancing at the edges of my vision.
What the fuck had I just seen? Panic gripped me, and more spots dotted the air. I pressed my hands flat on my thighs and took deep breaths.
Okay.
Okay.
When the panic receded, I closed my eyes and let my mind drift until one thought remained.
I want to see something else.
Maybe talking to my magic was dumb, but it wasn’t like anyone was around to laugh at me.
Show me something else.
I touched the wall.
This time, I spun into nothing and landed on my feet. I stood in the foyer of the opera house, my body whole and intact. Blinding sunlight filled the foyer and struck sparks on the gilded mirrors.
Tension eased from my shoulders. This was like the little museum, where I’d observed Romans having a social hour. I wasn’t trapped in someone else’s skin.
Ulfrik burst from a corridor.
He tore across the foyer, blond hair streaming behind him. The mirrors multiplied his naked body, throwing back a dozen copies of his scorched torso. Several sets of puncture wounds circled his thick neck.
Shouts rose behind him. He sprinted for the doors. Pets rushed him, and he spun and bolted the other direction, but more pets poured from other corridors, cutting off every exit.
He roared something in a harsh, guttural language as they swarmed him and took him to the marble. Stun guns crackled against his skin.
He bellowed and heaved, throwing bodies off him. A pet strode from a corridor, lifted something to his lips, and blew.
A silver dart sprouted from the center of Ulfrik’s chest.
He slumped and gave a final, hoarse cry that made the crystals in the chandeliers shiver.
I jerked back from the wall, head spinning and blood rushing in my ears.
Ulfrik had been a prisoner in the opera house. But when? It had to be before he turned me. Before he went rogue and ended up on a jogging trail in New York. Which meant…what? He’d escaped? Carlo had lost him?
None of the pieces fit together, and my brain was too bogged down with silver to unscramble the puzzle.
The cell door clanked and swung open.
Two pets filled the doorway. The first was the bald bodybuilder who’d kicked us out of the opera house. He looked the same, nothing but traps and swollen thighs. The second was just as big, with a blond buzz cut and a stupid little mustache riding his upper lip.
They crossed the cell and hauled me to my feet.
“Get the fuck off me!” I tried to yell it, but my head swam and the silver sucked at my strength, so I ended up sounding like some breathless porn star pretending to resist. My punches were just as embarrassing, my fists landing like throw pillows.
The bodybuilder smirked. “I hope you like your cell. You’re never getting out of here, stronzo.”
Whatever that meant, it wasn’t flattering.
“Fuck you,” I said, head swimming.
He laughed, and they dragged me through the door, letting my elbow smack the frame. Pain flared to my shoulder. Rage followed, hot and useless.
“You’re never getting out of here, either,” I told the bodybuilder. “You know that, right? The vampires only turn pretty people, and your head looks like a dick.”
He punched me in the kidney.
I doubled over, nausea sloshing through me in a greasy wave. My don’t puke mantra returned for a sequel.
The buzz cut pet snapped something sharp in Italian. The bodybuilder grunted, then clamped his hand under my arm.
“Walk, cunt.”
Okay, I understood that one.
They dragged me forward, and I staggered between them, bare feet scraping the cold ground.
Torches flickered in brackets on the walls.
Cell doors lined the stone on either side of the corridor.
A small table held an oil lamp, its flame shuddering as we passed.
The bulbs in the ceiling were dark. Hopefully, the power being knocked out worked in my favor.
But I doubted it.
A moan drifted from a cell on my right. The gaps in the bars showed a naked man lying on his side in the middle of the floor. Long, tangled hair obscured his face, and his beard grew in ragged patches as if someone had torn away chunks of it. A patchwork quilt of burns covered his body.
He lifted his head as we passed, and he turned his face toward me, tracking my progress. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and a growl rumbled out of his throat.
Too low to be human.
Deep in my mind, my beast stirred against the weight of the silver in my veins. Recognition flared, weak but present. I didn’t know the man, but I knew what he was.
Werewolf.
He thrust his nose higher, and the hair fell away from his face.
His eyes were missing. They’d been gouged out, the sockets filled with pools of hardened silver that reflected the dancing torchlight.
I forgot how to breathe.
Burns. Darkness. Skin covered in scabs. I’d been inside his head.
I’d been him. My mind raced, pieces slotting into place so quickly I couldn’t keep up.
The service door at the opera house. The mirror in the foyer. I’d never touched silver. Jesse and I hadn’t sensed silver in them because there wasn’t any. There never had been.
I’d touched this man’s pain, and my gift had dropped me into a body with silver fused into its skull. My visions had never been dark.
I’d been seeing through eyes that weren’t there.
I dry heaved, my whole body clenching around a stomach that had nothing to give.
The pets stopped, and the bodybuilder laughed. “A tough guy.”
“Go…fuck…yourself.” I swallowed hard against another surge of nausea.
They dragged me past the cell. The growl faded behind us, and I sucked in deep breaths, trying to get my legs under me. The bodybuilder tightened his grip on my arm until a nerve pinched.
“Quick question,” I panted. “How do you say follicularly challenged in Italian?”
He punched me in the side of the head.
Pain exploded behind my ear. The corridor smeared sideways. Something hot trickled down my neck.
Ahead of us, a door swung open, and Carlo stepped out. His doll’s eyes moved over the three of us, flat and unblinking, and went hard.
“What are you doing, Alonzo?”
The bodybuilder’s fingers flexed on my arm. “Nothing, signore.”
Carlo stared at him. Alonzo’s heartbeat picked up beside me—a quick, stumbling thud I could hear even through the cotton in my head.
Then Carlo pulled the door wider. “Bring him.”
The pets dragged me through the doorway, and I recovered enough to look around as we entered an operating room.
A real one, like something out of a hospital drama.
A surgical table stood in the center under a dead exam light.
Stainless steel counters crowded with darkened computer monitors lined the walls.
Tables held racks of blood retrieval tubes and trays of instruments wrapped in plastic.
A couple of IV poles loomed in the corner.
Rolling carts were stacked with gauze and coils of clear tubing.
Candlelight flickered over all of it. A few battery-powered lamps sat between the same kind of ornate candelabras I’d seen in Carlo’s office. The scent of wax mingled with the astringent bite of antiseptic, the mishmash of old and new making my head spin harder.
Then the pets dragged me deeper into the room, and my head stopped spinning.
Because Jesse was manacled to the far wall. They’d stripped him naked and bolted him spread-eagled to the stone. Thick bands of silver gleamed at his wrists and ankles. Dried blood stained his neck and shoulder.
His blazing gold eyes fixed on me.
He opened his mouth and roared.