30
My claws descend, tearing out of my fingers as I scratch and claw at Lyra. With every slice and cut on her delicate skin, her grip only hardens. I choke on water. It fills my lungs. My eyes. My nose.
I can’t win this fight. Not against her.
Lyra’s hair billows in the water, a spill of black ink on a crystal-blue page, and her gaze burns. She doesn’t even blink. Simply smiles, a true anchor sinking me to the bottom of the seafloor.
Shit shit shit.
I gag around the water that’s desperate to shoot from my lungs. Lyra’s nails puncture my skin, and then—
We ascend.
We shoot from the depths with two kicks of her long, curvaceous legs and explode out of the lagoon. I throw her from me the second we hit the stone and crawl away, puking up gallons of water, no longer caring about guards.
“Are you crazy?” I hiss. “Are you trying to kill me ?”
“We can’t die here, silly.” Lyra laughs. She wrings her hair onto the stone floor and lies on her back. “No one can die here.”
“You’re nuts.”
“That’s not very kind of you.”
“Yeah, well, forgive me. I’m still choking on the ocean.”
“It’s not the ocean, Vanessa.”
“What—”
She sits up suddenly, and the sopping wet of her nightgown slaps against the ground. “I need to go. You’ll be okay. Remember, trust your instincts. Your body knows what to do. Stop letting your mind derail it and listen to your bones.”
She glides up the stairwell like a wet wraith, and I can’t stop her.
Your body knows what to do. Stop letting your mind derail it and listen to your bones.
Goose bumps erupt over every inch of my flesh.
Celeste said that to me. At the party on the beach. She said it when our biggest worries were the boys we had crushes on. I hug my knees to my chest, sitting in the middle of the floor until my dress goes from soaking to damp. Until I remember why I’m here—the screams.
I climb to my feet, sucking in a sharp, pained breath, and move to the doorway on the far wall. “Is there… is there anybody here?”
A slender arch—clearly werewolf-made—gives way to a narrow room with a nauseatingly low ceiling.
If I had any claustrophobia, it would trigger here.
The walls seem to close in on me, yellowing stone stained with mildew and algae.
Hooks hang from the ceiling, metallic and spiky.
I touch one and hiss. My skin instantly blisters.
Silver.
“Who’s there?” a woman asks with a throaty cough. “Who are you?”
The words—the gravelly, distressed tone in which they’re spoken—make me flinch. I move deeper into the dungeon. In the far back, hidden in shadows, steel prisons trap three people with erratic heartbeats and weak breaths.
Humans.
The rotting stench of decay suffocates, wafting from them in waves.
The older woman sits on her knees, but her bones are too feeble to hold her up, as if every bit of fat has melted off her body, rendering her a skin sack of bones and tendons.
She coughs again and blood sprays from her mouth.
She covers it quickly with a shaking hand, her gray eyes and hair charcoal in the blackness.
Beside her, in their own cages, are a young man—amber eyes, flaming orange hair, and a wound oozing through his thin cotton shirt at the center of his chest—and a child.
Not more than five, with brown eyes and a dirt-smeared face.
Oh god. I fall to my knees in front of the prison and grab the bars without thinking.
The silver scorches my palms, and I swallow a shriek of pain.
The boy blinks at me. “Don’t touch the bars,” he says, and holds up his tiny toddler hands. They’ve melted, congealed into pink puddles.
“Oh dear,” the woman murmurs to herself, rocking back and forth now. “Oh dear, dear, dear.”
The young man watches me, silent, his nostrils flaring as his chest wound bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. I can’t breathe—can’t swallow. Vomit rises in my throat. But I can’t throw up here, in front of them. And I can’t force the bars open to let them out.
“What do I do?” I ask, voice cracking. “Please tell me what to do.”
“Has your queen not done enough tonight?” the woman murmurs. “Or has she sent you to torture us more?”
“Torture you… no. No. ” I force myself to my feet. Inside, my soul breaks. My heart splinters. But I keep my head high because they don’t need to see my fear. “I heard your screams. I was coming to rescue you—”
“ Rescue us?” The woman’s eyes wrinkle as her lip curls.
“Funny. After so much torment, you expect us to believe that one of you would—would ever help us?” She scoots farther back in her cage when I glance at the young man.
He opens his mouth, and old, brown blood slides down his chin.
The nub that was once his tongue is almost invisible in the gore. I muffle a cry behind my hand.
“Soft,” the woman says. “You are soft.”
The small boy says, “I miss soft.” He cranes his neck, just a bit, but it’s enough to spot the rash of webbing climbing up and over his skin. The welts beneath his shirt. The sweat on his forehead.
Oh god oh god oh god.
They’ve been… they’ve been Bitten. I check the other two for rashes, and sure enough they explode upward—each spiraling from their necks. They’ve been Bitten.
“How long?” I whisper.
The woman immediately understands. “I have been here three days.”
“A week,” the boy croaks—as his nose morphs into a snout, and then breaks. My stomach churns.
The young man doesn’t speak, though his eyes widen, and he flops onto his back as a seizure overtakes him.
The woman nods at him. “He’s been here the longest, but I can’t tell you an exact time.
We… we’ve become interchangeable. There were bloodstains when they threw me into this cell. I’m not the first to live here.”
No no no.
They’re dying. They’re all going to die down here, and no one will know. No one will care . They are humans.
Just like Celeste.
I glance at the bars—at the padlocks forcing them closed. Silver. Soldered shut. Not a keyhole in sight. But I’m a werewolf. Surely, I’m strong enough to break it. I seize the lock on the woman’s prison even as it scorches me, threatening to dissolve my skin, and tug.
“Pointless,” the woman says. “Look at us.”
I tug and tug, but it doesn’t break. Panic strangles my lungs. I can’t focus, and that’s the problem. I need to find my rage. It’s buried under layers of trauma, however, and I can’t reach it .
“You let us out, and what do you think the guards will do? Will they let us leave this castle unharmed? Will they let you ?”
I groan, releasing the lock and letting it clang back into place. Unchanged. Why can’t I break it?
She’s right, though. I can’t walk out of here with them. They reek—even if the guards don’t see us, they’ll smell us from miles away. “You can’t die in here,” I tell her, refusing to meet the watering eyes of the child as he touches his mangled nose. And no one else will save you.
“We grieved our losses the moment that woman stole us into her great black car.”
That—that woman ? My breath hitches. A great black car.
“What woman? Did you see her? Do you know if—if she’s the one who bit you?”
“I don’t know,” the little boy says. “I didn’t even know I was Bitten until they brought me here and told me so. They said I would have to die.” Quieter, he says, “I’m dying.”
Tears burn my eyes.
“The same as what happened to me,” the woman agrees.
“One night, I was on a date to the beach, and the next morning I was alone in my house. Nothing out of the ordinary until that SUV pulled up and ripped me from the street in the afternoon. I remember a woman with black eyes tying my limbs behind my back and tossing me into this prison.” The woman looks up with a widened gaze.
“There’s been torture.” She shudders. “So much torture.”
Sweat beads down her forehead. I back up a step. The woman screams. Guttural and crazed. The bite takes hold of her, and she fists her hair.
She is dying.
They are all dying.
And they don’t even recall how this happened to them. It could’ve been anyone. Could’ve been—my mind grinds to a halt— holy shit .
Black eyes. The woman who nabbed them had black eyes . Queen Sybil. I glance at the woman in the cell. One night, I was on a date to the beach…
I turn to the boy. “Did you go to the beach too?”
The little boy nods. “With my mommy. She took me to build castles.”
“And you went on your date?”
The woman ceases her cries. Her voice comes out shallow. Depleted. “Yes. We matched—matched in a dating app. She asked me to the beach. It was late. We picnicked in the sand.”
The young man who can’t speak points to himself. Violently smacks the wound on his throat.
“You too?” I ask.
He nods furiously.
“I see.” But I don’t. I know the puzzle pieces are before me, but I don’t know how they fit together.
Why would a wolf be biting all these humans?
Why would it be failing so horrendously that these humans have been locked up and tortured?
Nettie said it’s impossible to split one’s soul so many times. Is the same person doing this, then?
Did they do it to me ?
And, more than anything, how had this court—how had the queen —known to kidnap every single one of us?
“I have to leave now,” I murmur. “But I’ll come back, I swear. I’ll bring food… blankets…” I’ll figure out who’s doing this to you and stop them.
“Don’t bother,” the woman says, before echoing the very thought I’ve been having since I stepped foot in the dungeon. “We’re dead no matter what you do.”