37. Bad Feeling
Bad Feeling
Pain rippled through him, distracting him briefly from where he’d been testing the limits of the gold collar again, trying to find any wiggle room with the magical barrier.
The pain, which seemed to come out of nowhere, snapped him out.
Caelum rubbed his chest, biting his tongue when it worsened. He did everything he could to fight the feeling away, but it lingered, festering there.
It was getting worse.
Amun’s cock, it was getting so much worse.
“Something’s going on out there.” He muttered the words, mostly to himself.
He sat against the wall, back straight. He tugged at the cold, burnished collar around his neck, although he knew it would only rub at his skin more.
His anxiety rose as the strange noises grew louder in the corridor on the other side of their cell door.
He glanced at Arcturus, who gave a pointed glance at Caelum’s tugging fingers.
He dropped his hand to his lap, and exhaled in frustration.
His hand combed through sweaty hair, and he ignored his stomach growling.
Not being chained to the wall helped.
It helped, he told himself. This could all be worse. They usually didn’t forget to chain him to the wall when he was in here.
He could work out like this, which meant he could sometimes sleep.
He spent over an hour in here already, broken into three different sessions, where he did push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups on one of the beams, and a number of other exercises.
Usually he did those things outside his father’s cage.
He’d been expected to accelerate all of his physical training ever since he got dragged back here.
His father had figured out relatively early that Caelum was easier to manage, and to train, when he wasn’t so jacked up on magic and mania and excess energy that he couldn’t focus on a damned thing being said to him, even with repeated curses designed to motivate him.
The habit was ingrained in him now.
He’d needed it less with Leda.
Really, he’d not needed it at all with her, especially not once they’d started having sex.
He’d done it anyway for those few weeks they’d been together and his body had been working properly, if only to keep from driving her mad or getting too fucking demanding with her, and making her regret ever letting him touch her.
But the physical thing had been an issue since he’d first gone away to school.
He’d snuck away early in the morning and at night in primary and middle school, usually running in the early mornings and sparring or practicing Skyhunt later in the day.
He’d later added various balancing exercises he’d needed more space to accomplish, and started shadow-boxing at night, usually in a part of the campus no one used.
He’d also work on precision hits against statues and suits of armor, which taught him where to stop without breaking his hands.
It was never quite enough.
Right now, it felt like nothing would be enough.
Something was wrong.
He didn’t want to think about it, mostly because he knew it had something to do with Leda. He also knew, even with his few stolen moments with her, he was starting to lose it, being separated from her so much of the time.
It was hard to burn anything off in here, which probably made that part of him that missed her feel worse.
He’d woken himself up more than once, sweating, shouting, gasping for breath, and he’d been mortified to find Arcturus sitting nearby, watching him in the dark, which embarrassed him and horrified him in equal proportions, mostly because he had no idea what he might have said aloud before he snapped out of it.
From the look on Arcturus’s face a few of those nights, and the way he avoided Bones’s eyes, he feared he’d shouted things the kid understood all too well.
When he couldn’t exercise in here, he usually spent his time with Arcturus.
He ate with him, talked to him, asked him questions about the human world, and about human myth, human music, human dancing, human medicine, human universities, his childhood, Leda before she’d come to Magique.
He asked Arcturus detailed questions about television, which Leda had tried to describe to him already.
He asked Arcturus what he’d been learning in the Sanctum, and his favorite foods, and where he might’ve wanted to live, if he’d stayed on Earth.
He answered most of Arcturus’s questions, as well.
Anything that distracted either or both of them was good.
Anything that pulled Caelum’s mind off her, off his magic, off the likelihood the two of them would die down here, off the possibility he’d go mad first and kill himself trying to get out of the collar… all of it was good.
The collar definitely had an alarm on it of some kind, too, either an advanced linking charm that connected to his most recent gold tattoo, and thus likely his father’s magic, or else it set off some kind of alarm that got felt upstairs.
Either way, he’d activated that one once by accident, too, and three guards came running and entered the cell, all of them large.
He’d told them Arcturus got too close to him, and touched the collar on accident. He regretted his words immediately when the guard backhanded the kid across the face with an iron glove and snarled at him to keep his fucking dirty mongrel hands off the king’s heir.
Caelum hadn’t been locked to the wall that day, either.
He’d launched himself at the guard, and the fight immediately changed tenor as he proceeded to fight all three of them at once.
Malefic had been indifferent when he’d come down later to find him bruised and bloodied, but the real repercussions weren’t from Malefic.
The guards now knew he could fight, and it had become an unspoken challenge among them to try and take him down when they thought they could get away with it.
On the plus side of that, they hadn’t bothered Arcturus again.
It took him a long time to heal, though.
Caelum suspected Arcturus’s jawbone had been cracked from that blow. The metal glove also had a sharp edge that cut him across the face. The scar was faint now, thank the gods, but Caelum knew the kid had been lucky.
Arcturus told him over and over that it wasn’t his fault, that he’d had no choice but to say what he did, but since then, Caelum put himself between the guards and the kid whenever they ventured into his cell. Not that it was really necessary.
Caelum was a much more interesting target.
Wankers.
“Fuck,” he muttered, gripping the metal ring in his hands.
“What’s wrong?”
Caelum looked over to find the kid frowning at him. He’d thought Arcturus was asleep. Maybe he had been, and he’d just woken him up. The thought made his jaw hurt as it occurred to him it had to be night out there still, although he had absolutely no idea how late.
He struggled with an answer, then only shook his head.
His magic went back to compulsively toying with the collar.
“Something’s going on.” Arcturus glanced across the dark space to the iron bars on their cell’s only door. He tilted his head, as if listening. His eyes shone with visible frustration, which made him look strangely young, like a kid left out of a game he wanted to join.
“Do you see something?” Caelum asked.
“No.”
“Do you hear something?” Caelum pressed.
“I don’t see or hear anything, okay?” Hesitating, he blurted, “I can feel something, but you hate it when I tell you about those, because I can never explain it the way you want me to.” Arcturus sat up, resting his elbows on the rug to hold up his upper body.
“It’s faint, okay? It’s like this really faint, vibrating, tapping feeling, like a tingling.
Like electricity, maybe. I see a dark cloud, like I see around you sometimes, but this one’s a lot bigger. ”
“You’re right,” Caelum said flatly. “That’s bloody useless.”
Arcturus’s voice grew defensive. “It’s not coming from upstairs. I don’t think it’s coming from here at all. It’s more like a fire that’s burning very far away, and it’s slowly being fed so that it’s getting bigger and bigger. That black cloud is getting bigger, too.”
Caelum’s jaw ticked involuntarily.
Another bunch of vague, indecipherable, Obeah hoodoo.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked finally. “Why the fuck would you tell me that?”
“Because you would be more mad if I didn’t,” Arcturus countered.
The kid wasn’t wrong.
He also wasn’t wrong about Caelum’s tendency to get irritated with these kinds of fuzzy, useless descriptions of things that made no sense. Maybe if he didn’t feel these things might be life or death, it wouldn’t bother him so much.
He’d like to think so, anyway.
As it was, trying to figure out whether his wife and closest friends might be alive from riddles, vague descriptions of tactile sensations, and nonsensical talk of clouds, was its own kind of torture.
How was it that the only person in the cell with functioning magic was a half-trained, half-Magical teenager?
He knew he wasn’t being fair. The distance was mucking up the kid’s signal. When it was something near, the kid has a sunbeam-like precision, at least about certain things, but the further away it got, the more hoodoo vagueness crept in.
Thinking about that, he gripped the collar in his hand, and suppressed a low growl.
“Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?” Arcturus asked. He jerked his head in the direction of the iron bars. “You’ve got the fox all wound up. Look at her. She’s acting crazy.”
Caelum’s eyes followed the kid’s to the primal-like, glowing fox.
He was disconcerted to discover Arcturus was right.
The fox, which was a silvery-blue today, was pacing back and forth in their cell, snapping its jaws and flicking its fiery tail back and forth. It looked directly at Caelum, and he could have sworn the thing snarled at him, or maybe hissed.
“What’s wrong with her?” Arcturus prodded.
“How the fuck would I know?” Caelum asked. “And why are you so sure it’s a her, anyway? It’s a fox. Why not a him?”