Chapter 2
SADIE
Iwas ripped into consciousness with a violent jerk, and I became suddenly sure that I’d have rather been knifed and thrown in the ocean as I saw four wooden walls threateningly close on all sides.
A box. I was in a box, and judging by the rocking and jerking, I was being taken somewhere.
Someone had stuffed me in the back of their car, then.
Or—god, this was a worse thought—was I in a white van?
I’d always been suspicious of white vans.
Watch enough crime shows and you knew it was the serial killer vehicle of choice.
Clearly, we’d reached our destination because the box only shook a few more times before it came to a grinding halt.
That… didn’t sound like a car. Neither did the other noises that came when my box stilled; creaking noises like the hinges of a door, groans of other people, shouts that had the ring of swearwords but were in no language I’d heard.
Not a wooden box, I realised when a hatch swung down at the front of the space I was crammed into. A cart. A literal cart, with four massive wheels, wooden planks that looked like they’d seen better days, and axels that creaked when I shifted my weight.
I couldn’t see the face of the prick who’d opened my cart—my prison cart?—because it was hidden within the depths of a hooded cloak. That should have been my first clue that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto. The cloak, and the cart. Not a white van. Not a knock-off North Face jacket.
“Out,” the cloaked man barked, and I debated snapping, arguing, but I had a better chance of getting away from whatever the fuck this was if I was outside the wooden box.
My legs protested when I extended them, shocks of pain moving through my knees, my ankles. I’d been in that thing a while, then. Gran’s drugs weren’t the cheap shit, clearly.
I was going to kill her. That moved right to the top of my to-do list, right under get the fuck out of here, and find somewhere to live—because no way was I going back to that flat.
The hooded man—my jailor?—turned away from me, and another prison wagon swung open.
“Jesus,” I breathed, cold dousing my blood when I saw there were five of them. I wasn’t the only one abducted. Had the other four been drugged by their grandparents and sold?
Sold to who, though? And for what? Human trafficking was rife, but something told me this place with its wooden carts and robed men wouldn’t have nail bars or Deliveroo drivers.
No, there was a far simpler explanation, I decided as a small, blonde woman fell from the prison cart next to mine, her green eyes huge and terrified.
She looked like a doll. Not a Barbie doll, more like a Baby Annabelle that had been left outside in the rain after a brutal play session by cruel kids.
Her dress might have once been blue but now it was grey and ripped at the shoulder.
Her hair was lank and dirty blonde, emphasis on the dirty, her golden skin equally grimy.
It put my own treatment into perspective. Sure, Gran’s betrayal was a spiked ball in my chest, gouging all my soft vulnerable parts until I wanted to drop to my knees and sob, but my clothes weren’t ripped. I was more or less clean. I hadn’t obviously survived an assault.
“Are you okay?” I whispered across the space between prison carts, my attention darting from the thin-boned woman to the robed motherfucker who brought us here.
The woman swallowed, her throat moving up and down, and nodded.
She didn’t look at me, though; her wide green eyes were fixed on a building in front of us.
We’d been dumped in the courtyard of it, I realised.
I hadn’t paid too much attention to our surroundings—I’d been a little preoccupied with the prison carts.
But now I lifted my stare from the wagons, I saw a dark navy sky and a massive, hulking building with sharp towers, bay windows, and pointed roofs silhouetted by … uh. Three moons.
Three moons.
“You’re seeing this, too, right?” I asked the blonde woman. “There are three moons?”
“No talking,” the hooded prick barked.
My hand automatically curled to expose my middle finger, but I decided to be smart and kept it at my side instead of shoving it in his face.
I had to be seeing things, right? Golden light shone from within the mullioned windows of the grand building; maybe it was the lights’ reflections that made it look like there were three glowing orbs in the sky, each in different stages.
One full, two crescent moons. Yeah, that’s what it was—reflections.
Movement drew my eye, and I glanced to my side in time to see the blonde woman hold up her palm, fingers splayed, and two fingers of her other hand.
“Seven?” I whispered. “Seven what?” Something dawned, and a nervous laugh bubbled up. “Seven moons?”
She nodded, glass-green eyes shining in the light. In the light of seven fucking moons.
Okay. So there were a few extra glowing things in the sky—that was nothing, I was still fine. Right? So what if I’d been thinking we’d been trafficked for some zany, rich fuck who liked to live out his Ren Faire fantasies with the cloak, cart, abduction situation. Seven moons.
What if… the prison cart brought me somewhere a little more exotic than the Maldives? I had a very active imagination, and I’d already been thinking body snatchers when I saw Gran cooking, so it was a short hop to I’ve been abducted by aliens.
I shook my head at myself, and didn’t care if I looked like a loony.
I’d been drugged and stuffed in a wooden box; insanity was the least of my problems. But there was no way this was a different planet.
It was a trick, an illusion. I’d seen Scooby Doo, alright?
There was a villain with a cherry picker shining lights in the sky, trying to trick us all into thinking we were isolated far from home.
Probably so any hope we had of getting out of here would die.
There: a plausible explanation. I loved plausible explanations.
“Where the fuck am I?” a male voice demanded, crisp and full of importance that really didn’t fit our prison wagon circumstances. I stared down the row of wagons to see we’d all been evicted from our wooden boxes. Four women. One man.
Well. I guess the Lord who’d had us abducted had varied tastes, because we were all different in appearances.
When the hooded figure turned to the man who spoke, I casually felt for the pockets of my pants—I was still in my damn Direct Sports Shoes uniform—and kept my expression even as my fingers brushed the outline of my silver pen.
Good, I was armed. Like fuck was I becoming some rich fuck’s sex slave.
Neither would I allow the others to be, either.
If we had to burn this mansion down to escape, so be it. I’d always loved a bonfire.
“Did you hear me?” the man demanded. A few years older than me, with a square jaw, aristocratic face, and slicked back golden hair. “Where are we? I want to know—”
The cloaked fucker backhanded him so hard he went to the ground.
“We don’t abide disobedience at Lunova Academy,” he said in a cold voice that raised all the fine hairs on the back of my neck.
A voice in the back of my mind screamed at me to run, some deep-buried instinct howling so loud I backed up a step and bumped into the wagon that brought me here.
“You will learn to follow orders, or you will be left at the edge of the boundary.”
“What boundary?” one of the other women dared to whisper, voicing my exact question. I would have used more swearwords, though.
“The boundary that protects our slayers,” he replied, as if any of those words made sense together. “Outside the boundary, the wolves will rip you apart and feast on your organs.”
Oh, that sounded delightful. My teeth knocked together when they chattered, a sudden deluge of fear hitting my system and making my throbbing knees weak.
Run, that inner voice screamed. Turn around and run.
But I wasn’t the only one being screamed at by my instincts, and a brunette woman in her thirties did exactly what I wished to do.
She threw herself into the space between wagons and burst into a run, her dress vintage and floral, the cut of it like nothing I’d seen before even when I worked at a wannabe Oktoberfest in Manchester.
The cloaked prick took something from his pocket—a gun, I thought, and went deadly still—and a burst of golden light burst from the tip. Like a taser, it took down the running woman and she screamed.
Right, fuck, got it. No running.
“Back in line,” our jailor barked, but the brunette woman was too weak and shaky to stand.
The blonde beside me took a tentative step and gestured at the woman on the floor, and though the jailor said nothing, he stepped back, allowing her to help the collapsed woman to her feet.
“Do not run,” he warned the rest of us. “Do not speak out of turn. Follow me.”
What the fuck have you signed me up for, Gran? I thought in a hiss, hugging myself around the middle as the cloaked bastard gestured us forward, away from the carts and towards the looming building.
No fucking way was I putting my hands on some old guy’s slimy dick, but my attention slid to the brunette as she slipped. Whatever that stun gun was, it was powerful and painful, and I had no intention of getting on the wrong end of it.
So I ducked under the brunette’s arm and helped carry her across the courtyard, into the foreboding building. And if my teeth chattered, everyone else pretended not to hear.