“What do you get out of it?” I gave him a shallow smile. “Me, right?”
“Obviously. The others are blind to how Elliot Graves works. They think he is bringing a lamb to the slaughter. That he wants a bit of fun with you before he teaches you a lesson for making such a ridiculous show of yourself. But he wouldn’t give a plaything the largest suite of rooms. I have it on good authority that he spoiled you rotten with gifts, too. He gave you instructions on how to properly ward your rooms, since apparently you’re too…naive? Stupid? I’ll let you choose your own adjective. Regardless, he’s pampering you.”
“And you want to know why.”
“I know why, and it’s not the power, though I will admit you clearly have a lot of it. You don’t know how to use it, however, and we all know Elliot doesn’t take apprentices or partners, despite what he’s said. No, he wants those shifters, doesn’t he? He plans to organize them against Momar.” He shook his head. “I’ve never totally understood why Momar hates them so much. Hire some people and they aren’t hard to take down. But that bear you have is something else… That’s what Graves wants, isn’t it? The gorilla wasn’t a subtle hint. He’s calling me shortsighted for how I handled him. I will admit, it isn’t a bad idea to use the shifters against Momar. Too bad it won’t work.”
I’d never stared so hard in my life.
The gorilla wasn’t a subtle hint.
How I handled him…
“You killed Brochan’s mate and children. You killed children!”
His eyes narrowed. “I killed poachers and animals.”
Power boiled through and around me. “That doesn’t even make sense. Number one, you were on their land. You’re the poacher. Number two, poachers are people, animals are prey. You can’t call them both. Just call it what it was—slaughter. Despicable slaughter that will be your death sentence.”
He chuckled without humor. “And who will carry it out? You? Wrapped in rope with no use of your hands? Can’t even put up a simple ward spell or wash away those crow’s feet on your eyes? Sure. Or are you talking about the shifters? Because I’m all that stands between them and their annihilation.”
Finally Austin clicked back onto my radar, and a wave of dizziness rode the link. The other unconscious members of the crew woke up soon thereafter.
I breathed a sigh of relief and refocused on the issue at hand.
I could kill this disgusting mage right now. I didn’t need my hands—I’d learned some spells without them. I could kill every person in this room. I didn’t care that I would be stranded, tied up in ropes without even Cheryl to saw myself out.
But I wouldn’t.
Because Chambers wasn’t my fight. He was Broken Sue’s, and I wouldn’t take that from him.
I shook my head as Austin snapped to focus, and a deep, aching pain pumped through the link. Not a pain of the flesh, but a pain of the soul. He was reacting to the fear of what might happen to me—to the anguish of possibly losing me—and I could feel it overcome his whole person.
My heart throbbed and then overflowed, the pure, unchecked, incredibly raw emotion bringing tears to my eyes. If I’d needed proof of how much he cared for me, I had it.
“No need to cry. You won’t be hurt,” Chambers said, but I wasn’t paying him any attention.
Shock and alarm radiated from the links. Frustration. Anger. I wondered what was happening. Whatever it was, it was happening to everyone.
“So your plan is to trade me to Elliot for…favor?” I asked, passing the time. “For some sort of back-scratching thing?”
“Yes. There you go. Not so stupid, then?”
“And you will give Austin a hollow offer to keep him at bay until you can kill him, and then try to…what, play Elliot and Momar off each other or something?”
Chambers’s eyebrows pinched together. “A simplistic and juvenile grasp of the situation, but…you have the gist of it.”
Rage sparked in a few of the links, but none felt so tumultuous as Austin’s. From that alone, I knew he was being given the offer he supposedly couldn’t refuse.
Once upon a time, I might have worried he’d take it. It sounded good on paper. He would want to protect his family. I was just his girlfriend, after all.
Once upon a time, I’d been young, without any self-confidence. Without any power or strength of my own. Without the drive to insist I be given the things I deserved.
I wasn’t so young anymore. I might be naive when it came to magic, but I was no longer naïve about love.
And I did love Austin. I loved him with all my heart. I trusted him with everything that I was. He would come for me, just as I would fight for him. He wouldn’t take a ridiculous offer in the hopes it might be legit—he’d do battle, and once we were together again, we’d join forces to combat whatever came at his family.
No more holding back out of self-preservation. It was time to swing my leg over the saddle. It was time to accept what he already had—that we were meant to be bound together, body and soul.
First I needed to get out of this rope.
“You’re an idiot,” I said as Austin’s rage built, dark and twisted, a nightmare bubbling up from down deep. He would lose himself to his beast. This time, he wanted to. “Holy hell, you are an idiot. He’s pissed.”
Excitement surged within me. Anticipation. The desire to meet Austin and fight by his side.
I scowled down at the ropes.
“You’ve turned me into a damsel,” I murmured.
“Are you hearing a word I’ve been saying?” Chambers demanded.
The walls shuddered around me. The ground vibrated under my feet.
That wasn’t Austin.
My eyes widened as I looked at Chambers, my focus split between him and whatever was happening around us. “No, I haven’t. You unleashed hell, do you know that? Listen, really quickly, because it’s the last chance you’ll get. If you try to hold something over Elliot’s head, he’ll just kill you. He has no qualms about it. I don’t know why he’s pampering me, but it probably isn’t good. The others are almost certainly right about that. Second, your ego is out of control if you think you’d be able to pit Momar and Elliot against each other and not end up being smashed between them. You probably aren’t smart enough, or rich enough, or…whatever enough to handle the kind of crap you’re wading into.”
Glasses shook on tables. A small rock fell from the ceiling. The three lackeys in the room looked around, wondering what was going on.
I also wondered what was going on. What was the basajaun doing to this mountain?
“Third, you do not understand shifters at all. At all. They are incredibly loyal. They have pack mentality. If you are in the pack, they will saw off a limb for you. They wouldn’t leave a member of their pack out to dry. They aren’t like mages. And you just so happened to mess with the baddest shifter in the world. His brother doesn’t need you for safety. His brother needs him.”
Austin changed into his animal; I could feel it through the link. Niamh shifted, and the gargoyles did the same. They couldn’t use their wings, but their flyer forms had tougher hides and sharper claws.
Edgar came toward me fastest of all, slipping by whatever opposition waited in the halls in his swarm-of-bugs form.