Chapter Twenty-Eight - Wick, Candle Wick

"Alyssa!" Jenny screamed over the mic.

I winced, then lowered myself deeper into the shadows. No one had noticed, fortunately. The speaker around my neck was still set to a low volume, so even her screaming wasn't terribly loud, but that didn't mean that I could afford to have her shouting at the top of her lungs. "Sharp, keep her quiet," I hissed.

"Sorry! Jenny? Jen, come on, let's back up. She's okay, I'm sure she's fine."

"Fine? She looks dead!" Jenny snapped.

"She's not," I said. I knew dead when I saw it. Alyssa wasn't in anything close to good shape, but the young woman wasn't dead.

I carefully shifted to look both ways down the corridor, then waited until someone was trudging by. The moment they were past me, I darted out and slipped into their shadow where I stalked forwards until they were by the entrance to the room Alyssa was in. Then I shifted into that room as well.

There were six cages, which really turned what had been a few apartments into a very cramped space. The inner walls were mostly semi-transparent tarps, some of which were covered in grime and filth. There was an office desk to one side, and next to that, in the next apartment over, a small operating suite. The sort of thing I'd expect to see in a back-alley doctor's office.

There were no guards, but there was a man in the surgery room walking about and cleaning things. His back was turned, but even so I could tell he was moving with more alacrity and ease than the people just outside.

I snuck up to Alyssa's cage, being sure to stay outside of the circle created by the candles on the floor.

"See, she's breathing," Sharp said. "She's alive."

"Oh," Jenny said. There was a whole book's worth of relief in that one syllable.

The mage was breathing, but it wasn't great. Short, stiff breathes, like someone who had just choked and was trying to catch some air. A trickle of blood had run down her nose and down her chin, and from the bruise forming on the side of her face, she'd either been slapped or punched pretty hard.

I carefully shifted left and right, eying the extent of her injuries. It wasn't too bad. No broken limbs that I could tell. Her clothes seemed mostly intact, though I imagined that she'd been frisked. Her jewellery was all gone, and from the looks of it they hadn't been gentle with the removal.

That was fair. Jewellery was often a magical catalyst of some sort or another. Leaving a mage with something like that was unwise if you intended to capture them.

"Sharp, I need you to look up this candle and salt thing," I said. I leaned way down and sniffed at the ring of white powder on the ground. Some caught on my whiskers, and a whiff of it confirmed that it tasted like plain kitchen salt.

"O-okay," Sharp said. "What am I looking for?"

"Ways to restrict a magic user. Especially one tied to an eidolon." I turned and eyed the others in their cages. Mostly men, one other woman. They mostly looked normal, but one of them had a coat covered in a feathery fringe, and another had a large bear printed on the back of his shirt as well as running shoes with a bear logo on the side.

More warlocks, then? I couldn't imagine that they all belonged to the same two or three eidolons. This felt like more of a... spread, than anything focused.

I moved back to the shadows, keeping low and slow. One of them woke up with a groan and looked at me with barely open eyes, but he didn't make any real noise to alert their captors.

I heard arguing over the line, and it took a solid ten minutes before Sharp came back to me with something usable. "Okay, okay. I've convinced Jenny not to run in. Uh. So, we found something. Jenny had access to Alyssa's stuff, and she had a bunch of files on magic things and it wasn't too hard to find something about salt and candles. Well, a lot of things. But I think we found the right one."

"Go on," I said.

"So, there's two possibilities. Are there lines between all of the cages?"

I stood up a little, then nodded. "There are, yes."

"Okay... well, that was the worst option," Sharp said. "It says here that it might be a way to, uh, suck the magic out of people? Like a living battery kind of thing. You're meant to use it on like, creatures you capture from enemy eidolons until they're drained."

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That was horrifically ominous. "And yet these are human practitioners," I pointed out.

"Yeah, nothing about that here. But there are lots of warnings about not disrupting the salt circles and making sure that all the candles stay lit. There's a whole process to go through to replace them once they're about to run out, so I think that the whole thing falls apart if you just turn one candle off?"

I hummed. "I'll test it," I said.

"Yeah, it's probably best to test it first," Sharp said. "Not on Alyssa though!" she added.

I huffed. That was obvious. I sauntered over to the man with the bear-print stuff. He slowly blinked, then tried to push himself upwards, but barely moved before slumping back down. The man had cuffs on, and judging by his musculature and the blood on his knuckles, he hadn't been taken easily. Our eyes met for a moment, then I casually reached over and tipped a candle to the side.

It clicked slightly on hitting the ground, but the sound wasn't all that bad. I half-turned, then delicately ran my tail across the salty line.

The man stood up a little straighter, and I could see that colour was returning to his cheeks almost right away.

I tilted my head deeper in, and he followed my gaze to the surgery room and the man within. He nodded, and I hoped that he understood that I wanted him to keep quiet for the moment.

"That worked. But it feels like it'll take some time before our friends here are in any shape to fight. And they're still in cages."

I glanced up. The cages were... frankly, kind of crap. They were made of corner tubing, welded together with more enthusiasm than skill. I was pretty sure a few swift kicks would break someone out. The front was locked in place by a large commercial padlock. Were I still human and in possession of a bobby-pin, I could unlock one of those faster than if I had the damned key.

I nodded to the bear-warlock again, then slipped across the room once more. I snuffed out candles as I went. One per cage, including the one holding Alyssa. No obvious alarms went off, but two things worried me. One, there was that man in the next room over, and two, there was a camera in the corner ceiling. I had no idea if it was functional or not, and all the candle smoke was gathered in the ceiling which probably made visibility poor, but still, if we did something, we'd need to be fast about it.

Moving next to the surgery, I snuck my head in and stilled to observe.

The man within was in a stained lab-coat. Mid-thirties, bespectacled, greasy hair, one hand replaced by a higher-end doctor's prosthetic, the sort that concealed several knives, injectors, scissors and other tools, but which could transform back into a hand for ease of use.

This wasn't a drugged up, addle-minded cultist that would go down easily...

Not unless I got creative, and the large tank of oxygen next to the surgery platform gave me an idea.

It would be loud, however.

I continued to look around, but when I discovered the keys, I was upset to find that they were in the man's labcoat pocket.

Well, nothing for it.

I slid into the room, then padded next to the surgical bed in its centre. I'd have to be fast, and hope that he was more distracted cleaning than he was attentive. He had earbuds in, and I could just barely pick out the sound of what might have been an audiobook playing.

I did love it when a target distracted themselves.

I jumped up onto the bed, then leaned over to the command console next to it. There was a full suite of anaesthetic diagnostics systems there, none of it locked. It took three taps to start sending oxygen out of a plastic-tube with a mask on the end.

I hopped down the bed, then darted back into the room full of warlocks. There was some groaning, and a lot more motion. They were coming awake, Alyssa included. I had to hope that they were awake enough.

Grabbing a candle by the base, I held back a wince as some hot wax dribbled onto my whiskers, but I now had a source of flame.

Now, this next part was going to be interesting.

I'd really turned into a sloppy assassin since turning into a cat.

***