-CHAPTER THREE-

She woke to a warm weight on her lap, and sharp teeth nibbling at the wound at her wrist. She screamed before she even fully comprehended the why of it, flailing and slapping blindly at the thing that was abruptly no longer there, darting down somewhere into the dark.

She pressed herself back against the door, panting and gasping, feeling at her wrist. It had only bitten her the once, but she felt as if she’d been doused in filth all over a hundred times. A shudder went through her, and she tried to block out the sounds of scrambling and scratching going on at the bottom of the steps.

She had no idea how long she’d been asleep, but thinking of time made her remember what was in her pocket, what her captors had not taken. From the back pocket of her jeans she pulled her phone, safe in it’s waterproof case. The sudden illumination from just the locked screen made her sag with relief; the case had been worth every penny. That, however, was abruptly buried beneath a sudden avalanche of hope.

She’d never dialed three numbers faster in her life.

She held the phone to her ear, clutching it like it held her freedom and safety in its silicone confines, heart pounding hard enough that she was worried about being able to hear the emergency dispatcher over the rushing in her ears.

Nothing.

She looked at the screen in confusion.

No.

No.

She dialed again.

A pair of beeps, then the message, ‘No signal.’

She must still be asleep. She was having a nightmare. This whole thing had to be a nightmare. It had to be.

It wasn’t. She knew that. She wasn’t going to even try to convince herself it was and do something stupid like jump off a cliff. She’d had enough vivid, detailed, horrible and wonderful dreams in her life to know the difference.

She clutched the phone to her chest, switching the screen off to save the battery until she could figure out what it might still be good for. Light, if nothing else.

She put her phone back in her pocket, her clothes having mostly dried to uncomfortable stiffness, and searched her other pockets. Her jeans were form fitting, more fashionable than functional. Her plain cotton tank had been meant to be hidden beneath an oversized hoodie, but that had been hung over her arm when she’d been jumped; it was long gone now, probably still in the parking lot.

She found a hair tie in one front pocket and a spare set of car and house keys in the other. Her debit card and ID were in her other back pocket. Not that either rectangles of plastic would do her any good.

Karlene let her head thump back against the door, and she winced. She’d forgotten about breaking Rowe’s nose with her cranium. She frowned, thinking of the big man who’d...er, thanked her.

Now that her panic had subsided, Karlene couldn’t help but ponder the oddity of everything that had happened. There was no way to ignore or rationalize away one simple fact; this was not a standard kidnapping, in any way. At best, she’d found herself the guest of some sort of nest of anti-technology cultists. But that didn’t explain the sudden drop into the water. Or the pillar of sooty runes and charred ash. The only thing she could think of to explain that bit was that there had been some sort of hallucinogenic on the knife, something strong enough that just the tip of it had delivered enough of the substance to make her see impossible things.

She stared into the darkness, thinking. Not a dream, that she knew. But a hallucination? That seemed slightly more probable. Not all of it had been an illusion, obviously. She probably really was somewhere dark and dank and infested with rats, and she had probably really ridden here in something...but perhaps it had been a beaten up truck with a wooden bed, not a wagon. And perhaps they hadn’t dropped out of the air into the ocean, but driven there and jumped off a bridge. The fort might be a hut, the medieval kitchen some makeshift camp mess. If she were in the UK somewhere, the castle theme might have been more rational, but one thing the good ol’ US of A was not well-stocked in was castles.

She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands, feeling gritty and dirty and hardly human. She wanted a shower, food, a hospital bed and a banana bag to help her detox.

And her mom. She wasn’t too proud to admit it. Damn impending adulthood, damn the looming start of her freshman year at grad school, damn her independence; she wanted her mother to yank open the door behind her, scoop her up, and take her home where things made sense.

As if a genie had listened in and decided to grant the wrong part of her string of wishes, the door was yanked open behind her. It was not, however, her mother doing the door opening.

Karlene gave an undignified squawk as she fell backward, banging her head hard on the stone floor. She hissed and gripped her skull, willing the sudden pounding to stop long enough for her to see, aim for, and kick whoever had startled her.

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It was Sid, she saw, leaning over her with a bland expression. She supposed he must be done feeling sorry for what he’d helped do to her, now that he was back with his own insane...family? cultists? posse?

Deciding she didn’t care, she lunged, hands curled into claws. He caught her wrists, his bland face transforming into one of surprise. She heard a familiar cackling laugh behind her, and a stick came out of nowhere, sweeping her legs out from under her. She landed hard on her tailbone, and yelped.

“Easy there, my lamb. Won’t do no good to bite the hands that feed you, will it? Now you’ll have no breakfast.” The woman laughed again, one hand on her hip, the other planting the stick she’d used to trip Kalene against the stone floor. She was missing teeth, Karlene noted while she waited for sensation to return to her rear end. Several teeth. And the rest were yellowed and crooked. If she’d ever seen a dentist -or hell, a toothbrush- it had been before her adult teeth had grown in.

“Kiss my ass,” she hissed through her own teeth, barring them.

“Don’t tease her, Milly,” Sid said, and he sounded tired. She looked at him again and saw, unwillingly, that he hadn’t recovered from their swim. Or maybe he’d gotten high on whatever she clearly was still on and hadn’t come down. Either way, she refused to feel sympathy for him.

The Ham-Armed woman, apparently called Milly, snorted. “Not teasin’ if I mean it, now is it? You went and lost Mynda, and now I have to train a whole new dropling with hardly any notice. Did you know Lithandres wants her to Shift you lot as soon as the day after next? Can’t be done, I told him, she doesn’t know yet what’s good for her, not like my sweet Mynda. Aye, now there was a good girl-”

“Enough, Milly.” Sid said, and Milly, for a wonder, shut up. Where had this quiet authority been when Sid, calling himself Jon, had walked into her pristine shop covered in mud and grass and begged for a job?

He extended a hand down to her. She ignored it, and pulled herself painfully, every muscle cramping and stiffening in turns, to her feet. This was no worse, she told herself, than the morning after she’d moved out of her mother’s house and into her own apartment. Up four flights of stairs. By herself. In one day. After skipping leg day for two weeks straight.

Sid shrugged and pulled something from his back pocket. It was a pair of bracelets, wide cuffs of a silvery metal. They were etched with more of the same sigils she remembered seeing in her hallucination, the one that had been drawn onto the asphalt and had flashed to glowing lines of embers at the touch of her blood.

Sid held the cuffs up and hooked her gaze with his.

“These,” he said. He nudged a coil of rope at his feet. “Or that.”

She blinked at him. The bracelets weren’t connected by anything that she could see. Without being able to help herself, she gave him the most incredulous stare she’d ever given. He sighed.

“I keep forgetting. You look so much like them.” He gestured to Milly, whose jaw dropped.

“You can’t mean to-”

“I’ll take them right off. You know they won’t work on you for more than an hour even if I didn’t.”

Milly sniffed, lifted her chin, and leaned her stick against the cellar doorframe before extending her arms. He slid the bracelets over her hands to settle on her wrists. Sid made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, then shrunk that circle. At the precise same time, the bracelets shrank until they fit snugly around Milly’s wrists.

Karlene gaped.

“Do it again,” she said without meaning to. Sid looked at her, surprised. “Do it again,” she repeated, impatient. There had to be a trick to it. Had to be. She just had to catch it. Some sleight of hand, or something electronic. For the sake of her sanity, she neatly ignored the little voice of logic that told her the chances of finding an electronic toy advanced enough to do that anywhere around here was as improbable as the chance that everything she’d seen was a hallucination.

Sid obliged, but she didn’t see any wires, or chips, or shifting links or hinges. The bracelets simply shrank.

She still didn’t see how they were an alternative to rope, until Sid pinched his thumb and forefinger together, and Milly’s wrists were yanked together as if an invisible zip tie and been tightened around them. The bracelets stuck fast until Sid made the same motion in reverse.

“They can do more, but nothing I’m going to do to Milly.” Sid said, and Milly sniffed, looking as aloof as a drowned cat. He made the loop gesture again, this time disconnecting his forefinger and thumb, and the bracelets expanded back to their original size.

“Now,” he said. “Rope or cuffs?”

She eyed him like he was insane, lifted her chin and answered, “Rope.”

He looked surprised for some goddamn reason. Rope she could cut, could twist free of, even use against him if she managed to find both the opportunity and her hidden inner kungfu master. She had no idea how she’d get out of his magic trick cuffs, if that’s what they were. Better the bindings she knew than the trick she didn’t.

As if he were obliging her in some great favor, Sid sighed -again- and stooped to grab the coil of rope.

She saw the opening, and almost without thinking Karlene lashed out, kicking her right foot up into his face. She felt a snap as her foot slammed into his nose and spared half a thought to hope it had been his face and not her foot that had broken as she turned and bolted.

The bland faces of the kitchen staff glanced at the commotion but did and said nothing as she sprinted past, hearing Milly shriek and Sid yelp behind her.

She thanked her mother an endless number of times as she followed the route she’d been taken along yesterday in reverse. Half limping, half running, she knew if she hadn’t managed to pay partial attention the night before she would have been lost in moments.

She slowed when she reached the courtyard. There had been several people working in it yesterday, and seeing her stumbling like a bat out of rehab hell would be sure to raise alarms. She let herself slump, going listless and as dull as she could, like she’d seen almost everyone else act. With adrenaline spiking her blood and her pulse pounding it was harder than it should have been, but she eventually made herself step out into the sunlight. She did her best to adopt the attitude of the kitchen staff, slack shouldered and empty eyed, gaze downcast as she shuffled across the hard packed dirt and sparse layer of straw. Her nose told her which way the latrines were -oh, ew- and she headed for them. If she could get out of sight again and make her way around the edge of the courtyard, keeping behind the barrels and carts she could see…

When no one seemed to notice her or her direction, hope flared. She glanced behind her, half expecting to see Sid and Milly. Why hadn’t they followed yet?

There was a commotion so sudden and so loud at the main gate that she forgot for a moment her dullard disguise and looked, sharply, towards the noise. Courtyard workers who had been busy tossing hay to horses, fixing saddles, and any other number of archaic things she didn’t understand were dropping their tools and rushing to the opening gates, whooping as they went.

Now was her chance. She half ran, half limped to a pile of barrels and crates by the gate, and ducked out of sight to watch and wait for her opening. Soon as whatever had them all excited was through, she’d run before they could close the gate again.

A half dozen horses of varying quality -even she could tell the gray gelding was on its last legs- thundered through into the courtyard, their riders all laughing through their evident exhaustion. In their midst, the one member of their party not laughing stuck out like a sore thumb. He was a dark haired man, younger than the rest, and he was tied to his saddle.

Horse and man both hung their heads, but at least the horse had been fed and was relatively clean. The man, not so much. His face was pinched with exhaustion and hunger, his shoulder blades protruding through the thin shirt that, aside from a pair of pants that ended raggedly at the knees, was all he wore. She caught glimpses of thread that glinted at the outer seam of his pants. They’d been nice, once.

“Well, now, this is convenient.” Said a voice deep enough to vibrate her bones. She glanced to the source, a man standing atop the wide, sweeping stone steps. Immediately, she had to do a double take. Rub her eyes. Blink harshly. Gape.

Reassess her hallucination theory.

She’d only half convinced herself she’d been hallucinating before now. The speaker, however, was all the proof she needed that something was not right with the gray matter between her ears.

He was tall, blonde with massive shoulders, wearing soft white clothing of quality make and cut. And from his back, half furled, extended...

Wings.