Bayou Blues (22 page)

For once I listened to reason.

Then I got mad at myself for crying and blinked until the tears stopped. I concentrated on the part of me being gnawed at by worry and forced my rage into it. Whoever had hung me here knew what Wilder and I were. If I’d been hung from my arms like every hack kidnapping movie, I’d have been able to rip the hook right out of the ceiling without much traction.

If I tried that in my current situation, I would only succeed in dislocating something on my body or strangling myself.

A door creaked behind me, and I took a deep breath, hoping the smells carried in on the breeze might tell me something. I got a whiff of something human and then sneezed because the magnolia blooms were still too strong in the air.

We hadn’t gone far.

Keeping my body still, I tracked a pair of feet as they moved around me. Dusty brown men’s work boots with scuffed toes. Whoever this was wore paint-stained jeans and smelled male.

I wanted to remember his scent so I’d be able to hunt him down later, but once the aroma of magnolias was gone, it was replaced with the pungent reek of men’s body spray. So much of it, I couldn’t make out his natural body odor.

These guys were smart.

They smelled like sexual predators looking for easy prey on Bourbon Street, but they planned ahead. After he showered I wouldn’t be able to find his real smell again.

The man crouched in front of me, his face hidden behind a black ski mask. Brown eyes that might have been warm in other circumstances met my angry glare without blinking.

He wouldn’t have been cocky if I wasn’t tied up.

“You’re awake. Good. It took a lot of effort to bring you down. I was worried they might have really hurt you.” He brushed my bangs away from my face. I flinched but couldn’t recoil. “You don’t look like much, but you’re a scrapper.”

“You don’t look like much either.” I growled after saying it, in spite of the way my throat protested.

The area around his eyes bunched, and I realized he was smiling.

The urge to smash him in the face was so intense my body vibrated from trying to hold still.

“Still got some fight in you. Isn’t that sweet?”

Condescending prick was going to find out exactly how much fight I had in me as soon as I was free. I’d like to see if he was smiling after I turned his large intestines into an infinity scarf.

“If you let me go, nothing will happen to you,” I lied. “I just want to go back to my people.”

“You don’t have people.” His tone was suddenly cold and scary, and I didn’t like the way he said
people
, like he was mocking me. At first I was terrified he was suggesting Wilder was gone or something had happened to Cash. Then his meaning sank in, and it was much more obvious.

I didn’t have people because I wasn’t human.

Lowering my eyes to the floor beneath me, I focused on the black bloodstain. How many other non-humans had hung here before me? How many lives had these people decided weren’t important because we were different? I thought I might cry again, but this time the tingling had moved from behind my eyes and into my hands.

Not the tingling of feeling returning to my extremities, either.

If this guy didn’t want to deal with me as a werewolf, fine. But I had other ways to make him suffer.

“You’re going to want to let me go,” I said quietly. “And my friend too.”

“Oh? And why would I do something like that when I went to all the trouble of tying you up so nicely?” He ran his finger over the rope at my throat. Our eyes locked, and he seemed to be challenging me to stop him because he knew I couldn’t.

Takes a really tough man to challenge a lady when she resembles a Thanksgiving turkey.

“If you let me go, I won’t hurt you. I won’t make you suffer. I’ll walk away with my
people
, and I will pretend this town never existed. That you never existed.” I almost believed it myself. It might work. If I was released, I
could
leave. Take Cash and the Shaws and go.

Somehow, given my current circumstances, I didn’t think
walk away
was in the cards.

His loss.

The tingling in my fingers got worse. If not for the other sensations in my arms and legs, it might have even hurt. Instead it just woke me up, made me feel alive. It gave me something to focus on other than what he’d done to me.

“You’re not going to let me go, are you?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not a chance in hell.”

I smiled at him, and he must not have expected it because the uneasiness in his eyes was obvious. “Good. I might have felt bad otherwise.”

He stood up, moving out of my sight, and when he came back, he was holding a huge hunting knife. My limbs twitched in response, but I couldn’t do anything to get away or move my body out of his range. If he wanted to cut me wide open, there was nothing I could do to stop him.

“Now, I want you to tell me where your friend went. If you do that, I might not have to use this.”

Relief, a feeling almost as euphoric as an orgasm, flushed through my whole body. Wilder. Wilder was safe. He’d gotten away from this somehow, and they didn’t have him hogtied in another room. Just knowing he was okay made me let out a short whoop of pure, unadulterated joy.

If Wilder was free, that meant this might all still end okay.

I wasn’t depending on him to rescue me. His freedom just meant one less person I had to get out of this mess. Now I could focus on saving myself instead of worrying about him.

“Come closer,” I whispered.

“Do I look stupid?” He touched the blade to my cheek, but this time I didn’t wince.

“You’re wearing a ski mask in this weather. Of course you look stupid. It also makes you look like a coward.” The restraints tugged painfully as I spoke, but I couldn’t stop. My voice sounded raspier as I went, but I charged ahead. “You’re covering your face so I won’t know who you are. But what does it matter? If you’re really going to kill me, why do you care? If you believe in the cause you’re fighting for, why hide? The truth it, you’re terrified I’m going to get out of here. And you don’t want me to come find you when this is all said and done.”

He scoffed but lowered the blade. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then you must just be fucking ugly.”

My pinky stretched out, practically disjointing itself, but I was able to curl it around one of the ropes holding me. I hope that one touch was all I would need.

This wouldn’t be easy. I couldn’t shift my focus; I could barely string coherent thoughts together. I’d need to say the words out loud, because casting any spell with just my mind would be out of the question. I would need to be on the top of my game for that, and this hardly qualified as my best form.

“Air, hear me,” I whispered.

“What?”

I ignored him, hoping I’d be able to get through the whole thing before he decided to slit me open. “Earth, hear me.” I stared down at the still-wet spots my tears had left in the dirt and smiled. Never let it be said crying wasn’t good for you. “Water, hear me.”

“What are you saying? Are you praying?”

“No. But you should be.”

The last words of the spell spilled out of me in a war cry. “Fire, hear me. Fire, yield to me. Fire, be my breath, be my touch. Fire heed me.”

My skin felt as if it might crack open like an aged blister and peel away at the lightest touch. I was coming apart, being ignited from the inside out. In the midst of the spell taking hold, I stopped being Eugenia, and I
became
the magic. I was no longer human, even on a small scale. I was pure; I was liquid energy. There was no body to contain me; I was time and emotion. I was the start and end of the universe. I was the molten core of the earth.

I was this motherfucker’s worst nightmare.

The rope holding me caught fire, burning up and turning to smoke and ash. I should have fallen. I braced myself to hit the hard wood face first. Instead I floated up, the charred bits of my restraints hovering around me like blackened snow frozen in place, flecks of ember trapped in midair as if they were fireflies. My feet weren’t touching the floor, and I hovered near the rafters, bright red flames encasing my arms up to the elbows, licking outward. The heat was real, I could feel it around me, but I didn’t burn.

I would take time to be scared of myself later.

I would think about the fact I could apparently levitate later too.

First things first, I needed to make sure
later
was a reality I could count on.

“I gave you a chance,” I snarled. My voice gave me chills. It crackled and popped, words roaring like angry fire into a room. The space around us was filled with my words, as if they were tangible weapons I was spitting at him. “You could have made this easy. You could have walked away.”

“I-I… Wh-wha…” He eyed the door as if it was his last salvation.

The lucid part of my brain tried to imagine myself as he was seeing me. I couldn’t decide if I appeared more like I was demon-possessed, or like Jean Grey from the X-Men when she went all Dark Phoenix.

Either way, I hoped it scared the piss out of him.

He dropped the knife. “I’m sorry,” he sputtered.

You can’t kill him.

That stupid do-gooder voice in my head was back again, reminding me this wasn’t me. This wasn’t who I was.

But God I wished it could be.

I stared down at the floor uncertainly. Since I hadn’t willed myself to float up, I wasn’t sure how to control this new ability of mine. Was it just hovering, or could I actually fly? If it was the latter, that might be the coolest thing to ever happen to me. No one could fly. In spite of rumors to the contrary, vampires couldn’t. They couldn’t turn into bats, either.

I lowered myself down, feeling a rush when my feet hit the hard wood floor. Just standing was the strangest relief. When I’d been tied up, there was a small part of me, even for the briefest time, that thought this might be the end for me.

There’s nothing quite like being tethered to certain death to make you really
really
not want to die.

But I also wasn’t going to squander this opportunity to get the information I needed. If this guy was terrified, he might talk to me if only to save himself. If I could keep him scared long enough to find out what Deerling’s plan was, then maybe,
maybe
this whole ordeal would be worth something.

“Take off your mask.”

His hands trembled, but he didn’t argue. He lifted the mask from his head and dropped it to the floor, but kept his face lowered as if he was afraid to show me who he really was. He should be.

When he raised his head, I growled audibly.

“
You
.”

Anderson, the jackass deputy whose nose Wilder had broken. Now I was wishing he’d punched his fist right through the guy’s face.

I was also immediately worried about Hank.

Why had I been stupid enough to think the police might be safe people for Wilder’s brother to be with? I already suspected the sheriff was in on it. I should have known there would be no such place as a safe haven in a town supported by lies and hatred. I felt naïve for believing the police force might remain untouched by corruption. I should have known better.

Callum was right not to trust anyone. He’d been right to want to keep me close. There was no protection for us outside the pack. No one had our best interests in mind.

Even the police didn’t think we were people anymore.

I wondered what would have happened to Wilder if we’d left him in jail another night. Or what Anderson would have done if he’d caught him this time.

“What did Deerling do to the woman?” The fire on my arms had begun to snuff itself out. I was hoping it would last longer, but I was getting tired and a headache was building up steam, making my whole head feel swollen. I might as well have been blinking shards of refined glass.

I was going to have one hell of a magic hangover once I slept this off.

“She’s dead.”

Of course she was dead, I already knew that. That’s why they had Hank arrested after all. “Who killed her?”

“What are you talking about? The wolf killed her.” In spite of his shaky voice, he sounded like he was telling the truth. At least the truth as he knew it. I reminded myself Anderson had been with us when the woman died. He might not know what really happened that night.

“How many other wolves does he have locked up?” I glanced down to the dark stain on the floor. “How many
did
he have?”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t you
dare
lie to me,” I shouted, the flames streaming up again. My headache moved towards a migraine. If I didn’t get him to talk soon, there was a good chance I might not be able to walk out of here.

The other problem was if there was anyone else outside, they might start to wonder why I was shouting angrily rather than screaming in pain. If it would help, maybe I could make
him
scream a little. At the right pitch, screaming sounds the same from both sexes. Agony has no gender.

I took a step towards him, and he backed against the wall. If he could have gone right through it, he would.

“Tell me the truth.”

“I can’t be sure. Six, maybe? Ten?”

The hair on my arms rose as the flames flared high. For a moment the pain in my skull was so intense I was blind. I couldn’t see beyond the white haze of light. When I could see again, I had my hand wrapped around his throat, and the smell of burning flesh wafted up to my nostrils. He was trying to pry my hand off him, but he kept burning himself when he touched me.

“St-stop,” he pleaded.

I released him, horrified I’d been able to hurt him without even realizing what I was doing. This wasn’t
me
. It wasn’t like me to want to kill people, that’s not how my brain worked. I had never been the kind of person who wanted to inflict pain on anyone, yet here I was trying to choke the life out of a stranger.

My hand trembled.

What was I becoming?

When my mother said I was a killer—like my father—had she known something I hadn’t? Who
was
this person I was turning into? The powers were one thing, something amazing and special. But what was the risk to getting them? If I had to sacrifice my humanity to become a stronger witch, I didn’t want any part in it. I’d rather have no powers at all than to use them against others.