Authors: Anise Rae
She should leave. This was a mistake. The thought pounded in her head so hard she nodded with it. But her life depended on this. The medallion had to come off.
She took a breath and bravely stepped along the single path that trailed through the crowded room and led into the next. She needed to talk to the metallist before the Casteel sentry walked in, although for all she knew, maybe he didn’t find her a suitable senator. Maybe he wanted her to remove the medallion.
The miserable sound stopped before her slow pace brought her halfway along the path. In the doorway to the next room, a man wobbled out, big and lopsided. By the light of the dirty windows, she could see he had one blue eye and one made of solid, shiny metal. She bit back her gasp. If his metal eye allowed him to see, it violated the Law of Natural Physique. Even Nons knew it was forbidden to use mage power to augment or replace body parts. His teeth were capped and shined just as bright as his eye, but each tooth was too small, as if they’d been shrunk before being coated with silver. His nose was bumpy with scar tissue.
She took a step back and ran into a sharp, heavy metal slab on the floor. He looked her up and down, taking in her dress and her form beneath. She shivered.
“Good day to you, sir.” Her voice wavered. She took a breath to flatten it out. “I am in need of some metal work. I have a bracelet wrapped around my wrist. It’s spelled shut. I was wondering if you could remove it?”
“Show me,” he snarled with a sharp lift of his chin. His long, greasy hair flopped against his cheek. “Some man bind you as his whore?”
It wasn’t a man, she thought as she held out her wrist. The medallion gleamed against her skin as if it preened before all these hunks of drab, old metal, used and discarded.
“Casteel’s power.” The hiss fell from his mouth even as his blue eye shined with lust. “What are you doing in Rallis territory?” He spoke to the medallion as if it would talk back.
Bronte held fast to her serene mask but ignored his question. “Can you get it off?”
“I’m willing to try.” His teeth flashed in a vicious smile.
“There is a gentleman following me. I’d rather he didn’t get in here.” She cleared her throat. Fear clogged it. She couldn’t believe she was about to say this next part. “Could you spell the doors shut? And the windows?” She wouldn’t be able to get out unless he withdrew the energy of the spells.
He studied her with his mismatched eyes for a moment and then hobbled past her to the door. Instead of locking it, he opened it. An argument filtered in. “The boys are keeping him busy. Don’t know what they’re waiting for. Usually they’re punching into ’em by now. They must have had a long night.” He turned back to her. “What’s he want?”
It took her a moment to understand his grumble.
“I don’t know. I think he might be dangerous.” She’d tell him whatever was necessary to keep the sentry out.
“I’ll spell the door shut. The rest of the place is already sealed. It’ll be just you and me in here. And the medallion.” His gaze stuck to her, as oily as the scent that pervaded this hut. She felt the spell pop into place, but it was nothing like the force of Senator Rallis’s powerful sound spell.
He yanked her wrist up. “Let me see it.” His fingernails, tipped with metal points, poked at the chain. One sharp nail slipped off and pierced her skin between the chain’s links.
She tried to pull her arm out of his hold, but he only tightened his grasp. “You’re hurting me.”
He smiled, those little teeth gleaming, as if he savored her pain. He yanked on the chain, taking away the slack. Dots of blood squeezed to the surface from the punctures in her skin.
She leaned away from him. “Let go.” Her sharp order worked too well, and she stumbled against an old engine lying on the floor behind her as he suddenly obeyed. Anger mixed with fear. Her heart pounded. “Can you get it off or not?”
He tapped a long, sharp fingernail against his metal eye as if he were thinking. “Gonna hurt you. And your people. But I’ve heard they’re used to the hurt. Heard there isn’t much good going on in Casteel. Ain’t this proof of that! Guess you aren’t up to the challenge of being the leader of a bunch of no-gooders like the people in Casteel.” His voice was gravelly. “It’ll be like cuttin’ out your own vibes.
“I can’t feel it.” She didn’t know why she bothered to lie to him. He didn’t mind her pain. He raised every internal alarm inside her mind, but for the first time since she’d discovered the medallion around her wrist, she had real hope of getting it off. She faced him with a determination to survive.
He must have read it in her face. “You think you’re tough enough to make it through the hurt? These type of things merge with ya. Medallions are the most powerful of all. It’s why they don’t fall off after death. Someone else who can merge with it has to touch it. I can’t share its power, that’s for damn sure. But I’ll harness it into something.” The glee on his face contrasted sharply with the rest of him.
“You may not keep it, sir. I am leaving with it. I just don’t want it attached to me.” The medallion may have chosen poorly, but she wouldn’t let him confiscate it.
“Then no deal. I ain’t doing this for free, lady. It’s a risky business. No one’s ever removed a medallion from a living mage. By now the things have soaked up so much energy they could almost be alive. Removing it might kill you. Then I’d have the enforcers, the Council, and the Senate down on me. You want it off, I’m keeping it.”
She could not walk out of here without trying. “If you can get it off me, you can have the link of the chain you break.”
It was the only bargaining chip she had.
“Alright. A link. Let’s give it a try.” His chin jutted forward, his mouth full of dull mirrors flashing. “Come on through. My tools are in the back.” He spun around.
She followed slowly, fighting her instinctive desire to flee. This had to be done, she told herself. Senators were powerful. She was not.
She walked under an arched doorway, four feet thick and made of stone, to find herself in a chamber that belonged in a castle’s dungeon, not in a crumbling building in a junkyard. The room contained a huge wooden block, big enough to function as a table, and a collection of sharp metal tools that hung from hooks in the wall. Thick chains swayed above high above the table. Their ghostly creaks whispered through the air. The floor felt like dirt beneath her boots, though it was too dark to see it. There were no windows. The three mage lights hovering beside the walls did little to cut through the darkness.
“I can’t see very well in here.” Bronte began. “Don’t you need brighter light to see what you’re doing? I don’t want you to accidentally break my hand instead of the chain.”
Break? More like chop it off.
“You don’t need to see,” he grumbled. He tapped his metal eye. “I can see everything I need to.”
Despite the openness in the room, the walls threatened to collapse on her. Her feet would barely move her any farther. She came to a stop in the middle of the room. Yes, this would hurt, she told herself. But she’d live. Otherwise, she’d be alone among dangerous strangers—the Casteel mages in her family’s territory and the powerful senators at the Rushes. And Vincent wouldn’t be there.
“Put yer hand here.” The weathered man placed his hand near the end of the solid wooden block. A hundred gouges ran its length as if other medallions had been here before her. He picked up an ax and closed his real eye as he rubbed the tool in circles along a smooth rectangular stone. The whispering of the metal and stone sounded like undecipherable secrets swishing through the air. Bronte could not find any reassurance in the rhythmic hiss.
Every muscle tensed; her body rebelled against her. She had to clear her throat to get any words out. “Is it as simple as brute force?”
His blue eye opened, glared. “Nothing simple about a Mayflower Medallion. Probably a link isn’t payment enough if they come after me. But I like shiny, pretty things.” He smiled. There was nothing pretty about that shine. “Like to take their power until they fade to dull. And there’s nothing more powerful than that.” He flicked a finger at her wrist. “Now are we doing this or not? Put your hand here,” he growled, the finger tapping at the table.
His words prompted her terrified mind. This had to work.
She took six steps to his table and placed her hand on it. It was cold, unnaturally so, as if all the warmth had been drained from it.
His metal fingernails slid under the little slack in the chain wrapped around her wrist. “Not much room here. Easier to hack off your hand and slide it off that way if it’d come. But it probably wouldn’t. It’d just tighten up so it won’t fall off.”
It was good to know in advance that the hacking-off-her-hand plan wouldn’t work, she thought. She leaned against the table. A wave of dizzying fear pulled her in all directions.
“Don’t move.”
Bronte shook her head and panted, eyes wide and brow tensed. She couldn’t close her eyes, but if she watched, she would move—a simple survival instinct. She tried to take a slow breath.
Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move
,
she chanted silently. He raised the ax. She stifled a scream. It stuck in her throat as if she’d shoved a rag down it.
The medallion’s guillotine came down with a whistle, slicing through air molecules as it reached the chain. The force slammed against it and vibrated into her arm, up and down the length of her torso. Every cell of her body trembled. She tried to get away from the razor-sharp energy but it reverberated inside her. The pain echoed again and again.
No escape.
A scream rattled her eardrums. A black wave collapsed over her. She drowned in merciful darkness.
18
Vincent punched a blast of energy at the gates and forced them open. He sped through with just enough space to clear them. They rebounded behind his vehicle and boomed shut, their locks slamming into place. Gregor’s frantic confession replayed in his mind as he flew down the driveway. Vincent stayed focused on his objective: find her. But beneath that thin layer of concentration, a storm of fear brewed. It grew stronger with each minute.
She’d slipped away. Again. Only this time she had a damn medallion wrapped around her. His Bronte was the senator of Casteel. Pain stabbed at his chest as he contemplated the ramifications of that. He gritted his teeth and huffed it away.
First step: find her
.
Gregor was combing the city roads for her and her only possible accomplices, the two deliverymen. All three had vanished. Finding the new Senator Casteel was national priority since according to the High Council’s envoy, a mysterious potion had killed the last one and the murderers still were on the loose. Vincent had pulled two trackers from the bombsite to hunt her. He would have done it even without her upgraded status.
He slammed the brakes as he took the circle in front of the house. The tires squealed against the smooth pavement of the driveway. He jumped out and sprinted up the steps. Jasper met him halfway.
“They’re in the kitchen, sir. The lieutenant said something about the readily available knives there.”
Vincent tromped past him, hoping Dane had skewered the damn gardener with them. The front doors slammed open against the interior walls of the big house. His energy was out of control. Bronte would be horrified.
“Has he talked?” His boots pounded through the corridor and announced his arrival. Let them hear him. Let them sense the vibes of his fury.
“No, sir.”
The clusters of servants grew thicker as he approached the kitchen. Behind him Jasper reprimanded them with a harsh, nervous whisper to get back to work.
Vincent shoved open the kitchen door, ready to crack open the mage who’d infiltrated his family’s home. He surveyed the ridiculous scene before him.
The cook and her staff hovered by piles of chopped vegetables that dotted the counters. Dane leaned uselessly against the bar sharpening a knife. In the sitting area by the windows, Dell slumped on the couch with a bloody nose and a bruised cheek. His feet were propped up on the coffee table, while Mother sat holding his hand.
“You have to tell us where she is. She’s out there all alone,” she crooned.
Vincent marched up to Dane. “What the hell is going on?” His voice was a deadly murmur.
Dane held out a hand toward his mother and shook his head with a helpless drop of his jaw.
Vincent turned to the two on the couch. “This is not a counseling session, Mother.”
She flinched back at his roar, a hint of fear in her expression.