Kinked (27 page)

There was no self-pity on that feral, beautiful face. There was no emotion at all. “The thing is, Quentin,” she said in a perfectly rational-sounding voice, “I don’t know that I can do that.”

If she was too injured to shapeshift, if she had lost too much blood, she might really be dying.

“No,” he said. He shook his head. “No. I do not accept that.”

“Gods forbid something might happen that you don’t accept,” she said dryly. Her eyes closed.

“Stop it!” He shook her, not caring if it hurt or not. Hell, if it hurt, it might be just the jolt she needed. Her eyes flared open again, and she glared at him. Anger was good. It was awesome. He smiled at her. “I’m going to pinch you until you shapeshift.”

One corner of her mouth twitched. “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?”

“You say that like it’s news. Or even a bad thing.” He found a place under her arm where she wasn’t injured, and he pinched her hard.

A spark lit her dull gaze. “Ouch.”

“Come on, sunshine,” he growled. “I’m not leaving without you, and I haven’t got all day. And if I have to drag you by the foot, you’re going to be a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than you are right now. Shift!”

Her breathing quickened, and her face twisted. He could feel the struggle in her body as she strained. His heart started to pound as he waited. A low, shaking moan came from her lips.

He shouted in her face,
“
COME ON
!”

She bared her teeth and screamed back at him, an infuriated harpy’s shriek. And her wings slowly disappeared from sight. The alien quality of her features smoothed into the more human-looking Aryal. Her features were too pale and damp with sweat, and the area around her eyes was hollow with dark shadows.

Relief made him almost giddy. Who the hell could have ever guessed that he would come to care about what happened to this prickly pain in the ass he held in his arms? “There you are,” he said. He hugged her. “Good job.”

She glared at him and pinched him back, hard. “You suck.”

He barked out a short laugh, hugged her tighter and pressed a kiss to her temple for good measure. One of her arms crept around his waist, and she held him back.

A cautious-sounding Linwe said, “Is everything okay over there?”

“Everything’s okay,” Quentin said firmly. He looked into Aryal’s bitter gaze, and though he answered Linwe, he spoke directly to Aryal. “Or it will be.”

It had to be okay. He wouldn’t let it be anything else.

FIFTEEN

I
f Aryal thought about the damage that had been done to her wings, panic set in, so she tried not to think about it.

That wasn’t going so well.

She’d had a lot of time for what-ifs in her life, and if she couldn’t fly, she didn’t know that she could live. Flight was sewn into her nature. It marked the shape of her body. It went deeper than her sense of her own identity, into her state of being.

After she shapeshifted back into her human form, for all intents and purposes her wings appeared to be gone. But that wasn’t true. They were still there, still a part of her, and she could still feel the pain from the broken bones and the bite wounds.

She could still remember the agonizing grip of the shadow wolf as it crushed the critical carpal joint, and she knew at that point that the wolf might have already killed her, and everything else that happened after that point would be just her waiting to die.

The shapeshifting had been so hard, afterward she shook like a drug addict going through withdrawal. Quentin gripped her tightly. He sat back on his heels as he held
her, and at first she couldn’t even lift her head off of his shoulder.

Belatedly she realized she was resting against his bare, warm skin. She focused on the steady, strong heartbeat against her cheek. Concentrating on something outside of herself helped to stave off the panic.

He rested his cheek against her temple, and the light dusting of whiskers along his jaw felt good. She didn’t often like men’s beards, as sometimes the bristles felt prickly, but Quentin’s beard was as silken as the rest of his hair. In contrast, his wide, tanned chest had very little hair on it, just a light dusting of gold.

A sluggish curiosity stirred. Her voice sounded rusty as she said, “Your shirt’s gone.”

“I used it to bandage my leg and arm.” His arms eased. “Speaking of which, we need to bind your wounds. You’ve already lost too much blood.”

She pulled away and helped him to tear strips of her tank top off at the waist, which he used to wrap her visible wounds tightly. It wouldn’t stop the bleeding, but it would slow it down. As she watched him tie the ends of the cotton on her thigh, she asked, “How did you pick the lock?”

He smirked at her. “I have talented claws.”

Despite his lighthearted rejoinder, his gaze was sharp and assessing as he looked down her bloody figure. She looked down at herself too. They had left enough of her tank top so that it covered her breasts, and her jeans were torn and grimy with blood and dirt.

“You are one post-apocalyptic babe,” he said. “If only you had a padded bra to make you a C-cup.”

“Keep up with the wisecracks, why don’t you?” she told him. “I’ve started a tally. Help me to my feet.”

He put an arm around her waist and lifted her up. She held herself stiffly, unable to do anything to ease the pain of unseen wounds. When he let her go, he did so carefully.

At his unspoken question, she jerked her head to the open cell door and said, “Go on, help the others. I’ll manage.”

She was going to try to walk down that hall, and she
didn’t want him to see her struggle. He hesitated and his eyes narrowed, but when she waved a hand irritably at him, he turned and walked out of the cell.

She limped slowly down the hall. Her thigh held up under her weight, just barely, but her entire back felt like it was on fire. Even taking a deep breath hurt.

The Elves greeted Quentin with sharp exclamations that were quickly hushed. She left him to his reunion. There was a barred window at one end of the short hallway that held the door to the cell block. She limped over to it.

The window wasn’t big enough for a grown person to fit through, and it was the only source of fresh air for the whole block. When she looked out, the window opened over the water, so the prison area had to be carved into the cliff itself.

A gust of air blew in, hitting her in the face. It felt cool and damp. She put a hand to the sill to lean on it as she sucked in fresh air and looked out. The island was just visible, and she felt the constriction ease somewhat in her chest. The light was fading fast from the day, and the water was a deeply shadowed blue. Soon the daylight would be completely gone.

She focused on the island. She had meant to fly over there, at least briefly.

Razor teeth fastening on her wing. Her carpal joint crushed. Muscles torn.

Dread flooded her limbs, and she breathed shallowly through a wave of nausea. She had to find some sort of short-term goal, or the panic was going to drive her crazy.

Galya Andreyev might not have anything against the Wyr from America, but now Aryal sure as hell had something against the Russian bitch.

“I owe you one,” she whispered. “And I always pay my debts.”

Aryal owed the witch a bad one. Focusing on payback was a good enough goal for now.

Behind her, the others were talking. “Aryal and I need healing, and we need to leave the cell block as fast as we can,” Quentin said. “But we need to do it smart. Do you
know if the witch sets any of her shadow wolves to guard outside this block?”

“No,” Linwe said. “We haven’t seen them since she locked us up.”

“The witch didn’t need them when she came in here,” said one of the Elven males. “We were already captured. Besides, if they’re magic, they couldn’t come in anyway.”

“Interesting point,” said Quentin, with that tone of voice he used whenever something had particularly caught his attention. “Do you think they are a creation of hers from some kind of spell?”

Aryal answered him. She said over her shoulder, “I think they may be spelled or magical in some way, but they are not the product of a spell—at least not wholly. I think they are individual entities.”

“Why?”

“Their behavior was too sophisticated for one person to orchestrate. They exhibited pack behavior and lured us to where they wanted us to be before they attacked. And the twelve wolves kept us occupied so that the thirteenth—the alpha—could take me by surprise.” She forced a swallow down her dry throat. “It was quite efficiently executed.”

A short silence greeted her words. Then Quentin said, “That makes a lot of sense.”

“I’ll tell you something else that makes sense,” Aryal said. “That first shadow wolf I saw on the bridge back in the forest—I think that was a sentry. When we crossed over into Numenlaur, it must have tracked us for a while and then ran on ahead to alert the others. At least that’s what it looks like.”

“They did something very similar to us,” said one of the Elven males. “We found the witch’s trail leading into Numenlaur. There was plenty of snow cover on the ground, and her trail was unmistakable. Our orders were to stop anyone from looting, so we crossed over to track her down. We didn’t bother to leave anyone on guard—after all, it was just one set of footprints, and we thought we would be back over to the Bohemian Forest quickly.”

“Did you go into any of the houses?” Quentin asked, his
tone neutral. Aryal wondered if he asked because of the dead baby they had found. If these young people hadn’t yet realized that all the babies in Numenlaur were dead, she certainly didn’t want to be the one to tell them.

Sounding embarrassed, Linwe said, “No, but we think the witch did. Her trail seemed to lead inside a few of the first houses, but it also continued down the path. We were moving fast to try to catch her and cross back over as soon as we could. We screwed up. We all wanted to get a glimpse of Numenlaur. That’s why nobody stayed behind. Then the shadow wolves trapped us, and the witch threw some kind of sleep spell, and the next thing we knew, we woke up here.”

“So the shadow wolves are pack, they’re intelligent, and they communicate with each other,” said Quentin. “And they act independently from the witch. Actually they sound a lot like Wyr wolves.”

“And they’re affected by magic,” said Aryal. “Don’t forget that. Power affects them, and it looks like the nullifying spell in here might too.”

Her thigh throbbed, the invisible fire all along her back was getting worse, and she was growing light-headed from standing so long. Just as she started to turn away from the window, she saw a flicker of light on the island. She paused and stood on her strong leg, gripping the bars with both hands, her eyes narrowed. She hadn’t imagined that, had she?

No, she hadn’t. There it was again, a flicker of light, like a torch or a lantern. In the distance it looked small like the winking of a firefly.

She asked, “Does anybody know what’s over on that island?”

There was a pause as everybody adjusted to the apparent change in conversation, and footsteps sounded behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Quentin, a wan-looking Linwe and two Elven males walked toward her. Compared to the shock of seeing a shirtless Quentin moving toward her, his tanned chest wide over those lean hips and long legs, the Elves looked willowy and somehow unfinished.

Quentin was scowling. He said, “Are you trying to bleed out? What are you doing standing up?”

She told him, “I’m watching a light on the island. Someone’s over there.”

She swayed. He strode forward to put an arm around her. She twitched a shoulder angrily but she didn’t push him away. Instead she took the help he offered and leaned on him. He stared out the window too.

“I think the university is over there,” said Linwe from behind them.

Aryal’s eyebrows rose. When Quentin glanced at her with a silent question in his eyes, she shrugged. She hadn’t even known there was a university.

Linwe was continuing. “When we first woke after the witch locked us up, she asked us a lot of questions. She’s not just looting for treasure. She’s looking for something specific. She didn’t say what, but from the things she said, I think it’s either an item of Power, or maybe it’s a spell. The university here has a library that’s famous among the Elves, kind of like the lost Alexandrian library in ancient Egypt.”