Page 64 of Lost and Bound
His eyes glittered. “What did we want it for?” he demanded, sounding incredulous, and shook his head, laughing a scornful little laugh that made my flesh crawl even more, as if it was trying to get off my bones and scoot away somewhere safe. “You can’t see the benefit, the possibilities, in creating your own invincible army? Creatures like your mate. Or in being able to prevent werewolves from shifting at will, with just a quick spell and a little addition to their water supply. A whole pack, helpless, all but human. In an instant. Desperate to do anything to get their powers back. Obedient.” His lips stretched in a rictus grin. “I’m sure you know how that would feel, don’t you? You were our test subject for that particular technique, after all. And then you set the results on fire when you escaped. Which means I’ll need to do the research all over again,” he crooned, sounding half furious and half…anticipatory.
Nope, my flesh couldn’t crawl any further. I cringed back against the wall, hating the display of weakness but needing toget away from him. My tongue curled in my mouth, dry and frozen. I couldn’t have spoken even if my life depended on it.
Maybe it did. But I doubted it’d matter much.
“We already had your name and origins from the files we did manage to appropriate when we left the others,” he went on, calmer now. Very fucking unreassuringly calmer. He turned again, going back to work, that shiny little knife flashing as he chopped something on the counter. “It wasn’t any challenge to find you, and then wait for you to leave your warded territory, leave the protection of that thing you allowed to mate you. Losing him was a blow, and now we’ll have him back again. He’s too much of an achievement to waste.”
He finished, setting down his tools, adding something else to a bowl with a little puff of indigo smoke.
He turned to me, bowl in hand. “At any rate, the past is the past, and it’s unimportant. You’re here now. And you’re going to bring him here too.”
***
I resisted. At least, I tried. I screamed a lot, anyway.
It all blurred together.
The bond stood out, though. Amplification, he’d called it. Through my haze of pain, searing agony lighting up each of my nerves individually until I felt like it must be visible through my skin, jagged lightning patterns—through all of that, I heard him telling me. How magic functioned like any other kind of energy, how it had a wave pattern. How that pattern could be amplified, the frequency the same but the power of the energy output increased.
That energy crackled through my bones and electrified my teeth, my back arching and my lungs raw from the shrieks it tore out of me.
My pain, my terror, my despair rode that energy, flying out through the ether and arrowing its way to Calder, far away but not far enough.
I knew it wasn’t far enough. He could’ve been on the moon and he’d have felt me.
And I could tell when it reached him. Rage, deep and fierce and dark, like a black hole at the other end of the bond. Overwhelming, cold, burning fury.
“Tell him he has to come alone,” the warlock said, his voice reverberating in my head with agonizing force. “Alone. Or we’ll kill you. And we’ll know. We have our own defenses here.”
I tried not to, I tried until I felt like my limbs would snap and my spine would torque into a corkscrew, but he repeated himself, over and over again. I sent the message.
And then he released me from whatever compulsion he’d put on me, and I slumped against the wall, wrung-out and sobbing. My sweat-soaked skin felt like ice wrapped around me. Helpless shivers shook my body.
I’d called for Calder. I’d summoned him into a trap.
Gods, I prayed he’d ignore that summons.
But prayer hadn’t done much for me in the past.
Two voices rose and fell in the periphery of my feeble consciousness. One belonged to the bond-amplifying asshole, while the other was new to me. His co-asshole, no doubt, the other one of his ‘associates’ who’d been working with him.
A few words floated through my soup of misery.Bond, andbarrier, andcollar. Enough to tell me more or less what would happen next, although not when. How far had Calder gone from the pack territory before he got my involuntary message? Did he have a phone? Would he be contacting Arik? For that matter, what would Ian have done when he realized I’d gone missing? And where had they taken me? It couldn’t have been that far, could it? Although I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. But I’d still been vaguely tipsy when I woke up, and with the speedy way my werewolf metabolism processed alcohol, we couldn’t have been more than a few hours in transit.
A little bit of hope bloomed deep within me, no matter how I tried to squelch it. When I’d hoped before, the last time this had happened to me, it’d only led to more crushing disappointment. Hope wasn’t my friend.
But I couldn’t help it. If Calder called Arik, if Ian had already raised the alarm, if they all joined forces…I didn’t know how powerful Nate had become out of his father’s stunting shadow, but between him and Arik they had to be able to muster some magical firepower. Ian was a force to be reckoned with, particularly guided by Matt’s more restrained and logical judgment.
And Calder—well, I knew what he was capable of.
But they’d forced me to tell him to come alone. They haddefenses, whatever that meant—wards, maybe magical booby traps. The Armitage territory wards, newly revamped by Nate, could detect who crossed the boundary, not only whether or not someone did. These warlocks would have at least that level of surveillance.
My hope died. I tried to tell myself it was for the better.
Tears streamed down my cheeks, and inside my mind, I screamed at Calder:Don’t come, don’t come, it’s a trap. Let me die, because they’re going to kill me anyway.
Nothing. I still felt the bond, but it was attenuated and weak, maybe worn out by the way it’d been forced to function as a conduit for more energy than a mating bond should ever have to take.
My stomach roiled, but I didn’t throw up again. There wasn’t anything left to come up. And Assholedee and Assholedum sure as fuck weren’t bothering to feed me. I guessed last meals were more civilized than they could manage.
