Page 65 of Lost and Bound
A lot of time passed. Not days, but more hours than I could begin to keep track of. At some point the need to piss overwhelmed me, and I didn’t have the strength to keep it under control.
With a disgusted grumble, one of the warlocks performed some quick magic and cleaned it up.
Well, score one for them having to share an enclosed space with me, anyway.
Other than that, I drifted, in and out of consciousness, withoutbeing much preferable considering the agonizing thirst and hunger, and my cramped and aching limbs…and what I had to think about.
I tried to wrap myself in a daydream, imagining being—fuck, not in bed with Calder, safe in his massive arms. That hurt too much. Maybe…hanging out with Ian. No, that hurt too much too. Fixing the fence with Jennifer. Sunshine on my face. Kids’ laughter and the yips of little baby werewolves finding their voices ringing in the distance. A mallet in my hands, the thunk of a fencepost being driven into the ground. The breeze brushing over my heated skin.
I drifted again.
The bond snapped me back to something approaching reality. I could feel it again, pulsing, writhing and twisting with the force of the emotion transmitted through it—and strengthened by proximity.
Calder.
He was close by, and I’d have doubled over from the power of his anger if I hadn’t been strung up against the wall.
For the first time in the gods only knew how long, I opened my eyes all the way, wincing as my eyelids stuck together and then separated.
Two men bent over something on the counter, the tall scarecrow and a more normal-looking guy, medium height and medium build, with curly graying blond hair. He shifted a little to the side, and I caught a flash of something reflective, a mirror or a piece of polished metal.
They were scrying, almost certainly. And the tension in their stances suggested I knew what they were looking at.
“Good,” Curly said. “He found the phone we left outside. Let’s hope he can read,” he added with a nasty-sounding chuckle.
A phone rang a moment later. Scarecrow picked it up off the counter. “It’s him,” he confirmed. “We can see you through our surveillance spell,” he said into the phone. “So no bullshit.”
Calder’s low growl came through the phone clearly enough for me to hear, but I couldn’t pick up the words.
“Oh, he’s alive,” Scarecrow said. “Alive and waiting for you. We wouldn’t want to separate a mated pair. Go down the stairs and turn left. The door’s open. But I would much prefer you didn’t cross the threshold.”
Calder responded, and this time his tone sent shivers down my spine. Scarecrow went a little pale, and his hand shook around the phone. But he kept it together.
“No, you won’t be doing any of those things. The door is protected with an impassable barrier. Or rather, I suppose it could be breached by someone strong enough, but you’ll die if you so much as touch it. Have you ever seen someone die of radiation poisoning? Compress that into a few seconds. You’ll stay on the other side of it until we tell you what we want you to do. You’re the reason we have your worthless mate alive in the first place. If you get yourself killed, we won’t have any need for him at all. You’ll be killing him too. Remember that.”
A burst of static erupted from the phone, and Scarecrow pulled it away from his ear.
“He crushed the phone,” Curly commented, raising his eyebrows at the scrying mirror. “I presume he understood you.”
“He’d better have,” Scarecrow muttered. “I don’t want to have gone to all this trouble for nothing.”
Curly kept an eye on the scrying surface while Scarecrow moved into the center of the room directly in front of the door.
And then we all waited. I could hear all three of us breathing: my breaths shallow and ragged, Curly’s even, and Scarecrow’s a little too fast. He was scared, despite the magical barrier, which I could see faintly in the doorway now that I looked for it. A slight shimmer, fuzzy, a little bit like a very thin sheet of that frosted glass people used for bathroom windows.
Well, I didn’t blame him for being afraid. I just wished he had more of a reason for it. As far as I could tell, my captors held all the cards. A gun to my head might or might not have stopped Calder, but he was too canny and too experienced to throw his own life away.
Footsteps rang out somewhere in the distance, down the hallway that appeared to lie beyond the door.
The footsteps got louder, heavy and with an odd cadence, like whoever or whatever was making them wasn’t quite human.
And then Calder appeared in front of the doorway.
Chapter 18
The Barrier
Scarecrow stumbled back a step, shock in every line of his body, and Curly let out a strangled sound.
