Page 2 of Heart of a Dire Wolf
A phantom magical sensation alerted her to the proximity of her sister. Relief flooded her, because it had been much fainter for the last week, like when Rayne had been in Kenya last year. When they’d been young and untamed, their parents had traded with a golden elf in Wyoming for a magical locator link between all four of them. Her mother was dead, and their father had vanished off the face of the Earth two years ago, but the link still worked between her and Rayne.
When she heard the chains of the shackles, she moved close to the bars. The shadow spells that blocked prisoners from seeing into the nearby cells didn’t block their view of the wide corridor.
Shock froze her at her first glimpse of Rayne, who was surrounded by four guards and trailed by a fifth. Her sister looked like a feral version of herself, with unkempt frizzy hair, a bloody nose, and torn sweats with visible bloody whip welts underneath. Nothing sane remained in her half-shifted, solid brown eyes.
Skyla whimpered. “Rayne…” Only the painful warning tingle stopped her from reaching through the bars.
A husky guard accidentally stepped on the trailing chain of Rayne’s ankle shackles, causing her to stumble.
A dark-skinned, black-haired guard thumped her hard on the hip with a metal nightstick. “Bad dawg!”
In a flash, Rayne crouched and grabbed the nightstick with both hands, then used it to ram the guard’s belly. He folded and collapsed, but two other guards attacked in practiced unison, each going for Rayne’s knees with their batons. Rayne dodged by jumping, as if the heavy shackles weighed nothing.
The trailing guard, a sadistic creature with tusks, horns, and an armored hide, hurled a sparkling magical fireball into Rayne’s back. Magical shockwaves sparked against the cell bars up and down the corridor. Rayne grunted and fell to her knees. She bared her elongated teeth and growled a bone-chilling threat. Shifters up and down the cell block howled.
Skyla clenched her fists. “Rayne, stay down!” Skyla couldn’t use magic to help, or she’d set off the alarms.
Rayne sprang to her feet and grabbed the heads of the two human guards, then rammed them together and slammed them to the floor.
Caged shifters cheered when Rayne bent a metal nightstick and used it to hook the arm of the hated, thick-hided guard. The fireball the guard had been about to cast skittered across her own armored skin like lightning, leaving a chaotic pattern of scorch marks on her arm and chest. The guard roared louder than a freight train. More guards appeared to wade into the fray.
In the end, it took eight fully-armed guards to subdue one maddened shifter who had finally lost herself to mindless instinct.
Skyla dropped to her knees in helpless horror as the guards continued to savagely beat her sister into a barely recognizable mass of blood spatter and broken bones. The final blow was a fireball that left a blackened scorch mark on Rayne’s stomach as her T-shirt burned away.
The tiny magical connection between Skyla and her sister faded to nothing.
A guard bent to check the carotid pulse, then shook his head.
The blood-soaked, armor-hided guard held out her hand with another sparking fireball in her palm, glaring triumphantly at each of the cells. “Who elssse wantssss to die?”
From deep within the heart of Skyla’s beast arose an implacable rage, drawing her to her feet. She shuffled slowly backward to the far back wall of the cell. Taking two centering breaths, she focused all her attention on the bars as she gathered her carefully hoarded magic. Once she blasted through the bars, she would show the guards what she really was...
The next thing she knew, Lerro tackled her to the floor. With his full weight on top of her, he hissed softly in her ear. “Do not die.”
She snarled at him. “Let me go!” She borrowed her beast’s strength to buck him off so she could twist away.
He tackled her again and put his mouth next to her ear. “No one to live for?” His body shuddered, but he held on. “No friends?” His words were more breath than sound. “No mate?”
A powerful scent memory flashed through her, piercing the blind, black anger of her berserk beast. If she succeeded in killing the armor-hided creature, the guards would kill her as a warning to the others. Then she’d never even find out if her mate felt the call, or if he liked snow, or tasted as divine as he smelled. Her sister had died before ever finding her true mate. How could Skyla throw away her own chance?
Lerro must have felt her relax, because he rolled off her and crawled away. He fell onto his side, trembling and panting.
Rage and loss threatened to drown her, so she turned her focus to Lerro. She wasn’t all that surprised to learn he could talk. She very badly wanted to pepper him with a million questions, but that would expose one of his secrets.
A loud clatter from the corridor had her climbing to her feet. Everyone in the shifter holding cells knew that sound. “Oh look, the maids are here.”
Within minutes, a pair of guards dragged a four-inch hose in front of their cell. “Hug the walls. Now!”
She and Lerro flattened themselves against opposite walls. The guards opened the valve to unleash a forceful spray of soapy water onto the cell’s floor. Her bare feet ached from the cold. Lerro caught her eye, a newly intelligent gleam in his. He looked to the guards, then back to her again. A shudder racked him, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
Skyla looked at the burly human guards. As usual, it took two of them to hold the hose steady so it didn’t buck like a bronco. As usual, the water had a bit of magic mixed in with the soap and smelled of chemicals and metal. What was she supposed to be looking at?
She was about to risk a questioning glance at Lerro when it hit her. She’d seen it a dozen times and never thought about it. The magic of the bars should have repelled the water but didn’t.
She opened her magical senses wide and sent low-level probes to test the bars and the water, to see how they worked together. Unlike most of the lazy, brute-force spells she’d encountered in the underground prison, the interconnected security spells for the cell bars and doors were subtle and elegant. She sure as hell didn’t want to meet the dangerous and gifted wizard who’d created them.
She made herself look away, as if uninterested. Lerro was very much more than he seemed. She owed him twice, once for showing her the water magic, and once for preventing her from committing suicide.
Skyla wasn’t the right person to plan a great escape, but with Rayne gone, she’d have to do. She still planned to avenge Rayne’s death and do as much damage to the prison as possible, but she’d do it on her terms, and help as many people as she could in the process. Only together did they have a chance at freedom.
