Page 21 of Bizarre Bonds
I’ll get a little closer, and then?—
Just as the trick is forming in my head, Peri glances around. A pang of her concern reverberates through our connection. “Mirage? Are you all right?”
Who, me? No one’s here but the shadows.
She’s looking straight at the sliver of darkness where I’m lurking. I hesitate, disappointment washing through me.
Of course she sensed me coming. She’s even more aware of my mental state than I am of hers.
I’ll never be able to surprise her again. Never be able to play with her or delight her with an unexpected jolt of joy.
Her smile disappears completely with a knitting of her brow. “Mirage?”
The worried quaver of her voice and the guilt I can sense winding through her concern snap me out of my downcast spiral.
I jerk myself back into physical form and dip into a foxy bow with a swish of three of my tails. “I’m fine. Just playing around. This seems like a good place for it.”
“Oh. Okay.” Peri’s smile comes back, though it’s tentative. “You can play as much as you want around me. Especially if you’re enjoying it. I just thought—it seemed like—I’m sure you don’t have to go downstairs if you don’t want to. Rollick would understand.”
I grimace.Shedoesn’t have that choice. Rollick specifically wanted her to use her emotion-sensing power on the creatures.
Doesn’t he care how the setting might rattle her? She’s more than a feelings-omometer.
Someone has to be on her side.
I lift my head high with a flick of my fox ears into and out of existence. “Of course I’ll come. We’re a team.”
Peri’s stance softens. I got a bit of what I wanted.
It just doesn’t feel like anywhere near enough.
“You know—” she starts, but at the same moment, footsteps rap on the other side of the patio doors.
Rollick slides one open and peers out at us. “I think you’ll all be safe from the marauding beasties. Come down, and let’s see if we can determine anything new about these creatures.”
He’s mainly talking to Peri, not me, but as promised I amble behind her into the artificial cool of the house. Raze hasn’t returned, but Hail stands stiffly near the basement stairs.
“I don’t even have to go down there to sense that they’re upset,” he tells Rollick. “Wild creatures aren’t meant to be shut away.”
Rollick gives the winter fae a mild look. “And shadowkind aren’t meant to go showing off their strangeness in front of the mortals who’ll want to do a lot worse than shut them away. We need to solve that problem before anything else. You can go back outside if you’d prefer.”
Hail glowers at him. “I’m coming.”
As we descend the stairs and wait for Rollick to open the secure door at the bottom, Peri’s posture tenses too. This place must bring up even more awful memories for her than it does for me.
The sorcerer who caged her kept her in his basement.
I’d like to batter him with all five of my tails and shred him with my claws and fangs. If he wasn’t dead already.
Jonah casts a pained glance Peri’s way. “If it gets to be too much for you, you can take a break. I can tell Rollick’s keeping the creatures as comfortable as possible, but still…”
Our lovely Rainbow squares her shoulders with determination. “It’s okay. I want to help them, and that’ll be easier if I can see them.”
The room we enter isn’t as blazingly bright as the sorcerer’s basement or the lab where I was imprisoned. A desk stands against one wall, stacked with papers and notebooks including some I recognize from the notes the sorcerer had tacked to the wall in his workspace. A tall steel cabinet stands next to it.
The only other furnishings in the room, if you can really call them that, are a stack of solid metal boxes along the far wall.
A prickle runs through my nerves with the impression of the unpleasant materials embedded within the cages’ steel shells. The enclosures are all quite big, enough to contain a large dog.
