all right? Don’t worry. Right now, you just need to…rest. Just rest and let your body adjust to the change. Okay?”
Seth nodded, lowered his head, closed his eyes and muttered, “Okay.”
2
Vixen paced from one end of her cell to the other without breaking stride. Her steps were small and light and smooth, and she tended to walk on her toes. She didn’t like it here. She didn’t like the people who were holding her. She didn’t like the bars that held her captive or the fact that she couldn’t simply squeeze out between them. She could have, once. Before they made her into whatever sort of demon she had become. But she hadn’t been able to change since.
“Vixen, is it?”
The one called Briar leaned against the cage from the outside. Her hair was wild, wavy, thick and mink-brown, like her eyes. She was very young, must have been made into one of them at an unreasonably early age.
Then again, so had Vixen herself.
“What do you want?” Vixen asked. She gathered her hair, pulling it around to the front of her, so it hung over one shoulder, and stroked it. Whenever she was nervous, she tended to stroke or play with it—her way of touching her own nature, reminding herself of who and what she truly was. Not one of them. Never one of them.
“It’s not what I want,” Briar said. “It’s what Gregor wants.”
Vixen shrugged. “What does he want, then?”
“He wants you to help him. After all, he’s helped you.”
“He caged me. In this body. In this cell.”
Briar shrugged. “In the cell, maybe. Not in the body, though. You can still change.”
Vixen lowered her eyes, shaking her head slowly. Her throat felt tight, and odd, warm fluid filled her eyes. “I was in human form when he…bit me and drank my blood as if I were a chicken. He made me…whatever I am now. I tried to shift back, but—”
“You were newly made, and you were weak and frightened. That was six months ago, Vixen. You’re stronger now. You have to try again.”
Vixen looked Briar in the eye and shivered. She always shivered when she caught the scent of the darkness that lived in that one’s soul. It was cold and frightening.
“Try, Vixen.”
Vixen sighed and shook her head side to side.
“Try, Vixen,” Briar said again, but she said it differently this time. There was anger in her voice. “Try, or go to sleep hungry again.”
“I don’t mind going to sleep hungry.”
Briar sighed and reached up to the wall, where the long metal prod rested on a hook. Vixen flinched, and backed up as far as her cell would allow.
“Fine,” Briar said, “I’ll just play with you for a while, and then you can go to bed hungry. How’s that sound?” She stuck the rod between the bars, and no matter how Vixen twisted away, she couldn’t get beyond its reach. It touched her belly, and jolted her so hard her head snapped back and her knees buckled.
She curled on the floor, trembling. “Please, don’t.”
“But I enjoy it so.” Briar poked her again, in the neck this time.
Vixen jerked away, and her head hit the floor.
“Now, you’re going to try for me. Aren’t you, Vixen?”
Vixen opened her mouth to answer, but she couldn’t get words out. Briar stabbed the rod in the small of her back, and she arched and cried out, forming the word yes on her agonized scream. When it died, she lay there on the cold stone floor, shaking uncontrollably. “Yes,” she whispered. “I’ll try.”
“Good. I’ll give you an hour to recover. And if you make me torture you again, Vixen, it’s going to be something a hell of a lot worse than the prod. Understand?”
Vixen nodded, the motions jerky and tight.
“One hour.” Briar turned and walked away down the echoing stone hallway, taking the light with her. Vixen heard her feet ascending stairs, and then the slamming of a heavy door. She was alone. Her senses wouldn’t deceive her about something so simple. She was alone, here. The only prisoner of these cruel sapiens.
And yet, she wasn’t alone.
There was a mouse family living on the other side of the room. They’d made a nest in one of the deep chasms in the stone, and they huddled there out of sight whenever one of them came into the dungeon. But they would come out for her. Oh, they wouldn’t get too close. After all, she’d spent a good many hours of her life as one of their natural predators. But despite that, they sensed her animal nature, and her pain and distress. They were curious.
They came out now, though she’d felt them coming even before she saw them. She heard their little squeaks as they conversed and began hunting the floor for any crumbs, shooting looks her way as they went.
You won’t find any crumbs around here. Those ones don’t eat food. She thought the words at them, as images and ideas, not as a language. And she knew they understood. They hurried across the floor, to the loose board in the bottom of the door that led outside, and squeezed their tiny bodies through it.
She hoped they would gnaw it some more as she had tried to convey they should. If she could shift, she would need the board to give a bit more to allow her to squeeze through easily—though she might be able to fit even now, if only she could change.
Even when the mice were gone, she still didn’t feel entirely alone.
There had been someone else. She’d sensed him all at once tonight, when one of the drones had taken her outside for a well-guarded and far too short walk. Gregor wanted her healthy—weak, and half-starved, but basically sound—until he figured out whether he could use her or not. So she was granted a nightly walk. And tonight, she’d felt him. A male. A kind one. He had seemed so very real, and so near that she had even lifted her head, sniffing the air and feeling with her senses to try to locate him, even identify him. Human or animal or vampire—she couldn’t be sure. And then she had realized that he wasn’t close to her, not physically. But in some other way, he was. Incredibly close. And he was coming—coming to help her. She had felt it, known it.
He had told her so, somehow.
She had closed her eyes and focused on that feeling with everything in her. “If you’re coming to me,” she’d whispered, “please hurry. If I have to stay here much longer I’ll die. Please hurry. I need you.”
And just as suddenly as it had arrived, her sense of that other person, the male, faded entirely the moment she was ushered back inside, through the cellars she thought of as dungeons and into her cold cell.
She hadn’t sensed him again since then. She wondered now if she had only imagined him, and she sank to the cold floor, lowering her head as despair crushed her.
But
