Page 8 of The Mirror of Beasts

My heart lurched in my chest as realization conquered my disbelief.

Sorceresses.

It had been sorceresses in the apartment. Sorceresses had attacked and abducted us, finding us before we could even formulate a plan to find them. Unbelievable.

If my head hadn’t felt like it was on the verge of splitting open like a melon, I might have laughed at the sheer irony.

But there was nothing funny about this. Not when I couldn’t see the others.

“Hello?” I whispered. “Is anyone there?”

I strained my ears, but the only answer was the faint sound of breathing nearby.

The air hung like a black curtain around me, heavy with damp and an almost mineral smell. Each endless second it took for my eyes to adjust to the low light was agonizing.

Bit by bit, my mind was coming alive to the situation, collecting vital details: I was flat on my back, my wrists pinned down against the flat stone ground with what felt like solid stone manacles. I tugged at them, but there was no chain, no give. My legs were free, but a hell of a lot of good that was going to do me when I could barely sit up.

We were surrounded by rough-hewn walls of ancient stone on three sides. To my left, thick stone bars jutted up from the ground like stalagmites, sealing off the small alcove that served as our prison.

Another drip of water slapped my face and I scowled up at the darkness. I lifted my head, straining my neck until I could just make out the silhouette of someone sitting against the wall forming one side of our cell. Olwen. To my right, I caught a hint of the reflective fabric on the old sneakers I’d lent Neve. I heard a third person breathing from somewhere behind me. That would be Caitriona, hopefully.

I released a shaky breath. Blood returned to my muscles with the force of a thousand scalding pins, but I barely registered it as a short-lived wave of relief passed over me.

The sorceresses might have saved us the hassle of tracking them down, but the fact that they’d been searching for us at all, that we were now being treated no better than crooks, spoke to some kind of misunderstanding. Or worse.

Whatever these sorceresses wanted with us, it wasn’t a chat and a cup of tea. We needed to get out of here and regroup.

Based on what I could see, which admittedly wasn’t much, we seemed to be deep underground—in a cavern of some sort. The air had that certain, musty stillness as it all but wept with moisture. And a tomb would have smelled worse, frankly.

“So we can expect a vote at some point in the next century,” came a new voice from somewhere deeper in the cavern. “After they waste a lifetime deciding how to conduct said vote, of course.”

Great. I stifled a groan. There were three of them, and this one, while more soft-spoken, sounded just as surly as the other two.

“Don’t let any of the others hear you speaking in such a way, Acacia,” warned the first voice. “They’re all desperate to get in Her Serene Smugness’s good graces, thinking that’ll save them.”

Finally, new details carved themselves from the darkness—and none of them good.

There was a hallway beyond the bars of our cell, its floor adorned with swirling patterns of mosaic tiles, visible only because of the contrast of the white tiles against the darker ones. The longer I stared at them, the colder my blood ran. Here and there, curse sigils were disguised in the repeating pattern.

I closed my eyes again and sighed, beyond irritated at myself. It should have been my first guess. I’d been in far too many of them to not recognize a sorceress’s vault at first glance.

Now the exit, I thought, craning my head around to try to peer down the hallway. There’d be one entrance, which would open to a Vein. I scoured my memory for a sorceress named Acacia, but there were no useful tidbits tucked away there.

I pulled on the manacles around my wrists, testing them again. Biting my lip, I hunched and contorted my shoulders in turn, twisting my wrists around in the restraints to feel for sigils carved into the ground or the metal itself.

My fingers skimmed over a swirling shape on the left cuff, just above where it attached to the ground.

“Yes,” I breathed out shakily. The quick exploration had left the delicate skin of my wrists scraped raw and bleeding. I pushed my left arm down through the restraint as far as I could, freeing up more of that hand’s mobility. With another steadying breath, I drew my right leg up and crossed it over my body, turning my foot until the sole of the boot brushed against my fingertips.

Cabell and I had hammered metal spikes into the bottoms of our work boots for better traction on jobs. You tango with an acid pit and you’ll do just about anything to avoid a second dance.

I felt along the ridges of my shoe’s tread until I found a loose spike, twisting it until it pulled free.

Swallowing a little noise of triumph, I bent my wrist at a painful angle, pressing the sharpened tip of the spike against the stone cuff. It took more than a few tries, but finally, I got a good enough grip on the spike to start scratching against what I hoped was the sigil. Distorting the symbol might not be enough to break the spell locking me in place, but at least it would weaken it.

A soft pressure glanced against the top of my head and I jerked in surprise, the spike nearly slipping from my fingers. I craned my head back farther than before, twisting my neck painfully to look over my left shoulder.

Relief soared in me at the sight of Caitriona, her silvery hair bright even in the dark. Her hands were chained above her head to the stone bars. Even with her impressive height, she’d only just managed to stretch the toe of her tennis shoe out to reach me.

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