Page 1 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

1

EVANGELINE

One. Two. Three. Four. Turn.

One. Two. Three. Four. Turn.

One. Two. Three. Four…

My footsteps were loud in the quiet of my cell. Over and over, I measured the space, walking through the impenetrable darkness. At first, I’d done it with my hands outstretched to keep myself from bumping into the damp stone walls, but there was no need for that now. Four paces by four paces, with a stone slab in one corner, and a bucket in another. I turned. One, two, three, four. The air was cold and smelled like mildew. I turned. One, two, three, four. Every now and then, a hatch in the door opened, and a paper cup of water was pushed through, along with a paper bowl of slop that made me grateful I didn’t have enough light to see. I turned. One, two, three, four. I was sore and exhausted. How much time had passed? I’d slept four, maybe five times, but there was no way to track time here. My meals—if they could be called that—were irregular. My cell was pitch black most of the time, but every now and then the lights slammed on; blaring fluorescents that covered the entire ceiling. I knew enough about this sort of thing to know my captors were trying to disorient me. Unfortunately, it was working.

The lights blazed to life, and I winced, shielding my eyes with a hand. The heavy steel door creaked, then swung open on rusty hinges. A bulky man in a cheap suit stepped in. In the harsh light, his blue eyes were pale and cold. Beyond the threshold of the cell, I could see two bored-looking guards, even bigger and even more cheaply dressed. One of them stifled a yawn, and I caught a glimpse of his fangs.

“Ms. Summers,” he said, as casually as if we had run into each other at the park. “How are you enjoying our hospitality?”

“Well, Damien, I gotta be honest, I’m not going to leave you a great Yelp review,” I said tiredly.

Damien’s eyes flicked over me, assessing. His gaze rested on my wrists, which were still rubbed raw from the anti-magic cuffs that had been put on me when I was first captured. Then his eyes landed on what had replaced the cuffs—a line of runes inked around my right biceps, the symbols crammed together so closely that from where he was standing they must have looked like a solid black band about the width of my thumb. I’d been unconscious when the tattoo had been marked into my skin, and I didn’t know if I resented that or whether I was grateful for it. From the look of the tattoo, I was gonna go with grateful. Instead of the barely raised lines of modern tattoos, each line was a raised scar, like a chisel had been dug into my skin and the wounds packed with soot. It itched faintly, but whoever had done it must have thrown a layer of healing magic on top of their work. There was no point stopping my magic with a tattoo if an infection would warp the runes too far to work.

Every time he came into my cell, Damien checked me over the same way. At first, I’d thought it was… well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I’d thought I’d have to worry about something more than torture. There was no heat to the look, though, not even the casual lecherousness I got from old drunks when I wore a low-cut shirt to a bar. No, Damien looked at me the way someone might look at a kitchen knife to see if it needed sharpening. Given that I’d slipped Damien a truth serum and flirted with him until I could get him somewhere private at the masquerade where I first met him, I was pretty okay with the neutral, distant look. It was almost professional, although that wasn’t super reassuring when I was sure I still had bruises from him choking me out.

“We’ll need the room,” Damien said over his shoulder to the guards. “Do not disturb me. Do I make myself clear?”

There were two mumbled ‘yes, sirs’, and the door slammed shut, leaving us alone. Damien’s face softened minutely.

And that was why I couldn’t get a handle on him. The first time I met him, he’d confessed to being a double agent. The second time, he choked me out. I could never be sure which version of him would turn up in my cell on any given day.

“We don’t have long,” he said quietly, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a squished protein bar. He held it out to me, and I stared at it blankly. He shook it a little, and I grabbed it, tearing into it.

“Slowly,” he admonished. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

I added that to my mental list of weird shit about Damien. Most vampires were only vaguely aware of how human digestion worked, and I didn’t think the average vampire supremacist spent a lot of time around regular humans. Eyeing him warily, I ate slower. If I did make myself sick and wound up puking up chunks of the mint-chocolate granola bar, there would be questions I didn’t want to answer.

“Thanks,” I muttered when I’d finished the protein bar. I handed back the plastic wrapper, and he folded it neatly and tucked it into his suit pocket.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Damien said. “The boss is planning on paying you a visit today. I’d hoped I would be able to find a way to get you out before then, but…” He shook his head grimly.

“But you don’t want to blow your cover.” Whenever Damien visited, he made an excuse about not wanting to blow his cover. I was starting to think that maybe he was part of the torture, that they were sending him in to give me a little bit of hope just so they could crush it again.

Damien blamed his part in my torture on not blowing his cover. I wasn’t sure I believed him. At the very least, I didn’t think he enjoyed it. In my time as a paranormal private investigator, I’d seen people who thrived on violence, who came alive whenever they got the opportunity to hurt someone. But when Damien hit me, his eyes went empty, like he’d gone somewhere else. Still, whether he enjoyed it or not, he did it. I was mottled with bruises and cuts. Most were from Damien, but Gabriel’s father had paid me a few visits, too.

“She’ll be suspicious if it looks like you haven’t been hurt recently,” Damien said.

I sneered at him. “What, you want me to give you permission? We both know you’re going to do it either way.”

Damien looked away. In the glare of the florescent lights, he looked tired and very old. “I am trying to help you, Evangeline.”

“How kind of you,” I said. It might have been stupid of me. Damien was the only ally I had here, but I was tired, sore, and filthy, and I didn’t have the energy to be nice to the man who’d been torturing me. I slumped down onto the stone ledge and looked up at him. “Why did you send me the letter, Damien?”

Damien looked down at me tiredly and pulled out a knife from the same pocket where he’d carried the protein bar.

“Why did you want me to go after the ascendancy array?” I asked.

Damien flicked the knife open. The blade shone in the light.

“How did you know about me?”

He stepped closer.

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