Page 7 of Caged Kitten

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Elijah

“Done.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. With twelve cards still in hand, I looked up and across the table, only to find my vampire counterpart was, in fact, finished.

“All right, new game,” I grumbled, tossing my leftover cards next to our twin piles, his substantially neater and taller than mine. “This is the last time I play Speed against a fucking vampire.”

“I told you,” Rafe mused. He grinned as he gathered the scattered deck into a single pile, organizing them for a reshuffle, so accustomed to winning that it made me want to clock him right in that stupidly square jaw all the ladies swooned over. “I think you’re a masochist, old friend.”

“And I think it’s cheating to use vamp speed—”

“Hardly.”

My eyes narrowed. While he was wearing one of the prison’s charmed collars around his neck, same as me, vampires were a little different in their abilities. From what I could tell, the sigils diminished a vampire’s speed, but most of the warlock guards at Xargi Penitentiary were still required to use magic to tame the fanged inmates. That and the sun, which streamed through the windows for most of the day, even in this godforsaken territory—wherever the fuck we were. Rafe and I had spent the last six months guessing, ever since they’d hauled us in here together, nicked from my property just outside the cozy English village that had been my home for the last decade.

Although the sun could be the death of my friend here, the one supernatural being who, in my opinion, wasn’t a jumped-up asshole hell-bent on ascending the ranks of his clan or coven or pack or whatever, that great glowing orb was also a giveaway as to where we were in the world. Somewhere north, close to the poles. Xargi had an eastern European twang to it, possibly Russian, maybe Mongolian. When we’d first arrived, there had been about an hour of sunlight each day, and the vampires inside this hellhole practically ran the show. Now, six months later, we had a good nine to ten hours of sunlight a day, which, for the most part, kept vampires in their blackout cells.

Northern Russia, perhaps.

Siberia was also a possibility.

No confirmation from the guards whenever I floated the options. Not a professional amongst them—just former criminals given a pinch of power over the rest of us. It was like Christmas came early for these fucks every goddamn day.

As Rafe shuffled the deck, mulling over a few other games we could play for the thousandth time, my inner dragon snored softly inside, constrained and confined for six long months. At this point, I was desperate to let him out, to stretch our wings and take to the skies. It was an itch I couldn’t scratch with this collar in place, the runes designed to prevent shifting of any kind. Me, I understood. A dragon could destroy every brick of this place ten times over, our fire the hottest in any realm. But there were plenty lesser shifters in other cellblocks—Willow, a rabbit shifter in Cellblock B for instance, posed zero threat, but she couldn’t stretch her legs either, couldn’t shift and zoom around.

Torture.

Absolute torture for a shifter to be cut off from their inner beast.

But that was the point of this place: torture. Why, I still had no clue. Most of us were innocent… Rafe insisted that was just the way of the world, and some days I almost believed him. After all, he had four long centuries on top of my two. Six hundred years on this planet, living amongst humans and supers alike, was bound to make anyone jaded.

“Gin rummy?” Rafe floated, scrubbing at his cheek stubble with a sigh. I crossed my arms and cracked my neck.

“Again?”

The vampire’s thick black brows shot up. “Sorry, what else are we doing? Too good for gin these days?”

I flipped him the V. “Calm down, you tit, we can play gin.”

Even though the Irish vamp could sometimes be the moodiest asshole on the planet, I loved him like a brother. Neither of us played the supernatural politics game, preferring the simplicity of human society to our own. He’d stumbled into my English hamlet eight years ago, and as the only two supers in town, we had eventually found each other—it was inevitable. Unlike every other supernatural bastard I’d ever come across, from dragons like me all the way down to uppity elves, he just wanted to exist. No games. No power struggles. He wrote for dozens of publications in Britain and Ireland under various pen names and just wanted a space to work. I offered him the caretaker’s cottage on my property, and Rafe paid for its upkeep.

In his human life, the man who looked like a modern-day supermodel, from the chiseled jaw to the startling sea-glass-blue eyes, was a poet. A deckhand working odd jobs in an old-world Dublin, sure, but a poet too. A lackluster predator today, Rafe used to order blood deliveries discreetly and quietly to my property. No feeding on the humans in the village, despite what his charges at Xargi read.

Over the years, we’d grown fond of each other—which, when it came to our current predicament, had been my undoing. The bounty hunters had come for him; vampires were just so easy to pin false charges on. Then, imagine their luck upon discovering the village jeweler was also a dragon shifter. Two birds, one stone—they hauled us both out here on bullshit.

Fucking silver cuffs and knockout hexes. Seriously. Nowhere near a fair fight.

By some stroke of luck, we’d ended up in the same cellblock after the vampire in Rafe’s original unit refused to share with one of her own kind. Psychotic bitch, that one.

Laughter erupted to my immediate left as Rafe dealt our hands, and as he rolled his eyes, I spared our fellow inmates a cursory glance. Cellblock C was almost full, eight of us occupying the ten available cells. Although I hadn’t seen any other cellblocks, I assumed they all looked the same: a huge circular room, the walls and floors made of fossil-grey stone. In its center were nondescript metal tables and stools—all bolted to the dusty ground, of course, so we didn’t use them to beat each other to bloody pulps. Some mornings, guards brought in board games and card decks, and every Thursday the library cart arrived with new books. Assigned work duty spread most of us throughout the prison grounds six days a week, which left the block mostly empty for nine hours or so each day. Individual cells made up the perimeter of the space, all the doors open during the day and locked tight each night.

Deimos tended to grab the center table first thing. It was a power move, classic of most supers: take the biggest table, the best real estate, and fill it with his cronies—make himself look like top dog of this block. The pasty tattooed demon had been pinched collecting human souls from crossroad deals well before their allotted deadlines in Chicago, and while most of us were innocent, I had no doubt the fucker was not. Demons never were.

Elbows on the table, Deimos in his black jumpsuit reveled in the laughter of his underlings, who were guffawing like he had just said the funniest shit in the world. Clockwise from him, there was warlock Avery in purple, maenad Constance in grey, and rat shifter Blake in navy blue, which was identical to mine. We were classified by our type, all shifters in blue, demons in black, vampires in red. Helped the guards keep clumps of like supers apart in prison common areas.

King Deimos had also recently collected the two other Cellblock C shifters: Faustus and Helen—some kind of bird shifters, but they were too meek to share the exact type with me. While they kept to themselves at first, they had eventually flocked to Deimos, swept up by his pretty words and fleeting kindness, by whatever demonic seductions left unmuted by his collar. I had no clue what the prison gangs did in here, but I assumed it was the usual: contraband smuggling, drug trades, fight rings, paid assassinations—all the leaders competing to be Xargi’s one true alpha.

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