Page 31 of The Alpha's Warlock
Dor caught Ian by the elbow and hauled him back, Charlie started to yell, and then all hell broke loose.
A bone-rattlingwhump, like the sound of a gas stove igniting times a million, rocked through the trees and threw me all the way to the ground. Ian staggered, shaking his head to clear it and looking around wildly; howls burst out of the forest all around us, and a high-pitched ringing filled my ears: magic, and a lot of it.
Dor let go of Ian to seize Charlie and throw him over his shoulder. He twisted his hand in the air to make a doorknob and dived through the opening. The last I saw of them was Charlie’s arms waving as he tried to make Dor put him down.
And then they were on us, Kimball’s wolves, some fully shifted and some in partially human form, a mob big enough to take even Ian down. He fought, half-shifted with his claws raking and fangs tearing, but it wasn’t enough, though blood spattered and the wolves howled in pain and rage, and I saw a severed arm go flying through the air to thud against a tree trunk, crimson spraying from the still-pumping artery. Ian lost the fight. I couldn’t even see him under the pile of werewolves. I screamed his name and tried to pull magic of my own, but whatever hostile magic surrounded us made it impossible. A big hand landed in my hair and yanked, and I scrabbled at my attacker’s fingers as my scalp stung and my eyes watered. Another hand shoved something over my face, and that was that.
***
Consciousness came back in dribs and drabs, slowly enough that I was awake before I had the strength to open my eyes. And I’d thought waking up in Ian’s dusty shack sucked? I’d have given a lot to be there wishing for coffee instead of here.
And once I did have the strength, I kept my eyes closed anyway. I wasn’t fully functioning yet, but I knew damn well I wasn’t going to like what I saw. My feet and legs sizzled with pins and needles, and my arms were stretched over my head and bound at the wrists. I was sitting down, though, not strung up, so that was something. Always look on the bright side of life, right? Monty Python. I could focus on Monty Python.
Anything to keep me from opening my eyes, and probably seeing Ian’s mutilated corpse. Sick dread congealed in my stomach, and my heavy head throbbed.
The bond. I’d feel if he was dead, wouldn’t I? Hope swelled up, only to blow out again like a candle in a draft. I couldn’t feel anything: not Ian, not my magic — nothing outside of the immediate physical realities of something hard and cold, probably concrete, underneath me, and the bite of the manacles around my wrists.
Spelled iron, almost certainly. Hope rose again. If they were strong enough, they could cut me off from my mate bond along with the rest of my magical senses.
Ian might still be alive. I might have time to — to what? Win him back? A sob rose up in my chest, and I forced it down. I’d never had him. Had I even wanted him? Now that I’d lost any chance we’d ever had, it seemed like maybe I did. The way he’d held me, like he cared — fuck.Fuck.
“I know you’re awake, son. Open your eyes and stop stalling.”
Much as I would’ve preferred to never do anything he told me ever again, my eyes popped open. “Don’t call me that,” I rasped, my voice a dry scrape of vocal cords. “I’m not your son.”
My father stood in front of me, close enough to block out the rest of wherever we were, his head cocked, a slight smile turning up one corner of his mouth. I took after my mother, but there was something about the shape of his nose, the slant of his cheekbones, that echoed the features I saw in the mirror every day. We both had brown eyes, but his were small and deep-set, where mine were bigger, wider, and a lot less scary. Despite his dark-blond mane of hair and square-jawed blockiness, I was undeniably his son.
His low laugh echoed the thought. “Of course you are. An ungrateful brat, but my son all the same. Blood will out,” he crooned, his tone sending goosebumps down my arms and spine. A chill trickle of sweat followed their path. I was pretty sure he meant that literally, as in, my blood would be going out of my body in large quantities. My fucking father, ladies and gentlemen, the king of morbid, creepydouble entendres. I had no idea where I’d gotten my sense of humor from. It definitely wasn’t him, and my mother, as far as I knew, didn’t have one.
He stepped back and to the side, waving his arm like a genial game-show host showing off door number one.
And the prize, in this case, was Ian. He was strung up from the ceiling, his bound arms stretched over his head and attached to some kind of chain-pulley arrangement hanging from the rafters of what, now that I had a wider view, looked like some kind of barn. No horses, or hay, or anything friendly like that, though. No, this barn had a big metal table that a serial killer would drool over if he saw it on eBay, a few more unoccupied chains dangling from above, and a huge, rusty metal sink against the opposite wall.
At least, I hoped it was rust. It could’ve been dried blood. Another few drops of sweat dribbled down my back and sides.
Ian’s head lolled against his shoulder, and his eyes were closed. It looked like his wrists were taking his full weight, and I winced; that was a lot of weight to bear. Something was jammed in his mouth. A muzzle. They had him in a fuckingmuzzle, that locked around the back of his head. His ankles were manacled too, attached to chains that bolted to the floor. Those had to be as spelled as the ones that held me, or he’d have broken them in seconds once he woke. His clothes were in tatters, with slowly healing wounds visible through the tears. Blood dripped from his torso, each drop shimmering in the low light of a couple of bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and then slipping one after another to the floor to form a shining pool.
Those wounds should’ve closed already. Unless he had other, much more critical injuries that were healing first. Gods, what if he didn’t heal? He wasn’t conscious. My head spun, and my esophagus burned.
“As you can see, your mate’s here to keep you company,” my father said lightly, a faint twist to the wordmategiving away his fury. “I see you couldn’t fight the urge to stick your ass in the air for a werewolf for long. Since you seem to like being knotted so much, I don’t see why you couldn’t just be a good boy and give it up for the mate I chose for you.” My father shrugged. “One alpha’s the same as another, when it comes down to it. Useless brutes.”
Fuck. Of course. Of course, the forced bonding had been my father’s idea all along. I simply hadn’t had the five minutes I needed to think it through and see how obvious it was. The bond he formed with me when he drained me was temporary, but a mate bond was permanent. If he controlled my mate, then my mate — given a little training and assistance — could controlme. All the time.
Why was Ian still alive, if my father wanted me bonded to someone else? It was my father all over to wait to kill him until I was aware enough to watch and suffer, but now that I was conscious, he didn’t have anything to wait for. What the hell could I say to keep Ian alive a little longer, long enough for — what? Charlie and Dor to burst in, guns figuratively blazing? They’d buggered off like the assholes they were, but they hated my father too, and they had their own allies to avenge. They’d be back.
Whether that was before or after Ian was dead and I was raped and enslaved was another question.
“Pay attention,” my father snapped. And then the pain hit, a searing agony out of nowhere that wracked and convulsed every limb. I shook and screamed, and then it stopped as abruptly as it began. I blinked up at him, trying to clear the tears out of my burning eyes. He wavered in my vision, a streaky, scowling horror. “You shouldn’t let your mind wander,” he chided me. Fuck. Him. He’d always punished me when I didn’t focus well enough on what he called hislife lessons. “As I was saying. One alpha’s the same as another. If you want him alive, which you clearly do by that stupid moony look on your face, you’ll do your best to keep him in line, funneling your magic where it’s most useful. And you’ll do as you’re told. Fuck up, or try to betray me, and I’ll gut him like a fish and give you to Kimball’s brother. Helikespretty boys who do as they’re told.”
A thousand thoughts and wishes and could-have-beens flitted through my mind, a life with Ian, a life as a freelance warlock doing work I enjoyed, studying and reaching some of my potential, all winging past like butterflies in the summer, leaving me wintry and barren in their wake.
Ian would rather be dead than enslaved with me. He was too fucking stubborn. Even if he agreed, he’d piss my father off and get himself killed within a day. Like the pathetic, needy coward I was, I longed to have him by my side as I lived the life I was going to have to, now. If I had him, even if we were living the half-life of my father’s tools, maybe I could survive. Even find a few moments of comfort.
He’d never live like that. Never, and that meant he was going to die if I tried to fight back.
Despair settled over me like a worn, familiar blanket. I’d had two years of freedom. But this was inevitable. My father was never really going to let me go. A mysterious death, that he’d no doubt staged to get away from whichever supernatural asshole was gunning for him and start over? I should be so lucky.
It showed how incredibly fucking stupid I was that I’d believed I was that lucky.
