Page 5 of Her Vicious Beasts: The Beginning
“Do you have any other powers?”
“No, sir.” I lie.
He nods as if this confirms what he already knows. “I have a rather difficult situation that none of my healers have had much success with. I’m afraid you are my last effort at recovering this certain individual.”
Ice slides down my spine at his clinical manner of speaking, at the fact that experienced, qualified healers have already tried to heal this person. Halfeather himself has probably also tried.
Is this a trap? A way for my father to teach me a lesson about trying to leave for college? I try not to appear nervous, but I think it still shows because Halfeather leans forward and speaks as if to a child. “Can you keep a secret, my sweet?”
I clear my throat. “I guess I can, Mr Halfeather.”
“Just for me?”
“S-Sure.”
Every instinct I possess tells me to run from this eagle. To leave and never look back and ring my father and blast him forsending me here. But they have my bag, they have my phone, and there is a bloody boom gate at the front.
There is no escaping.
He leads me from the room and a second security guard joins us from nowhere—another eagle, bulky, with dark brown hair and blonde tips. It seems Halfeather only trusts his own kind. It makes sense if he’s doing shady business with people like my father.
Instead of taking me up the stairs, where I imagine the living areas are, we godown. One set of stairs and then another, and another. The elevators don’t go down to wherever we’re going. I know that because we pass two on our way.
We reach the end of a final set of stairs and Halfeather beams at me as we emerge into a dark room made of grey stone.
It’s cold and barely lit with little lights on walls. I put my arms around myself, rubbing my gooseflesh and cursing my father’s name. It looks more and more like the shady place I’d first expected. The entire thing is creepy, but I’m somehow drawn forward, wanting to know what the hell he’s keeping down here. I’ve been privy to the secrets of many animalia, but no secret as grand as this one. Despite my rising panic, my feet move forward by some primal curiosity. Power is floating at the corners of my shields, but I do my best to ignore it.
We walk through one set of locked steel doors, and then a second set. Talk about secure.
“Here we are,” Halfeather says brightly as the second set of doors swing open. “My pride and joy.”
We stand before a cold, shadowy maw. There’s stone set into the shape of a wide, low-ceilinged corridor that’s long and dark enough that I can’t see the end of it. Tiny lights are set at intervals along the walls, barely fighting away the shadowy gloom beyond. In between those intervals are steel bars. Cold realisation trickles down my spine.
Holy Mother…
Cells. This is a dungeon.
Chapter 4
Aurelia
Shit.
I stare around at my icy cold, stone-walled surroundings. The steel bars of the cages are like the bare incisors of a greedy animal, ready to gobble me whole.
Ahead, in the dark, somethingshifts. My insides turn into slush.
He’s keeping people down here. Gods help me.
“It’s not exactlylegal,” Halfeather says conspiratorially, his dark eyes gleaming with excitement.
“I dare say it’s not.” I smile sheepishly, as if I’m being coy. “Is this where you keep your debtors?”
He tuts at me in a casual manner that suggests he’s thought about it before. “Hardly, my dear. Just the feral beasts who do me wrong. Cross me, as it were.”
I try to hold myself together, at the same wondering how I could have been so stupid not to think my father’s type of colleagues kept prisoners.Of coursethey do. They are all monsters like him.
“If you do this for me, my dear,” Halfeather drawls, “you can consider your father’s debt repaid in full.”
