Page 105 of Misfit Monsters
A patch of face remains—a tuft of short white hair, an eyeless socket, a jutting nose. Enough for me to guess the victim was male.
Next to me, Raze’s presence shudders. “I think we found Ted McGaffery.”
He might be right. Did the sorcerer decide Ted was talking about his “monsters” too much and toss him down there as punishment? Was it a sick experiment to see what those monsters would do when egged on?
On second thought, I’ll skip the answers, thank you.
In the upper room, David Blaver is shuffling toward the side with the cages. I slip back beneath the table to watch.
He picks up a thin metal rod and slides it back and forth across his palm as he paces in front of the cages. After a few rounds, he stops by one. He says something in the sorcerous language and turns down a control on that cage to dim its lights.
A beast like a reptilian raccoon materializes from its cringing mass of shadow. It stares through the bars at its captor, jagged scales lifting and ruffling across its back.
The sorcerer thrusts the rod into the cage. With a flare of sparks, the creature jerks and spasms as if it’s being electrocuted. A thin shriek pierces the air.
A jolt of horror zaps through me in turn. Raze lets out asnarl, his presence twisting. Hail gives a hiss of revulsion, and Mirage simply whimpers.
I don’t know which of our reactions my former captor picks up on. Maybe it’s all of us at once. My only warning is a spurt of startled panic before he whirls around, already shouting out sorcerous orders.
This time, he doesn’t take any chances being tentative. This time, he hurls his magic at us with a punch of force that shakes the hold of Jonah’s command in my head.
I hurl myself away, as if I can flee his compulsion just by moving. My mind wobbles, grappling with the instruction to show myself. The sorcerous demand clashes with Jonah’s insistence that I refuse all other orders, but the hold of that earlier command is crumbling.
Mirage and Hail waver into physical form, their faces taut with anguish. Panic flashes across the sorcerer’s face as he shouts more commands at them.
One of his yells must hit Raze too, because the basilisk shifter jerks into the physical world with a rasp of breath. Every muscle in his sinewy body strains against his skin as if he’s fighting to escape his very body.
The sorcerer’s commands must be stopping him—stopping all of them—from using their powers. But whether because I’ve fought against his magic before or because my presence was the smallest and least noticeable of the bunch, I’m still holding on to some small shred of control, hidden in the dark.
That control is slipping through my grasp. Even if my former captor doesn’t hurl any more sorcery at me, in a matter of seconds I’ll be popping into view too.
Frustration and terror blare through my mind. The caustic flavor of those emotions surges into a rising wave.
No. This isn’t how I wanted this to go.
What if my power isn’t even enough? What if he catches deeper hold of me too quickly?
I just want everyone to behappy.
But even as that thought passes through my head, a more potent realization hits me, all the way down to the center of whatever soul I have.
I can’t always make everyone happy. Sometimes I can’t make anyone happy at all, and that’s just the way it is, because there’s already too much awfulness being spread around.
So maybe the best I can do in those moments is to stop the villain who’s stealing everyone else’s joy. Bring back the possibility of happiness, whatever it takes.
I can do that. I can shatter the crimes this awful man is committing and give all his captured creatures the chance they deserve.
With a swell of conviction, I propel the churning energy inside me toward the other side of the room as hard as I can.
The dark wave roars over my companions and my former captor, but that’s not where I was aiming the main force of the impact. The fiercest currents smack into all those burning lights inside and around the cages.
In an instant, every bit of illumination except the single lamp poised over the corkboards blinks out.
The imprisoned creatures spring through the bars in a whirl of energy. The sorcerer was already stumbling, skin scalded by my sudden flare. The onslaught of shadowkind hurtles into him, knocking him right off his feet.
Scrambling up, he teeters left and right. His hands catch hold of the bottom rungs of the ladder. He starts to haul himself upright—outside, to escape.
No. No.No. I’m not going to let this man deal out even more pain.
