Page 120 of Mortal Shift
“Whom,” he snapped. “Didn’t your human schools teach you anything?”
I bit back the urge to say they’d taught me manners, because frankly it would have been a lie, and it would only have goaded him further. Since Zane didn’t seem to fall into the camp of instructors who actively disliked me (he had, after all, given me some pretty good advice about not getting dead at the start of the year), it seemed like maybe that would be a bad plan.
“By whom, then,” I said, with what little of my patience remained.
“The domina,” he said. “So maybe don’t stand here with that dumbstruck look on your face wasting everyone’s time. I’ve got better things to do with my evening than playing messenger. You can play with your schoolyard friends later.”
His eyes locked onto Ling and he opened his mouth like he was about to say something, then snapped it shut and turned back to me. “What’s the hold up?”
“Why does Astor want to see me?” I asked.
“She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. But if I had to guess, I’d say it had something to do with visiting your criminal mate.”
Chapter Forty
Zane was right, and no sooner did I make it to Astor’s office than she, too, had a go at me for wasting everyone’s time, then Zane grabbed my arm and the whole world fractured around me, and reformed into something else.
I had no idea where we were now, other than in some kind of stone building with no natural light filtering in, or even a facsimile of it, like at Darkveil. It was as if they wanted the place to be as gloomy and depressing as possible, and I shuddered at the thought of Cole having spent the last two weeks here.
“Can the shivering,” Zane said. “You think showing weakness at Darkveil is bad? They’ll eat you alive here, and your mate isn’t going to protect you now.”
“I wasn’t shivering,” I said, shooting him a dirty look. “It was a shudder.”
“It was a sign of weakness and being human already makes you weak enough. Haven’t you learned a thing at the academy?”
“Yeah. Everyone around me is an asshole.”
“Yes, they are. So don’t forget it.”
A door opened, and two guards stepped into the small, barren chamber we were in. One was tall and wiry, and the other shorter and muscle-bound, but both had matching cold eyes and pinched expressions that promised trouble…and promised they would enjoy it.
“You’ll be allowed a ten-minute visit,” the taller of the guards said. “No conjuring, no magic, no shifting.”
“Well, that won’t be hard,” I muttered under my breath, and then louder, “Wait, only ten minutes? That’s not nearly long enough.”
I snapped my head round to Zane, who just shrugged. Obviously.
“It’s what you’ve got,” the shorter of the guards said, sounding bored.
“No way. I’ve waited weeks to be allowed to see him. We need longer than ten minutes.”
The guard curled his lip in a suggestive sneer. “Yeah, I bet.”
“Ew, no. Seriously, why is every supernatural I meet obsessed with fucking?” I turned the end of my question to Zane, who shrugged again.
“It’s ten minutes or nothing,” the guard said, folding his arms across his chest.
“Fine. Ten minutes.”
“And your bodyguard waits here.”
“He’s not my bodyguard.” Because bodyguard implied he might actually give a damn if the crap got kicked out of me, and I was fairly sure that wasn’t the case. But the implication wasn’t lost on me. I notched my chin, stopped acting like a whiny brat, and met the guard’s gaze. “I don’t need one. So if you’re done wasting everyone’s time, maybe we could move this along.”
Uncertainty flickered in the guard’s eyes just briefly, and he turned to his taller companion and nodded.
“Come with me, then. But you should know that we don’t guarantee your safety. If you step through those doors, you do it at your own risk.”
“Noted,” I said, as offhandedly as I could while my heart hammered in my chest. I was glad the pair of them seemed to be fae, because I was one hundred percent certain my heartbeat was loud enough that a shifter would have heard it right away, and a vamp would have been salivating.
