Corbin had never drained him so far before. He felt weak and shaky, as if waking up from a fever. Everything after Corbin had used his power to summon the other warlocks was a confused blur. All he could remember was fire, screaming, black wings cutting through rising smoke…
“Where?” he rasped.
“It seemed appropriate to celebrate our reunion by taking a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.” Corbin sipped his drink. “I am impressed, Blaze. Transporting so many people halfway around the world would have killed any lesser shifter outright. And yet you have recovered even faster than I calculated.”
“No.” Painfully, Ash pushed himself to his feet. He had to grip the iron bars to remain standing. “Where is she?”
“Ah, yes.” The warlock smiled thinly. “You burned your mate bond. You cannot sense her, can you?”
Corbin was wrong. Even though Ash had scorched Rose’s side of the connection to charred ashes, there was no power on earth—not even his own—that could destroy his love for her. She would always be his mate.
Ash concentrated, turning inward. In his weakened state, the mate bond was dim as a distant candle, but she was there. She burned resolutely in his heart, a single point of defiant light.
He sagged against the bars in relief. “I can sense enough to know that she is safe. You don’t have her.”
The faint
est flicker of annoyance flashed across Corbin’s face. The warlock quickly stifled it, but Ash knew that Corbin had hoped to use false threats against Rose to keep him obedient.
“The swan is irrelevant,” Corbin said, rising. The cage door opened at his touch. “Let me show you what I do have.”
Ash clenched his jaw as the binding bit into him. He allowed it to pull him after the warlock. No point in wasting his limited strength fighting it now. He had to be patient, and wait for his moment.
The courtyard was bigger than Ash had been able to see from within the cage. It was overgrown with creepers and weeds, but it looked like it had been some kind of private menagerie at some point. The high stone walls were lined with cages and enclosures; some large enough for a bear or big cat, most designed to hold smaller creatures.
Corbin led the way down the row. A black-robed warlock sat cross-legged on the ground outside large cage a little way off, hunched over a laptop. Every now and then he let out a delighted giggle.
“Progress?” Corbin asked the man.
The warlock lifted his head. His eyes gleamed pure gold, without white or pupil.
“I can see everything,” he said dreamily. “Patterns in the data. Connections I never imagined. It’s so obvious now. Give me a week with this power, and I will see the very fabric of the universe.”
His words washed over Ash. His attention was fixed beyond the warlock, on the dark interior of the cage.
“Griff,” he breathed.
The griffin lay sprawled on the floor, wings splayed like broken fans. Many of the long golden feathers were charred and blackened. His eyes were closed, but his beak gaped open, his furred sides heaving for breath. His talons clenched spasmodically, raking grooves into the concrete.
Ash tried to contact him telepathically, but ran into the thorns of the binding. He couldn’t reach beyond his own mind. All he could do was clench his fists futilely on the bars imprisoning his friend.
“Yes, yes, very nice,” Corbin was saying to the other warlock with a touch of impatience. “Anything useful?”
The warlock shrugged. “Oh, I’ve already worked out how to increase the potency of our binding spells tenfold. Child’s play.” His golden gaze drifted back to his laptop screen again. “It’s all so obvious. Why did I never see it before?”
“You didn’t have the right source of power,” Corbin said. His lips thinned as he glanced at the unconscious griffin. “Ensure that you ration yourself, and give your familiar time to recover. It is a unique resource, not to be spent too quickly.”
“Yes, High Magus,” the warlock said vaguely, lost once more in his research. “I just need to see a little more…”
Corbin let out an irritated sigh, but didn’t reprimand the man further. He went on, and the binding forced Ash to fall into step behind him.
He already knew what they would find in the other cages.
John would have filled the entire courtyard in his native sea dragon form. Even in his human shape, he couldn’t stand straight in his cage. But that didn’t stop his frantic, maddened pacing, back and forth, hunched nearly double in the tiny enclosure. From the bruises striping his face and bare arms, Ash guessed that John must have thrown himself at the iron bars until forbidden to do so by his warlock.
The sea dragon’s indigo eyes met his, half-feral and agonized. John sang something in his own language, three chords of pure misery.
Ash’s heart constricted. John had already lost human speech. The sea dragon had been born to the freedom of the entire ocean, his soul more dragon than man. To be cruelly bound to an alien will, constrained and tied down…he would go mad even faster than a land shifter.