“Probably as insurance in case you descended on them before they had Jessie. Mages must be watching this town awfully close for them to marshal in the one night ye didn’t show. We have’ta change that, somehow. We need a better system.”
“Right now we need to get going. See you at Ivy House.”
Heat and light blasted her as he shifted, making her stagger back. She wasn’t long in following suit, the bag getting caught on her horn instead of her neck. It would do. In a moment, she was airborne.
A team of mages had snatched up the bar—and Jessie—under Austin Steele’s nose. There was no chance they’d just randomly stopped for food and rest. If they were this organized, they’d have a safe place to hold Jessie.
Lord help them if they couldn’t find that place.23I came to slowly, a hard surface below my aching body and throbbing head. Cold air slid across my face, the breeze slight but uncomfortable. Silence greeted me as I fluttered my eyes open, trying to collect my scattered thoughts.
Steel bars interrupted my vision, slicing through the image of a flat, stony surface nearly lost to the dim lighting. The bars rose all around me, bowing inward and connecting to a circular plate above me. The large, rusted chain attached to the plate connected to a high ceiling, anchored who knew how.
The ceiling stretched out until it reached a fissure. Light bled in from outside, diffuse but bright enough for me to see within the cavernous space. Something shimmered from the ceiling to the floor of the opening, as though it had plastic wrap blocking it off. Probably a protection spell of some sort, not that it was needed. The opening was much too far away for anyone to jump from it to me. Even if they managed, I was two stories down or so, out of reach.
I pushed myself to sitting, my head swimming. The platform beneath me swayed over a drop of at least a couple of stories.
A sea of spikes, each probably a person tall, good and thick, completely covered the ground below me except for one small path leading to a shadowy area that probably had an exit.
Swell.
Even if I could escape this rusty cage from yesteryear, I couldn’t jump down from that height without breaking something or dying, and if I missed the small landing strip, or hit it and bounced, I’d find myself not just broken, but impaled.
The haze cleared from my mind as I arranged my feet in a more comfortable sitting position and sucked on my lip for a moment. Obviously flying would fix several of my problems. I could safely land or even try for that opening.
What was the magic covering the opening, though? Could I handle it? Assuming it wasn’t plastic wrap, of course. And if not, would that same magic be over the exit that was sure to be at the bottom of this place?
I pushed to standing, wobbled, and reached for one of the bars. Rough, cold steel greeted me. At least there wasn’t magic on my somewhat rickety cage. That was something.
A rectangular block of steel interrupted the vertical bars, and I threaded my hand through the bars so I could feel it out. There was a keyhole in the other side. I shoved at the door and then wiggled it. Not much give, made of strong stuff, and there was no way my muscles were up to the task. Ivy House had made me stronger, but there were limits.
This was definitely a limit.
I’d likely found the prison that one kidnapper was talking about. The holding cell. Or to use a different name, the rendezvous point for the mysterious contract holder to come and collect me from whomever had managed to grab me.
“So okay,” I murmured, sticking my finger into the keyhole and wishing the door open. Nothing happened. I’d half hoped my subconscious would take care of that. “I just need to learn how to magically pick a lock, tear down some sort of shimmery magical wall, and then finally learn how to fly and get out of here. Nothing to it.”
“What?”
I froze as the voice floated through the air before waning.
“What?” I asked back.
A shuffling sound preceded a sort of large hominid character hobbling into my line of sight, long strands of matted hair hanging off its head and down its body, like an upright shaggy dog.
A few feet from its starting location, it stopped and turned, hair and shadow draping its face, and a great mustache and even more impressive beard reaching down to its chest. Only the nose was visible, a large spectacle that hopefully meant a keen sense of smell or it was just overkill.
“What?” it—he?—asked again, that single word somehow managing to sound slow and deep and ancient.