“She’s a reporter asking too many questions.”
“Doing a story on the towns or the disappearances?”
“Both.”
The other man grunted. “You’d think no one would be interested in ghosts these days. We locking her in darkness?”
“She’s dragon, so it’s best to.” Footsteps echoed as we began to move again. “How’s the muerte?”
“After more than a week of darkness, the fire has all but gone out of him.”
Angus snorted again. “Thought those boys were tougher than that.”
We seemed to be moving downward now, and the bright sense of light faded into darkness and shadows. The realization gave me hope. If I was beginning to recognize light and shadow from behind closed eyelids, then maybe whatever drug they’d given me was starting to wear off.
Angus stopped and somewhere ahead a door creaked open. The shadows became true blackness and the air became stale, smelling faintly of mold. I was slung onto something hard and cold, my head hitting with enough force that stars danced behind my closed eyelids. Footsteps retreated, a door slammed, and thick, cold silence swirled all around me.
At least I wasn’t alone.
The muerte was here. Even if those men hadn’t said as much, I still would have known. The odd, tingling sort of awareness running through the part of me that wasn’t human suggested as much. But it was an awareness that had been hit-and-miss most of my life—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—and it was a lottery that had caused me a lot of grief over the years.
Of course, I had no idea what a muerte actually was—aside from the fact that muerte meant “death” in Spanish.
That they were locking him away in darkness meant he was at least a dragon, because dragons—and most draman—needed the warmth of the sun to fuel their shape-shifting and fires. Locking them away from sunlight for any length of time robbed them of two dangerous weapons—which was a good thing in this case, because it meant he posed no immediate threat.
Not that the darkness presented any real problem to me, but that was a secret I kept closely guarded. I’d been shoved in more than one dark box over the years, and the terror I’d shown on release had been due to the length of my stay rather than the darkness itself. I’d never been sure if they’d release me or forget me.
If the voice on the phone had been someone from my past, maybe that’s what they’d been referring to, rather than anything sexual.
r /> Old fears stirred, but I shoved them away. I wouldn’t be forgotten this time, even though this time it was probably the better option.
I swallowed, and centered my thoughts back on the man in the room with me. Angus had said he’d been over a week without sunlight. It was a long time for anyone, so why had Angus expected more from the muerte?
It was a question I pondered in the darkness, though no answers were ever likely to come to mind. My clique hadn’t exactly exerted themselves to educate us half-breeds. Not when it came to dragon lore, anyway.
I have no idea how long I lay there before I realized I could move my fingers. It could have been hours, and it could have been minutes. There was no point of reference in this utter darkness, and my mind was still oddly disconnected. I tapped my fingers against the cool steel of my bed, strangely reassured by the movement. Gradually, the rest of my body began responding, and suddenly the dragon came roaring to the surface, until my whole body burned with the heat of her. The glow chased the chill from the blackness.
My gaze was drawn immediately to the man on the other side of the room. Like me, he lay on a bed that was little more than a slab of polished steel. Unlike me, he’d evidently put up quite a fight before capture. What remained of his clothes were bloody and torn, and the strong body visible beneath the many rents and tears was cut and bruised. There were several more recent wounds, some of them still bleeding, some of them barely beginning to bruise.
His face was as battered as his body, and his hair—which was as black as the darkness had been before my flames had returned—was matted with sweat and blood. His eyes were closed, his breathing even, and he showed no awareness of my being in the cell with him. I wondered if the cause was drugs or the beating he’d received.
My gaze lingered a little on the strong, straight length of his nose and the lushness of the lips underneath, before moving on to canvass the room. At which point, my stomach dropped.
I had been locked in a place like this once before. I’d barely been ten at the time, but even at that age I had gained a high degree of control over my flames. It was the only thing that had saved me when Seth and his friends had locked me into one of the clique’s main freezers and left me there. Rainey had rescued me before I’d actually become a popsicle, but it had been a close thing.
And I’d been afraid of anything resembling a freezer ever since.
I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths, trying to calm the rush of fear, trying to stop the instinctive need to shiver and flame. This small, dark metal box wasn’t cold. It wasn’t a freezer, and I was in no danger of becoming a popsicle.
It was just a small, metal-lined basement—one obviously designed to contain dragons.
And best of all, I wasn’t alone in this darkness.
I forced my eyes back open and tried to concentrate on realities, not fear. Five steps, if that, divided the four walls. Beyond the two steel beds and the solid metal door to my left, there was nothing else in the room. No windows, no vents—although they had to be here somewhere, because the air, although stale, stirred sluggishly. But there was also nothing that would provide any obvious form of escape. There wasn’t even a smoke detector in the ceiling that I could flame and perhaps get help that way.
I swung my legs over the bed and slowly sat up. For a moment, the room spun around me and bile rose. I swallowed heavily and breathed deep and slow, until the spinning faded and the urge to throw up went away.
I waited several more seconds, just to be sure, then did a check of everything I had on me. My cell phone had been smashed by a car, and the only other things I’d been carrying were my keys and my wallet. My keys—like my jacket—were gone, but my wallet was still in my pocket. Okay, in a different pocket, which probably meant someone had been rifling through it. I took it out and discovered that while my cash, ATM card, and credit cards were still there, my drivers license and press card had gone. So they now knew not only who I was, but where I worked and lived.