Being in the mountains, you couldn’t actually see the mountains, unless you got to a peak or open valley where the vistas become visible, big sky and horizon surrounded by hills and snowy peaks. In the mountain forests, the land was a series of slopes, clearings, meadows, creek-cut gullies and washes, and steep rockfalls. Often, you couldn’t see more than fifty feet in front of or behind you. The slope Tom and I circled was a rocky bulge on the side of a gentler hill that probably dropped off to a valley or ravine on the other side. I was climbing steadily uphill; he’d gotten farther downhill. We might not meet up exactly on the other side of the slope, but I expected to be able to see him once I cleared the pine trees and outcrops of this particular formation.
He’d only been out of sight for half a minute. I could still hear him, soft breathing, quiet steady footsteps on hard ground. His scent was clear on the air.
Something hit me. Fast and small, like a Ping-Pong ball ramming into my side from behind, accompanied by a sting. Hissing, I jumped a step and reached around to slap at myself—my hand touched something hard and plastic hanging from my side, under my rib cage. I yanked it out, stared.
A dart, with a needle long enough to punch clear through my sweater and into my skin. The plastic syringe attached to it was as long as my hand. Enough stuff had been in there to knock out a bear, probably.
My heart raced, exactly what I didn’t want it to do. When I tried to call out to Tom, to warn him, my throat closed up. The sound was a choke instead of the intended howl. I tried to run.
Tranquilizer darts worked on werewolves, as long as they held enough of the drug. I’d seen it. I was guessing whoever had fired this one knew what they were doing, because the dart’s impact point started tingling, and numbness spread through my body. My breath caught—the air seemed to have turned thick, and my vision wavered, like I was looking through a fogged window. When I took a step, my legs trembled, and I couldn’t raise my arms to break my fall. Again, I tried to shout to Tom, to let out a howl. My voice squeaked like a mouse’s.
I fell facedown on a snowbank, trying to get my limbs to move, trying to fill my lungs with enough air to call a warning, and failing. The edges of the world took on a red tinge, then collapsed to darkness.
My last thought: my day was about to get truly awful.
Chapter 5
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED slowly.
I spent a lot of time in a half-dreaming fog, like what I felt the mornings after a full moon, waking up and trying to fit back in my human skin. I lay on something cold and hard, and thought that couldn’t be right, I was supposed to be home, there was supposed to be coffee, I needed a shower, but first I needed to brush my teeth, which tasted like milk-soaked cotton. My head pounded, my joints were stuck. Ben was supposed to be here, and I couldn’t smell him anywhere. My next exhale came out as a whine. I could call—
My phone, usually tucked into my jeans pocket, was gone. Of course it was. I slapped at my neck, pawing for a chain that wasn’t there—the chain that held my wedding ring. It was gone, too. So were my shoes and socks. I still had on the rest of my clothes.
I wondered: did my captor get Tom, or had he escaped? If they had caught him as well, where was he? At the moment, all I could smell was the drugged taint in my blood and my own sticky breath. I didn’t know where I was or who else might be here.
Who had done this to me? Was it Roman? If so, why hadn’t he just killed me?
My breathing, which grated roughly in my too-dry th
roat, echoed closely. When I opened my eyes, the world came back to me, piece by piece. I was in a small room, and it was dark. Black, really, only a sliver of light creeping in from somewhere. My werewolf eyes were good, even in the dark, and if I couldn’t see any details in the room, it was because there weren’t any. Bare, rough walls, a dusty floor. I breathed carefully, trying to sense anything through my drugged haze. The air was chilled, full of stone and age. Damp—not wet, but moisture tickled the inside of my nose. I was underground, maybe in a dirt cellar. Or maybe not—cellars didn’t normally have granite walls. These walls were solid stone, and I couldn’t sense any trace of a building to go with a cellar. No humming power cables or shushing water pipes. No smell of treated, painted wood. No wood at all, or trees, vegetation, people, mice, roaches, or anything. I smelled my own sick scent, the dusty air. A trace of … gunpowder? Faint, sulfurous, and old.
I started the process of unkinking my muscles and peeling myself from the floor. I ached all over, and the spot where the dart had hit me throbbed. Wincing, I rubbed it. Once I was upright, I sat, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass, gaining a better sense of my bearings. Something about this place made my skin crawl. I scratched my arms through my sweater, trying to soothe an itch that wouldn’t go away.
I was still dressed, and I wasn’t tied up. So, things could be worse. Way to be positive.
Now, what to do? If I could sense a draft, I could follow it out. But the air was still. I wanted a long drink of water. I wanted to run, I wanted to howl. My options at the moment were limited. I wanted to know more about who had done this to me. One thing at a time.
Carefully I stood, arms outstretched, searching for the walls and ceiling, the confines of the room. Figure out where I was, then where I could go. I had to duck, turning my head because the ceiling was just a touch too low. I squinted into the darkness, and my hand touched gritty stone surface. Now, I ought to be able to follow the wall to … something.
Traveling step by careful step, I felt along the wall for any clue, and took slow breaths, trying to filter some meaning from this world. There was dead stillness—nothing for me to hear, no voices of evil kidnappers, not so much as water dripping. The walls were definitely solid—chilled, ancient, no give at all. I was in some kind of cave. However, I wasn’t sure it was natural—it seemed too uniform. Artificial, then. A carved tunnel.
My hands itched, and the annoying burn got worse, until I had to shake them, rubbing them together to get rid of the feeling. The more I thought about it, though, the more my whole body started feeling that itch, that slow burn that never got truly painful, but would drive me crazy before too long.
I knew that sensation—silver. There was silver here, low grade, scant quantities found in scattered flecks in the walls, and the more I touched them the worse the allergic reaction would become. Just as they’d known how much tranquilizer to use, my captors knew to paint the walls with silver, to keep me captive, quiet.
No—not a room, a cell, or a cave. This was a mine. They’d taken me to a silver mine, probably one of the hundreds scattered throughout the Colorado mountains, abandoned and forgotten. For some reason, the thought that I was still in Colorado—still relatively close to home—comforted me. I had to find a way out of here and get home.
I continued my circuit of the tiny cave, brushing the wall with only my fingertips, ignoring the building itch. It was just a little silver, it wouldn’t kill me unless it got in my bloodstream. This must have been some branch of a tunnel, excavated a short distance, blown out with explosives, then abandoned when it didn’t yield high-quality ore. The ceiling arced evenly overhead.
Finally, the stone ended. I touched wood, set perpendicular to the cave wall. I pressed my hands flat against it, felt all over, and didn’t feel the burn of silver. Just plain wood. I studied it. A sheet of wood reinforced with two-by-fours had been set across the cave’s opening—it might have been a door, but if there were hinges, they were bolted on the outside, into the rock. The inside, the side facing me, had no handle, no lock, no sign of a lock. The wood itself felt solid. I banged on it, gave it a shake, and it didn’t budge. There was a gap at the bottom of the door, enough to stick my fingers through, enough to let air in, and a faint sliver of white light, maybe from a lantern. I also found a seam, as if some kind of slot had been cut into the wood.
Bottom line, there was a door. A shut door could be opened and allow escape.
I pounded on the wood and yelled. “Hey! Wanna get the fuck over here and explain yourselves? Hey!” After one last, good hard pound, I pressed my ear to the gap near the floor, waited.
Nothing happened.
I lay on the floor, pressed my nose to the gap, and breathed several slow, deep breaths, hoping to catch a scent of someone, something, anything. Mostly what I smelled was stone and dusty air, and I swore I could smell the silver pervading everything, tickling the inside of my nose. I sneezed, scrubbed my nose on my sleeve, and tried again, determined not to think too hard about silver anymore. I just had to be careful not to get cut while I was here.