And there they were, the same scents Tom and I had tracked: the two lycanthropes, wolf and lion. They’d lured us out and gotten us. I wished I knew why.
Other scents mingled with the two I recognized. Those I wasn’t as clear on. One seemed human enough, but vague. I couldn’t even tell the person’s sex. The other—chilled. A corpselike cold. Vampire? Or was it just the pervasive cold of the stone masking something else?
That didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it.
I spent five minutes pounding on the door, shouting until my voice went hoarse. After the first minute I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a response. But I kept doing it, just to be doing something.
No one answered. I might have been alone in the mine.
This was ridiculous. You didn’t drug and kidnap someone, then lock them into a dark room and leave them there for no reason. I wondered where the night-vision cameras were hidden.
This whole place made me itch, and I rubbed my arms. I went to the middle of the cave, as far from the walls and traces of ambient silver as I could get, and sat. Stared at the door that I very much wanted to be on the other side of.
I could claw my way through the wood, given time and motivation. I had the motivation, but I didn’t know how much time I had. I had another problem. I could turn Wolf, dig and chew through the door, and get cut up in the process. Being a werewolf didn’t mean I didn’t get hurt, it meant I could take a lot of damage and heal quickly. But if I really was in a silver mine, it didn’t matter how defunct it was, there could still be traces of silver all through this place, ore that was never excavated, a residue embedded in the walls and even scattered in the dust on the floor. If I cut open my paws, my hands, and if the silver got into my bloodstream, I’d be dead. The bullet half of the silver bullet didn’t kill werewolves; blood poisoning from the silver did. Silver-inlaid knives did as well. I didn’t know if there was a minimum amount of silver it took to poison a werewolf to death—maybe traces of powder on the floor wouldn’t be enough. But I didn’t want to be the one to test that threshold.
So any escape plan that might break skin was out.
Cold didn’t affect me as much as it did a normal human being, but I started to shiver. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my sweater, hugged my knees to my chest, and tried to keep my breathing slow and steady. My mind spun, a hamster racing in a wheel that didn’t go anywhere.
The pieces of what was happening here didn’t fit together. The tranquilizer dart, the efficiency of the strike—I’d never even heard the gun fire, and whoever had the gun must have been downwind because I hadn’t smelled anyone that close—made me think military. At one point the army had werewolf soldiers serving in Afghanistan. I’d been called in as a consultant when a unit of werewolves had broken down, its members suffering from post-traumatic stress and unable to control themselves. Out of necessity, the military made excellent use of tranquilizer gun
s on werewolves in that situation. But if someone in the military had kidnapped me, I’d have ended up in a steel and Plexiglas cell in a hypercontrolled situation in some lab. I’d had a bit of experience with those settings, too. If this had been a military or even some wacky paramilitary situation, I’d have been exposed, plenty of one-way mirrors and closed-circuit cameras watching me. There’d be someone standing there with a clipboard. They’d have had a reason for taking me, even if they didn’t want to tell me what it was.
This setting—this was thrown together. This was making use of available resources. This said my captors might not have been working with a lot of time and money on their hands. They could probably get the tranquilizer gun and darts off the Internet, and they used a prison they had at hand rather than building one.
A few choice questions would help me figure this out. I cycled through them a dozen times and didn’t find answers. Was Tom here? I desperately hoped he was free, safe, and calling the cavalry. On the other hand, it would be nice to have an ally. I thought about calling his name, then thought better of it. If whoever had done this had missed him, I didn’t want them going back for him. Were my captors targeting werewolves in general, or me in particular? If the answer was me in particular, that opened a whole catalog of enemies who might have done this. Who said that having enemies was good, because it meant you’d stood up for something in your life? Ah, I remembered: Winston Churchill. The guy who also said, If you’re going through hell, keep going. Yes, sir.
Most of all, what I wanted to know was what did this have to do with Roman and his confrontation with Antony? Because whatever Colette said, sometimes all threads did lead back to a conspiracy.
The culprit might be any one of a number of antisupernatural groups that had sprung up over the last few years, as vampires and lycanthropes and other brands of magic became more visible and more accepted. I made an easy target because of my radio show. Any truly crazy activists would have just killed me outright—I’d gotten plenty of threats. But these guys wanted me for something. And antisupernatural activist didn’t mesh with the evidence that at least some of my captors seemed to be supernatural themselves. They could be working for the enemy, but why?
The possibilities I considered got more outlandish. A rabid fan had captured me, Misery style, and obsessive games of admiration and torture would soon ensue. Another werewolf pack—one that included a were-lion for some suitably dramatic reason—needed me for some in-person counseling. Flattering, but unlikely. Those folks usually approached me in restaurants, and without tranquilizer guns. Maybe I was being prepared as a hideous sacrifice to some ancient, chthonic god. That had actually already happened to me once, in Las Vegas of all places, so it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of reason. But then there should have been candles, burning incense, weird statuary, and chanting. Or maybe I was being collected for display in an alien zoo.
My imagination was getting away from me. My questions accumulated, growing more and more urgent: When would my enemy finally appear? Would there be food and water? Sooner or later, if the door stayed shut and locked, the need for water would drive me to try to break out, danger of silver poisoning or no.
The chill was getting to me, so I got up and paced. Three steps down the long side of the rocky cell, two steps across, three steps back. Not too cramped, as far as terrifying underground prison cells went. With thoughts like that pressing on me, the pacing didn’t do a thing to get rid of the gooseflesh pricking my arms. My head itched, and my lips had pulled back, unconsciously baring my teeth. I hadn’t realized I’d been doing it. I pressed my hands to my face, rubbed my cheeks, tried to get the muscles to relax. Appear calm. Not at all like a cornered wolf, no sir.
I had to find a way out of here.
* * *
I DIDN’T know much about old silver mines except in the most general historical sense. In the last half of the nineteenth century, prospectors discovered gold, silver, and a collection of other valuable minerals throughout the Rocky Mountains. Industry flooded in, dozens of fortunes were made, cities were built. Mining was still an important industry in the state, but hundreds of antique mines like this one had been abandoned and left to decay. They’d been built with nineteenth-century technology, tunnels blown out with primitive black powder and dynamite, men digging with shovels and pickaxes, hauling ore out with carts and donkeys.
I didn’t know how deep a mine like this ran, how many tunnels and chambers it might have, if there was a standard layout or if they twisted randomly depending on where the ore was. I didn’t know how stable the arcing stone rooms might be. Not very, was my feeling—hikers and travelers in the mountains were always getting warnings about not venturing into such tunnels. They collapsed a lot, I gathered. If I started worrying about the roof of the place caving in on me, on top of all the other anxieties, I’d freeze completely. So I just didn’t think about it.
The darkness was giving me a headache. The strain of trying to stare my way out of a near-lightless cave was telling. Not to mention the fear and anger, with no target to aim toward. I ended up sitting on the floor again and thinking of Ben. He’d find me. Somehow he’d figure out what had happened, come looking, and find me. It was just a matter of time. I could be patient.
I caught myself whispering hurry, hurry, hurry.
* * *
IF ONLY I knew how much time had passed. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious, and I couldn’t see outside to know if it was day or night. The timelessness gave me a feeling of mental seasickness, a nausea that crept into my gut. The ground didn’t feel firm.
Around the roaring in my own ears, I heard something new—something different outside, breaking the silence of the mine tunnel. Barely there—soft, careful, steady. Slippered footsteps, creeping close. I held my breath. The sound was no greater than that of snow falling. The bare whisper of breath that came with the steps I could hear a little better.
Whoever had approached the door paused just on the other side. I was torn between wanting to shout and wanting to remain as still as possible, straining with my ears and taking deep breaths through my nose, hoping to catch a scent and learn all I could.
The person waited, breathing softly. The smell—female, feline. The were-lion. She’d used some kind of herbal hand lotion recently, and wore clothing of washed cotton.