Mind Magic (22 page)

He hesitated, reluctant. Hating to give up this form. As soon as he became two-legged, the man would begin
thinking
again—thinking about what might be happening to Lily and mistaking what he thought for reality. Reality was this moment, with him crouched low to the ground, his nose full of messages—fried food, a nearby squirrel, the sour reek of exhausts. Earth. Leaves. The scent of a lone man walking slowly toward his rig. The tang of days-old dog urine from that shrub at the edge of the concrete.

Lily had been taken by some enemy. That, too, was reality. The pain of that truth, the urgency, had been part of the run he’d just made . . . but so had relief. At last he was acting to end their separation. Why had the man allowed it in the first place? He knew the reasons. He even understood them. He did not understand why the man had deemed them sufficient. Foolishness, to be parted from her. Look at what had happened.

For now, she was alive. He didn’t wonder if she’d been hurt, if she was hurting now. He had no way to know, and until he did, there was no point in dragging his thoughts around in the mire of maybes. The man knew this, but knowing wouldn’t help. He would still think about all sorts of bad things that might have happened, might be happening, to Lily. He would still react to those thoughts as if they were reality.

To the wolf’s way of thinking, the man was slightly insane.

He didn’t have to Change yet. He could have his clansman drive while he rested in the backseat . . . except that the speed of a car wasn’t all he needed.

Find Lily. Find the enemy.

He’d cleared the mental brush and found a target, but taking that trail meant finding the enemy first. He did not want to do it that way. Sometimes the man’s maybe-thinking cracked open possibilities the wolf hadn’t seen. He needed to give the man a chance to come up with something better, faster. With a trail that led to Lily.

He started moving again, heading around to the other side of the parking lot. His Leidolf clansman should be waiting. He’d have cash, a vehicle . . . and the clothes Rule would need when he was two-legged once more.

EIGHTEEN

ONE
second Lily was in a sleep so deep no dreams could find her. The next, her eyes popped open.

Rock. Rock above her—dim, craggy, with orange light dancing shadows into the crevices. Rock beneath her, too, rock she’d been lying on for quite a while, judging by the way she ached where flesh met stone. Her bladder was full to bursting. She was warm. Too warm, and downright hot along her left side. Someone was lying next to her. Someone furry. Rule. As automatically as breathing, she reached for him—with her hand, her mind, and her mate sense.

Turned out Rule was a mile directly overhead. No, he was immediately behind her, which she barely noticed because the rocky ceiling abruptly grew hands. Lots of hands. Some of them sprouted arms and reached down for her and she tried to shove them away, but a pair of them got through and wrapped around her throat and—

And were gone.

A hallucination. She’d had another hallucination. She lay still, breathing fast, feeling terrified and horribly alone. But she wasn’t alone. The furry presence at her side might not be Rule, but he wasn’t a hallucination, either. At least she didn’t think so. She turned her head. A wolf lay with his back pressed against her.

Charles. Rule was in D.C., and Charles had been with her when . . . what had happened? How long had she been lying here? Where was
here?

Lily remembered where she’d been—following the little brownie through the woods in the nature preserve. Charles had been scouting ahead when she stepped out into a clearing, and . . . nothing. She had nothing beyond that moment. No memory of someone knocking her out, and her head didn’t hurt. A dart? She didn’t remember being hit by one, but it was the only thing she could think of.

Her stomach felt sore. She slid a hand over it. Definitely tender, but in a superficial way. Not cracked ribs, just a bruise. Had someone kicked or punched her while she was unconscious? More quick explorations let her know she still wore her jacket, slacks, and tee. No shoes. No shoulder harness. Her pockets had been emptied.

Charles hadn’t stirred. A flicker of panic made her lay a hand on his shoulder and shake him. He didn’t wake, didn’t respond at all, but she felt the distinctive pine-needles-and-fur of his magic, so she knew he was alive. She took a shaky breath and began taking more careful stock of her surroundings. Her fingers found rough fabric beneath her. She wasn’t on bare rock after all. A wool blanket separated her from the stone . . . relatively smooth stone. She and Charles lay in a smooth indentation in the stony floor of a small rock chamber. A cave.

Lily had bad memories of caves. Those memories swam up and drowned the present, turning her breathing fast again.
Stop that.
She made herself take several slow, careful breaths and pay attention to now
.
To here, wherever that might be. A cave, yes, and one that didn’t have the decency to block her inadvertent attempt at mindspeech. Earth and rock were supposed to block mind magic. It should have kept her flailing Gift from touching another mind.

Which meant that either she’d brushed against Charles’s mind to trigger the hallucination, or there were more people down here with her.

If so, they were really quiet. She couldn’t hear a damn thing.

Lily sat up, wincing at the soreness in her stomach, and looked around. Directly ahead, the stone was smooth and rounded. To her right the rock was more jagged and was interrupted by an opening. The source of the flickering light lay out of sight around that corner. Firelight? Sure looked like it. The stony floor where she lay sloped down toward the back of the cave, lost in shadow in the dim light. The ceiling was extremely uneven, but there was room for her to stand up.

She did. And stared. Was that what it looked like?

Lily stepped carefully over Charles. Four feet away a primitive porta-potty sat on the floor—a camping stool with a hole in the seat. A plastic bag was fastened to the hole and a roll of toilet paper sat on the floor beside it. A small plastic glass sat next to the toilet paper; it held a toothbrush and a travel-size tube of toothpaste. And her shoes were lined up neatly beside the plastic glass.

She immediately sat down and put them on.

What did it say about her captor, that he or she had provided minimal sanitary facilities? She frowned and decided she didn’t have enough data yet to make a guess. Now, if she were to find soap and a makeshift shower around the corner, where that flickering light came from . . . and her purse. And her phone. And maybe a little bell she could ring to summon room service, she jeered at herself, for thinking of a shower had made her realize how thirsty she was. Once she’d noticed, she couldn’t stop noticing. She licked dry lips. She needed water.

She didn’t have any. Check out the source of the light first, she told herself. Find out if she was alone. Everything else could wait, including her bladder. She headed around the corner.

Another, smaller chamber. No one here. The ceiling sloped down abruptly; the walls narrowed and the floor rose, so that all sides converged in what had to be the exit from her stony cell—a narrow opening she’d have to duck or crawl to get through.

She’d also have to be fireproof. It was blocked by a curtain of flames, the source of the flickering light. Flames that put out heat and light—it was warmer in here, uncomfortably so—but no smoke. A fire that burned without any visible fuel.

Magic fire.

Lily grimaced. She hadn’t really thought she’d be able to just walk out—or crawl out, as the case might be. But magic fire was not good news. Cullen could create and maintain a fire that didn’t require conventional fuel, but he was unusually good with fire . . . as he’d gladly tell anyone who asked, and often those who didn’t. She wasn’t happy to learn that her abductor possessed skills equal to Cullen’s.

Near the fire curtain were two plates. One held what looked like trail mix. The other was piled high with jerky. A plastic bucket sat next to them, as did a dented mental canteen. She licked dry lips and headed for it, ducking low to avoid the low ceiling. The bucket was full of water. That would be for Charles. He couldn’t drink from a canteen.

She grabbed the canteen, verified with a shake that it held water, and sighed in relief. Then stared at the other items that had been left for her: a thick puzzle book and a pencil.

Lily sat back on her heels, perplexed. Food, water, crude sanitary facilities, a blanket. A puzzle book and a pencil. Magic fire across the exit. Someone with substantial skill at magic had gone to a fair amount of trouble to set up a livable cell for her, which meant—good news!—they didn’t want her dead. Not right away, anyway. As for the puzzle book . . . she picked it up, leafed through it. None of the puzzles had been worked. Was her captor thoughtful enough to give her something to pass the time? If so, that was a depressingly thick puzzle book. It suggested a long stay.

She frowned at the canteen in her hand. Could she risk drinking? Eating? Either or both might be drugged.

She felt so damn shaky. Thirsty and shaky. Some of the shakiness was fear, sure. She was scared. But some might be from hunger. Her blood sugar was probably in free fall, even if she didn’t feel especially hungry. When you were really thirsty, you didn’t notice hunger. She rubbed her face and tried to think. If her captor wanted to drug her again, the water was an easy way to do it. The food might be drugged, too, but the water would be a sure thing. At some point she’d have to drink.

The thing, then, was to choose that point. Do what she needed to first. She took the canteen and the plate with trail mix back into the other chamber, then emptied her bladder and checked on Charles. He seemed okay, for a value of “okay” that meant he couldn’t wake up. His heartbeat was slow but strong, about right for a sleeping lupus. Then she began exploring the dark end of the “bedroom.”

It went back over twenty feet. She tried not to rush her exploration, which was more by touch than sight. No spooky hands formed from the rock to grab her, though she kept expecting that. And her own hands didn’t find a tunnel or crack she could slip through. By the time she finished, she didn’t much care if the water was drugged or not. She sat down next to Charles and unscrewed the cap on the canteen.

The water tasted stale, metallic, and wonderful. She drank about half of it before she could make herself stop. No telling how long it would have to last.

Charles would be thirsty, too, when he woke up. If he woke up. God, she hoped he’d wake up. Was that selfish? He was dying anyway. He might be better off passing away quietly in his sleep instead of enduring whatever . . . no. No, that was giving up. Somehow, someway, she’d get out of here, and she couldn’t take him with her if he was unconscious. And if part of her wanted him to wake up just so she wouldn’t be alone, well, that part wasn’t in charge.

Why had she woken up, but he hadn’t?

That should have occurred to her before. Her head was fuzzy, and that might be due to hunger. She frowned and tried some of the trail mix. Dried apples, peanuts, and some kind of crunchy bits. It tasted wonderful. She made herself nibble instead of shoving in handfuls.

She’d save the jerky for Charles, who would need the protein if he woke up. When he woke up. He hadn’t been drugged. That was obvious now that she thought about it. Drugs didn’t work on lupi, so he must have been spelled into sleep. Or charmed? The sleep charms Cullen made had to be held in place, but she shouldn’t assume that was the way all sleep charms worked. Maybe she’d better make sure there was nothing hiding in Charles’s thick fur. She dug her fingers into the ruff around his neck, hunting for any kind of foreign object.

It seemed as if she was dealing with a versatile and well-equipped bad guy. He or she had knocked both Lily and Charles out, but he’d used magic on Charles, a drug on Lily. She knew that because magic didn’t work on her and drugs didn’t work on Charles. Apparently the bad guy knew it, too.

Bad guys, plural, she decided, continuing to run her fingers through Charles’s fur while she nibbled trail mix. One person might be able to knock both of them out and haul away her unconscious body before José came looking for her, but it was unlikely one person could carry them both off that quickly. Charles probably weighed in around two hundred pounds.

No foreign objects on his head, neck, or chest. Stomach next.

Why in the world had Charles been taken? Surely it would’ve been easier to kill him. Or to just leave him behind, sound asleep. Maybe this wasn’t about her. Maybe she was the add-on, and Charles was the real target. But that didn’t make sense. They wouldn’t bring in a porta-potty for a wolf . . . unless their captor didn’t realize Charles couldn’t Change. But if Charles was the real target, why take her? And why take both of them, but not the brownie?

There was one obvious answer to that last question. It just wasn’t easy to believe. Lily grabbed another handful of trail mix with her left hand, felt carefully along Charles’s hindquarters with her right, and thought about brownies.