Soulbound: A Lone Star Witch Novel (22 page)

I
wake up some time later, heart racing, my own breath harsh in my ears. Something’s wrong, though I’m not sure if that’s true in reality or just in my dreams.

For long seconds, I lie here in the dark, half-asleep, half-awake, trying to figure out why I’m so alarmed.

Did I hear something?

Am I not feeling well?

Do I have to pee?

There’s nothing distressing in the answers—everything sounds and feels fine. So why am I awake?

I’m still on my stomach, face half buried in my favorite pillow, and I start to roll over to find a more comfortable spot. Except I can’t.

I can’t move.

Can’t sit up.

Can’t swing my legs off the bed or move my limbs at all.

Can’t do anything but turn my head and wiggle my hips a little.

I have one more moment of confusion, of noncomprehension, then panic grabs on to my stomach and squeezes before zinging outward like an electric shock. I yank at my arms, my legs, try to twist and turn, even buck against what feels an awful lot like restraints, but nothing happens. I’m stuck, tied spread-eagle and facedown to my bed.

And I have no idea how it happened.

By now my heart is pumping so hard and fast that my whole chest hurts. I try to catch my breath, but I can’t—every inhalation is a jagged saw cutting through my lungs and the perceived safety of my dark and quiet room.

I’m suffocating, drowning in my own fear and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. There’s a tiny part of me that’s still in control, that tries to tell me to calm down, to think. To reason this out.

But the words aren’t getting through. I’m too busy screaming and yanking, wrenching and trembling to pay attention to anything else. Even myself.

I jerk against the restraints until my legs cramp up and my wrists burn. Something thick and warm rolls down my palms to my fingers and I realize that all my struggling has drawn blood. The knowledge brings on another freak out, and still the restraints don’t budge an inch. Neither does the panic.

“Is anyone there?” I scream. “Lily? Kyle? Brandon?”

There’s no answer.

“What’s going on? What do you want?”

Still no answer.

Images of Lina and Amy are running through my head and all I can think is that I don’t want to end up like them. Please, Isis, don’t let me end up raped and mutilated, my body dumped for some other unsuspecting woman to find.

“Hello?” I call out one more time. My voice is hoarse from all the screaming and now my throat hurts too.

No one answers, and finally it gets through to me. Either there’s no one here or whoever it is is playing with me and won’t answer anyway. So unless I can calm down and think, I’m pretty much screwed either way.

Exhausted, terrified,
furious
, I rest my cheek on the bed and for the first time since I realized I was tied down, I try to think past the terrified buzzing in my head.

Experimenting, I wiggle my right wrist. It burns and more blood leaks onto my hand, but I ignore the pain. Instead, I try to concentrate on what the binding feels like. I can’t really tell though—the broken skin and throbbing make it impossible to isolate the feel of the bonds.

I focus on my feet instead. They’re sore, but I don’t think I’ve bloodied them yet.

I twist my ankle in a circle, feeling the hard wood of my bedpost against the bottom of my foot. I try to focus on the bonds, to figure out if they’re rope or cloth or metal, but I can’t actually feel anything. I know I’m being held down—I can feel the pressure, the inability to lift my foot—but when I actually try to concentrate on texture, it’s like there’s nothing there. Nothing soft or hard or cold or hot or silky or rough. It’s the strangest thing.

I turn my head to the left again—that wrist isn’t bleeding as badly as the right, plus it’s closest to the faint light leaking in through the sliver in my curtains. I wiggle my fingers, just to check if I can see them move. I can, barely, but it gives me a point of reference. I look about four inches south and find my wrist, slickly shining.

If I look closely I can see the width of my wrist along with the line of blood encircling it. But if I can see that, it means there’s nothing there to block my view. No rope or handcuffs or fabric. Nothing tangible at all.

Which means I’m being held, tied across my bed, by nothing but a spell.

It’s a hell of a time for me to realize that I should have listened to my mother and her damn witch whisperer. A little magic would go a long way right about now.

I close my eyes for a second, do my best to think through the adrenaline still racing along my every nerve ending. I don’t know what to do, how to get myself out of this, but I have to do something. I don’t know when—or even if, Lily will be back tonight—and I’ll be damned if I’ll
lie here trapped for the next however many hours. I can’t take the vulnerability, especially not when everywhere I turn, women who look like me are being murdered.

When I’m calm enough, I think back over the spells I learned when I was still trying to be über-witch. There were a lot of them, but I don’t think any of them covered how to tie a person down using magic—or how to free them. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have been this spell. Now that I’ve been able to work through the panic, I can smell the stench of black magic all around me. It freaks me out, makes me even more determined to get free.

But how?

I pull against the restraints one more time, just to test them, but of course the bindings don’t loosen at all. In fact, I’d swear they were tighter, but they could just feel that way because of the rawness of my hands and feet. I decide to go with that, simply because I won’t be able to function if I lie here imagining the restraints getting tighter and tighter and tighter.

I clear my mind, try to think of what Salima told me at Beanz today. I was supposed to take the herbs and conjure up an image of my mark deep inside my mind, to use it as a talisman. It’s too late for the herbs, but my mark is never far from my mind, especially lately, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.

I take a deep breath, build a picture in my head of the Heka tattoo I carry embedded in my skin. Round, empty circle topped by a semicircle with points on the end. The circlet of Isis.

I concentrate, focus on it to the exclusion of all else, and mutter the words for a simple necessity spell. At first, nothing happens. And then, miraculously, I feel my restraints start to move. Thank the goddess. I have no idea how I did it and at this moment, I don’t care—all that matters to me is that I’m almost free.

I start to murmur a quick prayer of thanksgiving, but stop before I get to the end of the first line—my bindings aren’t loosening at all. Instead, they’re getting longer, slithering around my arms and legs until the lower half of each limb is completely engulfed by the restraints. Terrific. The first bit of magic I’ve ever been able to perform and it has made everything worse.

Part of me isn’t even surprised. I’d known from the second I first met her that Salima was a quack.

So, what am I supposed to do now? I can actually move less after trying to escape than I could when this whole thing started.

Quickly, I run through the list of the spells I actually remember—which aren’t that many. Oh, I know bits and pieces of hundreds of spells, but to be certain that I know them word for word, in their entirety, is altogether different. After all, I thought I knew the necessity spell and look where that got me.

The spells I do know are from my childhood, incantations that were impressed on me in school and at home before I even knew my times tables. It’s hard to forget those. But none of them are going to help me out of this predicament.

If I ever find out who did this to me, I swear I’m going to kick his ass. At the moment, I’m more than mad enough to do it, even sans magic. Unable to hold it in anymore, I scream in fury, one long, loud shriek that releases a bunch of tension and ratchets up my anger.

I’m glad of that, glad I’ve moved beyond fear into something more constructive. And though it didn’t work the first time, I pull up my mark a second time. Concentrate. And go for the first spell I learned—an entreaty to Isis to imbue me with the power to perform my most desired spell.

It’s a long shot and I know it—after all, I’m asking for the magic to do a spell I don’t actually know. But the
second I murmur the final words of the spell, I feel Isis’s power sweep over me…right before the carpet on the far side of my room bursts into flames.

Oh, shit. Oh, shit. OH. SHIT. I guess I should have been more clear about which spell I wanted above all else at this particular moment. Because now I’ve gone from being tied down to being tied down in a room that is on
fire
. How the hell am I supposed to get away from this?

The panic is back, as thick and overwhelming as the smoke that is even now beginning to fill my room.

I stare at the flames, which are licking at the ends of my curtains and starting up my wall even as they spread across the carpet, getting ominously closer to my bed with each second that passes. Terror beats at me from every side, and I struggle to think through it. I know I need a water spell but I’m too frightened to grasp anything but a couple of words here or there. I have to calm down, but I can’t. How can I when I’m about to burn to death?

In the middle of my panic and the encroaching flames, my cell phone starts to ring. Of course, it’s across the room—next to the binder and books Salima gave me—and is absolutely no use to me at the moment. I try to will it over to me, but telekinesis is a gift that few witches have and while I’m spouting all kinds of weird magic tonight, moving objects with my mind is obviously not one of the things I can do.

The ringing stops abruptly and I’m left alone with the fire and my fear. Okay, I can do this, I tell myself even as doubt is a huge, empty cavern inside of me. I
have
to do this. Either a water spell or something to loose these bindings—I don’t actually care which. But I need something now, because the fire has made it to the posts of my bed. I can feel the heat of it on the bottoms of my feet.

The smoke is heavier now and I’m coughing constantly,
my lungs spasming with every breath I try to suck into my lungs. Freedom, I think, focusing on my mark one last time.
I need to be free. I need to escape. I need these bindings to cease to be.

Except it isn’t only my mark I see in my mind’s eye anymore—Declan’s is there, as well. Seba, the ancient Egyptian star glowing and spinning around my mark until the circlet of Isis is all but swallowed by the star.

At the same time the restraints jerk a little, loosen, and I repeat the spell I’ve just made up even as I yank and pull against the imaginary straps. It’s a silly spell, childish and immature and completely ridiculous, but if it’s working—even a little bit—I’m going to go with it.

My phone starts to ring again and at the same time I hear a loud pounding coming from outside of my room. Someone’s knocking on the front door and calling out. The words are muffled, but whoever it is must know I’m in trouble because the tone is frantic.

I scream then. “Help me! Help me! Fire! Help!”

The phone cuts off again and I mutter the freedom spell one more time as Declan’s mark intertwines with mine until I can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. And in that moment, when the symbol of his power is merged completely with mine, the restraints break. I scramble off the bed, make a mad dash for the front door just as it is ripped off its hinges and crashes inward.

It flies across my living room, slams across the back wall and Declan strides in. I’m as shocked by his sudden appearance as I am by the agitation that all but pours off of him. His eyes are wide and anxious as he grabs me and shoves me the last few steps to the front door even as he dashes through the living room to my bedroom.

Fresh air hits my aching lungs and I collapse, sinking to my knees on the front porch as I suck in the life-giving oxygen. Over the coughs that wrack my entire body, I hear the roar of the flames as they devour my room. I
can’t see them or Declan, but the sound of his voice drifts to me on the wind. I don’t know what he’s saying, can’t make out the words, but the moment he stops chanting, the crackling of the flames dies as well.

He’s used magic to put out the fire.

Seconds later he’s on the porch again, crouching next to me and pressing me down so that I’m lying flat on my back on the rough boards. “Xandra?” His voice is low and urgent. “Are you okay?”

I’m coughing too hard to answer him.

He lays a hand on my chest and though he doesn’t speak, I know he’s done something there too because I can breathe again. My lungs still ache, my throat still burns, but it’s bearable now.

“Xandra?”

I push at his hand—now that I know I’m not going to suffocate on my front porch, it’s way too close to my breasts for comfort. “I’m fine.” But when I try to sit up, the night spins around me.

“Yeah, I can tell.” Firm pressure on my chest has me lying back down, and this time, I stay down. At least until I watch Declan turn around and stroll back into my house.

“Where are you going?”

“To make sure the fire’s out. Unless you’d like to explain to the fire marshal how you lost your whole house to an inexplicable wall of flames.”

He’s inside for a few minutes, long enough for me to get my body back under control and start feeling stupid about being draped across my front porch like a Victorian lady on a fainting couch. I sit up, push slowly to my feet so that when Declan finally comes back, I’m standing, ready to face him. Why is it that he always seems to be here for the most awful moments of my life?

It’s maddening.

Still, he did save me. I’m working on the words to
thank him when he leans against one of the posts on my front porch and asks, “So, what happened? You didn’t have enough going on with bodies popping up left and right? You felt like you needed more of a challenge?” There’s a sardonic twist to his lips and his eyes are filled with annoyance.

That’s all it takes to get my back up, the words of gratitude flying right out of my head. “What are you doing here anyway? Nobody asked you to come.”