“I didn’t mean for it to do that!” A fractured female voice sounds, muffled, at a distance.
“Then what did you mean it to do, Aimee? Seriously. You wanted a magical bomb. I delivered. End of story,” another raspier voice snaps. “We’re inside.”
“I hope we got the right cell.”
A pause, then, “You seriously had me aim a magic bomb at a dungeon without knowing if we were aiming itdirectlyat our friend?”
RJ. And Aimee. The witches had arrived.
Hope is brighter than an emergency flare.
“At least we’re in. And we made a good show of it. Are you okay?” RJ asks.
I’m not okay.
I can’t find the strength to get the words out but the question wasn’t for me. A second female coughs, wet and garbled, before clearing her throat.
“I didn’t think we were going to bring half of the castle down. Seriously!”
Risking blindness, I pry my eyes open. At first the dark world casts strange shadows on everything, absorbing the light outside my prison. Then the shapes congeal into something tangible.
“We got the cell open,” RJ insists. “Now do you want to waste time arguing while the vampires rain down on us like angry hornets? Or find Mandi?”
Loose stones and mortar crunch beneath their feet and when the shadows finally clear, the witches stand in stark relief against the gloom of the ruined dungeon. The cavalry has arrived.
RJ pauses where the cell door used to be with a beatific smile splitting her face. Aimee is a step beyond her, light hair done in a tight braided coronet around her face.
She waves the smoke away with one hand and holds out a lantern with a smokeless flame trapped inside.
“There you are,” RJ says to me.
Shock keeps me grounded in place for a long, tense moment. Finally I pull myself to my feet, keeping a palm flat against the wall. “You came.”
My voice holds even if it sounds like I’ve swallowed sheets of sandpaper.
“We weren’t going to leave you to rot, Mandi. Come on.” Aimee holds out her arm to help me over the debris. “We just had some vamps to handle on the way. No big deal.”
RJ glances over her shoulder. “Actually,bigdeal. They’re pretty pissed off.”
A pissed off vampire isn’t too high on my list of things I want to deal with. I grab Aimee’s hand, letting her tug me forward, the toe of my sneaker catching on the rough edge of stone.
“We expected this.” RJ’s glare cuts through the smoke from their rescue. “We went over the variables before we came. It’s not like we made the decision spur of the moment.”
I’m a fumbling mess and caked with filth and grime. Neither one of them notice.
A long hallway stretches in front of us lined by cages. Steel warps and flakes into ruin in places, but the locks are shiny and new. They hold fast. I hadn’t heard any other cries since I’ve been here but that doesn’t mean there aren’t bodies decaying behind those doors.
I’m lucky enough to live despite it all.
“How long?” I ask Aimee.
She practically drags me toward the curving stairway out of the darkness. “Four days. It took us a bit of time to get out the first go around.”
Only four days and I’d started to lose my mind?
Blood drains from my face. “Lacey? Colt?”
Their names break off in another cough, my throat burning from the reek of smoke. My wolf whines and shrinks down into the pit of my stomach where she’s the most comfortable. I could really use her right now.