I’d never felt wrath like this, and I no longer had the willpower to curb it.
It was a testament to how powerful I’d gotten that even with the containment spell wound into the cuffs, I retained enough power to out-muscle the enchantment. I pushed my energy out, disintegrating the spell. The full force my power flooded me, thickening the air in the car. Another push of magic and the cuffs snapped open, falling away from my wrists.
“What was that?” Maggie said, sensing a shift in the air. I saw the moment she realized the cuffs no longer contained me, her spine stiffening, her shoulders tensing. Slowly, she swiveled in her seat until our eyes met.
I smiled, and power pulsed out of me.
The windows and doors blew out. The sound of shattering glass and crunching metal echoed in the night. Wind whipped through my hair. I laughed as a howling gust of lost souls joined it.
Byron slammed on the brakes and the wheels locked. We spun.
My skin lit up at the chaos, and right in the middle of it, I leaned over the driver’s seat and whispered into his ear, “You’re going to regret what you did last night.”
“Knock her out!” he yelled. “Knock her—”
The butt of a baton slammed into my temple, and the world went dark once more.
I woke briefly.
“Should we just kill her?” Maggie’s voice.
“You want her coming back for you?” Byron’s.
I blinked open my eyes only to see a black baton coming down on me once more. Pain slammed into my temple, and I lost consciousness again.
Eventually, the blackness bled away. A shiver wracked my body. I was too hot and too cold at the same time. My head pounded. It shouldn’t pound.
I reached up to touch it and felt a lump.
Where I’d repeatedly been hit.
I rubbed my temples, trying to massage the pain away. Another shiver raced through me.
“Feels terrible, doesn’t it?”
My body tightened at the voice.
I looked up. Iron bars separated me from Caleb. He sat outside my cell, his legs folded and his hands steepled against his lips. He watched me with tired, tormented eyes.
“This feels familiar,” I said. Only this time I was the prisoner. “Are we in Castle Rushen?”
Caleb nodded.
Unlike the cuffs, the enchantments of this cell pounded away at my skin and sucked me dry of energy. Perhaps if I had been awake when they brought me here, I would’ve retained enough power to break free of the cell. But as I’d slept, the neutralization spell had drained me.
I rubbed my temple again.
“Yesterday, they meant to kill you,” Caleb said. “Maggie was then supposed to get a read off of your body.”
As a psychometric, Maggie had the ability to pull information off of whatever she touched, living or dead, animate or inanimate.
“Andre scared them off, then your body disappeared—or so they say.”
I lolled my head back against the cement wall, letting him talk. This weak, I couldn’t do much more than listen.
“That’s why they captured you tonight. To understand you better.”
So they could better understand how to defeat me.
“Why are you here telling me this?” I asked.
“You could’ve killed me, but you didn’t,” he said. “And last night, when you faced us off, you spared the officers then as well.”
I just stared at him.
“I keep expecting death, not mercy from you,” he said.
I didn’t really care what he made of me. I wasn’t doing this to prove anything to him.
He fell quiet, and for a long time we sat there together, me in agony, him in deep reflection.
“Remember our first date?” he finally said, shattering the silence.
My jaw clenched. I nodded.
“You asked me why I was interested in you, and I told you that you were mysterious. I hadn’t known … I hadn’t known the half of it.
“And then Samhain came around.” He swallowed. “That night I began to realize that you were really as doomed as you warned me you were.” He blinked several times. “You were marked by the devil, but I believed I could save you. I truly thought that’s what I was doing when I pulled the trigger four nights ago.”
So this was Caleb’s apology, part two, and I had to sit here and listen to it.
Lucky me.
“I still want to save you.”
“There’s no coming back from what you did,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how you defend yourself. You tried to murder me. We will never be friends again.”
He held my gaze. “I know, Gabrielle. I’ve figured that out.”
“Then why are you here?” God, I felt like shit. I was sure the enchantments of this cell were turning my organs to mush.
“Seers have been looking into the future,” he said. “It’s not good. But some have said …” His eyes captured mine, “some have said that there’s at least one future where you save us.”
Bullets pinged in the distance, interrupting story time.
Caleb stood, his attention going to the end of the hall.
The gunfire stopped abruptly.
Both of us waited with baited breath.