Despite the amazing effects just a touch of the flame drug could create, Maeve always felt guilty using the illegal substance. Flame drugs had landed her here.
The drugs had been the method by which thealterserums had been introduced into human society. Originally designed to be a synthetic competitor for cocaine and heroin, the flame drugs had quickly garnered a third of all drug-trafficking in the U.S.
Thirty years ago, the original creators of the drug had accidentally developed serums that changed the human genome and the fivealterspecies became known to the world: Vampire, witch, wolf-shifter, fae, and dead-talkers.
Worse, once infected with a serum and transformed, every person was immediately quarantined in lands set aside throughout the U.S. to keep the populations separate. The earlyalter-species had been notoriously violent.
Phoenix had fifteen square miles in the north heartland of the metropolitan area designated foraltercreatures like herself. Thick walls and a serious Border Patrol kept the inmates quarantined in the prison-like setting of Five Bridges. Each bridge separated one warring territory from another, while a central no man’s land, the infamous Graveyard, made all kinds of traffic and exchange possible.
Humans were allowed into Five Bridges every night and on the weekends, they arrived by the thousands in search of drugs and to take advantage of hundreds of sex clubs.
Alterswere only, and very rarely, permitted to leave the territories with Tribunal passports. The Trib governed Five Bridges.
She hated this world into which she’d landed all because she’d eaten a tainted piece of peach pie. Someone had dosed the pie with the witch serum. She’d had the pie. Her husband, Frank, had chosen pecan.
Now she was analterwitch, eighteen-months-old, who had to make a good living to keep her rescue facility running smoothly. So, a touch of flame it was.
Her witch workshop, though more accurately called a spellroom, was down a second staircase of spiraling stone steps deep underground. Only with this space, she’d left the jagged rock walls and ceiling exposed. She wanted the connection to the earth. Sometimes, she even slept down here.
She called this place her burrow. She had a leather club chair and a small writing table at the opposite end. A door to the right of the table led to a meditation and sleeping room which housed a garden. She’d created beds by jack-hammering the rock and filling the deep holes with a lot of good soil. She grew shrubs and flowers with gro-lights, vines that crept up the walls, and even a small tree in the corner. In the center of the room, she’d scattered faux furs on a stone-laid floor. There were nights, especially when her grief over Frank’s death overwhelmed her yet again, she slept on the furs.
Only her witch mentor, Kiara, knew about her underground garden-burrow and how much peace of mind it gave her. Kiara had encouraged her to go there as often as needed. So, she had.
Thoughts of Kiara, however, forced her to grow very still in front of her work table.
Veyda had abducted Kiara three weeks ago and Maeve had been hunting for her ever since. Two days before rescuing Braden from the Graveyard, she’d finally located Veyda’s well-hidden compound. She’d even succeeded in finding Kiara’s holding cell.
While waiting for Braden to recover, she’d gone back each night. It was a tremendous struggle to work her way through Veyda’s security spells to reach Kiara’s cell.
Where she was imprisoned was a small eight-by-eight space, one of a number along the west side of Veyda’s building. Each cell had barred windows and no glass. Steel shutters came down during the day to protect the inmates from the deadly sun. Other than that, the prisoners had to endure the falling temps at night then the rising desert heat as the sun rose.
Last night, she’d had a breakthrough and had made her first telepathic connection with Kiara. The latter had wept and spoken of the kind of torture she and the other women were enduring. Worse still, the torture eventually ended in death.
Maeve wanted desperately to help her, but she didn’t have either the natural witch power or the basic physicality to do it. As young as she was inalterterms, she didn’t have a single connection in the community of good witches that could help her. Kiara had been her only link in Elegance.
She’d tried taking Alfonso with her, but the presence of an extra person had somehow tightened Veyda’s spell and she’d been unable to pierce it with the tall shifter in tow.
She wasn’t even sure what it would take to break Kiara out of the place. Kiara’s plight was a problem Maeve’s mind now worked on constantly.
For the present, however, she felt a strong drive to get Braden back on his feet. He was well out of danger, but somewhere she’d come up with an idea. Maybe, if they worked together, this powerful alpha shifter could somehow help her rescue Kiara.
Swallowing hard, she went to her small refrigerator and took out a dark green bottle with an eye-dropper for a lid.
Emerald flame.
The purified content of her flame supply had cost her a small fortune, but worth every penny. She had two different forms of the drug. One liquid, the other granules. She used the liquid for infusions and potions. The granules went into any mixture that involved the grinding of herbs and other ingredients in her mortar.
She carried the bottle back to the table carefully as though the smallest bump would cause an explosion. Emerald flame didn’t work that way. It had no power to ignite the elements in her spellroom. But if it aerosolized in a large amount, the fumes could kill her. Even if she hadn’t known the nature of the drug, her witch instincts told her just how much power she carried in her hands.
Sheba offered a warning meow.
Maeve glanced at her. “I’m well aware I need to be careful.”
Sheba’s tail swiped back and forth twice, but her gaze was fixed to Maeve’s hands.
Opening the small bottle, she squeezed the eye-dropper to bring the liquid into the attached glass tube. She carefully shifted to a nearby spoon, held level in a special cradle she’d made just for the purpose. She never added the drug straight into whatever concoction she was creating. More than the number of required drops would ruin the effect.
With painstaking effort, she slowly squeezed first one drop, then two into her spoon. She breathed a sigh of relief.
