My stomach clenched. Wait. Did he say Thrax frequented the cave?
Could it be the cave from my dream? The one where Thrax had lain on the floor lifelessly?
“What do you mean? He goes there?” My voice cracked.
Merton threw his arms wide. “She didn’t even know until now!”
I ignored him, staring at Amelia, who still watched me with a desperation to claw through my brain and fish out what I knew about Thrax.
“He goes every single day,” she said. “We can’t get close to the cave. It would kill us if we tried.”
My mind reeled. So that was where he disappeared to everytime. That was his “unfinished business.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Why do you think you are here? Because we want to know as well.” Amelia stood up, checking her watch before glancing to her brother, “It’s fading.”
Merton nodded, retrieving a syringe from the lab table and advancing towards me.
“Don’t you dare.” Panic surged through me, my body scrambling backward against the wall. “Stop this, Amelia!” I barked, not wanting to fall asleep again. “Do you think Thrax won’t find me?”
“When you wake up, you’re going to tell us everything you did in that house with him. And that needle might knock you out for a little time. We have not perfected the formula. The soporific component is stubborn. Right now, the best we can manage quietens connection and induces a short sleep—thirty minutes, maybe an hour if you’re unlucky. He’s trying his best to exclude the sleeping effect, so be patient with us.”
I frowned. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying...we are also practitioners, Sanora. The thing I’d injected you with wasn’t a mere sedative. It is a severance draught, an art handed down through our blood. Think of it as a temporary but practical drug that dulls perception and feeling towards external magical stimuli.”
I blinked, trying to find purchase. “Severance draught?”
She nodded, as if I should already have known. “Our ancestors compiled recipes from both herb and rite. My grandfather played a huge role in distilling it. Merton refined them—part chemistry, part ritual. The compound severs the sympathetic thread between two beings and places the subject’s emotions out of the reach of occult connection.” She waved it off. “Not that you need to know all that.”
Angry tears clouded my vision with the new information. She was right. If Thrax could find me, he’d have done that many hours ago when my mind blanked out in the station. They were trying to break whatever link I might have with him. He must truly think I was on the train.
“For our purposes,” Merton said, dropping on one knee in front of me, “it must render you unfindable to the Soulless Man while you’re with us. We weren’t even sure you two had some kind of connection or anything that needed to be severed since you’re just basically human. But we did it in case. Because you never know with the Soulless man.”
Amelia continued after another glance at her watch. “Right now, if you don’t inject her again to keep the two apart like we’ve been doing, brother, we will join our ancestors sooner than planned, and the Soulless Man will be the one sending us there.”
Before I could completely process everything that was said, Merton stabbed my neck, liquid ejecting through the needle and flooding my veins.
And then, like a marionette with its strings cut, I sank back into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
SANORA
By the time I woke up again, I was the only one in the warehouse. Only now, I was lying flat on my back, precisely on my hands. My wrists were still bound beneath me, crushed by the weight of my own body, the rope biting so deep I couldn’t even feel my fingers.
A broken groan escaped me as I rolled onto one shoulder. Blood came rushing back in violent waves, a thousand needles stabbing their way up my arms. I clenched my eyes shut, willing myself not to scream as I tried to hold myself and my thoughts together.
Amelia was a psychotic researcher. So was her brother, and they’d left me here alone. I wondered how long I’d been asleep this time. Thirty minutes, or had an hour slipped by already? If it was close to an hour, they’d be back any second.
My gaze dragged to my legs, and despair punched me in the gut. The rope wound tightly around my ankles with no gaps that I could work with. I knew I was fucked when I realised my wrists too were bound with the same kind of rope. They were thick, coarse and unyielding—ropes that bit into skin and refused to give no matter how much you struggled.
How long were they planning to keep me here? They knew damn well that if I was ever released and made it back to Thrax, they’d be ruined. The only way to secure themselves would be to kill me.
But would they? I wasn’t sure they’d murder me here in Nimorran while knowing the repercussion this town would have on them.
So what then? Keep me tied up for a month until the next train came?
