He gave me a censorious stare. I liked that better than the slightly smoldering ones he’d leveled at me during our first meeting.
“I told you. I’m here to save you.”
“And how do you expect to do that from my mind? Last I checked, I was chained and about to be burned alive. I may be a little slow, but I don’t see how you’re going to rescue me unless you have a teleportation ability.”
He tapped his lips thoughtfully. “Are you in pain now?”
I gave his question serious consideration, turning inward and assessing how I felt. Nothing seemed to be wrong. No heated skin or burning flesh. Distantly, I felt an ache in my ribs, but not much else.
I shook my head. “No, but would I even feel the sun burning me while I was unconscious?”
During normal slumber, most people wake immediately at pain. When the sun rose for me, I was dead to the world. Nothing could wake me. At least nothing I’d encountered yet.
“It’s hard to say. You’re young, which usually means the sun would make you insensible until it sets, but the drive to survive is a powerful thing. You might be aware of it on some level or even wake up as your body attempts to save itself.”
Great. Not really good news. I would be forced to experience my death first hand rather than being unconscious for it. Burning to death was supposed to be a pretty terrible way to go.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Basement. Dirt floor. Furnace looks to be one of the older models. Probably about twenty years old. I’d guess it was an older home. Definitely not a new build.”
“Anything else?”
“It’s not like they told me ‘you’re at 1032 Builder’s Drive’. I was unconscious when they dragged me in here so I didn’t see anything.”
His eyes unfocused as he turned inward, following me as I started walking. Now that I knew this place was an extension of me, I couldn’t believe I’d missed that fact before. The paths and scenes were all images I’d seen before, whether in person or in a photo.
I concentrated, trying to turn the forest to spring. The light dipped and then the trees shifted, rustling their great branches and shedding leaves.
There. A bud. I’d swear to it, and it hadn’t been there before. Looked like Aiden had been right. This place was something my mind had created.
“Stop that,” he said querulously.
“Why? It’s kind of cool. I can move things around to create any sort of place I want.”
“Your mind created this, but it did it on a subconscious level. There is a reason why things look the way they do. You going about and mucking with it could do damage.”
I stopped and looked around, noticing shadows that hadn’t been there before and a slight blurriness to trees in the distance, as if I had a camera and a soft focus on them. Damage? To my mind, perhaps.
Uneasily, I let the forest revert to its previous form.
“We think you’re still near the cemetery,” he said after several minutes thought. “The wolves are searching, but it’s slow as they don’t know how many in their pack are part of this treachery so they only have a few Brax trusts with this search.”
“He can add the rest. Victor is in this alone as far as I can tell. At least he hasn’t mentioned any wolves helping him. There’s a witch by the name of Angela, but he’s planning to kill her off tomorrow night.”
“Do you know what his final game is?”
I shrugged. “Nothing too original. Destabilize the pack and incite a war that ends with him as alpha of the werewolves. I get the feeling he wouldn’t mind if the rest of the supernatural community in Columbus tore itself apart as well, but I don’t think that’s his end goal.”
“That’s not an insignificant undertaking.”
I jerked one shoulder up, my feet silent as they glided over the forest floor. Aidan crunched along noisily beside me. “Story as old as time. Little man wants power and is willing to deceive, lie and murder to get it. I’ll admit using a reanimated corpse to do his dirty work is a new one. I’ll give him points for creativity in the implementation.”
“You’re so young to be so cynical,” he murmured.
One side of my mouth quirked. Not really. I didn’t consider myself cynical or even a realist. Most of the time my head was so high in the clouds that my feet barely touched the ground. Facts were facts, and the truth was that people wanted to stand on top whether or not they deserved to be there. It was only a bad thing when people were willing to do anything, including betray everything they were supposed to stand for, to get there.
“Not that any of this matters,” I said. “If I don’t figure a way out of being chained to a pipe before the sun hits me this afternoon, I’ll be dead and won’t care who wins this little battle of yours.”
