Stopped at a red light, Davin turned to stare at me like I was a camera on a reality TV show.
“What?”
But he didn’t answer, just sighed and shook his head. Then his eyes narrowed as though in serious thought. “Call Blair. We’ll take him to your island.”
The island.
Myisland.
Ugh.
Still struggling to deal with that, for sure.
Apparently it wasn’t a piece of land owned by the government, but a weird sort of almost...nation of its own, so at least I didn’t owe millions of dollars in back taxes, but still, it was weird that I owned an island.
On the other hand, it wasn’t a bad idea in this case. I could get Blair to take Sexton out to the island with a ton of food, and he could take his time recovering in peace and quiet, without danger of being ambushed on any street corner by whoever had already attacked him. I nodded to Davin, pulled out my phone, and started dialing.
CHAPTER 4
SOMEWHERE IN THE NORTH SEA
?
It wasn’t the easiest thing, scraping at mortar behind my back, but I couldn’t take the chance that my actions would be seen.
So over the years, I’d gotten very flexible. One arm constantly twisted behind me as I lay on my terrible makeshift bed, one finger extended into a claw. Scraping that claw, over and over, against the mortar that held the stones together. When eventually the claw dulled, I used the next finger. They never stayed dull for so long that I ran out of claws to scratch with—they were strong things, dragon claws.
It had been a while, though, this time. Weeks since I’d been drained dry of the will to live. Maybe months. I was feeling...not well, exactly, but shockingly alive.
That could only mean that the time was coming, and too damned soon. It was always too soon.
“It’s his son, I’m sure,” a tinny, crackling voice said through a speaker from somewhere down the hall.
“How?” the usual strident, authoritative voice demanded in return.
Thatvoice. The one that still made me jerk away and shudder, ready for strikes that no longer came, because I now lived inside a magical glass case, a trinket on a shelf, not to be touched. Only continually zapped with whatever magic device it was that he’d wired into the cell itself. A device that periodically drained me of every scrap of life I managed to regain.
No one had touched me in a long time, I thought, and the realization was distant, like a dark thing I could hold in my hand and examine, rather than a horror that left me sobbing myself to sleep most nights.
“There are pictures of Rían with the Knight woman before his capture, and tonight, the boy came to save Darragh’s son. He looks like the vampire, but there’s a certain similarity there.”
Rían.
Because moving forward was too much work, apparently, even though Rían was a name from another lifetime, centuries before.
As the words coalesced in my mind, though, something unfortunate started to form there. The Knight woman. The vampire. Similarity. Saved Darragh’s son.
He saved Darragh’s son?
That was...nice, strangely enough, even though I’d taken some pains to make sure that Darragh’s only son, Sexton, would never come within a thousand miles of...
“Fine, then. Take them both. No reason to wait. Darragh’s son and Rían’s. That will fill the last two cells. The machine will be complete.”
Take them both.
Darragh’s son and Rían’s.
Except that Rían didn’t have a son, because Rían had ceased to exist hundreds of years ago.
