He snarled and lunged forward into them. His shoulder rammed into a hard gut and they both lurched backward. The narrow cot tangled between their legs and they pitched down onto it. Took threw a punch, and his brain finally caught up with his panic. He recognized Madoc just as it was too late to pull the blow.
Madoc grabbed his wrist before Took’s knuckles connected with his jaw. He used the leverage to casually throw Took off the bed like a sheet that had gotten in the way. Took hit the ground with a thud and skidded into the bookshelf. It pitched forward, a rainfall of books showered down over the floor, and it landed on him.
Fuck.He kicked the shelves off and scrambled to his feet. Old, hard-earned instincts wanted to fight, because defiance had been all that kept him together. Instead he made himself back away on stiff legs.
“I don’t exactly know what’s going on,” he said—lisped, rendered ridiculous by shredded lips and extended fangs. Took licked his lips and tried again. “I don’t want to fight.”
“Could have fooled me,” Madoc growled as he prowled to the side. He wiped blood from the side of his face and smeared black liquid into the black fabric of his shirt. The scrapes were as deep and thin as if Snack had been at him. “Who are you?”
“You’re the one who can’t remember my name,” Took pointed out. He tripped over a tangle of naked flesh on the floor and just about caught himself before he landed on it… him. A risky glance down revealed it was Waring, naked and charred. “What the fuck?”
Smoke in the air made him cough and then resolved itself into Madoc, eyes narrowed and fangs exposed as he grabbed a handful of Took’s hair and yanked his head back. He leaned in and sucked in a breath of air straight from Took’s mouth.
The slivers of… something… in his head convulsed with panic. Took’s cock thickened with the conviction it was hot. The dissonance of it made him shudder and suck in air that tasted like salt, blood, and….
“What is that?” he asked as he grimaced around the flavor of something he couldn’t define, not even as “like” something else.
“Took?” Madoc said. Then he dragged Took in close and kissed him with rough, almost desperate, possession. One hand stayed twisted painfully tight in Took’s hair and the other touched his face like it was precious. After a moment he leaned back and gave Took an exasperated glare. “Next time, you stupid bastard, close your eyes.”
It took a moment for Took to remember he didn’t need to breathe, so he couldn’t be literally breathless. He hitched a breath in raggedly. “What? Why?”
Madoc let him go and bent down to grab the naked Waring by the scruff of the neck. He dragged the limp sprawl of body to its feet and let him dangle. His lip curled with disdain.
“Because now we know how Waring got into his victim’s houses,” Madoc said. “He was inside them.”
That wasn’t right. It wasn’t wrong either.
Took rubbed his forehead. The stuff in his head felt like… light and cinnamon, alive as it writhed in an effort to get free of him. It ripped away, shred by shred, but he grabbed at it as it went.
A girl with no eyes and tea that made his mind splinter.
Books. Frustration. Surrender.
Skinny scarred arms, the flutter of black wings. All the little pale kids made of matchsticks and fire.
A car. A name. A—
“I didn’t do it,” Waring rasped as he opened his pale green eyes.
The threads ofsomethingthat Took had fitted together went up like foxfire. He flinched away from the inside of his own head, but it didn’t want him just the bits of…other. Waring convulsed as the foxfire backlashed into him, his veins lit up from within as it scorched through. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he screamed.
It was only the second noise he’d made in years, and it flecked his lips bloody.
Madoc spat out a curse and wrestled Waring down onto the bed. Bare heels battered against the frame until they split and the fire struck out from his body at Madoc’s arms. Took reached for his gun, but other than the comfort of its weight, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. Madoc pinned Waring down by the shoulders as the boy flailed and screamed until the energy that burned through him finally flickered out and he went limp.
“Remember when people thought you were a sorcerer?” Madoc said as he finally leaned back. Unlike Took, who the fire had mostly left alone, Madoc’s fingers and forearm were striped with burns. “Heisone.”
Took expelled what air he had left in his lungs on a whistle. “That was magic? Real magic?”
“This?” Madoc held up his burned arm and flexed his fingers. “That was magic. The cost of it was his…. No. Not silence, he could have written his denials, then. His voice. The ability to communicate.”
A car. A name. A…something….
It wasn’t a memory, more like a dream. Someoneelse’sdream, sketched in their dream symbols and scribbled lines.
“He hid them,” Took said. He rubbed his forehead again as if he could squeeze something else out, but it had all burned up. “Somehow he hid them. That’s why he held his tongue for so long, to keep them from being found.”
“Why speak now?” Madoc asked as he got up off the bed. He waved one hand at the still, singed boy draped on the thin cot in the uncomfortable sprawl of the profoundly unconscious. “What did it gain him?”
