It had been just at Took’s fingertips, whatever scrap of memory he’d caught from Waring. He could see the car—the long, sleek Mustang nose that faded back into a sort of car-shaped notion, and the name was Gra… ce? Gra… y? A second longer and he’d have what came next.
Maybe? How could he?
“What happened?” he asked.
Madoc rubbed his thumb down the raw lines that ran from his lower eyelid to the corner of his mouth. “He jumped into you, crawled in through your eyes, and then tried to rip my face off. Luckily he didn’t seem able to access any of your training, and he was a piss-poor fighter. Sorry about the—”
He pointed at Took’s mouth. Took licked the blood off his lips. It had tasted better before, when he hadn’t tasted the heady sweetness of Madoc’s blood.
“I’ll assume it was necessary,” he said. “How did you… dislodge him?”
Madoc shrugged and walked over to hammer against the heavy metal door. “I didn’t,” he said. “He just didn’t seem to be able to keep control of you. Twice you just sort of collapsed, like your strings had been cut, but he managed to hang on to the reins. The third time he just spilled out of you, like old milk from a jug, and collapsed.”
“So you hit me again?”
“You came up swinging,” Madoc countered coolly. “I didn’t know what effect the… possession… might have had on you.”
Took wondered what it would be like for someone to find themselves in his brain. It was locked doors, trapdoors hidden under rugs, and basic things that he never thought about—the wine they’d had at the party when he’d been… thought he’d been taken, for example—because it triggered a cascade of bad memories until something split a scar open and the worst memory spilled out.
He could hardly blame Waring for cutting out. If he had the option, he might too.
“I think he left… thoughts, memories… behind,” Took explained slowly. He paused while Madoc hammered on the door again. “Bits of magic maybe? I could see them in my brain, fragments of Waring caught in aspic. I think he could see it too as I picked through them. When he broke his silence, I’d just seen a car, half of a name, and… something important. Something he really didn’t want me to see.”
“Like what?”
Took spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said. “When he spoke, it all went up in flames. Only impressions are left. Guesswork.”
“Better for him if you got more,” Madoc said dourly. “Once the boyars know he’s a sorcerer…? Some of them were too, once. They know how to track the fracture lines. It might take a while, but they’ll crack the boy open like a lobster.”
The last thing that Took wanted to feel for Waring was sympathy, not when the inside of his mind still ached with the intrusion. On the other hand, he knew what it was like to be used, to be broken open and your insides picked out. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
“Do you have to tell them?”
Madoc gave a fatalistic shrug and gestured at the salt-crusted walls around them. The flare of magic had spread fractal patterns of green through the medium. “They’ll know.”
The hatch of the door popped open and James stared in. Gray eyes found Madoc first and then flashed to the sprawled, naked, bruised body on the cot. In the absence of any other context, Took couldn’t blame his old instructor for the flash of bleak, terrible anger that crossed his face.
“I will have your badge for this Madoc,” James snapped, his face pulled in tight, angular lines framed by the narrow rectangle of the slot. “Then I’ll lock you up down here in the deepest hole I can find, down where you’ll never even smell fresh air on my clothes again. And what the hell, Bennett, you just let him brutalize that kid?”
Took flinched at the accusation. He’d have hoped that James knew him better than that, but then…. Madoc could say the same. Tookshouldhave known better than to suspect him, yet he still had.
“The boy’s a sorcerer,” Madoc snapped as he rapped his knuckles against the door. “He nearly killed us. We’re lucky salt blocks pure magic as well as inhibits us, or he would have walked out of here in your skin.”
James looked dubious. “I’ve never seen him do anything like that. Not even light a match or stir a breeze.”
“It takes a year to work a spell,” Madoc said. “And magic is fickle.”
That still wasn’t enough to convince James. It was Took’s turn to gesture at the walls. “Look at it,” he said. “If it wasn’t magic, what did we use? Limeade?”
It took James a second to pick out the lightning-bolt spray of green over the walls, half-hidden between the one set of shelves upright and the door to the small, barren bathroom. Once he did, he still had a suspicious cast to his mouth, but he let them out.
“I had no reason to suspect the boy was—”
“No, we all had reason,” Madoc said blankly. “We just didn’t see him. Do you know the protocols to bind a sorcerer?”
James reluctantly shook his head. He frowned at Waring’s still body as though he wanted the unconscious young man to do something to prove Madoc’s allegation.
“I never had need,” he admitted. “I’ve seen a dozen so-called magic users, claim they can cast a miracle to summon a dragon or ride the storm. They were all left with their dick in their hands when nothing happened.”
