“Good enough for me.”
I pulled my lock pick set from my bag and crouched in front of the cage, examining the bars up close. There was no keyhole, visible latch, or hinge. Goddammit. Why was nothing easy?
The runes covered every joint where a lock should have been, fused into the iron as if the cage had been forged around her. I tried anyway, sliding the thinnest pick into the seam where two bars met, feeling for a mechanism, a catch, anything.
The pick scraped uselessly against solid metal.
I switched to a tension wrench, then a rake, working the seam from different angles. Nothing gave. The iron wasn’t just locked, it was sealed, bound by magic that didn’t care how skilled my hands were.
“It cannot be picked,” Anunit said quietly, her fire dimming once again.
A horrible idea struck that I couldn’t quite dismiss as crazy. I sat back on my heels, staring at the runes and racking my brain for something else—literally anything else—to try. When nothing came to me, I drew my dagger and pressed the blade to my palm. The steel bit into my flesh, and blood welled in a dark line across my skin.
Anunit watched, her furnace eyes wide.
I held my bleeding hand over the nearest rune. “Here goes nothing.”
Blood dripped onto the iron.
The rune flared white-hot, searing my vision, and then cracked down the center like an egg. The glow died, and a hairline fracture split the bar beneath it.
Anunit gasped.
So did I, though for different reasons. My blood had just shattered a mage’s spell like it was nothing. That wasn’t normal. Thatwasn’t even in the neighborhood of normal. I stared at the slice across my palm, half expecting it to glow or sprout runes of its own.
It didn’t. It just bled, like any other cut.
But the cracked bar changed the math entirely. I could free her. I could break every rune on this cage and release a creature who’d been tortured for years, gaining us a powerful ally against the fishmen.
I could, but should I?
“What are you, anyway?” I winced the moment the question left my mouth. “I mean, if it’s okay to ask. I’m a wolf, if that makes this less weird.”
Her smile seemed genuine. “I am a fire sprite. And I am not offended by your curiosity.”
A fire sprite.
A fire sprite who’d spent years on the water in an iron cage, burned every time the sea rocked, forced to attack the only friend she had left. If that didn’t breed rage, nothing would. And a fire sprite’s rage wasn’t metaphorical. A pissed-off fire sprite had once leveled downtown Seattle, after all.
I looked at the cracked rune. Then, at the remaining ones. Then, at the wooden ship surrounding us.
“Before I keep going... can I get your word that you won’t set this ship, or anything else, on fire? At least while my pack is on it. And that you’ll stay here, pretending to still be captive until we’re ready to attack.”
Something flickered in her furnace eyes, possibly amusement, or even recognition that I was smarter than I looked. “When do you believe that will be?”
I shrugged. “That’ll be up to the alpha, but I’m guessing it’ll happen as soon as we see land.” Rowing a dinghy in foreign waters, full of God-only-knows-what in the middle of the night with no land in sight seemed like a horrible idea.
“Sprites are bound by our vows, so let me ease your mind by confirming that I will stay here in my prison and await yourcommand before attacking. I will not harm you or your people. Nor will I engulf this ship in flames until you and yours are safely away from it.”
That was about as good as I could expect to get.
I nodded, sealing our agreement, then moved to the next rune, pressing my palm flat against it this time to get the same result before moving on to the next. And then the next, until the cage finally shattered beneath my blood.
I stood, and the edges of my vision darkened. Apparently, the runes hadn’t been as easy to break as I’d thought. I knew better than anyone that handling magic always came with a price.
It was worth the drain to see Anunit tremble as she stepped out of the wreckage. Her bare feet hovered above the wooden deck, and for a moment, she simply waited, as if she couldn’t believe she was finally free. Then her wings stretched experimentally, crackling with sparks as the circulation returned.
When she looked up at me, the fire in her eyes had turned oddly watery, which shouldn’t be possible. “Thank you, Ziara. I am in your debt.”
