Roger made a signal to wait and stretched out his senses to check the area. No one else was close. He gestured for the Wrights to move.
Thomas led the way to a window. He repeated his quick ritual to test for a magical barrier, but nothing came up. Quickly, he used his knife to slide open the window lock. After sheathing his blade, he hauled himself through the window first. Then Cal helped Amber in.
That left Cal and Roger outside, waiting for the other to go first. The next patrol wouldn’t be forever. One of them would have to surrender and put their back to the other.Am I the scorpion or the frog? Feel like the frog.
With a huff, Thomas leaned out and offered his hand to Cal. Cal grimaced, handed his shotgun over to his father, and climbed through the window. Roger followed him.
As they moved down the hallway, Roger continued pushing the extent of his senses. The mansion was still, almost too still.Other than the Wrights’ pulses, the occasional beating heart sounded far away. No distant conversations, no heavy breathing. Seamus must have taken most of the household with him to meet with Josefina.
But there was something … else that Roger was feeling. It reminded him of Halloween—of when he’d felt the siren cast a spell on the mortals. There had been a snap in his mind, and suddenly, he had simply known more. This time, it was like running his fingers across a floorboard and finding the grooves left behind from use. Nothing discernable, nothing active.
Magic had been in this place.
How did he know that? Some aftereffect of his coma?
The path to the basement door was clear. Roger slipped on a pair of leather gloves and reached for the silver door handle. Standing so close to the door, a wave of ingrained fear rumbled through him. Not much of it was new fear. So much had happened around and beyond the door that it was stained with the remnants of terror.
The damn thing was locked.
Amber took out her lockpick kit while Cal, Roger, and Thomas kept an eye on their surroundings. Her movements with the lock were smooth, near silent.
“I don’t like the feel of this,” Cal whispered. “Too fucking easy.”
Must be a cold day in Hell. I agree with him. Roger continued focusing on his senses rather than responding.
A moment later, Amber unlocked the door.
Roger took point as they headed down the basement stairs. If some surprise was waiting for them, he wanted the Wrights to have a chance to run or prepare. He wouldn’t be able to buy them much time, especially considering the speed that supernaturals could move as opposed to humans, but they were trained for that sort of limited opening.
Cal followed, then Amber, and Thomas brought up the rear. The weight that came with Cal’s presence was almost enough for Roger to ignore the increasing sense of compounding dread bearing down on his soul.No. I have to stop hiding from the pain. He refocused on what was happening around him and the sensations his extra senses were telling him.
The basement was made of concrete and heavy stone so that the sound of the individual rooms was entirely blocked out from one another. Anyone in the hall might have heard echoing screams slipping through doors—and Roger was startled that there were none.
But that strange sensation of magic interrupted his chain of thoughts. It was less of a groove and more of a deep, empty river bed.What has Anton been doing to my loves?
Roger tried each door as he went past. The first four revealed identical, empty rooms. Ten feet by ten feet, they were clearly designed to be cells for captives. Though decades had passed, Roger had thrown others into these places before. Always at Seamus’s bidding, but that didn’t lessen his growing guilt. He could’ve said no. What would Seamus have done? How far could Roger have pushed him before he decided that the bet wasn’t worth winning and killed him?
His spiral into what-ifs ended when he reached a fifth door and found it locked. Roger stepped out of the way and nodded to Amber, who set to work with her tools. Hope flared as soon as he heard the tumblers click open. He gripped the handle and pushed the door open.
Spanning from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, silver wires crisscrossed the room. The low light glinted off the wires. They had been stretched in a pattern that brushed against the man in the center of the room, threatening more damage if he moved.
The man hung from the ceiling by his wrists, toes barely touching the floor, without a stitch of clothing on his pale body.With his head fallen forward, his dark hair hid his face. The silver touching him left angry red lines on his skin. Thin blood trails had danced down his arms, his cheeks, and his chest but were dried.
Roger knew him. He’d seen this man naked countless times.
Dmitri.
Old wounds were torn open and salted. Dmitri had believed Roger couldn’t follow through with killing Anton and enacted a reckless plan that had ended with Roger killing a hunter in front of a crowd. During their last conversation, Dmitri had spoken oddly, displaying symptoms that he was giving in to his worse, self-destructive impulses. He’d wanted his agony to stop.
And Roger had been too willfully ignorant to realize that Dmitri’s depression hadn’t ended in his mortal days but continued into his long nights as a vampire. For three hundred years, Roger had been too caught up in his own shit to see that the man he’d tried to love time and time again was drowning in despair.
Roger had thought he was dead. Had thought that was what Anton meant when he said the gamble was settled.
I never know what’s going on.
This wasn’t the time to brood on his inadequacies as a lover and a friend. He glanced around at where the silver wires connected to the walls, searching for some way to dismantle them.
“Oh my God,” Amber whispered, horror plain in her voice.
