Kat
I was hauled without sympathy into Arik’s study, the one room that had remained locked my entire time in the lair. No protest, no amount of twisting or pulling at Arik’s hand or kicking his steel-like shins stopped him. When I dropped my weight completely, he grabbed my free arm and used them both to drag me. The growl that escaped me as he forced me onto my feet inside the room rivaled the ones Arik occasionally produced, but he didn’t growl now. He didn’t say anything as he leaned over me to palm a mouse, moving and clicking it until a paused black-and-white video appeared on a wide monitor hanging opposite his desk.
“What—”
Arik jerked me around and got right in my face, his grip bruising my biceps, silencing me with one vicious look. “Not. One. Word. Nothing. Just watch, got it?”
Without waiting for a response, he turned me back to face the monitor and clicked the Play button.
An alley appeared on the screen. The camera angled downward—surveillance video, maybe? At the sight, sweat broke out on my skin, though I didn’t know why. I only knew that, whatever I was about to see, I wouldn’t like. The feeling grew stronger as shadowy figures moved across the screen, their outlines bulky, heavy, menacing. The last shifter—they had to be shifters—stopped below the camera, glanced up. Arik froze the video.
The male who had attacked me. I’d recognize his face anywhere. But this wasn’t my attack; I was sure of it. Still I held my breath, my heart pounding behind my rib cage, both knowing and dreading what was to come.
Seconds later the silhouette of a young woman stepped into the light at the end of the alley. Arik froze the video again and zeroed in this time, bringing up a still of the woman’s face. “Take a good look.”
My gasp echoed in the silence. That face…something… I leaned closer. No, it couldn’t be. “Laney?” I whispered, then stronger, “That’s Laney Jennings, isn’t it?” As preteens, the two of us had been in the same state home. Something had drawn us together; I’d never decided what. Maybe the despair of knowing our lives were never going to change. I had felt it even then, the isolation from the rest of the world. Laney had felt it even more acutely, apparently, because she’d attempted suicide after six months in the group home. I had never seen her again.
Rubbing my wrist as I remembered the long, gushing slices in Laney’s forearms that last night together, I asked, “What is she doing there?”
Arik shook his head, but his hands shifted from my biceps to settle heavily on my shoulders. The muscles of the chest pressed to my back went less rigid, his voice softening in a way I hadn’t heard all night: “Watch.”
But I didn’t want to. Whatever was going on here, whatever those shifting shadows contained, could not be good or Arik wouldn’t be forcing me to watch it. I didn’t want to see, not with Laney. “No. I won’t.” My head shook hard, reinforcing my refusal, but Arik’s grip on my collarbone tightened. “Arik, no—”
“Yes.”
I threw myself to one side, desperate to escape. Without warning, hard arms surrounded my ribs, immobilizing me. Instinctively I pulled my feet off the ground, my panicked, “No no no!” ringing like a bell signaling the end of a boxing round. Arik held tight, refusing to let me turn away from the screen.
“Yes, Kat. You have to see.” His chin settled on top of my head, the downward pressure forcing me to stillness, and he whispered on a breath, “I’m sorry.”
Was he? The video flickered, backed up, then restarted. “Nooo,” I moaned in protest.
Laney walked into view once more, pausing in the light. They were on her in an instant, dragging her into the alley even as the lines of her body stretched taut with her struggle, her head tossing as she tried desperately to dislodge the hand clamped across her mouth. Her eyes…God, her eyes were stark even in the black-and-white film. Terrified. Full of agony. She knew she was going to die, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
I closed my eyes, unable to bear that single haunting look and what I knew would come after it.
Somehow Arik knew. “Open your eyes. Watch, Kat. Look at what we’re up against, what the world is up against. If we won’t fight them, who will?”
The next minutes passed in slow motion. I saw every detail, every gruesome moment, my eyes glued to the screen as if bearing witness would somehow stop what had already happened. Pain burst through my gut as Laney, so slender, so helpless against the monsters hurting her, was dropped to the ground like so much trash, and then… No! God, no. Sobs choked me as I watched the last moments of my friend’s life, and hate built in my heart. In that moment, I finally understood what Arik had been trying to tell me, what I would be up against, I realized, a chill running through my veins. I had been hurt, yes, had nearly died, and yet I felt small and petty in the face of Laney’s suffering. And when they dragged her body, wrapped in what looked like a black garbage bag, toward a waiting van, I realized something else: if not for my gift, that bag could very well have been carrying me. Without the power I had somehow managed to tap before the Anigma had drained me dry, I would have been as dead as Laney.
Fierce satisfaction surged when I remembered what Arik had told me, that I’d decapitated one of the shifters who’d attacked me. I wasn’t sure when Laney’s attack had taken place, but I hoped he’d been one of her attackers, that I had somehow managed to bring my childhood friend at least that much justice.
When the van on-screen finally drew away from the curb, I closed my eyes. “Turn it off, please.”
Arik silently complied. When his arms loosened around me, I hobbled on boneless legs to sit on the computer chair, feeling like I’d survived the crash of the Titanic. My world, what I knew about myself and my place in it, had changed forever the night I’d been triggered. Now I teetered on the brink of another sea change, one I wasn’t sure I had the will to survive. I pushed the thought aside and dropped my head between my knees, fighting nausea.
“I don’t know how they’ve managed to stay hidden this long, but for over a year packs of Anigma have been roaming the Southeast, attacking young women, some of them disappearing, some ending up dead. Maddox is at the forefront,” Arik said. “And now, with you, we have a chance to stop him.”
“It’s not the Anigma you hate. It’s one man.”
“He’s not a man, and yes, I hate Maddox to the very depths of my being. He decapitated my parents and set me up to take the fall.”
More pieces of the puzzle fell into place. “And Sun?”
“He led the charge against me.”
Arik didn’t have to continue; I got the picture.
He cleared his throat. “But if you think I can watch what happened to that female and not feel hate almost as deep as what I feel for Maddox, you’re wrong.”
I stared into his eyes, read his expression to see if he was, in fact, telling the truth. Arik let me look.
What I saw on his face said he was being a hundred percent transparent.
“I’m not strong enough to fight that,” I told him, my voice a croak.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not. You’ve seen me. I can’t come anywhere near the precision I would need to take those…shifters out. Not without taking everyone else with them.” I ignored his narrowing eyes and hurried on. “I can’t even get the hell out of the stupid front door, Arik. How am I going to fight ancient beings with lifetimes of experience and a complete lack of conscience?”
“You’ll just have to work harder.”
“Exactly how am I supposed to do that? You, the almighty griffin, don’t even know what you’re doing with me. How can I figure it out, Sherlock?”
When he started toward me, I couldn’t help scrambling back, sending my seat rolling backward until it crashed into the wall. Arik followed, his relentless hands dragged me up as if I were a leaf instead of a woman, and he shoved me toward the door. “Maybe we’ll just have to give you some incentive.”
Anxiety crawled across my skin as he marched me down the hall and into my room. When he forced me onto the bed, I couldn’t stop the whimper that escaped my throat.
“Give me some credit,” Arik growled, his distaste clear. So he didn’t have sex on the brain—good to know. I scrambled to press myself against the headboard and tried to breathe.
Until he reached into the bedside drawer and drew out a pair of heavy steel handcuffs.
I gasped. How had those gotten there? Backing away frantically, I choked out, “Kinky, much?”
Arik smirked. “Sometimes.” He grabbed my ankle—why did that make such a convenient handle for him?—and dragged me back. Ignoring my struggles, he snapped one cuff onto my wrist and forced my hand close to the headboard. “But not right now, baby.” The other wrist met with the same fate as the first, and then Arik stepped away from the bed. “Let’s see you get out of those.”
He was halfway to the door by the time my anger and anxiety could connect with my mouth. “Who do you think you are, asshole?” Fear fell away as I jerked on the cuffs. They dug into my wrists, drawing a hiss of pain.
Arik watched it all with a smug smirk that only heightened my need for violence. “I’m the asshole with the key.”
The door slid softly shut behind him, leaving me alone with the realization that, strong or not, I could rely on no one and nothing but myself and my power to get me out of the mess Arik had made of my life.