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Grey glanced back to Noel and Cy as they were stopped and pointed toward another gate. He suppressed that want to beg his captor to tell him where they were going in favor of cooperation the moment the guy dragged him past the rolling gate. Cables ran along the ceiling of the cave, splitting off at each intersection or running down at the caged corners through the floor to some subterranean level. Barred or solid metal doors broke up the bleak, blank corridors.
Everything looked the same. He might as well have been a mouse being led through a maze, never to escape. It wasn’t until they turned down one final hallway and headed straight for a door sitting at the end that he was able to find a unique marking: a purple-painted machromancer symbol.
He tensed as the man leading the way stopped to unlock it, and the heavy door was pulled open to a dark, cavernous room. The only light came from a small lamp tucked into the corner, it’s soft glow both soothing and depressing in the oppressive atmosphere of a space heaped with trunks, a duct-taped chair, a desk with a book propped under one leg, and a mattress laying in the center of the floor, smothered in quilts. A rattling breath from the gray-haired woman buried beneath put every one of his nerves on edge.
When the door shut, he half expected her to prop herself up and don a wicked smile like that macharomancer woman who’d sought so much joy digging tools into his skin. Grey gasped as his knees smacked into the floor beside the woman’s bedside. The flick of a pocket knife sent his head spinning before the release of the zip tie—a zip tie quickly traded for a gun at his temple.
“Don’t try anything stupid. Check her.”
Check her? Grey didn’t even know where to start. Superficial wounds? He could handle those without a problem, but this—whatever this was, he had so little to go on.
“I- I don’t have anything to trade?—”
The gun nudged his head again. “Check. Her. I didn’t tell you to do anything yet.”
His hands shook as he reached for her forehead. Closed eyes. Shallow breathing. Her face felt scalding hot to the touch. Grey moved his fingers down to her neck, feeling for that pulse—steady, but faint.
He swallowed. “Do you have any idea what happened to her?”
The barrel of the gun pulled away ever-so-slightly. “Found her collapsed in the storeroom a couple days ago. She was coherent until this morning.”
Grey bit his lip, snagging on the memory of running into Cy. The pink-eyed fair folk. Cy’s explanation they were going to a macharomancer town.
There’s a fucking curse spreading, boy. Whatever came for these people is coming for us.
A curse… Grey closed his eyes and the woman’s skin felt like the leather-bound tome he cradled back in that library.
Originally one of the most powerful of the mancers, hydromancers, were snuffed out during the first return of Queen Mab. Her Majesty warped the magic flowing through them to confine their power to that of blood: twisting them into beasts during the second Great Wild Hunt.
Was all of this to snuff out macharomancers? His eyes opened again, and he rocked back to sit on his feet. “I… I don’t know if I can cure this,” he admitted. “I don’t know if it’s fae madness or something else?—”
His voice was swallowed by the other man on the other side of the room, who strode over to a trunk and rummaged around inside to pull out a small cloth pouch. The man stooped down next to Grey and grabbed his arm, forcing his palm to face up as he dumped the contents into his hand.
A red teardrop-shaped gem, looking shot through with black ink that pulsed in in the dim light. He knew this object—something that had been described so vividly in his Uncle Atticus’s stories. “A sacrificial ruby?” Grey asked hesitantly. “Where did you get?—”
“No questions,” the man snapped. “Can you use it or not?”
Grey recoiled, his fingers curling around it instinctively. “I- I’ve never?—”
“Try.”
Intense dark eyes bore into his as Grey shifted and leaned forward again, his thumb tracing the buffed facets of the ruby. His other hand rested on her forehead, and he closed his eyes. Whatever dark lurked within, he could feel. The gentle pulse from the ruby worked through him, becoming an extension of the power thrumming under his skin—letting him push past those normal limits to tug at those binding threads dragging this woman into her nightmarish slumber.
A gasp cut through his concentration the moment he cut the final cord. His eyes flew open, the gun was lowered, and the man beside him let out a ragged breath before a relieved chuckle escaped him. The ruby was scooped from his hand as he absently stared on, unable to comprehend the blur of activity flooding into the room as he was hauled to his feet.
Grey was dragged past nameless face after nameless face until they reached another inconspicuous door. Unlocked. Lights on. A mattress in the middle of the floor with a neatly folded quilt, a pillow, and a squatty desk pushed up against the wall. His captor gave him a small shove inside.
“I’ll be back with dinner and some books for you in a few minutes. Sit tight.”
Then the door to his pleasant prison pulled shut. The lock clicked. And Grey was alone with his thoughts again. All while knowing what fae madness truly looked like.
38
GREY
The food sat too heavy in his stomach half-way through his meal, the taste of the seasoned chicken and diced potatoes turning sour when Grey thought about what might happen to him next.
“Not hungry?” asked the guard, who casually stood against the door to his cell to supervise him, like he might choke and die if left to his own devices.
