Page 9 of Wolfsbane

Except it wasn’t just Mariah, or the strange new feeling in my head. It was thinking at all. I wasn’t allowed to think! Who’d told me to think?

Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. He was trapped down there, alone and starving, and⁠—

We could do something.

I had to do something.

Hopefully something that didn’t get myself killed by a starving vampire.

I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling, not even sure what I was planning until I realized it was time. Finally, just before four in the morning, the house had gone quiet. Everyone was breathing steadily or snoring, and I could hear each one of them.

I set Mariah aside and crept out of bed, down the stairs, through the kitchen and to the basement. The keys were hanging on the kitchen wall by the stairs down, and I snatched them. I tiptoed into the dank and dark to hear Altair’s soft, silky voice. “Hello there.”

What the fuck was I doing? Mother was going to be so pissed . . .

Screw her. She fucking sucks.

I flinched. That was pretty harsh, even if I couldn’t actually say it wasn’t true.

Thankfully, Altair stepped up to the bars of his cage and pressed his face against them, demanding my immediate attention. “Are you finally ready for your awakening, pet, or are you going to disappoint me and take one of those disgusting dogs to bed?”

I swallowed hard, face flooding with heat. “I’m not⁠—”

Altair’s gaze flicked down to my hand, to the keys gripped between my fingers, and a satisfied curl turned his lips.

“I’ll make it good for you,” he promised. “You know I can. No one leaves me unsatisfied, do they?”

Yeah, this was about as far from a loving rendezvous as I could imagine.

But Altair pressed on. “I want to,” he purred. “A pretty little thing like you—how could I not? And you can have me any way you like, but gods, save me from this drudgery. Come inside. Let me take care of you.”

Everything he said made my skin crawl, and that shuddering wrongness propelled me forward. I stuffed the key into the lock and pulled the door open.

“You need to go,” I said.

“What?” Altair blinked at me, eyes wide like I had lost my mind.

In that moment, he didn’t look very much like the predator I’d feared.

“It’s four in the morning,” I hissed, ushering him out. “You’ll have a few hours to find shelter, but not long. Everyone’s asleep. You might be able to make it, but you have to go now.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“For fuck’s sake, go!”

I stepped into his cell to grab his arm, but he jerked away from me, hissing. He snatched my arm and tried to wrench it around, but somehow I got free. He must’ve really been starving, for me to manage it, but with desperation or tenacity, I managed to get him outside of his cell and locked the door behind him.

With me trapped inside and him, staggered, outside the bars, we stared at each other. I dropped the keys behind me.

“If you don’t go and they find me like this, what do you think they’re going to do?” I asked.

A muscle in his jaw flexed, but the next second, he turned and fled. I had a split second of panic that he’d tear his way through the coven house on his escape, but he didn’t. I just heard him open and shut the front door.

Then he was gone, and I sat on that wretched old cot he’d used for decades and wondered what the hell had possessed me to let him go when I knew what that risked.

Not just people dying, but Mother’s wrath.

It’d all be my fault.