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Nate strode in first, anger radiating off him. Marco slipped in ahead of me. As I passed through the doorway, my nose caught the rogue’s scent. He was canine—some sort of dog. I wasn’t surprised. He had the look of amutt.
West’s teeth bared when he came in. For once his glare was turned on someone other than me. This guy would have been his kin if the dog shifter hadn’t turned to murderinstead.
Aaron stayed in the doorway, Alice right behind him. She stood tensed, as if she didn’t totally believe the precautions taken would be enough to protectus.
“You,” Nate growled. “Let’s start with the easy questions. What’s yourname?”
The dog shifter’s gaze slid up toward Nate’s face, but his thin lips stayed clamped tight. He swayed slightly where he sat, his shouldershunched.
Nate loomed even higher over him. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “But I’ve just come back from sending off four of my kin, whose deathsyouhad a hand in. I’ve got nine others still recovering. So I’m not feeling very forgiving at the moment. We can do this the painful way if youwant.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” the rogue spat out. His voice was slightly slurred, I guessed because of thetranquilizer.
My back stiffened. If he’d attacked us, I’d have had no problem seeing Nate savage him. And there was no question in my mind that he deserved payback. But if what we wanted was answers, I wasn’t sure torture was going to get us any. We’d watched rogues throw themselves to their deaths, impale themselves on our claws, just to avoid talking. They didn’t seem to value their own lives much compared to theircause.
“I’ll ask you again,” Nate said, his tone turning even darker. He raised his hand, and it shifted into a giant grizzly bear paw. “Just tell us yourname.”
The rogue stared back with a wavering but defiant gaze. Words tumbled from my mouth before I’d even thought themthrough.
“There’s another way we can get him talking. I can use the truth-seeking flames. It worked on the faemonarch.”
Nate turned to me. “Are you sure you’re up for that,Ren?”
I shrugged. Now that I’d volunteered, I’d better be. “I’ve had a day to get my energy back. And it’ll be a lot faster than anything else we could try. You know what the rogues arelike.”
“Yes.” He eyed the dog shifter. The rogue stayed where he was with the same hunched posture, but I thought a little of the remaining color in his yellowed face might have drained away. He might not know what I was talking about, but he knew it probably wasn’t good forhim.
That settled things. “Let’s do it. Now, while the tranquilizer is still affecting him. We’ll need to bring him to a bigger space so I have room toshift.”
“That can be arranged.” Nate motioned to theguard.
The rest of us backed out of the room. “You’ll have to ask most of the questions,” I said to the other alphas. “I can’t carry on much of a conversation while I’m busy spewingflames.”
“I think we can handle that, Princess,” Marco said with a grim smile. He brought his hands together, one clapping over the other in a fist. “There are an awful lot of things I’d like to find out from thatasshole.”
Nate and his guard marched the rogue out of the cell, Nate holding the chains for the prisoner’s left arm and leg and the guard those for the right. The dog shifter walked sluggishly. He glanced over his shoulder at me with a flash of the whites of his eyes.Nervous.
We tramped back up the stairs. Just as we reached the hall, the rogue wrenched at his arms. He threw himself forward and around, putting all his strength into breaking his captors’hold.
Fortunately for us, Nate and his guard had plenty of strength on their side, and the rogue’s was muted by the drug. Nate wrestled the dog shifter still with a quick jerk of the chains. Alice stepped closer, her handsfisted.
“You can walk, or we can carry you,” Nate said. “Yourchoice.”
The rogue grimaced at him. Then he started walkingagain.
Our strange procession took a sharp turn and ended up out behind the estate house in a small yard of hard-packed earth and tufts of grass. “This field is usually for outdoor sports and training,” Nate told me over his shoulder. “We’ll have plenty of room. And we can make use ofthis.”
He hauled the rogue over to a rectangle of metal jutting out of the earth. A mini-sized football goal, I realized after amoment.
Nate and the guard attached the chains to the sturdy posts. The rogue tugged at his bindings, but only feebly. Then he shrank down as close to the ground as he could get in a cringing pose. I guessed he’d givenup.
I walked up to him until I was just a few feet away. He just looked at theground.
“I won’t be doing this to torture you, but I don’t get the impression it feels all that great either,” I said. “If you want to skip that part, you could start answering questions now. Tell us why you and your ‘friends’ attacked thisestate.”
Not apeep.
Fine. We’d do this the dragonway.
