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“Careful, my friend,” Adriel whispered. “Thoughts like that will get you shunned or worse.”
She was right, so he didn’t think long on the subject. He turned his ear back to Council Hall where several voices shouted. Over time, fewer and fewer of the males saw a reason to destroy the witch, another indicator that they found a use for keeping her locked up below.
“Can you read her?” he asked Adriel.
“The plebe? I suppose, but I have no interest.” She looked at him in confusion. “She’s mortal and roughly your age, can’t you?”
He’d tried several times, but she had him blocked. “It’s like there’s a forcefield around her mind. I sense that I could read her, but she’s doing something to stop me.”
“Witches. Never trust them.”
“So long as she’s gagged and bound, her magic remains inaccessible,” a male voice yelled. “See how she can’t protect herself when there’s pain?”
“Animals,” Adriel hissed, shutting her eyes as the muffled moans of the witch wailed through the wall.
“What are they doing to her?”
“Burning her feet.” She held her breath as the shouting grew. “They stopped, now. She’ll be fine after the healer tends to her.”
“Barbaric.”
“She tried to burn one of us alive, Dane. They would be justified to do much worse if they chose.”
“So much for Christian forgiveness.”
A cold chuckle passed her lips. “You’re smarter than that.”
He was. They might live an Amish life and worship their God through the words of the Bible, favoring verses that justified chastisement and discipline, but they also did things that weren’t Christian at all. Things that took place in the silent hours of the night under covered mouths and clenched eyes.
First and foremost, they were predators, enslaved by their animal instincts and loyal to their impulses. Immortals reveled in the hunt. They lived with an ever-present lust for blood and loved to flaunt their dominance over others. The elders had come here to curb such impulses and find a more domestic way of life, which they had, but they would never change what they were. Inside every immortal hid a vicious vampire, and the problem with vampires was that they lived forever.
The doors opened and two males dragged Juniper out. Her bare feet were charred and blistered at the souls and her head hung weakly between her shoulders, her arms still bound tightly behind her back.
Dane’s jaw clenched. He didn’t like the girl, but no one deserved that sort of mistreatment. Aside from what she’d done to Jonas, which he truly believed was the workings of her older aunt, her only other crime was taunting him and making Gracie cry.
The meeting sounded as though it were concluding, and he no longer wanted to sit there. The two immortal males returned from the basement empty-handed.
Dane stood. “I’m leaving. Let me know if I miss anything important.”
Adriel nodded, her gaze focused on her work as she carefully pulled the needle through the material. “I will. If you see my son, tell him I was looking for him.”
He took the long corridor to the cellar entrance. Far beyond what appeared to be an old forgotten basement hid another door that led to the cells below.
Cybil wouldn’t be awake this early in the day because she followed a nocturnal schedule since the change, but he detoured into the basement anyway. The witch’s soft weeping could be heard from the stairs.
He slowly followed the sound to the first cell and frowned at the way they left her. Curled on her side, her blistered feet peeking from her chemise, her neck and face hardly on the cot, but her body too weak to change positions. She reminded him of a broken swan, the kind kings would admire only to destroy and eat in the end.
The iron muzzle covering her mouth, otherwise called a scold’s bridle, was a medieval device used to silence and shame difficult women during the sixteenth century. It secured to the face with a metal frame that encircled the back of the head and suppressed the tongue with a flat lead that was inserted into the mouth, locked in place by a small key.
He’d read about such things in high school when they learned about the Salem witch trials, but the horrific devices weren’t just intended for witches. They were originally created for rude and troublesome wives and applied mostly by husbands.
Her whimpered cries tore at him and he struggled to leave her in such pain. Glancing back at the door, he assumed the meeting could take several more minutes to conclude. A chain rattled from the far end of the corridor where Cybil slept and Isaiah prowled, no doubt woken by the foot traffic on this end of the hall.
“Hey,” he whispered, and the witch stilled.
Her head couldn’t turn very far under the weight of the bridle but her silence implied she heard him. With her eyes covered as they were, she wouldn’t know who spoke.
