Lilith Saintcrow - Taken

“There’s only four of them!” Cullen objected.

“Four’s more than enough,” the Tanuki shaman replied. “We’ll help. We’ll unlock any doors and steal any shinies.” Her nose twitched again.

Cullen stared at Ilona, who returned the stare with interest. It wasn’t quite a struggle for dominance, but there was a general move backward, anyway. If the two decided to tangle, nobody wanted to be in the way.

Zach saw his moment and slipped back. The Tanuki shaman gave him an odd look as he passed, her kohl-smudged eyes bright and intelligent, and the low thrumming growl in the air mounted another few notches.

There was a crowd by the door, but they parted for him. “Zach—” Eric sounded breathless.

“Stay with the Tribes.” His tongue felt too thick for his mouth.

“Zach—” Julia, this time.

“Stay with the Tribes.” The Change ran inside him like glass wires. His failure, his responsibility, goaded the animal living under the surface of his skin.

The animal stretched, finding that he would not chain it this time. There was a meaningless babble of noise, ignored like everything other than what the animal understood. Food. Shelter.

And possession .

The rain outside was flung silver needles, soaking through his hair and useless clothing. The blood in him burned, his nose lifted, tasting the night. Wet concrete, burning exhaust, the jungle of a city like every other wilderness. Only this one had a clear crystalline ringing under each raindrop, a distress call muted by concrete and inimical metal.

It was the call of a shaman in danger.

The human part of him couldn’t have heard it. But the animal knew, and it responded with a throaty howl that ended with a series of clicks. The rage was sweet fuel to them both, a golden thread he would follow until it ended at what he sought.

Something that belonged to them had been taken.

And he would not rest until he had taken it back .

The dark was total. Sophie lay in a small space on concrete, though near her feet was a wooden door. At least, she thought it was a door—it moved slightly when her feet found it. And she was vaguely aware of needing to pee, though it wasn’t critical yet.

She had other problems.

It smelled too horrible to be believed in here, and the thin thread of musk rising from her skin didn’t help. It only accentuated the reek coating the back of her throat. Her mind kept pairing images to the smell—terrible, soul-destroying images of rotten flesh, skeletons grinning through veils of slime, bones and worms, and—

It was better not to think about it, the cricket voices said. Sometimes their words were coming through, reedy little sounds shaping comprehensible syllables. The faces pressed close to hers, insubstantial smoke warming for just a moment until it felt like flesh, but they never stayed.

She lay there and thought about it. If she was crazy—

No. Zach swore she wasn’t crazy. And there were vampires, she’d seen them. Which was more insane, seeing crazy shit or denying the crazy shit right in front of your own eyes?

She tried to breathe deeply, working through the incipient panic attack. Her nose was full, and her muscles were cramping despite the way the faces crowded around, ghostly hands stroking along her limbs, easing them, drugging the pain. Tears leaked hot and soundless down to her temple, dripped over the bridge of her nose.

She’d huddled on the floor so many times, trying to breathe through the sobs, her body on fire with pain. It never got easier to deal with.

It never became routine .

At first she’d tried to predict him, tried to be more pliant, more perfect. She’d tried to find what was irritating him so much, find ways to soothe him, make him happy. Back when she still thought he loved her. Back when she still thought love was pain, or pain was all right if you could just love enough.

Then came the survival phase, where everything began to seem like a dream. Just keeping her head above water was hard enough. Actually thinking about what was happening lost out to just trying to get through the next explosion.

After that was the most horrifying thing of all—being so trapped, so hopeless, that she began to think she deserved it. The world skewed itself a few degrees off, and she began to lose parts of herself.

If she had to get right down to it, she wasn’t actually in school to become a social worker. She just wanted to understand how she worked, how people worked, so she could put herself back together again. And quit looking over her shoulder.

It was no use. The ropes were too tight, and the faces were contorting, some of them crying soundlessly.

Thank God Lucy’s face wasn’t there. Which brought up an interesting line of thought—were these dead spirits, or something else? Zach hadn’t said, and she hadn’t thought to ask.

Another sound intruded. A squeak, a thump. Footsteps. Distinctive footsteps, the heels jabbing hard.

Sophie realized she was making a small whining sound, swallowed hard. The reek filled her throat, the footsteps grew closer. The faces whispered, and she caught enough of their reedy little syllables to guess who was down here, wherever “here” was.

Oh, God. I really didn’t ever want to see him again.

There was a scraping sound, and weak light fell into the closet. It was a closet, she saw, and its dimensions looked vaguely familiar. He grabbed her ankles and pulled, his fingers biting in cruelly, and if the spirits hadn’t been clustering around her, somehow easing the soreness from her muscles, she probably would have screamed in pain.

She lay on her side, still on hard concrete, blinking furiously as her eyes ran with hot tears. He walked behind her, heels landing hard on the concrete, and she suddenly realized why he did.

He wanted her afraid.

Well, I am. But after the past few days of whipsawing terror and comfort, her fear-meter seemed to have busted.

And God, she was so tired of being afraid.

“Hello, Sophie,” he breathed in her ear. The hot, meaty smell grew ranker, if that was possible. She had a sudden mental vision of canine teeth grown long, lips thinned out and flushed with deadly cherry-red.

She found her voice. At least they hadn’t gagged her. “Hello, Mark.” Now that I’ve got a really sensitive nose, I just have to be stuck around hideously stinky stuff. Great.

“You’ve been a very bad girl, my dear.” He kept breathing on her ear. Three days ago Sophie would have cringed.

Now she just wanted a bathroom and some more of Julia’s steak with caramelized onions. So she just kept quiet. He was going to talk for a little while, she knew that tone. The falsely conciliatory cheerfulness.

“Bad enough that you embarrass me with legal difficulties. But then you hide from me, as if I’m some sort of common criminal. And you take up with such undesirable elements. My dear, you have no couth .”

And you’ve been hanging out with the Happy Vampires. Really, Mark, lecturing me is so passé. Why don’t you find something else to do? But that was a sure way to make him angry, so she concentrated on blinking away the tears. The room gradually began to take shape.

It was a basement. Or more precisely, the wine cellar. She’d been down here hundreds of times, obsessing over which bottle to choose, knowing the wrong one would bring a patronizing grin and a promise of punishment.

The racks of bottles had been taken out. Dark, nameless liquid splashed the walls, and the heavy wainscoting over concrete was splattered, as well. The lighting was always dim down here, and she’d been in the small temperature-controlled closet for the brandies and cognacs.