“Can you help me?”
There was silence.
I heard my own breathing. In and out. Inhale, exhale. They were shallow breaths. They grew shallower by the second.
Then I heard his response. “I cannot.”
“You’re powerful enough to speak to me, to see what they are doing, but not enough to free me? What kind of a sorcerer are you?” My tone was loathsome.
There was a sharp intake of air and a powerful explosion immediately after. The force of it threw me against the far wall of my cage. For the first time, I didn’t feel the impact. As soon as my body fell down to the metal bars, I lifted my head once more and gazed around. He had gone. I knew that, but my eyes quickly searched for anything. And then I saw it. A small amount of smoke still floated in the air, near the top corner of the room. He had been watching from there and the next time he came, and I knew he would.
The door crashed open, and Lucan raced inside. “What was that?”
I frowned. I would’ve expected him to be angry, but as I searched his face, there was no rage. When I felt into him, there was concern, but no anger. I murmured softly, “It was nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me!” He grabbed the cage and lifted it, shaking it.
My eyes grew wide. My cage was big enough to encase an entire bedroom and he lifted it without breaking a sweat. There was no resistance, as if he lifted a bag of books.
Lucan set my cage back down immediately and backed away. His eyes caught and held onto mine.
“You are not a normal human.” I rushed to the end of the cage beside him. “What are you? What have you done?”
He was quiet, staring back at me. Then he left, just as quietly.
When the door closed behind him, I sat back. He wasn’t human. He was more. I didn’t know what that meant, but it meant something. I felt it in my bones. I could use that to help me escape. I just had to figure out how first.
The voice never came back. It seemed like a month had passed. And Lucan stopped taunting me. He stopped coming to sit by me. I didn’t know if they corresponded, but something had happened. Perhaps his magical palace wasn’t so magical after all. Perhaps the enchanted Mori weren’t so impervious. I didn’t know, but after that day, things weren’t the same. Lucan wasn’t so mad crazy. He had stopped enjoying my pain.
The witches continued their chanting spells, and he still insisted the thread could be pulled out of me, but I caught his stares a few times. He was scared, but he wasn’t scared of me. It had to be whatever had happened to me, whoever that voice had been.
Then one day, Lucan sat beside me again.
I tensed and waited as the witches left again. Was this the day he started taunting again?
“I can see why my brother loves you.”
I laughed. “Really?”
He didn’t look at me, but sat beside and stared at the wall ahead of us. It was bleak, made of cement, and the night had fallen. The room had grown dark; soon the cold would come.
“You’re beautiful. You don’t know it so you’re not a high maintenance girl.”
“You can tell that here?”
“I could tell before, and you were Kates’s friend. They both love you—”
I gritted my teeth. My fingernails pressed into the palm of my hand. It wouldn’t be long before blood would start to drip down.
He continued, “—He loves you because you love him. Even now, you see his face every day, but you don’t flinch. You hate me with passion. You should’ve broken by now. You should be pleading with me, begging for your life. You haven’t done any of it.”
I clenched my jaw. Blood splattered onto my legs now. It made its way slowly down to the floor.
“Lucas was the quiet one when we grew up. Did he tell you that? Mmmm. I suppose not. I was the outspoken one, the leader. We had a group of friends and they did whatever I told them to do. Lucas didn’t like it. He said that I didn’t think ahead at times. He might’ve been right. I know he thought he was, but I never cared. I could’ve thought ahead, but there was no fun with that. There was no adventure. We weren’t tested then. We couldn’t rally and see who we could really be.” He laughed softly. “Our friends were weak. I never cared about them, but I loved watching my brother. Every time we’d get in trouble, Lucas would make everything okay. He always stepped in and got us out of trouble. He grew and grew every day. He became who he is today because of me. I made him. I created him.”
“A Roane vampire sired him.”
He sighed and stretched out his legs. “He has their blood. He became a vampire because of them, but he’s the man he is because of me.”