But, no—she didn’t think she could count on the big Kindred bodyslave to help her. Surely he must have been in on her drugging and dumping. He had been the one massaging her, after all. Maybe he had even been the one who drugged her in the first place and dumped her in the Dark Market.
Shouldn’t have trusted him, Jillian told herself grimly. Hadn’t she sworn never to trust a man again after what Brad had done to her? And then, in the space of a single day, she’d broken her own rules and gotten herself into much worse trouble than her brief marriage had caused her.
She couldn’t count on Hard or Kind, Suzanne’s Twin Kindred mates, to come after her either, Jillian thought. She had stupidly allowed herself to be lured into the Yonnite spa without telling anyone where she was going. Nobody was going to miss her until sometime tomorrow, when Suzanne came to find out how the prep for the VIP dinner was going and found that Jillian wasn’t in the kitchen of the Pat-ar.
And by that time I’ll be pregnant with a Trollox spawn or chopped up in pieces and laid out in those trays in the butcher’s case and Trollox customers will be buying me by the pound, she thought, feeling sick. God, wasn’t there anything she could do to help herself?
I tried to help myself—I used my poison checker to test that weird tea Mistress Douchenbag gave me, didn’t I? How could they have drugged me when the poison checker said everything was okay?
She still had it in her pocket—she could feel the lump. Jillian decided to pull it out and test it to see if it was broken in some way, just for something to do. It was foolish, of course, but maybe it would take her mind off the fact that Ripper had pulled one of the humanoid arms onto the butcher’s block and was whacking it into chunks with the enormous silver cleaver.
She reached into her jeans pocket but instead of the poison checker, her seeking fingertips found the crinkly plastic of a grocery bag, wrapped around something hard.
“What in the world?” Jillian muttered to herself. Reaching deeper, she pulled out the bag-wrapped object, opened the bag, and looked inside.
For a moment, she wondered why in the world she had a melon baller with her. Then she suddenly remembered.
Oh—the ion-scoop. Of course!
For a moment she was excited—but then she frowned. What could she do with such a small instrument? She remembered Mistress Douchenbag’s claim that it could “cut through anything” but was it true—or more of the wily Yonnite’s lies?
Well, there’s only one way to find out, I guess.
Jillian looked over her shoulder. The first customer had left, but another Trollox customer—this one with three heads—had come in and was asking for a scoop of fingers and a measure of eyeballs, so Ripper was busy. She didn’t think he’d notice the hum of the ion-scoop over the sound of his own loud conversation with his customer, whose heads kept talking over each other.
Carefully, she flipped the switch in the handle and, holding the scoop down by her side, she pressed it against the rusty iron bar by her leg.
At first, she didn’t think anything was going to happen. Then, with the feeling of a knife cutting through the tough outer rind of an aged cheese, the scoop dug into the rusted iron and dug out a neat little solid chunk of metal.
Jillian gasped in surprise and turned off the ion-scoop to examine the results of her experiment. She expected the chunk of rusted metal the scoop had dug out of the bar to be molten hot but to her surprise, it wasn’t heated at all. It was cool to the touch—as cold, in fact, as the iron bar it had been scooped out of.
This was an amazing discovery and Jillian tried to think of the best way to use it. Part of her counseled patience. Just wait until tonight when Ripper’s gone to bed. Then you can use the scoop to get out of the cage and run back to the exit of the Dark Market and get out of here!
But there were several problems with this plan. First, she had no idea if Ripper planned to leave her in the iron cage or not. What if he decided he couldn’t wait to impregnate her and wanted to start tonight? She couldn’t bear the thought of being raped by the huge, smelly, disgusting creature. Ripper was like something out of a nightmare—an ogre from a fairytale come to life. She had to get away from him as soon as possible.
Her second consideration was the fact that she was disoriented on this side of the wall that separated the markets, and she had no idea how to get back to the curving archway with its long black curtain. God, she wished she had a better sense of direction! But she had to admit she was lost and she had an idea that running through the Dark Market after night had fallen might be even more dangerous than traversing it during the day. So it was probably better to try to get away sooner rather than later.