“Menagerie,” he said.
The earth around them rumbled. Birds, suddenly shrieking, took flight off the branches all around them. Dust kicked up over Iz’s shoes.
A hole was opening up in the ground.
Magic. She had seen enough of it in her life, of course. The entrance to Riell was concealed unless you knew exactly what you were doing, and the only reason she had met Cooper was because he and Gretchen had needed her help getting into another dragon village. Plenty of all-shifter enclaves, especially mythic shifter communities, were often concealed by magic.
But this felt different. This made her skin crawl.
With magic, sometimes you couldfeelthe intention behind the original spell, and this wasn’t benign. This hadn’t been cast to keep anyone safe—not even someone as awful as Randolph Sebastian. It had been cast to keep a secret—and a horrific one.
The darkness down there seemed like it wanted to swallow her whole.
Please don’t make me go down there. Please don’t make me go down there.
She bit her tongue to keep herself from begging him. He didn’t have any pity in him, and she wasn’t going to humiliate herself—and delight him—by asking for it.
“Down you go,” Sebastian said, poking at her with the fang.
And down she went.
Chapter Five
Logan had lost allsense of day and night, down there in the dark, so he had no idea what time it was when his hellhound started whining.
Once, he’d had an extremely accurate internal clock. He hadn’t needed an alarm to get him out of bed, not even at the oddest and earliest hours: he had just woken up when he knew he needed to. But that was an eternity ago. Now time was only broken into two massive pieces. There was everything before he had gotten here, and everything afterwards. And this endless now, in the dark, was a greased slide down to him totally losing his mind and going completely feral. That was a kind of change, he guessed, but it didn’t make for much of a calendar.
Nothinghappenedhere. Nothing outside of his own head. That was part of what made this place so unbearable.
But all of a sudden, there was something new. Something beautiful.
And nothing beautiful belonged down here.
A sick sense of doom washed over him.
Logan flattened down to the floor, pressing his belly against the dusty floor of his cell. His muzzle wrinkled back as he growled in a combination of warning and fear.