Big Cat Marc padded out the cave and disappeared into the night.
Carlson stood, picked up a backpack from just inside the entrance, then grabbed what looked like a brush torch. He shoved it into the fire, making it flare up, then came towards me. He was wearing jeans, his chest bare other than a wide bandage wrapped round his lower ribs. Grim satisfaction trickled through me. He was injured. Maybe Finn had got a horn in before he’d been captured.
Carlson dropped the backpack down, jammed the fiery torch into a hole and crouched next to me. I glared at him as he lifted my head, pulled something from behind me and fastened it around my throat. Not constricting, but tight enough that I could feel it was stiff, like new leather. A loud click at my nape, the chink of something metallic, and he lowered my head back into the furs. It took me a stunned moment to realise he’d put a collar and chain on me.
A sudden image of Malik’s memory of the snow-covered plateau with Dilek a.k.a. Fur Jacket Girl werewolf, naked on her hands and knees inside an ash-marked circle, tethered by a leather collar and chain, slammed into me. Whatever had been done to her, this male was planning on doing to me.
Terrified panic rose up in me. I shoved it back. Forced my hand to slowly clench around Ascalon’s ring. Marc the innocent was gone. Carlson the guilty was easily within sword distance and, if the damn anaesthetic would wear off so I could move more than just my fingers and head, I was going to kill him.
Carlson the guilty moved to sit cross-legged out of my reach. He looked impassively at where I lay, the fire throwing half his face into shadow. ‘Yous ain’t no virgin, girl.’
Chapter Fifty
I stared at him. It was a statement, not a question, surprising me, even though I knew he’d been lying earlier. Then I recalled his easy manipulation of Marc. However stupid he’d initially sounded by supposedly not checking his facts, he wasn’t. ‘No, I’m not,’ I said calmly, then realised my mouth had unfrozen and I could talk again.
‘S’pected as much.’ He patted his chest. ‘Yous don’t feel quite right.’
‘Then why didn’t you check?’ I asked, working on the age-old maxim that if the baddie wants to talk, let him; there’s always a chance he’ll tell you something you can use against him. Of course, I didn’t really have any other option than to let Carlson talk. But I was curious. Somehow, for all his manipulations, I couldn’t see this guy letting Marc try to mate with a non-virgin if it meant the younger male would die. Not that I’d have wanted Carlson to check. If I had my way he wasn’t leaving this cave, so there was no chance of him kidnapping any other poor girls, virgo intacta or not, ever again. ‘All it would’ve taken was a simple medical examination,’ I added.
‘Ain’t only the physical that counts,’ he said. ‘Yous gotta be able to take the shift. Gnome says yous probably magical ’nuff it’ll work. That’s why I were watching yous in the park.’
‘I heard,’ I said flatly.
He nodded, telling me he’d known I’d been listening. ‘Gnome said I should take the blonde, but ma nephew likes the girl. Knew he ain’t gonna agree to using her.’
The blonde was Katie. Whether Marc agreed or not didn’t make me like him any better. He was out of Katie’s life, for good.
‘Lad wanted this redhead. Only, like I says, she definitely ain’t a virgin. I seen her with the gnome one time.’ His mouth turned down. ‘If yous know what I mean.’
Ugh.
‘She got habits,’ he added.
Poor girl.
‘An’ once yous no longer intact, then even if yous shift, the mating kill yous.’
Nice. ‘So even though you thought I might not be a virgin,’ I said, voice dry as dust, ‘and even if I did shift, then this mating would kill me and your boy, Marc, you still decided I was the one. I’ll be honest, leaving aside the whole kidnapping and performing magical rituals on me against my will thing, doesn’t sound like you’re on to a winner with me. So why bother?’
‘We always birthed girl an’ boy kits till this last generation. Now we’s got four boy kits in need of mates. Ma nephew’s the first. If he ain’t getting a mate soon, he ain’t gonna live. If all of thems ain’t getting mates in next five years, then our pride is dead. Adults ain’t living once kits all gone.’
I snorted. ‘C’mon, you can’t really expect me to believe that?’
‘We’s already lost seven male kits,’ he said softly. ‘We’s descended from old, old tigers. Tigers ain’t livin much past they be twenty or so. Ma nephew’s twenty-four. Soon as his animal soul moves on, his human soul goes with it. Only thing keeps us all living is if we’s mated an’ having kits.’
Shifters had two souls? Was that the explanation for their long lives, the one Mary hadn’t got around to reading in the witch archives?
I narrowed my eyes. ‘But you’re older than him, and you’re not dead.’
‘I’s two hun’red an’ fifty-six. We’s ain’t ageing much once we’s mated, not till one of us passes. Ma mate, Shona, passed last month. It’s why I’s doing the ritual. I’s dying soon anyways. But if the ritual working, then ma nephew gets a mate an’ he’ll live.’
And shifters didn’t die as long as they were mated. It would’ve been interesting if I wasn’t chained up. Still, I felt some satisfaction that Carlson was dying, slightly less that Marc was too. Though if Carlson thought I was going to feel pity for them . . . ‘But I’m not a virgin. So the ritual was never going to work.’
He leaned forward. ‘The ritual ain’t finished yet. If yous shift, then we knows the ritual works. Not like when that chink weretiger tried it an’ killed them tree girls. It may be too late for ma nephew, but ain’t for our other kits.’
It all fell into place. He’d gone ahead with the ritual because even if it didn’t work out fully, he’d hoped to learn enough for next time. I was a fucking experiment.
‘So yous can sit up now, girl.’
The anaesthetic vanished from my body, aches and pains rushed in and I groaned and sat up before I could stop myself.
‘Sorry,’ he said in a tone that didn’t sound it. ‘It takes yous like that.’
I groaned again. Less from the pain and more to give myself time to scope out the cave. Ice slid down my spine as I saw I was in an ash circle, glyphs glowing at intervals around the circle’s edge, like the one Dilek had been in on the snow-covered plateau. Carlson was sitting outside the circle. I straightened, shoving aside the thick chain dangling from the collar banding my neck. It disappeared beneath the furs, so presumably was attached there. But there was enough slack in it to strangle him, if I could get him close enough. But then if he was that close, I could skewer him with Ascalon.
I looked him in the eyes. ‘What takes you like that?’
‘The mate bond. Means I’s got control of yous. Your body anyhows.’ He smiled, showing normal human teeth. ‘The ritual worked, girl. First part anyways. Yous got a part of me in yous now. Means I gits to tell your body what to do, and it does it. Yous can nod your head.’ Something shifted inside me and I started nodding, anger and fear ripping into me when I couldn’t stop, couldn’t even talk. ‘Yous can stop now,’ he said.
My head jerked to a stop. I glared at him, feeling the strain in my neck where I’d tried to resist him, and an alien magic – his – fluttering to life in my stomach. ‘That’s sick.’