Lost and Bound

When they didn’t take me out of my cell for a few weeks, I knew my time was up.

Or maybe it was a couple of months. I’d long since stopped bothering to scratch marks into the walls of my cell—or into my own flesh, since I healed too quickly and the entertainment value of hurting myself paled after a while.

There’d been that time a while back…sometime, in the past…when I hadn’t healed. When I’d clawed my own arm and then watched, glazed and still too sedated to care, as the blood didn’t stop welling up. That had been after one of the trips to the lab.

And that had lasted for a few weeks. Maybe.

And now this had lasted for a few weeks, maybe, the guard only opening the door once a day to slide in some food and maybe a sliver of soap or a roll of toilet paper, and then slamming it again without saying a word to me.

My cell had concrete walls and a concrete floor, a mattress in one corner and a toilet and sink in the opposite one. The concrete had a hairline crack to the left of the door. It split into a Y-shape near the end.

It was by far the most interesting thing in the cell, and I’d examined it in detail, day after day, staring until the light from the slits along the top of the other wall faded away, and I had to imagine the crack there, tracing it in my mind over and over.

Some days, I’d thought about getting a tattoo of the shape of that crack if I ever got out.

I knew I wouldn’t be getting out.

Either they needed me for something—the endless vials of blood, the occasional injections that left me itchy or screaming or unable to heal, or once, shifting back and forth from wolf to man over and over again within minutes, uncontrollably, until I didn’t know my own skin and could only scream in both my voices until I lost consciousness—and they wouldn’t let me go, or…they didn’t need me anymore.

Footsteps echoed distantly from the hallway.

I looked up from my lap, where I’d been idly contemplating the shape of my knuckles. Gloomy gray light filtered in, so it was still barely daytime. Whatever that meant. Not food time, though. That had already come and gone.

My heartbeat started to lift out of its usual slow tempo, skittering into an unsteady reel. I’d thought the prospect of death didn’t matter to me anymore, but apparently my body disagreed.

The footsteps stopped; the door opened. Two guards stood partially framed in the doorway, the blond one who usually didn’t hit me and the bald one who usually did. No matter what I’d tried, I’d never been able to get either of them, or their several equally laconic colleagues, to give me a name.

“Get up,” the blond said.

I got up. Slowly, though, or as slowly as I dared, anyway. There was a fine line between pissing them off and not rushing to get my throat slit. My heart pounded away, double-time.

“Sometime this fucking year,” Baldy grunted.

My feet felt numb, but I got on them and crossed the cell to the door. The blond took me by the elbow and tugged me out and along the hallway, the concrete out here rougher against my bare soles than in the floor of my cell. Maybe from all the jackbooted assholes marching around out here and scuffing it up.

The hallway lacked windows, but dim fluorescents hung at intervals along the ceiling. One of them kept flickering. I resisted the urge to fight, to struggle, to try for a few more minutes of living. It wouldn’t matter, and I’d end up beaten or tased into unconsciousness. I’d never even see how they were going to end me. Somehow that seemed worse than at least knowing how I was going to die, for the few seconds between finding out and actually, you know, dying.

Blondie led me to the left, and I stumbled, my legs trying to carry me the other way. The labs were to the right, along the hallway and up the stairs. I’d been heading that way on autopilot, even though every time I’d been there I’d been some combination of bored, hurt, and terrified.

But we went left, and the bald guard fell in behind us.

The urge to fight hit me again. A couple of years—I thought? But I couldn’t be sure—of living in that cell, alternately experimented on and ignored, had left me thinner and weaker than I’d been. But werewolves were resilient, and I’d started off tall, muscular, and able to fight.

I could still fight.

Except that every time I’d fought, I’d lost. They had weapons, and these guards might not smell like much except the sharp, acrid tingle of magic that obscured their natural scents, but they weren’t human. They were stronger than me, and armed. I’d lose again.

I walked down the hallway, the blond’s grip on my arm firm but short of punishing. He knew I wouldn’t run. He knew I wouldn’t fight.

Somehow, paradoxically, that drained the last of the impulse to fight right out of me. I didn’t used to be like that. I used to be a contrary bastard.

We reached the end of the hall, and Baldy pushed past me to put his hand against a panel set into the wall by a metal door that stank of magic. The panel glowed faintly purple for a moment, and a heavy thunk and click echoed from inside the door.

The blond pulled it open. The room beyond lay in murky shadows, and I could only see a glint of something metallic. He shoved me through, and I stumbled and tripped a few steps inside.

“Brought you something to play with,” the bald guard said, his voice thick with something foul and anticipatory, making my heart skip a beat and the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

And then the door slammed shut behind me.

The scent hit me first. It wasn’t a bad scent, exactly, although no smells in this place had ever been mouthwatering.

It was a terrifying scent. Hot iron and bone-freezing chill, like fresh blood spilled on glacier ice, with a vein of uncontrollable wildness running beneath.

I blinked and stumbled back again, my shoulder blades hitting the door hard. I pressed my palms against it, clammy flesh on unyielding cool metal. A faint chink of metal sounded in front of me, and I blinked again, adjusting to the lack of light. After a moment, dim slits of twilight gray resolved out of the darkness, tiny windows like those in my own cell, high up in the wall across from me. I focused on them, hard. If I looked at those, I didn’t need to see anything else. Whatever was in this cell with me, I didn’t want to know. The scent had intensified, richer and sharper both, becoming mesmerizing.

And the sense of menace that came with it had grown too. I really didn’t want to know.

Finally I had to know. Night had almost come, and in a few moments there’d be no light at all to see what lurked in the cell with me, no matter how much my werewolf senses compensated for the dark.

I looked down, away from the window slits.

Something sat against the wall on a pallet similar to my worn mattress. Something big. Three faint gleams: a metallic reflection, and twin pale stars, the glow of alpha eyes. Not golden, like the alpha werewolves I’d always known before, but bluish silver.

It didn’t move.

I didn’t move.

Whatever it was took deep, even breaths, slow and calm, and it didn’t move a muscle.

My legs started to shake, protesting their rigid tension after weeks of sitting on the mattress twenty-three hours a day without even the exercise of walking to the labs.

I’d long since given up on exercising in my cell.

I slid down the door until my ass hit the concrete, drawing my knees up to my chest.

Darkness fell. I could still see a little, the faint starlight filtering in through the wall slits giving me enough to make out shapes, at least.

My heart still pounded in my throat at first, but after some indeterminate time of nothing fucking happening, it settled down. I got cold and stiff, but at least calm again.

And nothing happened.

Something to play with.

Either I wasn’t a tempting toy, or the…whatever it was across from me wasn’t in the mood to play.

The air between us hung thick with nauseating uncertainty.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d almost forgotten this aspect of my own personality, the inability to keep my stupid mouth shut. It’d been so long since I’d had anyone to talk to. My lips and tongue practically ached with the need to move, even though my throat felt so dry I didn’t know if words would emerge.

“Who are you?” It came out a hoarse whisper.

The shape across from me moved slightly. I had the impression of size again, of something massive shifting in the depths of the ocean, or of a predator moving in the darkness of a forest. All my hackles would’ve gone up, except that they’d hit peak up the moment the guards opened the door.

“Does it matter?” I twitched, adrenaline jolting through me. That voice, oh fucking gods, that voice. Deep and raw, and not human. Not remotely fucking human, not even in the way shifter voices were human.

I swallowed hard, peering into the darkness at those faintly glowing eyes.

“Since we’re stuck in here together, it matters to me?” My voice came out high-pitched and weak. “I’m Jared.”

His laugh scraped along every one of my nerves, a rusty knife dragging over concrete.

And it was definitely his. No way did that voice, that laugh, belong to anyone not male. What kind of male creature, though…that I couldn’t even guess at. His scent was like nothing I’d ever encountered.

“I don’t give a fuck what your name is,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me. I doubt it matters to you, either. Not in here.”