Words of Power (Alice Gray Book 3)

29

One thing that was working in our favour, however, was the fact that our own pack magistrate had the combination to open our cell, and her retinas were a match for the scanner.

The glass door opened with a pop of suction release. The cool musty air of the old building flooded into the cell faster than even Lucas could gather me up in a hug and then pat me down for signs of injury.

Emily stepped round us and looked Sam up and down.

"Name," she barked.

"Sam Sorenson."

Emily tapped something onto a small tablet, brows drawn together in concentration.

"Public brawling. Petty theft."

Heat warmed Sam's golden skin, making him look younger even than his eighteen years. It did nothing to alleviate the cold glare of Emily's magistrate focus.

"Why were they holding you in high security?"
Sam shrugged, eyes shifting to me.

"They'd given him something. All the shifters at the club were jacked up on some drug that the DPA had doled out to Kev, that bastard wolf."

Emily's eyes narrowed in disbelief. "That's against protocol," she said, rapidly tapping on her tablet again. "Prisoners are protected against mistreatment while in custody. The DPA doesn't deal with criminals like Kev."

"Maybe it's above your security level," I offered wryly as Emily continued to tap furiously, desperate for her tablet to smooth over the DPA's corruption.

I don't know why she was trying so hard. It was Emily that first clued me into the double-dealing that went on behind the agency's squeaky-clean façade. The winter solstice ball had been the precursor to the crap that had landed me in this mess, and that event was a veritable smorgasbord of human and paranormal bigwigs battling it out for power.

All in crisp suits with debonair smiles.

The DPA was a front that gave the humans in the know a fuzzy warm feeling of superiority. Human bureaucracy bringing all those wayward creatures under its umbrella of organisation; of civility. What it really hid, though, the DPA's biggest secret, was that human politicians had been colluding with paranormal creatures for centuries.
Why would today be any different?

There was obviously something dodgy at play, and it was happening above the magistrate's head. Not good.

Emily speared me with a sharp glare, retort ready on her equally sharp tongue, when a low rumble of a growl stopped our bickering.

"We need to get out of here now," Lucas said, his voice scratchy and deep.

My head shot round to see his wolf glinting out from his flashing green eyes. Emily's head bobbed in a tiny nod. She grabbed Sam's arm and pulled him out, shielding him with her body. She might not be happy about bringing him along, but he was still a prisoner of Her Majesty's Service, and Emily was still a Magistrate working under Her Majesty's Government.

The DPA might be as crooked as a dog's hind leg, but Emily was not.

In the main part of the old house, my body sagged, the tension in my muscles releasing as soon as the door to the cells clicked shut behind us. There was something about those sterile rooms that wasn't right.

The memory of Jonathan's torture kept creeping back, worming its way into my mind, stimulating my brain receptors into showing me that image over and over. The one with his skin peeling away from his face as his eyes stayed glued to me, seeing me in our shared vision, willing me to help him when all I could do was watch as his flesh was flayed from his skin.

In a sterile white room, just like the cells that Sam and I had been in.

Why the hell would the DPA need to keep rooms like that, if they weren't using hapless criminals like Sam for their own nefarious purposes?

Hapless criminals like me, I realised, the cold creeping sensation of fear trying its very best to gain more ground.

I couldn't let the terror take me under now. There was too much to do. I swatted a wave of dust out of my eyes, taking my frustration out on the particles that swirled through the air in front of my face. Lucas's hand shot out to grab my arm, stopping the momentum from carrying me straight into the swarm of grey particles that churned around us.

"Can you guys see that?" I asked, unable to tell if this was some new kind of life-force that only I could see.

"Um hmm," Lucas rumbled. "I can smell it too."

I paused for a moment, drawing the air in through my nose slowly. The acrid stench of old death coated the insides of my nostrils. Way past the rotting corpse stage, this was more like dry, cold fear, permeating the air, encasing every molecule.

The old kitchen was grey, dust covered every stone of the hearth, every item of furniture, like one of those abandoned houses from a dystopian fantasy. All this place needed was an abandoned meal set out on the table, and the long-dead children's toys left behind mid game. A moment of tragedy, frozen in time until some hapless kids stumbled upon it, an eerie ghost town to fill up their nightmares.

But time hadn't neutralised this disaster, not by a long shot. The dust here wasn't still. It swirled and churned around us, carried on a non-existent wind or directed by an unseen hand.

"What now?" Sam asked, the tremor in his voice betraying his fear despite his obvious intention to stand with the rest of us.

"We're going to have to move through it, right?" I asked, my own voice barely more steady than his.

"Right," Lucas growled, extinguishing the tiny hope I'd been nurturing that he or Emily knew what was happening and had some miraculous way to save us.

Someone was messing with us. The way that dust shifted and settled, constantly moving on a breeze that I couldn't feel, forming shapes that disintegrated before I could make them out, clogging up my brain and confusing my senses. I could taste it in the back of my throat, it was dry, and caustic, and it stank of death.

So, when the voices flew past me on the foul-smelling wind, the relief brought a laugh bubbling out of me before I could stop it.

Ghosts.

Erm, Alice, not sure it's relief you should be feeling right now...