GAME ON - GoM 2

2

Alex sat on the wooden floor with her back against the wall. The chain kept her hands above her head, and soon her shoulders started to sting and burn. She closed her eyes and sighed. Blake was right: she should save her strength.

A part of her was baffled at the way she was feeling and thinking in such a situation. Because the other part of her had grown positive that she wouldn't make it out of there alive. She might even be hours away from a slow excruciating death like Harry's. And she kept wondering why that didn't make her snap and panic. Maybe because she considered the possibility of an awful, cruel end as a fact—nothing she could do to help it, so she'd deal with it when the moment came.

Meanwhile, she needed to find a way to keep Claire and Tom away from the house on the cliff. She was betting on Blake's interest in not being bothered. He'd let her call them to keep stalling. So she needed to come up with a convincing excuse to stop them from looking for her. But she couldn't think of anything to tell them. Instead, her mind was an odd, dull blank in the silence filling the cellar. The light coming in through the windows told her the long spring afternoon was coming to an end. Now and then she heard footsteps over her head, and muffled voices, but she couldn't pick a single word.

When only a dim twilight glow lit the high windows, and the aching burning had spread from her shoulders all over her arms and down to the back of her waist, the cellar door opened and the pair of demon thugs preceded Blake in. One of them turned on the foot lamp. The other grabbed a clean glass from the cupboard and opened a bottle of red wine. He poured but a finger and give the glass to Blake, who sipped, nodded and handed the glass back for the demon to fill it. Once he had the glass of red wine in his hand, Blake turned to Alex. This time, his pleased little smile caused her a chill. She didn't have a chance to linger on the feeling, though. One of the demons turned the handle to a sheave on the wall. The chain slid up around another sheave on the ceiling beam, pulling her back to her feet. The bastard only stopped when the shackles kept her almost on her tiptoes.

"Missed me, dear?" Blake asked, soft and ironic.

Alex needed to clear her throat to growl, "You'd be surprised."

But Aidan's motto wasn't a good choice, because he was so far away, all the way across the country, checking on his father. One more thing to make her feel so helpless.

"Fancy some wine?"

"Like I'm drinking anything you give me."

"But you still might," he said, amused, as he came closer to her, a hand in his pocket, the other holding the glass of wine—such a player. "Time to talk, Miss Corban, you and I."

"I ain't giving you the Cross."

Blake scoffed. "Of course, the Cross. We'll talk about that too. Later. First you need to understand your situation. So listen carefully, dear: the only way you're walking out of this room, and this house, is with me. Now how you do it, that's what's up to you."

All of a sudden, Alex's glandes recalled part of their job, and she couldn't tell what scared her the most: his words or how final they sounded. She didn't reply, trying to conceal how she felt, and held his eyes as he came to rest against a keg, only a step away from her.

"You see, channelers have been in short supply over the last hundreds of years," he said, awfully conversational. "So you can come in pretty handy to my work. Sure Greg told you about it—opening the gates of Hell and all that."

"You can't use me. Even if I was so sick to accept, I was initiated into white Channeling. Forcing me to channel for you would only kill me."

She hated his soft chuckle. "Really? Why? Because Greg says so? Because the lore says so? Let me tell you something about the lore, Miss Corban: those old books were written by proud men for proud men. Monks, alchemists, hunters. All so full of themselves, proud of their secret knowledge and their skills. True alphas, even those who never came out of the closet to keep from staining their reputation." Blake seemed to be in an educational mood, speaking in no hurry, sipping his wine when he paused. "Trust me, dear: they were far from knowing it all. But they were too proud to admit their shortcomings and mistakes. Tell me, in all those books you surely cherish, have you ever read anything like, 'we're not sure,' or, 'maybe we were wrong'?"

"Well, Moses wouldn't have made much of an impression, coming down the mountain to say, 'Hey, I think there's a talking bush up there.'"

"Exactly!" Blake smiled wider, enjoying her reply. Alex hated it: you can tell you're doing something wrong when the Duke of Hell likes it. "So all you know is that they were never able to revert a white initiation. Which doesn't mean by far that it can't be done. So trust me, dear Miss Corban: it can be done and I know how to do it."