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gone, but he still had his body. Lindsay swallowed a scream and pushed his tongue into Dane’s mouth,
trying to elicit some response, anything.
Nothing.
Dane stood there, as still as a corpse. Lindsay’s stomach twisted and he barely kept from retching on
the asphalt.
Jonas snorted, and he grabbed a handful of Dane’s hair and shoved him toward the van. “All that
effort and no show.” McKay, standing by the door, laughed and helped him throw Dane’s unresisting form
in the back.
The limo driver, a slight, gray woman, was holding the door. “Come along, Lindsay,” Lourdes said.
“We can’t keep Dr. Moore waiting.”
Lourdes patted Lindsay on the cheek as she breezed past. He flinched at her touch, but he couldn’t get
far enough to avoid the warm brush of her fingers. Dr. Moore could wait until hell froze over. He was
going to find a way out of this, one way or another.
His new guards guided him toward the limousine, helped him in, and settled beside him on the seat
facing the back. Lourdes sat across from him, phone in hand. “Would you tell Dr. Moore that I’ve got what
she wants?” she was saying to whomever was on the end of the line. She gave Lindsay a sweet smile once
he was settled. “Yes. We’re looking forward to seeing her too.”
Lourdes’s mind—it must have been hers—was still clenched around Lindsay’s magic, keeping him
from it without any sign of effort on her part. He had thought she was gone from his mind, but he had no
other explanation for it. Unless…he glanced at the twins, and one of them, he thought it was Mahesh,
smiled at him. Lindsay stomped on his panic at the idea that he had to deal with three mind mages at once,
and sorted the information he could get.
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Guests. So Dane was going to the same place Lindsay was. That made him feel a little better. With the way Lourdes held his magic in check, he couldn’t imagine what he’d be able to do with that, but knowing
that Dane’s mindless husk wasn’t being taken somewhere so that Jonas could kill it while Dane couldn’t
fight back was a relief. It would make it easier for Lindsay to find Dane when he got out. He pushed for his magic again. That he couldn’t feel or hear Lourdes in his head was no reason to think the grip on him
wasn’t hers. All Lindsay could do was wait for a break in her attention.
Lourdes tucked the phone away in the purse that sat on the seat beside her and folded her hands in her
lap. “We’re so glad you’re back,” she said pleasantly. To his dismay, Lindsay had the distinct impression
that she was sincere. That made things so much worse, that these people might care about him as though he
were one of their own, as though he were a wayward little brother. “Everyone’s just dying to see you
again.”
Dane knew exactly what was happening the moment the world slowed. He tried to say something,
managed to get Lindsay’s name out, but that was all. He even knew who was doing this to him. How had
Cyrus missed this? How had he?
As he stood there, frozen, fighting to keep his awareness co
stepping out of a service hallway. He could see the widening terror in Lindsay’s eyes as Jonas laid hands on him. As he was falling away from himself, he saw Lourdes.
Not for some days. Ezqel’s voice and Cyrus’s sounded the same in the fading echo along the hallways of his mind.
She looked much as she had when he’d seen her last, though the childish roundness was gone from
her face and her body. Now, she was slim and willowy, her fine red hair pulled back tightly in a twist at the nape of her neck that reminded him of Moore. Lourdes’s pale, pale eyes were the last thing in his vision
before he was gone.
Dane woke with a collar around his neck and his hands trapped behind his back in iron gauntlets. He
was in a moving vehicle, his back pressed up against bars. He’d been here before. Maybe not this exact
van, but one like it, more than once. He didn’t have to open his eyes or do anything beyond inhale to know
that Jonas was there with him.
“So, do you ever get tired of failing?”
Yes. Yes, he did. “Fuck you, Jonas.” Dane got very tired of failing. In fact, he was exhausted from it.
Failing all by himself was one thing, but this new twist of failing Lindsay was something else altogether.
“So, the elf fixed you did he?”
When Dane opened one eye, he saw Jonas sitting across from him, back to the bars on the other side
of the van, trapped in here with him. “Looks that way.”
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“I’d forgotten what you looked like.” Jonas sounded almost thoughtful. He stretched his legs out in
front of him and crossed his arms over his chest. He was ugly, brutal-looking like a club or an axe, but he was still human on the outside. “Pity you got so pretty just in time to die.”
“Who says I’m going to die?” Dane didn’t have any intention of dying. He had a lot of fucking up to
fix; he didn’t have time to die. Lindsay hadn’t even had a chance to live, not really, not whole, and Dane
pla
“Me. They won’t let me kill your scrawny little boyfriend, so I’ll have to be satisfied with killing
you.”
Dane lunged forward, trying to get his feet under him, but his collar was chained to the bars and he
was wrenched backward before he managed to get any momentum. The metal squealed in protest but didn’t
give, even when he tried again. Jonas sat there and laughed, watching him strangle himself as he fought to
get free, blood trickling from where the collar cut into his neck, and his claws splintering on the inside of the gauntlets.
Finally, Jonas stopped laughing and moved enough to slam one foot into Dane’s face as Dane surged
forward again. Dane felt his nose crumple and his teeth crack. Blood poured down the back of his throat
and his head smashed into the bars. It should have hurt worse than it did, but all Dane felt was a rush of
ecstasy as his magic flowed through his flesh and began to knit it together again.
It took everything he had to keep from laughing, to make himself sag in his bonds and fall limp
against the bars. Jonas was mocking him again, oblivious to Dane’s deception. The smell of blood must
have been thick enough in the van that it covered anything else. Or maybe Jonas never had grasped the idea
of self-sacrifice.
Dane hung there, his breath barely rasping past the pressure of the collar on his neck, as Jonas got to
his feet and, holding the bars overhead for support, kicked Dane over and over again, cracking bone and
pulping flesh with glee. Dane lay there and let Jonas break him, soaking in the pain and waiting for his
chance to get free.
For every purpose, there is also a season, Ezqel had said while he was being healed. Your season canbegin again. You think you have much left to do. I can see it in you, you know. You will fail, and fail, andstill not end. At the time, with his magic fading and runes burning into his skin, it had felt like a fresh curse.
Jonas wrenched Dane’s head back and, for a moment, Dane was looking up at the man who had been
his friend. For a moment, there was regret on Jonas’s face. The regret was gone as soon as it had come,
replaced by hate. Dane mustered up a smile as Jonas slit his throat. …and still not end.