could be used against me had never crossed my mind. I shivered, the backs of my swollen knees pressed against the icy floor. I'd been pulled around like a toy. No wonder demons showed up pissed.
"You're cold," Bis said, as if only now realizing it. The kid could, and did, sleep in the snow.
"Mmmm-hmm." My misery was temporary. I could endure it.
"I can help," he said, and a dull red warmth blossomed in the dark, lighting my cell with a weird shadow glow as his skin turned pink. He was glowing like an overheated rock, his gray, pebbly skin taking on a luminescent sheen. Bis's big tufted ears were back like a scolded puppy's, and his pushed-in, ugly face was pinched in worry. His tail, too, was wrapped around his oversize feet to make himself as small as he could. "Bis, you are a wonder!" I said, holding my hands out until I pulled them back from the sudden heat. My shins, too, were getting warm.
The teenage gargoyle blushed, sending out a wash of heat, but then his big ears pricked and swiveled, his eyes following a second later. The sound of a buzzing alarm came faintly, followed by a key in my outer door's lock. Shit. Was it time for my interrogation already?
"Hide," I said, and he immediately dampened the heat and the light with it. "Don't do anything unless they try to take me to the hospital wing. They might give me a lobotomy."
"I won't let them" came his voice from the dark ceiling, and the faintest scratch of nail on metal sounded. The memory of him was a glow on the back of my eyelids, fading when the first door creaked open and harsh electric light made a long rectangle, shining on my untouched salad and my swollen knees.
I blinked, trying to move as a guard opened the inner door and stepped back. I couldn't get up the normal way because of my knees. Above me, Bis clung to the ceiling like a cat-size bat, my protector in case things went from bad to worse. My pulse hammered, and using my hands and the corner, I managed to wedge myself to my feet with my shaking arms. I would not go to the prison hospital. I'd die fighting first.
A shadow eclipsed the electric lights. The scent of roast pork slipped in, and my stomach growled. "I'm not going in there," came Brooke's voice, sour and slightly supercilious, and the light returned to the floor. Brooke? Brooke wanted to talk to me?
My chest hurt. It wasn't the medical people, at least. Maybe the dissension I'd seen in the coven chamber was deeper than I thought. A three a.m. meeting couldn't be sanctioned. She was here on her own.
"I'm not going in there," Brooke said, louder this time when a guard protested. "Bring her out. I'll talk to her in that excuse of a library you have."
There was a moment of muted conversation, then a masculine, "She is your boss's boss, you cretin! Get her out!" echoed dully.
A flashlight panned over me. "Out," someone ordered, and I shuffled into the light, feeling very... orange. The dried coffee on my jumpsuit looked like old blood, and I lifted my chin when Brooke looked me up and down, lingering on my swollen, cuffed wrists. The sprig of heather in her Mobius-strip pin had wilted, and I felt a pinch of worry when I noticed the same shape embroidered on all the guards' collars. Jeez, they had their own prison?
"Can you walk, Rachel?" she asked.
"It's Ms. Morgan, if you don't mind," I said, leaning against the wall. My stomach hurt and I was almost dizzy from the pain in my knees.
"The inmates aren't allowed in the library, Madam Coven Leader," one of the guards protested weakly, and she spun, giving him a nasty look.
Tm not going to sit on your ugly little chairs and talk to her through plastic. The woman is cuffed. She is wearing charmed silver. She isn't going to hit me or take me hostage. She can hardly stand up, thanks to you. Rachel, this way."
"I told you, it's Ms. Morgan." Head down and my lank hair falling into my eyes, I shuffled after her. Crap, I could hardly move, and a sudden nausea made me glad I hadn't eaten. It would have been nice if someone had offered me a pain amulet, but we were surrounded by salt water. Besides, it would ruin the beating they'd given me.