Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,122

to the ground, a lifeless sack of chopped meat. I was pushing to my feet when he turned to look at me. A twisted light shone in his blue eyes while blood soaked into his shirt and slacks. It dripped from his face while more rained from the fist tightly gripping the knife. He might need me alive, but the insanity dancing in his eyes said that he wanted to carve me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and dig for the wishbone with his fat hands.

“And now you know I’m serious,” Henry Fox said, breaking the thick silence.

I forced myself to smirk because fear was shredding what was left of my self-control, making it hard to grab a lungful of air. “Never doubted your seriousness, old boy.”

Fox flinched at my familiar tone, his hand tightening on the knife, so that fresh blood dripped to the ground. “Good. Then I’ll give you a choice. You can come willingly and submit to questioning, or we kill you. I will then raise you and you will tell me anything I want. I’m sure you can guess my preference.”

Yeah, I knew the sadist’s preference, but he would avoid it if he could. I’m sure he thought he could raise me from the dead, but we both knew that zombies were notorious for giving incorrect and incomplete information. The mind deteriorated way too fast after death because the soul couldn’t be anchored in the body. And I was pretty sure that with Lilith holding a chunk of my soul, the underworld bitch wasn’t going to let me be called back unless she could gain from the bargain. Henry Fox wasn’t going to raise me, no matter how powerful he was.

Unfortunately, my other option was pretty shitty too. Questioning always equaled torture, and I was not going to let this bastard touch me. Particularly since he was going to kill me after.

If I was going to get out of this, I needed to change tactics. I couldn’t remain on the defensive because they were going to wear me down until I made a mistake. But I wasn’t a full-fledged, trained warlock like they were. I knew most of the spells that they could attack with, but I couldn’t perform them with the same speed or strength. Most would be batted away before I finished. I had to stick with my strengths, the common, seemingly useless spells I could work reflexively. They weren’t curses, but types of enchantments—easier to unravel but much harder to predict.

Widening my stance to keep my balance, I blanked my mind while shoving down the nausea rising in my stomach. Adrenaline bubbled in my veins until it felt like my hair was standing on end. In a breath, I pulled up a swell of energy, and I slammed it into Greasy and Fox. I couldn’t manage all three at once. Greasy was a nuisance and Fox was dangerous. Brownie was somewhere in the middle.

Narrowing my eyes, I could feel Brownie summoning up a shield, but it wouldn’t work. With only the smallest push, I directed the energy toward him but my only thought was of peeling an apple. I was vaguely aware of him jerking one arm sharply and twisting, looking around for whatever was attacking him. His face was a mask of confusion as he stubbornly held on to his magical barrier while straining to figure out what I was doing. A second later, his scream rang out, sending shards of glass cutting through my soul. His body twisted and writhed in pain. I tapped down the revulsion while my brain locked on the vision of a small paring knife sliding around a bright red apple as it cut away the skin in a single, long coil.

With the spell in place, I turned to find Greasy staring in horror. He seemed to have forgotten about me. I lifted one hand and extended one finger, pointed down. I slowly spun it in place, imagining that I was stirring a cup of coffee. The warlock gave a surprised shout as he began to spin in place as well, but his shouts and flailing arms were quickly replaced with pain-filled shrieks. When I took the time to magically stir my coffee, I also heated it.

I should have been feeling horror, revulsion. I should have been throwing up the contents of my stomach, but I felt detached and numb as I killed them. My mind desperately clung to the images of an apple and coffee because