the okay sign when Morax isn’t looking.” I hold my hand up, my index finger and thumb forming a circle, with my middle, ring, and pinky fingers straight.
“That could work, even if we’re strapped down, we can see each other’s hands.”
“If you’re in trouble, just call for your scythe,” Toreon offers, once again draped in the shadows he seems to wear so well. “Don’t give him time to shut down any kind of help signal you could come up with. Just call your scythe and do your worst,” he adds, and both Medley and I look at him in thought for a moment before nodding solemnly at the advice.
I hate that he has a point; by the time we send a secret signal for help, we could be in deep trouble, and if the other person is in their cage, they wouldn’t be able to get out anyway.
I make a mental note to test my darkness against the bars of these cages next. It works against Morax’s power, so maybe I can figure out a way to externalize it and break whatever wards he has on the bars trapping us in here.
“Well, if we’re just gonna call our scythes when we’re in trouble, then maybe we shouldn’t have an okay signal. We can just say if you see a scythe poppin’ up in the other’s hand, then…”
I look around at our cages again and know exactly why she trailed off. If one sister is in trouble, what is the other sister going to do? We’ve been feeling all excited and ready for Morax because we’ve figured out a way to override his orders, but really, it’s just one step of many in order for us to get out of here. There’s so much more that we need to figure out.
I take a deep breath and shake off the heaviness of everything we still need to do in order to escape this place.
“We’ll keep focusing on one thing at a time,” I tell Medley and myself. “You keep working with your darkness and manipulating it and your body, and I’ll start working on my cage, see if there’s a way to use what we can do to help us open it somehow.”
“He might feel you messing with your bars,” Toreon offers. “If you break his wards somehow, he very well might sens—”
The doors to our dungeon slam open, and all three of us jump. I know just from the sound that shocks through me that it’s Morax. He’s the only one who storms in here like that.
When he does stride through the shadows, I see he has what looks like a small rectangular box in his hand, like he brought us some assorted chocolates or something, but what really worries me is the pleased glint in his eyes.
He drops the box on the table and turns to survey first Medley and then me. The black slit in his white eyes settles for a beat on my hair and then my wings before the corners of his lips tilt up slightly. Alarms blare inside of me at the appearance of his smirk, but I try to quiet everything inside of me and reassure myself that no matter what, I’ll be okay.
I will survive whatever he has planned for us next. We will get out of here. He will pay for what he’s done.
“I see that Medley still has her eyes.” Morax leans forward slightly and scans her wings with his quick gaze. “And the damage to her feathers couldn’t have been too severe, as I don’t see any patches. It’s a wonder what you can do when you’re properly motivated, Sable.”
I try not to narrow my eyes at his words and his condescending tone, but I’m not completely successful, and it seems to excite Morax even more as a glare breaks out over my face in spite of my best efforts to stop it.
“From the look of you though,” he starts, his creepy eyes once again raking over me from top to bottom, “things will be much smoother moving forward. No more of this willful nonsense your wards afforded you. You can’t hide behind them anymore now that they’re gone.”
This time, when my eyebrows want to jump up in surprise at his words, I stop it from happening and instead drop them down like I’m confused. The look is what he wants, I can tell by the slight flaring of his nostrils and the way his eyes flash with eagerness.