Annaleia tried to make her mind work, tried to formulate a plan. But she was in a pickle. The metal-reinforced leather cuffs around her wrists and ankles prevented even a millimeter of progress when she yanked or thrashed against them. She wasn’t going anywhere that way.
And her mind didn’t seem to want to work. Maybe because she was injured.
Her captors had gotten in a few pretty good shots, and her body was blossoming with bruises. Her bottom lip throbbed where it was busted open. She was sure it was very pretty.
Her cheekbone felt heavy in her face where she’d been back-handed, and she could just imagine that was becoming attractive too. Nothing like black and blue blush to raise people’s suspicions about what you did in your off hours.
But those were mere distractions, superficial comparatively speaking. The pain was worse in her hands and knees, all across her shins, and up and down her arms. These were the locations on her body she’d used in her attacks, and all places she’d likewise been struck. That kind of pain alone could wear a person down after a while and slow down their attacks because the prospect of being hit in the same place even one more time is so unpleasant, the body unconsciously pulls its punches.
Not that she’d be attacking anyone else again for a while. Maybe not ever.
Still, it wasn’t that bruising that had Anna concerned either.
For one thing, her ribs hurt worse. One strike had been with the toe of a really hard boot, and another had been in the exact same place but she’d been struck with a man’s shoulder in a kind of tackle. Now each time she commanded her body to draw in air, it felt as if her lungs didn’t quite want to obey; they did so begrudgingly. It hurt to breathe. She wondered if any ribs were cracked.
And for another thing, the bullet wound in her leg would probably cause her to bleed to death before anything else.
When Annaleia had joined the person she’d thought was Lily Kane and entered the beautiful white colonial-styled house, the very first thing her eyes settled on was not the simple gray concrete and empty room that greeted her, but the chair. It was a single hardwood armchair, straight-backed, sturdy and thick, and bolted down at the center of the otherwise empty room. Around each leg of the chair and over each arm were metal mesh-banded leather-lined cuffs with strong, metal locks.
At once, Annaleia’s instincts kicked in.
She turned toward the person or thing she now knew damn well was not Lily Kane, and as she did, she leaned into her right arm and imagined herself punching a hole through the wall behind the woman’s head. As a result, the punch landed full-force, and the woman’s head snapped back, lending Annaleia the precious time afforded by the element of surprise.
She took that time to run right back out of the building in the hopes that she could pull up another portal, or at the very least – keep running out across the fields until she got somewhere.
But the moment she made it through the door, the world changed. The fields of wildflowers and tall grasses that had been there before were gone. In their place was a plain, dimly-lit concrete hallway with no doors. Just a hallway.
It was nothing more than a space to transform with illusory magic so it would appear to be much larger and much prettier.
Annaleia tried magic too. As fast as she could, she spat out the words to a transport spell, but even as she was speaking them, she could tell they would fail. They felt different, hollow, devoid of power. When they did indeed fail, Anna tried to resurrect shields around herself. If she couldn’t escape, she could at least keep anyone from touching her. But the words to those spells felt exactly the same, as if they were only nonsensical phrases and not ancient terms that could be strung together to help her.
And that’s when Annaleia remembered the gun. Cain’s gun.
She wasn’t accustomed to carrying a weapon. She didn’t go into battles with the other wardens of her clan, so Conall hadn’t insisted she have a loaded weapon somewhere on