Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,32

axe to grind with Raffe and Kadar, and planned to use me as leverage? It didn’t make a lot of sense since Raffe and Santana had their own children who would’ve made for better targets, but perhaps the Levi-Catemaco kids had been harder to snatch.

Opening my eyes again, I began to make out vague shapes in my surroundings as I adjusted to the darkness. Slices of faint light shone through broken slats on the far side of wherever I was, revealing looming shapes that could’ve been mechanical… or could’ve been human. Fear gripped my throat in an icy hand as I waited for the shadows to move, for something horror-movie-esque to happen. The steady drip drip of water splashing onto the slimy floor. The wet, cold, awful feeling of this place. I guessed I was in a warehouse of some kind. An old one, probably a fishery that had been abandoned a long time ago, if the stench was anything to go by. This kind of location was used for one reason, and one reason alone—to make people disappear.

“Hello?” I shouted again, trying to smother my terror. Maybe it would bring help.

Or maybe it would bring my abductor back.

I tried to shuffle my hands underneath me so they weren’t trapped behind my back, but my stiff limbs wouldn’t allow it. It was only then that I felt a familiar sensation: a faint bristle like an electric shock, tickling up my arms. I’d felt the same thing when Victoria’s hunters had clapped me in Atomic Cuffs.

A djinn wouldn’t use these on me… I wasn’t even sure a djinn could use them. And if they knew who I was, then they would’ve known that Atomic Cuffs were useless on me. I had no abilities to inhibit, aside from Purging. And I wasn’t sure if they’d be able to stop a Purge.

The pixies! With my head all foggy, I’d forgotten they’d been with me at the lookout point. “Boudicca?” I whispered. “Cynane, Spartacus? Are you here?”

None of their squeaks or chirps echoed back. Only that persistent drip drip and the faint clang of metal somewhere in the near distance. Wherever I was, and whoever had taken me, they’d left the pixies behind. A rock of dread sank in my stomach. The pixies were my best line of defense. Without them, I was completely at the mercy of my abductor. Even Leviathan didn’t seem to be showing up to give me a telepathic hand, though I was pretty sure this counted as heightened emotion. Perhaps he was choosing to ignore me because I’d thought this was his trickery, or maybe his last visit inside my box dream memory really had taken a lot out of him.

“Are you a djinn?” I yelled, my voice bouncing back. I wanted to be sure, in case I was wrong about the cuff thing. According to Marcel, in a fight for your life, it was best to get the upper hand as quickly as possible. “If you are, you’ve got the wrong person! But I know you like deals—we can strike one, if you show yourself!”

I froze at the sound of footsteps. The acoustics made it impossible to tell which direction they were coming from. Any moving shadow could have belonged to my attacker. I shuffled backward, trying to make myself as small as possible, even though it went against everything Hosseini had taught us during hunting classes. The trick was to make yourself as big and intimidating as possible, but right now my instinct was to hide, no matter how futile the attempt might be.

A bitter laugh cut through the fishy air. “A djinn, eh?”

Hmm… The voice was deep and masculine, with a distinct Irish accent. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a djinn; I could be dealing with a Kadar-Raffe-esque shared body scenario.

“Are you cursed?” I battled to keep my words steady. “I can’t undo any djinn curses, so if you’re thinking I can help you, you’re wrong. Only the djinn can undo djinn curses.” A curse was all I could think of to explain the red eyes, the heat, the petrifying growl. It fell cleanly into djinn territory, and my mental monster compendium couldn’t come up with anything else. Unless he was another kind of monster entirely.

I heard a switch flick, and an anemic lightbulb blinked into existence. Stepping precisely into his sickly spotlight, my kidnapper finally revealed himself. He was standing much closer than I’d expected him to be, not more than two yards away, and